Marco Rubio: To Protect Freedom Of Speech, The Censorship-Industrial Complex Must Be Totally Dismantled

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uring his historic comeback campaign in 2024, President Trump vowed to close the book and end a dark chapter in America’s constitutional history: the weaponization of America’s own government to silence, censor, and suppress the free speech of ordinary Americans. The American people responded to this promise by giving President Trump a landslide victory last November.

Everything this administration has done since then has been laser-focused on fulfilling the promises made during that campaign. 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).

GEC was supposed to be dead already. However, as many have learned the hard way, in Washington, D.C., few things ever truly die. When Republicans in Congress sunset GEC’s funding at the end of last year, the Biden State Department simply slapped on a new name. The GEC became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) office, with the same roster of employees. With this new name, they attempted to survive the transition into the new administration.

Today, we are putting that agency to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is completely dead & will not return.

Over the past half-decade, agency bodies like GEC, crafted by our own governing ruling class, nearly destroyed America’s long tradition of free speech history. The enemies of free speech used new lingo to justify their authoritarian impulse. It was “disinformation,” allegedly pushed by nefarious foreign governments, that was the No. 1 threat to “our democracy.” To protect “our democracy,” this “disinformation” had to be identified and stamped out.

GEC’s history shows the pernicious way Washington turns laudable public goals into a means of entrenching its own power and rolling back the freedom of regular Americans. GEC began life in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications (CSCC). CSCC’s purpose was to monitor the narratives of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations and advise the American government on what counterterrorist narratives to use in response.

However, this worthy purpose didn’t last long. In early 2016, the Obama Administration renamed CSCC the “Global Engagement Center,” stripping away the explicit focus on international terrorism. Then, after Donald Trump’s historic victory in 2016 but before he took office, GEC’s mission was expanded to cover any and all “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”

This pivot was no accident. Obama’s man in charge at GEC, Rick Stengel, touted his efforts to protect “democracy” while redefining it so that “democracy” came to mean silencing the part of the electorate he didn’t like.

In 2019, Stengel directly equated President Trump’s campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda, writing, “Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.” That same year, Stengel wrote an entire article about “why America needs a hate speech law.”

“I’m not against propaganda,” Stengel once said. “Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”
All too many abuses of trust that occurred at the GEC seemed to reflect Stengel’s dark founding vision. 

In 2020, a coronavirus from a Chinese lab swept the globe, and GEC popped up with a report warning that a “Russian disinformation apparatus” was behind public speculation that the virus was an “engineered bioweapon” or that it existed due to “research conducted at the Wuhan institute.” GEC tarred not only specific claims as foreign propaganda but also specific users. It created lists of thousands of accounts that were accused of being foreign propaganda vectors simply for sharing articles or even following certain accounts. These lists were sent to social media companies for “review,” but nobody was fooled — the purpose of this was to pressure private companies in the direction of more censorship and less free speech. 

GEC was an enthusiastic participant in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), an infamous group established under constitutionally questionable conditions to monitor “disinformation” about the 2020 election. The EIP pretty much exclusively singled out accounts and narratives associated with President Trump and his supporters and, in fact, directly flagged President Trump’s tweets, along with his family members and friends of the administration. 

GEC was not only one of the top participants in the EIP in terms of flagging content, but it also funded at least one of the EIP’s four main sponsoring organizations. 

Indeed, when it wasn’t directly nagging social media companies to censor more, the GEC paid private actors to do it for them. 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.”

My decision to publicly publish this information is no coincidence. One recipient of your taxpayer dollars was a British entity called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). GDI once produced a list of the top 10 “riskiest online news outlets” in a direct bid to drive off their ad revenue and put them out of business. It’s no coincidence very one of those 10 sites was on the political right.

Another entity receiving State Department dollars was NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of various websites, once again for the purposes of driving traffic and ad revenue away from those rated poorly. NewsGuard claims to be nonpartisan — but its board of advisers has included one Rick Stengel, the very man who built the Global Engagement Center, who says Donald Trump uses ISIS propaganda tactics, and who believes that propagandizing the American people is a good thing.

Some of the third-party implementers GEC paid to fight so-called disinformation were downright laughable. One such implementer, which continued to receive funding even after Congress sunset GEC, flagged the DOGE Dog as a symbol associated with Nazi SS officers. No, I’m not kidding (I wish I were).

Ultimately, the problem wasn’t that our government picked the wrong people and NGOs to police “disinformation.” The problem is that they were picking anybody to do this at all. The entire “disinformation” industry, from its very beginnings, has existed to protect the American establishment from the voices of forgotten Americans. 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. This travesty has gone on long enough. 

Our Republic is based on placing trust in the ordinary citizenry. Our Founding Fathers took the bold step of believing that ordinary citizens can sift through information, decide which policies and candidates are best, and vote accordingly.

Our “disinformation experts” reject this thesis and, in the process, reject the democratic element of our Republic itself. If citizens need the government to step in and tell them what is disinformation and what isn’t, then power doesn’t rest with the people at all — it rests instead with those who write and create the propaganda telling the public what to believe.

The Trump Administration completely rejects this anti-American attitude. The American people don’t need any obscure government agencies to “protect” them from lies by pressuring X to ban users or trying to put conservative media outlets out of business. This administration will fight false narratives with true narratives, not with heavy-handed threats decreeing that only one “truth” is permitted to be visible online.

Finally, as we recommit this country to its core constitutional free speech principles at home, we will also remain vigilant in our support of free speech abroad — not just against threats from adversaries such as Communist China but also from less expected countries where authoritarian censorship is gradually strangling true freedom of speech. We are not afraid. At her birth, America was a lone beacon of freedom to the world. If necessary, we will happily be that lone beacon once again.✪

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