Eric Schmitt

It's hard to overstate how big this is.

For years, the State Department ran a global censorship operation—not just in America, but across the West.

Now, it's pushing free speech instead.

Here's why this matters. 🧵 

The "disinformation" and "hate speech" industry is one of the top threats to Western freedom today.

"From its very beginnings," @SecRubio writes, this industry "has existed to protect the American establishment from the voices of forgotten Americans."
https://x.com/SecRubio/status/1912532522191249696

As Attorney General of Missouri, I sued the Biden admin for working with Big Tech to censor conservatives. We took them all the way to the Supreme Court.

That case—Missouri v. Biden—led to the release of thousands of pages of documents detailing a vast censorship enterprise. 

Piece by piece, we uncovered exactly how this system worked. Under Biden, government agencies funded an army of third-party censors and "disinformation" groups to do what they couldn't legally do themselves—censor American speech.

More details here:
https://x.com/Eric_Schmitt/status/1899826920419664131

One of the nerve centers of this censorship machine was the State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC). Founded under Obama, the GEC was originally billed as a way to combat FOREIGN propaganda. But it began to target Americans—under the guise of fighting "disinformation." 

And it wasn't just Americans. The GEC funded and worked with powerful NGOs pushing speech restrictions and creating advertiser blacklists—designed to crush conservative media—across the West. Your tax dollars were funding a global war against conservatives.

As Rubio writes: 

These people were very good at burying their radicalism in neutral, harmless euphemisms—"disinformation," "information integrity," etc. But in practice, they were almost exclusively going after right-wing speech.

This was an international effort to silence criticism of the Left.

For example: One GEC-funded group, the London-based Global Disinformation Index, compiled blacklists of media outlets to feed to advertisers—essentially a form of financial warfare against disfavored outlets.

The top 10 outlets on its "disinformation" list were all on the right. 

Last year, I led a fight in Congress to shutter the GEC for good.

The agency was supposed to sunset at the end of 2024. But the Biden State Department simply renamed it, kept all the same employees, and tried to smuggle it into the next administration.
https://x.com/SenEricSchmitt/status/1869799875149476182

That's how the administrative state works. It morphs and adapts to protect itself.

But now, those of us in Congress who pushed for these reforms have an administration that shares our goals.

As Rubio writes today: "Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return." 

This is a huge step in dismantling the Left's censorship enterprise. Free speech—and in particular, free speech online—is one of the major battlefields of our time. It's one of the fights that will define whether we win or lose on everything else.

It's a big, big win.