On Wednesday, April 16, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio very publicly abolished the censorship body known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
GEC was actually supposed to be dead already after Republicans defunded the State Department offshoot last year. However, this didn’t stop Joe Biden’s handlers from rebranding the group with a new name, the Counter Foreign Information and Interference office (R-FIMI) with the same roster of government employees.
Rubio explains how Obama’s man in charge of GEC, Rick Stengel, in 2016 twisted the mission of the organization into focusing on fake news and misinformation here at home. Stengel was a lunatic Trump hater who essentially believes that a secure democracy means “silencing the part of the electorate he doesn’t like.”
Secretary of State Rubio describes how GEC worked overtime to silence voices who challenged the official regime narrative on the COVID-19 pandemic including, its origins, treatments, natural immunity, and the experimental vaccines.
Rubio added, “GEC was an enthusiastic participant in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), an infamous group established under constitutionally questionable conditions to monitor “disinformation” about the 2020 election.”
The GEC used taxpayer dollars to fund outside censorship organizations,, including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which listed several conservative outlets as the “riskiest online news outlets” including The Federalist and Daily Wire.
The Gateway Pundit has reported extensively on GDI for several years now.
On April 7 2023, TGP shared a report from investigative journalist Bob Bishop regarding the Global Disinformation Index. Bishop wrote:
The public is awakening to social media censorship (Twitter and Facebook) and the extreme bias of prominent media outlets (i.e., the New York Times) promoting and supporting the Federal and state governments’ narratives and totalitarian behavior. An emerging and highly destructive new strategy is “blacklisting” independent conservative media to defund them of advertising revenue, leading to their financial demise.
The mission of the Disinformation Index (“DI”), with its U.K. parent organization, Disinformation Index LTD. (“GDI”), is to defund conservative online news sites with claims of alleged disinformation. GBTDI disinformation focus is LBGT, climate denial, election fraud, illegal immigration, the RussiaUkraine border conflict, abortion, the Biden family’s foreign business dealings, and anti-vaccine content. The organizations invert facts and truth to create an adversarial political narrative.
Their rating system creates a blacklist shared with major advertising companies and advertising exchanges, including Google and Microsoft, to shut down disfavored speech by defunding advertising. These companies contract with GDIDI for information on who to target for defunding. When comparing GDI’s risk sources, the bias is highly apparent.
This list omits The Gateway Pundit (TGP) and Breitbart which are constantly targeted by these organizations for some reason. Gateway and Breitbart typically are at the top of any censorship list.
We later found out why. GDI lists Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit in their own special category.
In a podcast on The Safety Tech Podcast in 2022, Clare Melford, GDI CEO, discussed its strategies for defunding conservative websites. She stated that the Gateway Pundit was on GDI’s “exclusion hit list,” which led to advertising companies and Google not monetizing its content. A link to the podcast is here, and the segment starts at 24.10.
Host Ben Whitelaw: Is there any specific examples of new sites that you know have been defunded in the way that you talked about?
Clare Melford: I can only talk about the ones that are already in the public domain, which are not necessarily the result of our work, but of the whole ecosystem of organizations that are trying to do the same, both of which there have been many news stories about. So the first is Breitbart. There’s even video and footage of Steve Bannon talking about how the advertiser, a reaction against the content on Breitbart, cost them 90% of their ad revenue. And the second is The Gateway Pundit. There was a documentary on French TV, TV2, I think, in France last year, which showed a lot of the content on Gateway Pundit and talked to the advertising technology companies that monetized it, notably Google, and led to those companies deciding not to provide services to the Gateway Pundit in the future.
Host Ben Whitelaw: What type of misinformation are you most concerned about in the work that you and GDI do?
Clare Melford: I think I am increasingly concerned about not an individual narrative, but the meta-narrative that democracy isn’t working. Democracy is the best form of governance human beings have yet invented as a way of enriching and developing stable, prosperous, peaceful societies. That is under attack, and it’s been under attack for several years. But the year 2021 started out with a great democracy attacking itself with the Capital riot on January sixth. And that has continued throughout 2021. And if you look at a whole range of disinformation narratives, They are becoming, they are blending together in support of this Uber narrative that democracy isn’t working, that there’s a corrupt elite working only for themselves, not serving the will of the common man, and that only a strong man can get rid of the corrupt elite. So I’ll give you the example of QAnon, which started many years ago as a narrative around deep state elites, with some crazy stuff around these elites pedophiles and cannibals, and had a very strong anti-Semitic element to it, but it was niche. It then, over the course of 2019, 2020, 2021, morphed into a narrative around COVID and anti-vax content, mask protests, lockdown protests, voter fraud around the 2020 election, and now it’s even morphed into a narrative around abortion.
Here is the clip.
What is interesting about this clip and admission by Clare Melford
Gateway Pundit appeared regularly in GDI’s weekly tracker. GDI has scrubbed the weekly tracker reports from its website. However, below is an example from the Wayback Machine on the 2020 election fraud. The Wayback Machine link includes numerous weekly research lists that target leading conservative websites like Breitbart News, American Thinker, Fox Nation, and World News Daily.
The Washington Examiner reported that U.S. taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center during 2020 and 2021 funded $665,000 to U.K. GDI. Funds used domestically to defund conservative websites.
Other high-profile funders are George Soros’s Open Society, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. Foreign governments have an adverse influence with the freedom of the press. Could DI be considered an agent for foreign governments and be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)?
The post CEO of US Taxpayer-Funded GDI Admits to Creating Special “Exclusion Hit List” Program that was Used to Strip Ads from The Gateway Pundit and Breitbart – Captured on Audio appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.