Posted on Monday, December 30, 2024

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by Aaron Flanigan

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Weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated to his second term, the America First movement is already making headway in Washington, D.C., retaking hold of our national institutions and sending the Deep State leviathan into a frantic tailspin.

Among the most notable examples of conservatives’ pre-inaugural political power has been Congress’s effective closure of the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC)—an interagency organization that has openly blacklisted and censored conservative Americans under the guise of “combating disinformation.”

The GEC’s stated mission was “to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign… disinformation. Established by the Obama administration, the office had a budget of roughly $61 million and a staff of 120. It was considered a partner to agencies like the FBI, CIA, and NSA, among other branches of the intelligence community.

Instead of focusing exclusively on foreign threats, however, shadowy bureaucrats at the GEC quickly turned their focus inward, abusing their authority to clamp down on right-of-center voices in the American public square. In what was perhaps the biggest scandal for GEC, independent journalist Matt Taibbi unearthed troves of evidence signaling that the office coerced social media platforms into censoring Americans to curtail the spread of so-called “disinformation” relating to the COVID-19 pandemic—including the so-called “lab leak” theory that even the FBI has now acknowledged is likely true.

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA,” Taibbi testified to Congress in the spring of 2023.

Moreover, as Taibbi wrote on X as part of the famous “Twitter Files,” the GEC “funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious—and idiotic—new form of blacklisting.” The GEC, he reported, “flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.’”

“State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. website ZeroHedge,” Taibbi continued, “claiming that it ‘led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.’”

Furthermore, a report issued by the House Small Business Committee earlier this year condemned the GEC for awarding grants to organizations that tracked domestic “disinformation” and assessed the credibility of American publishers.

“This report uncovers how taxpayer dollars contributed to the censorship that picks winners and losers in the online marketplace,” wrote Chairman Roger Williams (R-TX).

Last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with conservative media outlets The Federalist and The Daily Wire, also filed a lawsuit against the Department of State and Secretary Antony Blinken for “engaging in a conspiracy to censor, deplatform and demonetize American media outlets disfavored by the federal government.” The lawsuit alleged that, even though Congress authorized the GEC “expressly to counter foreign propaganda and misinformation,” it instead “weaponized this authority to violate the First Amendment and suppress Americans’ constitutionally protected speech.” Paxton went on to criticize the project as “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation.”

As a result of these overreaches and others like them, Elon Musk characterized the GEC as the “worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”

But the GEC’s reign of censorship against American citizens all came to an end earlier this month when Congress deprived the group of its funding.

“The Global Engagement Center closed on December 23, 2024,” the group’s website states. “The Department of State has consulted with Congress regarding next steps,” a State Department spokesman added.

Though Congress had initially included funding for the GEC in its end-of-year continuing resolution (CR), a rewritten version of the bill, which arose following the adamant conservative protest, did not reauthorize the agency—a massive win for freedom of speech and an encouraging sign for a revitalized conservative presence in the public square.

Of course, the GEC is far from the only agency that has flagrantly abused its federal authority to target law-abiding American citizens who dissent from ruling class orthodoxy. As stunning and as un-American as the work of the State Department has been, the GEC is likely just a small sampling of the government’s ongoing censorship activities.

As Republicans prepare to formally take control of the White House and both chambers of Congress this January, particularly with the advent of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the GEC is a reminder that conservative leaders must remain focused on bringing the left-wing censorship cartel to a resounding—and permanent—defeat.

Only then can free speech be fully protected in American life.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.