Remember the Global Engagement Center? The State Department's censorship squad became a target after the release of the Twitter Files, which showed the GEC (among others) strong-arming social media platforms to remove or suppress postings and subscribers that dissented from the Biden administration's positions and policies, especially on COVID. Mark Zuckerberg just this past week belatedly discussed the heavy-handed pressure to censor dissent at Facebook as well, although he has yet to release Meta's own files to name names. 

Eventually, the courts and the public exposure forced the State Department to disband. In fact, the Daily Signal credited Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with forced its dissolution as "DOGE's First Scalp" in this video three weeks ago in defeating the first CR floated in December. All of this comes via Matt Taibbi this morning, to whom we will return to tie this all together:

That CR died ... but the GEC turned out to be only mostly dead ... if that. At the same time that the Sixth Circuit ended the Biden administration's resurrection of Net Neutrality -- another form of progressive speech control -- the State Department resurrected the GEC and dispersed it across its bureaucracy for maximum cover. Gabe Kaminsky reported on it last week:

The State Department has crafted plans to distribute staffers from a shuttered office accused of censoring conservatives to a new internal “hub” that will coordinate its activities, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.

The Global Engagement Center, the office that Republicans accused of working with groups aiming to demonetize right-leaning media outlets in the United States, shut down in late 2024 upon lawmakers agreeing to no longer fund it. However, in a non-public letter to members of Congress on Dec. 6, the State Department outlined its plans to “realign” more than 50 GEC officials and tens of millions of dollars in funding to a hub purporting to counter foreign interference, documents show.

The plans, which have not been reported on until now, will likely lead to investigations from Republicans into the State Department’s handling of the GEC’s closure.

Lest one think this was a routine reassignment of civil servants to other duties, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein got the new mission statement for the renamed org, now called the "Counter Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference Hub." See if this sounds familiar:

"Welcome to the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference Hub (R/FIMI) is a Mission Center energizing a network of U.S. interagency, international, and private sector partners that decisively exposes and counters disinformation and propaganda.

Our Mission

To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations."

It sounded familiar to Taibbi:

The new “R/FIMI” mission is lifted verbatim from a 2018 bill, modifying the original December, 2016 legislation establishing the Global Engagement Center:

The purpose of the Center shall be to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.

The State Department is having a last laugh at its would-be reformers. 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.

Consider when all of this took place. The incoming Trump administration had made clear that it intended to end all government attempts to interfere with speech and debate. The refusal of Congress to provide funding for the GEC made clear the legislative intent to put an end to it, too. Instead, the State Department under Tony Blinken, in the final days of a discredited administration, resurrected the program while hiding it under a new name and dispersing its members to keep the censorship effort from being discovered, let alone ended. 

Does that sound like a benign effort, or a program legitimately aimed at "national security"?

It doesn't to Republicans contacted by Taibbi and others, who appear to have been blindsided by Blinken's shell game. Now that they know about GEC's new alias as the "R/FIMI," they now plan to stamp that out ASAP:

When I asked aides if they felt there was any support in the Trump administration for retaining GEC/FIMI, perhaps for the purpose of aiming it in a different direction, the answer was unequivocal: no way. Moreover, Republican staffers insist that though the ex-GEC employees can try all they want to continue their work, they will soon be reporting to a new Undersecretary of State for Public Policy, who won’t be confirmed unless he or she promises to kill Disinformation Jason. “They did it, they tried to get away with it, they got caught, they got outed, and now we’ll just ban it,” the veteran GOP aide said.

“I look forward to working with the Trump administration and my colleagues to ensure whoever is responsible for this is identified and proper action is taken,” added Schmitt.

Might I suggest that Marco Rubio's first task at State should be to put an end to all Big Brother efforts aimed at the speech and debate rights of Americans. Anyone still at State involved in either GEC or R/FIMI should get fired on January 21, along with anyone who assisted in attempting to bury this effort in State's vast bureaucracy. 

Be sure to read all of Taibb's excellent report, too. He has more on how the R/FIMI would have coordinated with other Western agencies to suppress speech and dissent, selling out the First Amendment to enforce the progressive party line. The subscription is worth the price.