by Sean Moran at Breitbart
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of the Global Engagement Center as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the “censorship-industrial complex.”
“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, titled, “Rubio: To Protect Free Speech, The Censorship Industrial Complex Must Be Dismantled.”
Rubio wrote that, in 2016, the Obama administration changed the GEC’s focus on combatting international terrorism cover any and all “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”
Secretary Rubio's live conversation with @MikeBenzCyber on dismantling the censorship bureaucracy at the State Department https://t.co/D45dpwBr4W
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) April 16, 2025
Rubio explained:
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 doesn’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.”
The Secretary of State said that GEC was an “enthusiastic partner” in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) which monitored alleged 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,” Rubio noted.
“With its multimillion-dollar budget,…
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Former State Department Asst Director Mike Benz Weighs in – click on X post to read his thread
Continue ReadingBREAKING 🚨 The US State Department has just placed all 30 full-time staff at the Global Engagement Center’s remnant known as R-FIMI on leave, eliminated all 50 full-time staff positions and delivered a notice to Congress ending R-FIMI’s existence and $65 million in funding 🧵👇
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) April 16, 2025