Sara Gonzales REACTS to Federalist exposé on GEC targeting Blaze Media — ‘Yes, the deep state actually is THAT threatened’

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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Government funded a weapon to fight terrorism — and then used it in test on Blaze Media

It didn't take long for a federal government agency originally designed to censor certain foreign entities and curate their narratives on terrorism to be turned on Americans.

Then-President Barack Obama issued an executive order in 2011 establishing the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications within the State Department — an agency tasked initially with "using communication tools to reduce radicalization by terrorists and extremist violence and terrorism that threaten the interests and national security of the United States."

Obama broadened the mission of the agency and renamed it the Global Engagement Center in another executive order just months prior to President Donald Trump's electoral victory in 2016.

'Greatest level of disinformation risk.'

The Global Engagement Center — overseen by a steering committee of deep-state officials, codified into law in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, and afforded both grant-making authorities and the ability to "leverage expertise from outside the federal government" — eventually became, as one former intelligence source told investigative reporter Matt Taibbi, "an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex."

In the final days of the first Trump presidency, the deep state and its censorship contractors — desperate to control the narratives about the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 virus — apparently turned this "disinformation complex" on Blaze Media in a proof-of-concept test.

According to discovery evidence gleaned by the Federalist in a now-settled case against the government, the Global Engagement Center backed a trial targeting Blaze Media and the free speech it platforms, despite concerns at the State Department about possibly censoring an American company with an American audience in contravention of the agency's foreign-focused mandate.

Damning discoveries

The Global Engagement Center — which Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged "actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving" — was nominally closed in January 2025, then effectively killed by the Trump administration last April under its final name, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub.

Two years prior to the agency's demise, the Federalist and several other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the Global Engagement Center and the State Department.

Artur Debat/Getty Images

The lawsuit accused the government of actively intervening in the news media market through the Global Engagement Center "to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press."

Prior to negotiating a deal with the State Department and settling the case last week, the Federalist obtained discovery evidence confirming that the Global Engagement Center had regularly backed and promoted censorial technologies including NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index.

Blaze Media previously reported that NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index generated blacklists of supposedly risky or misleading news outfits with the aim of getting them demonetized and directing funds to news organizations that advanced establishment narratives.

In the Global Disinformation Index's fall 2022 report, for example, NPR, the Washington Post, and other liberal news outfits were labeled as the "least risky sites," whereas Blaze Media, Reason, the Federalist, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, and other conservative publications made the top 10 list of "riskiest sites" and were smeared as having the "greatest level of disinformation risk."

It turns out that Blaze Media was targeted for more than just a blacklist.

Testing Americans

In an August 2020 press release, NewsGuard showcased that it and two other technology companies — PeakMetrics and Omelas — had won a $25,000 contract earlier that year offered jointly by the State Department and the Pentagon to develop solutions that would help the departments evaluate "disinformation narrative themes in near real time 'by identifying online sources spreading COVID-19 disinformation or misinformation narratives.'"

The Federalist obtained evidence that these Global Engagement Center-funded companies ran a test from Dec. 14, 2020, until Jan. 7, 2021, wherein Blaze Media was apparently a featured target.

The Global Engagement Center reportedly explained ahead of time that the test would entail PeakMetrics "first identify[ing] popular yet potentially divisive narratives relevant to the U.S. elections that are trending across channels."

Omelas, in turn, was supposed to provide "evidence of direct attribution of these narratives to state-sponsored sources of disinformation."

After PeakMetrics and Omelas assessed which narratives were becoming "integrated into domestic messaging," NewsGuard "would highlight which sites the narratives continue to surface from and 'provide information on the reliability, popularity, and endurance of the sites and dissemination platforms,'" reported the Federalist.

This proposed plan apparently made at least one person at the State Department uncomfortable. In a September 2020 email, the person apologized for a lack of clarity regarding the proposed test, noting that the agency had "explained to CYBERCOM" that it would be "impossible" to "focus on domestic audiences" and that "this test will NOT focus on US audiences."

A PeakMetrics report — produced by the State Department and reviewed by the Federalist — suggested these reassurances, which prompted a department official to approve the test, were misleading.

The report explained that the outfits "collaborated to create a mockup of a joint dashboard incorporating all three companies' capabilities."

PeakMetrics noted further that it had performed a preliminary analysis on "Omelas' 'Unrest and Violence in America' narrative," then integrated its "technology enrichment for sources," allowing "operators to garner insights such as technology stacks used for a site, IP addresses (and IP2GEO) associated with the site, and potentially affiliated sites using the same ID for particular technologies."

The report added that "analysis of this metadata can provide unique insights into networks of disinformation propagators."

