Free Speech

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is shuttering the State Department’s online speech censorship office after the Biden administration opted to rebrand the office amid Republican scrutiny last year.

Rubio announced the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, previously known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a unit that originated with a counterterrorism mission but quickly transformed into a tool for online speech suppression of Americans.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday shuttered the State Department’s controversial Global Engagement Center, which under the Biden administration faced heavy criticism from House Republicans who said it was used to censor Americans.

Rubio made the decision “to preserve and protect the freedom for Americans to exercise their free speech” after the center — which was briefly rebranded during former President Joe Biden’s final months in office — “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.

The Trump administration is shuttering the state department’s last remaining bastion to monitor foreign disinformation campaigns.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the State Department is closing an office designed to counter foreign disinformation, stating that the effort had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans.”

During his historic comeback campaign in 2024, President Trump vowed to close the book on a dark chapter in America’s constitutional history: the weaponization of America’s own government to silence, censor, and suppress the free speech of ordinary Americans. The American people responded to this promise by giving President Trump a landslide victory last November.

Pro-life activist Livia Tossici-Bolt was convicted earlier this month for standing outside an abortion clinic with a sign reading: ‘Here to talk, if you want.’ She was fined £20,000 for twice breaching the clinic’s ‘buffer zone’.

The amendment declares that children's rights to moral, physical and spiritual development supersede any right other than the right to life, including the right to peaceful assembly.

Hungary's parliament has passed an amendment to the constitution that allows the government to ban public events by LGBTQ+ communities, a decision that legal scholars and critics are calling another step toward authoritarianism.

The amendment, which required a two-thirds vote, passed along party lines with 140 votes for and 21 against.

Harvard University announced Monday it will not agree to the Trump administration’s demands to address antisemitism on campus.

The Department of Education (ED) sent a letter to the Ivy League school April 11 demanding the school agree to a host of reforms, including adjusting and enforcing disciplinary processes, improving screening of international students for “hostile” views and auditing “programs with egregious records of antisemitism.” Harvard cited academic freedom concerns and free speech rights in its announcement rejecting ED’s demands. 

Harvard University on Monday rejected demands from the Trump administration as it threatens the school’s federal funding as part of a broader clampdown on higher education.

In a message to the Harvard community from its leadership — and in a corresponding letter from the school’s attorneys to the federal government — the university said that while it is and will continue to engage in reforms, those changes should not be mandated by Washington.

Harvard University rejected a list of demands from the Trump administration that would require sweeping changes at the higher education institution to secure back nearly $9 billion in federal funding, saying it would not allow itself “to be taken over by the federal government.”

In a letter to administration officials on Monday, lawyers for the university said the list of demands the government sent in early April “go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration” and refused to agree to the terms.