A Federalist article published yesterday revealed that the government-funded Global Engagement Center assured the State Department its censorship “test bed” platform would not target U.S. audiences, yet it proceeded to fund a trial specifically aimed at Blaze Media.
“Let me break it down simply,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says.
“Back in 2011, Obama signed an executive order to establish the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications … to support ‘agencies in government-wide public communications activities targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations,’” she recounts.
This was the “seed,” she explains, that would eventually sprout and bloom into a domestic censorship apparatus.
In 2016, Obama then signed an executive order, renaming the existing Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications the Global Engagement Center and tasking it with coordinating U.S. government-wide counterterrorism communications activities directed at foreign audiences abroad to counter terrorist messaging.
“Pay attention to these dates. 2016, [Obama] is out the door,” Sara says.
In the waning days of President Trump’s first term (December 14, 2020, to January 7, 2021), however, a GEC-funded test-bed trial diverted from its stated mission to target foreign disinformation when it set its sights on Blaze Media.
Its other target was Sputnik News, a Russian state-owned news agency and radio service.
“Why would we be as big of a target as a Russian state news agency?” Sara asks. “Is the deep state that threatened by what we talk about?”
“The answer is yes — the deep state actually is that threatened by what we talk about,” she answers definitively.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut down the GEC and its successor office, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, in 2025, the New York Times and other left-wing outlets lamented it.
Sara mocks the coverage the story received: “He closed down the State Department office on foreign disinformation. Why would we want to have disinformation? That’s bad!”
“No, it was just being used to suppress and censor actual American media,” she explains. “Sorry, I’m saying American media like it was plural — like it was like this big venture. … No, it was just us.”
Why Blaze Media specifically?
Sara believes it’s tied to Blaze Media’s COVID coverage.
“We were one of the only (actually the only) alternative media outlet that was telling the truth during COVID, myself included,” she says. “We were getting demonetized left and right because we were actually telling the truth.”
To hear more, watch the episode above.
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