Are we sure this time? Are we 4Imprint certain?
After all, we celebrated the end of the Global Engagement Center in December, only to discover a month later than it had metastasized throughout the State Department as “the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference Hub (R/FIMI).” Its mission sounded very, very familiar to Matt Taibbi at the time:
The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference Hub, or “R/FIMI,” is the Global Engagement Center. Despite Republican determination to kill the agency, GEC lives, brazenly and in the open.
It gets worse. In case you were under the illusion that government employees are grownups and would never play games with taxpayer money, GEC staff didn’t just move funds and change a name. According to one Hill source, they took GEC employees from one location and physically scattered them through State Department offices, leaving the operation in place but decentralized, the bureaucratic version of a fake mustache. The mission statement and memo gave this silliness away, so it appears this elaborate office shuffle was meant as a parting pants-drop by Tony Blinken’s staffers in the direction of their budget conquerors. …
Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, who as his State’s Attorney General filed the Murthy v. Missouri digital censorship case that reached the Supreme Court, was withering.
“I worked hard to ensure the Global Engagement Center was shutdown, including raising my concerns when an initial end-of-year spending deal included the reauthorization of GEC. It was a failed experiment that tried to yet again censor Americans under a fancy name,” he said. “The State Department creating the same entity, but by a different name, flies in the face of Congressional intent. Make no mistake, there will be accountability.”
Added a veteran GOP congressional aide: “This will not continue into the Trump administration.”
Pardon us, then, if we all keep the champagne on ice after another obituary for the GEC or its descendants. However, this time Marco Rubio assures us that the GEC/R-FIMI has gone from mostly dead to the go-through-its-pockets-and-look-for-loose-change stage. Rubio announced the dismantling of the entity by all names at The Federalist this morning:
GEC was supposed to be dead already. But, as many have learned the hard way, in Washington, D.C., few things ever truly die. When Republicans in Congress sunset GEC’s funding at the end of last year, the Biden State Department simply slapped on a new name. The GEC became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) office, with the same roster of employees. With this new name, they hoped to survive the transition to the new administration.
Today, we are putting that to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return. …
My choice to publish this piece in The Federalist is no coincidence. One recipient of your taxpayer dollars was a British entity called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). GDI once produced a list of the top 10 “riskiest online news outlets” in a direct bid to drive off their ad revenue and put them out of business. Every one of those 10 sites was on the political right, and The Federalist was among them.
Another entity receiving State Department dollars was NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of various websites, once again for the purposes of driving traffic and ad revenue away from those rated poorly. NewsGuard claims to be nonpartisan — but its board of advisers has included one Rick Stengel, the very man who built the Global Engagement Center, who says Donald Trump uses ISIS propaganda tactics, and who believes that propagandizing the American people is a good thing.
Later in the day, the Secretary of State told Ben Shapiro that terminating these efforts is only the first step. Rubio also announced that the State Department would launch investigations into how the GEC operated, which targets it chose, and why. Only then, Rubio said, could accountability be achieved:
Biden’s regime used YOUR tax dollars to censor you. @SecRubio is nuking their propaganda machine—firing the censors, ending the abuse, restoring free speech.
Full breakdown on The Ben Shapiro Show tomorrow. Don’t miss it. pic.twitter.com/5V0KptOZyg
— The Ben Shapiro Show (@BenShapiroShow) April 16, 2025
Both the GEC and Newsguard came after Townhall Media sites, including Hot Air. They used tendentious ‘requests’ to justify painting opinion as “misinformation” while in some cases propagating it themselves. Cutting off funds are a good start to demolishing the government-sponsored and corrupt “fact checking” industry, but it’s only a start. And “accountability” won’t be achieved until the apparatchiks in the federal government that created the Big Tech-Goverment Industrial Censorship Complex are all publicly identified, at the very least.
To the extent that Rubio succeeds in this mission, Americans will owe him a debt of gratitude. But let’s not kid ourselves, either. The GEC and the Big Brother Industrial Censorship Complex are always one election from resurrection, with no end of apparatchiks ready and willing to censor the speech and dissent of fellow Americans with Double Plus Ungood Thoughcrimes running around in our heads.
And that is why we can never be certain of our freedoms. We have to vote in every election like they are under attack … because that is the reality and those are the stakes.
