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With its censorship capacity limited and reputational cancellation attempts no longer working the way they once did, the regime has largely resorted to a combination of lawfare (and potentially assassination) to go after Trump and his supporters in the 2024 cycle, a deeply troubling phenomenon about which we’ve written extensively.

With Elon’s takeover of X, the public exposure of the Twitter Files, and the looming extinction of key censorship think tanks such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Censorship Industrial complex has taken a number of severe blows in the past couple years. The little known but deeply important Global Engagement Center is another crown jewel of the censorship complex that is almost sure to be radically reformed or disbanded entirely in the event that Trump returns to the White House, and the deep state is in panic.

Politico:

This year, a little-known center within the State Department exposed a major Russian disinformation campaign in Africa, scoring a rare but decisive victory as America’s adversaries seek to sow chaos and confusion around the world.

Now, the Global Engagement Center, which acts as America’s nerve center in combating foreign, state-backed disinformation campaigns in other countries, is itself under threat — not from foreign capitals but from within the halls of Congress.

[…]

In late December, the GEC’s congressional authorization is set to expire, potentially dismantling this specialized unit at a time when its architects argue it’s needed most.

A bipartisan pair of senators is working to extend the center’s mandate into the next decade. But they’ll need to muscle past several skeptical Republican colleagues, who have accused the center of overstepping its ambit to coordinate U.S. counterterrorism messaging to foreign audiences, alleging it has turned its gaze toward American shores to silence conservative voices.

A Democratic victory in the House in November could breathe new life into the center during a lame-duck session, however. But if Republicans continue to hold on to the lower chamber, the center is all but dead.

“[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 Global Engagement Center is housed within the Department of State, and as we can see from the above excerpt, represents its mission as “combating foreign disinformation.” Of course, this is a euphemistic way to describe its mission of advancing the agenda of the United States government with propaganda overseas. Although we might take issue with the nature of the propaganda being disseminated globally (stuff like promoting drag queens to advance “democracy” overseas), we can agree that in principle the Global Engagement Center’s stated and ostensible function is legitimate. A dominant trend that we’ve seen over the past several years, however, is government institutions using the cause of “fighting foreign disinformation” as a pretext to use the tools of the national security state to suppress and punish the political speech of American citizens. The Global Engagement Center happens to be one of the worst offenders in this regard.

Longtime Revolver readers might be familiar with the Global Engagement Center from a piece we did years ago that happened to feature Rick Stengel, a former Obama staffer who in fact founded the Center.

Some of Stengel’s hits include discussing his self-described role as a “propaganda artist” for Obama.

In the clip below, Stengel declares his dislike for Fox News while begrudgingly admitting that NewsGuard can’t give them a “red mark,” as that would completely undermine their already thin pretense of “balance.”

In this clip, Stengel argues for curtailing the free flow of information on the internet and even proclaims that the First Amendment ought to be modified in the digital age to allow for the censorship of so-called “hate speech”—that is, presumably, speech that Rick Stengel’s former bosses Obama and Joe Biden hate:

Thanks to the Twitter files, another of Rick Stengel’s projects, “Hamilton 68,” a propaganda campaign created by the political establishment to smear dissenting views as “Russian disinformation,” was proven to be a complete and total scam.

The very biography and public agenda of Rick Stengel put the lie to any legitimate claim for the Global Engagement Center and show that partisan corruption and censorship are very much part of its founding DNA. But the trouble with the GEC goes way beyond Stengel himself.

The scandal of the Global Engagement Center was so flagrant that even Elon Musk weighed in.

One of the early Twitter files included extensive documentation of how the Global Engagement Center wrongfully smeared information and outlets that reported critically on the Biden Administration’s response to COVID as “Russian disinformation.”

Then, of course, there was the GEC’s funding of the disgraced Global Disinformation Index, which labeled conservative domestic media outlets in the USA such as Newsmax, OAN, and the New York Post as “high risk.”

That the Global Engagement Center is on the chopping block in Congress come December is a very encouraging thing and only serves to highlight the significance not only of the presidential election but the Congressional outcomes as well. A Trump victory and strong showing for Republicans in Congress could very well deal the death blow to the Global Engagement Center, which is one of the most precious of the Censorship Industrial Complex’s Crown Jewels.

There is, of course, a legitimate function for pro-USA propaganda overseas. But it is critical, given the abuse of especially such sectors of the national security community, that an understanding is arrived at that no one in the government is to use the powers it is given to advance the cause of the United States abroad in order to undermine and influence and at times totally silence legitimate political speech at home. This needs to be priority number one when, God willing, Trump steps back in the Oval Office.

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