'This travesty has gone on long enough': Trump admin annihilates rebrand of Obama's censorship agency

The Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the U.S. State Department that was credibly accused of working with domestic and foreign organizations to silence conservative voices, was supposedly shuttered on Dec. 23, 2024. This closure was, however, a sleight of hand.

In the final weeks of the Biden administration, the censorious practices undertaken by the agency established by Barack Obama in 2011 and the officials who executed them were migrated to a new outfit called the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the closure of the State Department's R/FIMI, which reportedly had 40 employees and a budget of over $51 million.

"Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions. That ends today," wrote Rubio. "I am announcing the closure of the [State Department's] Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, formerly the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year and actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving."

'American taxpayers through the State Department were paying groups to attack Americans.'

Rubio discussed the birth and death of the censorship outfit in a live conversation Wednesday with Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, alluding to the GEC's origins: a pair of Obama executive orders aimed at reducing radicalization by Islamic terrorists and extremist violence threatening the interest and national security of the United States.

"Who's going to be against that? That sounds normal," said Rubio. "By 2020, it had grown into this movement of ... actually going after individual American voices."

Rubio noted that money from the program was being directed to supposedly "impartial" NGOs, which were "tagging and labeling voices in American politics — Ben Shapiro, the Federalist, others — tagging them as foreign agents."

"American taxpayers through the State Department were paying groups to attack Americans and to try to silence the voice of Americans," continued Rubio. "And there were consequences. These weren't just a label they put on people. Some of these people got deplatformed; they got taken down; they couldn't communicate."

A lawsuit filed against the State Department in December 2023 by Texas, the Daily Wire, and the Federalist accused the Biden administration of actively intervening in the news media market through the GEC "to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press."

The lawsuit alleged that the GEC had, for instance, backed the Disinformation Index Inc., the American component of the British think tank Global Disinformation Index, and NewsGuard Technologies.

Blaze News previously reported that both GDI and NewsGuard Technologies generated blacklists of supposedly risky or misleading news outfits with the aim of getting them demonetized and directing funds to news organizations that parrot approved narratives.

The GDI's fall 2022 report, for instance, labeled NPR, the Washington Post, HuffPost, and a number of other liberal news outfits with troubled relationships with the truth as the "least risky sites."

Meanwhile, Blaze News, Reason, the Federalist, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, and other conservative publications made the top-10 list of "riskiest sites" and were smeared as having the "greatest level of disinformation risk."

Gabe Kaminsky then of the Washington Examiner — a publication that also appeared on the GDI blacklist — reported in 2023 that GDI would compile a "dynamic exclusion list" and provide that list to corporate entities such as the advertising company Xandr. Xandr and other recipients subsequently declined to place ads on websites flagged by the GDI.

Matt Taibbi, an investigative reporter who helped expose some of what the GEC was up to, previously told Blaze News, "The GEC was turned into a key actor in the narrative-control bureaucracy."

"It was outrageous," Rubio said Wednesday regarding the GEC's work and impact.

The secretary of state noted that the GEC, which was deemed the "worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation" by Elon Musk in the wake of the Twitter Files and found to be internally dysfunctional in a 2022 State Department Office of Inspector General report, was technically disbanded in December but really just rebranded before President Donald Trump took office.

'Trump administration is smashing the censorship cartel.'

"Over the last few months, we've worked on it and just taken it down," said Rubio.

Rubio noted in an article Wednesday on the Federalist — a publication chosen on account of its targeting by a GEC-backed organization — that "whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return."

Last month, Rubio and Darren Beattie, acting under secretary for public diplomacy, apparently terminated over 100 contractors who worked with the agency.

The MIT Technology Review reported that employees at R/FIMI received an email Wednesday inviting them to a meeting with Beattie, who notified them their office and jobs were no more.

Rubio noted his Federalist piece that "Obama's man in charge at GEC, Rick Stengel" once said to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, "I'm not against propaganda. 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," wrote Rubio.

The secretary added:

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," Rubio declared.

He told Benz, "The best way to counter disinformation is free speech — is to make sure that what's true has as equal or greater opportunity to communicate as what's not true. We've learned that the hard way."

Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called Rubio's final blow to the censorship outfit a "very important action," adding that the "Trump administration is smashing the censorship cartel and restoring free speech rights to Americans."

Benz wrote, "R-FIMI is R-FINISHED."

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