Trump administration pushes back against the left's attack on free speech

 Newsmax:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says dismantling the "censorship-industrial complex" is a key priority of the Trump administration and his department had officially closed the Global Engagement Center (GEC), an office used to stop free speech.

In an article for The Federalist published Wednesday, Rubio said, "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."

The GEC, which had originally begun in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications, or CSCC, was tasked with countering extremist propaganda.

But in 2016 the Obama administration moved to rebrand it as the Global Engagement Center, broadening its scope to combat what it called "foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts."

Critics say the shift turned a counterterrorism office into a tool for censoring political speech.

"When Republicans in Congress sunset GEC's funding at the end of last year, the Biden State Department simply slapped on a new name," Rubio wrote, referring to the office's transition to the "Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI)" initiative. "Today, we are putting that to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return."
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The Biden administration was more interested in suppressing speech it disagreed with than having a debate about the matter.   Rubio is right to push back against censorship that the left tried to impose using the Global Engagement Center.