The Global Engagement Center, a State Department unit that called out Russian and Chinese propaganda campaigns and became a MAGA boogeyman, has been shut down. Team Trump is promising that it’s just the start of an examination of alleged censorship during the Biden administration.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the move “a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech” in an op-ed for the right-wing site The Federalist. Critics say it’s part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to withdraw from a decades-long contest of ideas and information with America’s adversaries.
Wired
Up is down. Black is white. Shuttering anti-propaganda function is free speech.
In early February, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the Justice Department task force on covert foreign influence and radically narrowed enforcement of the law that outlawed secretive propaganda for overseas regimes. The Trump administration gutted the parent organization of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, which aimed to provide news and demonstrate the value of a free press in regions of the world where both were often in short supply. [...] “Most shameful moment at the department since the purges of the 1950s,” one State Department official, who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the press, tells WIRED.
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Sometimes, with grants of just a few thousand dollars, it funded the work of journalists in countries targeted by the Putin regime. “We were really focused on building the capacity of folks that were already doing that good work and making sure that they had the platform to continue to tell their stories—to tell the truth in an environment that was trying to take that from them.”
We won't have people telling the truth. And neither will Putin.
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