from Revolver News:
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.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
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.
