Court filings in the case The Daily Wire LLC et al v. United States Department of State et al revealed that the Global Engagement Center (GEC) will likely be terminated on December 23, 2024, a welcome Christmas gift for conservatives who have been victims of the weaponized censorship organization over the last decade.
The filing states that “GEC’s statutory authority contains a sunset provision by which, absent further action from Congress, it will terminate two weeks from today” and that “Congress has not extended the [authorization] of the GEC thus far, and it is Defendants’ understanding that reauthorization is unlikely to occur.”
But there’s a catch.
The filing also states that, “the Department transmitted a notification to Congress regarding its plan for the forthcoming termination of the GEC and its plan to realign the Center’s staff and funding to other Department offices and bureaus for foreign information manipulation and interference activities in the event that the termination is not extended.”
BREAKING: State Department provides notice to Congress of shuttering of Global Engagement Center or “GEC” and reassignment of employees. 1/ pic.twitter.com/ptLHNiwIDq
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) December 10, 2024
Some elected politicians are still supporting the extension of the censorship apparatus in the State Department. In October, Politico published a piece laying out the desire for the censorship apparatus to continue its existence with the blessing of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):
“[The GEC] has played an indispensable role in combating Russian and Chinese disinformation. It would unnecessarily undermine U.S. national security if we eliminated this tool,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who co-led the bill that helped create the center in 2016 and who is now leading the effort to save the center from extinction alongside Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
The two lawmakers have proposed an amendment in this year’s must-pass National Defense Authorization Act that will extend the center’s mandate through 2031, with tighter controls on how the center spends its money and strict bans on supporting entities that engage in U.S. political activities.
Special envoy James Rubin, a veteran of the Clinton-era State Department and once known as Madeleine Albright’s right-hand man, signed on to lead the foreign-focused center two years ago, inheriting an upstart organization of around 180 staff and a rough budget of $61 million.
The assertion by Sen. Murphy and support from Sen. Cornyn ignore the recent discoveries regarding efforts by the GEC to censor and fund the censorship of not just American citizens, mainly conservatives, but citizens of foreign allies, such as Britain. The GEC and the National Endowment for Democracy funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) to the tune of $665,000 in 2020 and 2021, amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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In 2022, Claire Melford, the co-founder and CEO of the Global Disinformation Index, stated on a podcast (at the 24:10 mark) about the work, not necessarily of her organization, but “of a whole ecosystem of organizations that are trying to do the same” that saw essentially the financial de platforming of Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit (TGP). Specifically, she referred to a French television channel that criticized The Gateway Pundit and led to advertising technology companies that monetized TGP, specifically Google, no longer offering services to TGP.
During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Mike Benz, the Executive Director of Foundation for Freedom Online, laid out the chronology of the GEC from its inception under the Obama State Department as the “first official censorship capacity in the US government.” It was initially presented as a “back channel” to the social media companies to alert them about ISIS accounts and narratives that were trending by utilizing AI to scour for trending language.
You can watch the full segment here:
Mike Benz explains how the State Department used ISIS as an excuse to implement full surveillance through social media companies:
“In 2014-16 the State Department created this thing called the Global Engagement Center, which was the first censorship capacity of the USG. This… pic.twitter.com/N0gh6HrymP
— Autism Capital (@AutismCapital) December 3, 2024
According to a House Judiciary report from 2023, the Global Engagement Center is described as
“a multi-agency organization housed within the State Department, which Elon Musk has described as “[t]he worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.” The GEC and GEC-funded entities have, on multiple occasions flagged content to social media platforms that included Americans engaged in constitutionally protected speech.
The report also documents the Global Engagement Center’s collusion with the Election Integrity Partnership to censor American citizens:
“…the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of “disinformation” academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) that worked directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department, to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election. Created in the summer of 2020 “at the request” of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the EIP provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.
The Gateway Pundit has previously reported on the EIP’s “The Long Fuse Report” and the acknowledgement of a coordinated effort to censor Americans and the media at the behest of government officials, in direct violation of the First Amendment.
With the creation of the (unofficial) Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), spearheaded by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, there seems to be an effort to dismantle some bureaucratic institutions before President Trump is sworn in on January 20th, 2025.
Last month, The Gateway Pundit reported on a bill introduced by Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) to abolish the Department of Education. Much like the termination of the GEC, the proposed dismantling of the Department of Education wouldn’t eliminate the bureaucracy in its entirety, but rather delegate responsibilities to different entities. In other words, it’s not eliminating anything. It’s simply spreading it into other institutions.
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