Donald Trump is making some huge moves in cutting the size of the federal government.
His focus has been on slashing waste, fraud, and abuse as well as ending agencies that promoted leftist ideology.
And Chuck Schumer was steaming mad after Donald Trump shut down this federal agency that funded and participated in censorship.
The Trump administration recently announced it is shutting down a federal agency that funded and participated in censorship of conservative viewpoints online.
Blacklists of conservative outlets
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) finally is shutting down almost a decade after its creation.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the closure in a news release and said it was due to “free speech” concerns.
The GEC has faced massive criticism from Republicans in Congress and conservative groups and media outlets.
It was also facing a lawsuit for funding groups that allegedly created “blacklists” of conservative and right-leaning media outlets.
“Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving,” Rubio said. “This is antithetical to the very [principles] we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.”
The GEC was first established by former President Barack Obama through an executive order in 2016.
The stated goal was to try and counter foreign terrorist propaganda.
But the agency later began funding entities such as the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a Europe-based group that creates “exclusion” lists that describe conservative websites as spreaders of false information.
Pressuring online platforms to blackball conservative groups
The GDI also pressured online platforms to avoid doing business with them, according to the Washington Examiner.
The GEC also reportedly helped the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and private groups track social media posts with supposedly “false information” and report them to platforms to be taken down.
Not only that, but the GEC started actively targeting individual American citizens as well.
“By 2020, it had grown into this movement of like actually going after individual American voices,” Rubio said in a broadcast interview about the GEC.
The Daily Wire and The Federalist also sued the State Department in 2023 for funding the GDI.
In the suit they alleged the government was violating the First Amendment and federal law at their expense.
The move by Rubio should finally put an end to this anti-American taxpayer-funded agency.
Congress effectively defunded the GEC back in December by cutting it from a spending bill after some Republicans opposed its activities and use of taxpayer funds for clearly leftist activities.
“To the extent we’re spending money now, we are going to spend money on messaging,” Rubio said. “It’s going to be pro-American messaging and it’s going to be incentivizing and protecting free speech, which is threatened all over the world.”
“The best way to counter disinformation is free speech,” Rubio said.
On this issue Marco Rubio is exactly right.
24/7 Politics will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
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