The Trump administration drove a silver stake into the heart of the censorship-industrial complex in April when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the closure of its Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub (R/FIMI), formerly the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
But like a predictable horror movie, sometimes the villain tries to spring back to life and create more chaos. That is what is happening with a spate of propaganda pieces published this week, aimed at discrediting the Trump administration’s under secretary for public diplomacy, Darren Beattie.
The GEC is dead, but the dutiful press is trying to squeeze another “Russian disinformation” hoax out of it. Weirdly, this round of propaganda originates in the United Kingdom, with a piece from The Telegraph claiming Beattie, who “shut down counter-Russia agency” (GEC), “has links” to the Kremlin. Other outlets are using the poorly sourced Telegraph piece as their source.
The so-called “links to the Kremlin” are based on Beattie’s 2021 marriage to Yulia Kirillova who “fled Russia at the age of 16,” according to The Times. Kirillova’s uncle is Sergei Chernikov, who once “received a letter of thanks from [Vladimir] Putin for his help in the election campaign which first brought the Russian leader to power.” Putin came to power in 2000.
This and the copycat stories aim to convince the public that Beattie, with his tenuous “links to the Kremlin,” was up to something hinky when he helped shut down GEC, a so-called “counter-Russia agency.”
But the $50-million-a-year GEC was never actually about Russia. It was formed in 2016 under former President Barack Obama and presented to the public as a tool to combat foreign disinformation, with an emphasis on the threat of “Russian disinformation.” Instead, GEC “pressure[d] Big Tech companies into censoring what they claimed to be ‘disinformation’ during the 2020 election,” as The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood previously reported.
Americans, including The Federalist’s Editor-In-Chief Mollie Hemingway and CEO Sean Davis, engaged in constitutionally protected speech, were targeted by the GEC, and deplatformed, muted, or silenced online. If you were ever put in Facebook jail over a political meme, you may have felt the long arm of the GEC.
Global Propaganda
Why are U.K. media outlets writing hit pieces on Beattie, an administration official many Americans have likely never heard of? It could be because the Trump administration is pressuring Europe to abandon censorship of citizens.
“It isn’t a coincidence that these attacks are surfacing as the administration is working to fight censorship domestically and champion free speech around the world,” a senior State Department official told The Federalist. “These fake news outlets are so desperate to keep these censorship tactics alive and discredit the transparency initiative, they are publishing false smears on a respected and effective employee at the State Department.”
Censorship is in opposition to the human spirit that longs to be free, and the Trump administration has been having tough conversations with U.K. and world leaders about the alarming increase in censorship.
When U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the Oval Office in February, Vice President J.D. Vance condemned free speech intrusions in Europe. People in the U.K. have been jailed for social media posts and arrested by police for praying silently in front of abortion businesses.
Rubio announced on May 28 a “new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign nationals” who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States.
“Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance,” the State Department wrote in a recent Substack post that decries censorship across in Europe.
“Americans are familiar with these tactics. Indeed, a similar strategy of censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization was utilized against President Trump and his supporters,” the post said. “What this reveals is that the global liberal project is not enabling the flourishing of democracy. Rather, it is trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people.”
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