PeakMetrics' report featured two examples of so-called "disinformation propagators": Sputnik News — a Russian state-owned news agency — and Blaze Media, one of America's largest independent media companies, which the report claimed had a "record of promoting conspiracies [sic] and misinformation surrounding prominent figures and elections."

Through a grant of over $2 million to a third party, the State Department funded the testing of the three companies' technology and financed the test bed on which they collaborated, the Federalist noted.

"Our government financed testing for private technology companies to improve their products — products that target American[s’] speech and seek to silence domestic media outlets," the Federalist summarized.

PeakMetrics and Omelas did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Matt Skibinski, the COO of NewsGuard, attempted to downplay the finding, telling Blaze News, "This small contract with the Trump administration's Global Engagement Center was exclusively for the purpose of tracking narratives emanating from Chinese and Russian media outlets. The scope of work was extremely specific, even going so far as to list the foreign-owned publications that would be the subject of our monitoring."

Skibinski did not deny that Blaze Media was used in the test.

"PeakMetrics simply incorporated that publicly available rating into its dashboard to test whether this would be useful," said Skibinski. "Again, this was not part of the scope of work we were paid for, and again, The Blaze [sic] was rated well before we had this unrelated small Trump administration [Global Engagement Center] contract covering foreign disinformation."

"We did it because we thought it might be a useful capability that could lead us to future contracts," said Skibinski.

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Davis: The Government And Big Tech Censored Americans. It Must Never Happen Again

'It is time to return to a world where we can say what we wish without fear of being censored, or deplatformed, or shot dead'

Left whines over Kimmel’s cancellation, but conservatives faced real federally funded censorship

The left is in an uproar, accusing conservatives of pushing Jimmy Kimmel off the air and of hypocritically undermining their own First Amendment principles.

Yet, Kimmel’s exit was driven by a fed-up network responding to market forces. The left has looked the other way when conservative outlets battled federally funded censorship campaigns targeting their voices, including as recently as December 2024.

'Jimmy Kimmel got canceled by his own Democrat-run network because his own affiliates finally got fed up with his garbage ratings, his garbage behavior, and his garbage lies.'

The now-defunct Global Engagement Center, a subdivision of the State Department, was formed under the Obama administration and tasked with the mission “to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.”

While the GEC was initially created to protect Americans from “disinformation” from other countries, it was used against several American media outlets, including Blaze Media.

Under the Biden administration, the GEC expanded its so-called disinformation efforts, partnering with the Global Disinformation Index, a United Kingdom-based nonprofit. GDI claims to provide “independent, neutral, and transparent data and intelligence to advise policymakers and business leaders about how to combat disinformation and its creators.”

This partnership allowed the Biden administration to finance the censorship of American media without violating its goal of countering foreign propaganda.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

The GDI published a report in 2022 that listed American outlets it deemed the “least risky” and the “riskiest” for publishing "disinformation."

According to the GDI, the top 10 “riskiest” media websites included:

New York Post
Reason Magazine
RealClearPolitics
The Daily Wire
The Blaze
One America News Network
The American Conservative
The Federalist
Newsmax
The American Spectator

GDI labeled NPR, AP News, the New York Times, ProPublica, and Insider among the top 10 least risky.

The federal government’s funding of GDI prompted a lawsuit in December 2023 from Texas, the Daily Wire, and the Federalist. The lawsuit called it “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation.”

Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

“Conservative commentators and news outlets like the Federalist were blacklisted, censored, and illegally targeted for destruction by the federal government for years, and Jimmy Kimmel never said a word,” Sean Davis, CEO and co-founder of the Federalist, told Blaze News.

“Jimmy Kimmel got canceled by his own Democrat-run network because his own affiliates finally got fed up with his garbage ratings, his garbage behavior, and his garbage lies,” Davis continued. “Charlie Kirk, who was murdered in front of his wife and children because of his beliefs, is an actual martyr. Jimmy Kimmel is a pathetic crybully who’s finally getting a taste of his own medicine.”

The GEC was officially shut down in December 2024.

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UK Media Are Very Mad At Darren Beattie For Dismantling A State Dept. Censorship Apparatus

The GEC is dead, but the press is trying to squeeze another disinformation hoax out of it. This round of propaganda originates in the U.K.

Former 'disinfo' czar Nina Jankowicz tells Europeans to take a stand against the US, double down on social media regulation

Nina Jankowicz, the former czar of the Biden administration's short-lived Disinformation Governance Board and briefly also an adviser to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, addressed the European Parliament this week, telling members to "stand firm against another autocracy: the United States of America."

Fresh off telling the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the "censorship industrial complex is a fiction," Jankowicz concern-mongered before foreign leaders about the Trump administration's fight against censorship efforts at home and abroad.

