With the center’s congressional authorization about to expire at the end of the year, some Democrats are panicking at the prospect that it could be shut down entirely should Trump take office.
The founder of the Global Engagement Center is former Obama staffer Rick Stengel, who once described himself as a “propaganda artist” for the former president. He has said on the record that he thinks the First Amendment needs to be modified to allow “hate speech” to be censored in the digital age.
Stengel was also behind a controversial propaganda campaign known as Hamilton 68, which sought to smear any views that went against the political establishment as “Russian disinformation,” claiming that legitimate American accounts that used hashtags such as #SchumerShutdown and #FireMcMaster were Russian bots without any evidence to support it.
This initiative was exposed as a scam in the Twitter Files, which also provided documentation demonstrating how the center smeared posts from media outlets and individuals alike who criticized how the Biden administration responded to COVID-19 as more “Russian disinformation.”
GEC-funded index labeled conservative outlets as "high risk"
The GEC also funded the Global Disinformation Index, which was widely mocked for labeling conservative American media outlets such as the New York Post and Newsmax as “high risk.”
The Global Engagement Center’s censorship has become so extreme that Elon Musk described it this way on X: “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC.”
Therefore, it’s not surprising that its existence is in question depending on the outcome of the election.
Defense One warned about this possibility back in July, when they said the center’s $61 million per year funding could expire if it does not get reauthorization from Congress at the end of the year.
They cautioned: “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.”
And now, Politico has published an article about how the Global Engagement Center, which they point out exposed a major Russian disinformation campaign in Africa, is in danger if Trump takes office. Although it may survive if Democrats take the House in November, it doesn’t stand much of a chance if it remains Republican controlled.
Some senators are trying to extend the center’s authorization, but Politico notes that “they’ll need to muscle past several skeptical Republican colleagues.”
One of the senators who is pushing for its extension through 2031 is Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), who argues that it has “played an indispensable role in combating Russian and Chinese disinformation.”
He added: “It would unnecessarily undermine U.S. national security if we eliminated this tool.”
However, House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability Chair Brian Mast (R-Florida), and Representative Darrell Issa (R-California) claimed that the GEC is “at best indifferent to, and at worst complicit in, an orchestrated and systematic effort to stretch the term ‘disinformation’ to encompass viewpoints that, among American progressives, are deemed to be politically disfavored or inconvenient.”
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