President Trump has dismantled a controversial State Department agency that played a key role in Democrat-led efforts to censor conservative speech in the name of "our democracy."
Paul Sperry, a senior investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations, confirmed that the Global Engagement Center (GEC) has officially closed down, Breitbart reports.
During the Biden era, the center came under close scrutiny from Republicans as left-wing efforts to track and censor "disinformation" went into overdrive.
Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio had announced in April that he was shuttering the GEC, which was founded in 2016 by President Obama, nominally to combat foreign propaganda.
"Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” Rubio wrote in an op-ed for the Federalist.
The GEC originated as the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications (CSCC), which was meant to track propaganda from terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda, Rubio said.
In Obama's final year as president, the group was rechristened the Global Engagement Center and given a broad mandate to match its vague title.
It was likely no accident that Obama's point man at the GEC, Rick Stengel, is an advocate of "hate speech" restrictions who has compared Trump to ISIS and Vladimir Putin, Rubio noted.
Long after Obama left the White House, the GEC was a useful tool in progressives' censorship toolkit.
Under the Biden administration, the GEC played a vigorous role in pressuring social media platforms to censor Americans on topics like the 2020 presidential election and the COVID pandemic, Rubio noted, often by tying them to foreign entities.
The center's efforts extended to sending U.S. taxpayer money to foreign think tanks like the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which targeted conservative news outlets on an infamous blacklist that named popular outlets like the Federalist and New York Post as vectors of disinformation.
“With its multimillion-dollar budget, paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting ‘disinformation,’” Rubio continued.
The GEC ran out of funding late in 2024 as Republicans in Congress refused to back it, but the group limped into the second Trump administration under a new name, Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI).
"The entire ‘disinformation’ industry, from its very beginnings, has existed to protect the American establishment from the voices of forgotten Americans,” Rubio wrote in his op-ed. “Everything it does is the fruit of the poisoned tree: the hoax that Russian interference, misinformation, and ‘meddling’ is what caused President Trump’s victory in 2016, rather than a winning political message that only he was offering.”