Jankowicz stressed that Europeans should persist in their efforts to regulate content on social media, claiming that doing so while also throwing additional support behind Ukraine would be "the clearest signal the European Union could send to Russia and other adversaries that it will not stop fighting to preserve democracy at home and around the world."

Like Democrats in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election and those European elites challenged in recent years by ascendant populist parties, Jankowicz appears to use "democracy" to denote a state of play preferable to the ever-weakening liberal establishment.

'Rubio gleefully announced he was obliterating the office.'

Jankowicz, who previously emphasized that "freedom of speech does not necessarily mean freedom of reach" and registered as a foreign agent in 2022, appeared especially concerned about the threats supposedly posed to "democracy" by the Trump administration. In particular, she is vexed by the administration's opposition to the European Union's Digital Services Act, which critics have dubbed a "censorship law," as well as by the administration's shuttering of the censorious Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, formerly the Global Engagement Center.

"Just last week in the United States, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gleefully announced he was obliterating the office tasked with tracking and responding to foreign information, manipulation and interference," complained Jankowicz, referring to Rubio's April 16 announcement that the Hub was no more.

The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub was a rebrand of the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the U.S. State Department that was credibly accused of working with domestic and foreign organizations to silence conservative voices.

Jankowicz tried gaslighting Congress about the GEC during an April 1 hearing, claiming, "There was no censorship going on at the Global Engagement Center at the State Department."

Contrary to the foreign agent's suggestion, Rubio noted last week that the GEC "cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year and actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving."

The GEC worked with Jankowicz's fellow travelers in the censorship industry, backing, for instance, the Disinformation Index Inc. — the American component of the British think tank Global Disinformation Index — and NewsGuard Technologies.

Blaze News previously reported that these two outfits generated blacklists of supposedly misleading news outfits with the aim of getting them demonetized and directing funds to news organizations that parrot approved narratives. While liberal publications like the Washington Post and NPR were labeled as the "least risky sites," Blaze News, Reason, the Federalist, the New York Post, and other websites carrying content apparently unpalatable to the liberal establishment made the top-10 list of "riskiest sites" and were smeared as having the "greatest level of disinformation risk."

'We will never restrict our citizens' right to free speech.'

"Many other U.S. government institutions have been similarly dismantled in the months since President Trump took office under the guise of protecting free speech and allegedly 'ending censorship,'" continued Jankowicz in her address this week to the European Parliament. "Now the European Union has become the subject of the Trump administration and tech executives' ire."

During his Feb. 11 speech at the Paris Artificial Intelligence Summit, Vice President JD Vance declared that social media platforms developed and/or based in the U.S. would remain free from ideological restraints, stating, "We will never restrict our citizens' right to free speech."

One of the key European censorship initiatives at issue is the EU's Digital Services Act, which is touted as part of a regulatory strategy to "prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation."

The European Commission has taken aim at Elon Musk and X for supposed content moderation violations under the DSA and has threatened monster fines. The commission slapped Meta and Apple with hundreds of millions of dollars in fines on Tuesday with parallel tech regulation, the Digital Markets Act.

'The Trump administration is undoubtedly preparing a pressure campaign to force EU institutions to roll back regulation like the DSA.'

Ten days after Vance's speech, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum "to defend American companies and innovators from overseas extortion," in which he noted "regulations that dictate how American companies interact with consumers in the European Union, like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, will face scrutiny from the Administration."

Despite this threat, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently told Politico that Europe is going after American companies anyway.

"We apply the rules fairly, proportionally, and without bias. We don't care where a company's from and who's running it. We care about protecting people," said von der Leyen.

Jankowicz, apparently enraged by the Trump administration's refusal to allow the regulation of American content by foreign powers, stated, "Neither Washington nor the social media platforms at his capture are interested in protecting democracy. They are interested in maintaining their power and hoarding profits."

"The Trump administration is undoubtedly preparing a pressure campaign to force EU institutions to roll back regulation like the DSA, to end support for Ukraine, to stop holding Russia to account. Do not capitulate. Hold the line," said the self-described "Mary Poppins of disinformation."

According to Jankowicz, social media regulation and cooperation from platforms are needed especially because the Kremlin is supposedly taking "advantage of decreased tech platform regulation and attention to foreign influence campaigns" and "using emerging technologies, including generative artificial intelligence, to infect our public discourse."

"If Europe wishes to stand firm against Russia and defend its democracy and sovereignty, it must start by standing up against the bullies in the White House," concluded Jankowicz.

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Sara Gonzales REACTS to Federalist exposé on GEC targeting Blaze Media — ‘Yes, the deep state actually is THAT threatened’

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Testing Americans

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Damning discoveries

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