This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
'The American people don't need an obscure agency to 'protect' them from lies'

One of the most damaging attacks on Americans' constitutional rights in recent years actually came from the government itself, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he's working on President Donald Trump's campaign promise to "close the book" on the "weaponization" of the bureaucracy's agenda to "silence, censor, and suppress the free speech of ordinary Americans."

He's doing that by eliminating organizations like the Global Engagement Center, a key player that once had a huge role in the censorship industrial complex.

In a commentary posted at the Federalist, he explains:
"Over the past half-decade, bodies like GEC, crafted by our own governing ruling class, nearly destroyed America's long free speech history. The enemies of speech had 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"

He then explained that GEC got its start in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications, responsible for advising the government on how to counter narratives from terrorists such as al-Qaida.

Then it strayed, he said.

"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.'"

That was a deliberate move, he charged.

"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,'" Rubio charged.

America has paid a price for the leftist ideology.

That agenda created "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."

He added, "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."

Further, "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," he said.

GEC even, "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.'"

The former Florida senator confirmed he chose to publish his piece in the Federalist, because one group funded by taxpayers, the British Global Disinformation Index, "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. Every one of those 10 sites was on the political right, and The Federalist was among them."

He cited another group getting State Department dollars, 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."

He said the Trump administration rejects propaganda, and the belief that information Americans get must be censored.

"The American people don't need an obscure agency to 'protect' them from lies by pressuring X to ban users or trying to put The Federalist out of business."

He explained one of his projects has been to "liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center."

It was "supposed to be dead already," he noted. But when Republicans in Congress ordered the end of its funding last year, "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 hoped to survive the transition to the new administration."
Not so, he said. "Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return."