BREAKING: Trump’s State Department Shuts Down Obama-Era ‘Disinformation’ Agency Targeting Conservatives

The Biden-era censorship machine is officially being dismantled. The State Department, under the leadership of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has formally shut down the Global Engagement Center (GEC) — a major victory in President Donald J. Trump’s mission to end the “censorship industrial complex.”

Investigative journalist Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations reported that the GEC — which had quietly coordinated with Big Tech and foreign-funded “fact-checkers” to suppress conservative speech — has now been dissolved.

Rubio confirmed the move in an April op-ed for The Federalist, writing, “Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC).”

The Florida senator-turned–Secretary of State made clear that protecting free speech means tearing down the institutions that weaponized “disinformation” claims against Trump supporters.

“To protect free speech, the censorship industrial complex must be dismantled,” Rubio said.

The GEC was originally created under the Obama administration to counter terrorist propaganda overseas. But under Obama’s leadership, it morphed into a political censorship arm — targeting any speech that challenged establishment narratives.

“This pivot was no accident,” Rubio wrote. “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.”

Stengel, who served as the GEC’s first head, infamously equated President Trump’s campaign messaging with terrorist propaganda, writing in 2019: “Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.”

That same year, Stengel publicly called for a “hate speech law” in the United States — a radical proposal that alarmed free speech advocates.

According to Rubio, the GEC worked closely with the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in 2020 — a coalition of government-funded groups that “monitored” so-called misinformation on social media during the election.

“The EIP pretty much exclusively singled out accounts and narratives associated with President Trump and his supporters,” Rubio noted. “In fact, they directly flagged President Trump’s tweets, along with those of his family members and friends of the administration.”

The GEC, Rubio said, was an “enthusiastic partner” in this effort — using taxpayer money to suppress American voices under the guise of “protecting democracy.”

“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,’” he explained.

One of those taxpayer-funded groups was the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) — an organization that ranked news outlets by their supposed “risk” of spreading false information.

GDI routinely blacklisted conservative media outlets such as The Federalist and the New York Post, while giving top “trust” rankings to left-wing sites like HuffPost and ProPublica.

In other words, the GEC was funding censorship — paying foreign and domestic operatives to undermine the very free speech rights guaranteed to Americans.

Recent polling suggests that the public has had enough. A national survey earlier this year found that Americans are losing their appetite for censorship, with support for government or tech company “fact-checking” falling sharply since 2023.

“The entire ‘disinformation’ industry, from its very beginnings, has existed to protect the American establishment from the voices of forgotten Americans,” Rubio wrote.

“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.”

The closure of the GEC marks a turning point in Trump’s broader effort to restore free speech and accountability across federal agencies.