The Hydra of Government: How the Global Engagement Center Lives On Through Rebranding
The Hydra of Government: How the Global Engagement Center Lives On Through Rebranding The Global Engagement Center was defunded, only to reemerge under a new name—proof that bureaucracy rarely dies, it just rebrands. By Roger Kimball January 5, 2025 If you visit the State Department’s website for the Global Engagement Center , you will read that “The Global Engagement Center closed on December 23, 2024.” Not really. As has been often observed, the nearest thing to immortality this side of the pearly gates is a government initiative. I have noted in this space and elsewhere that the innocuous-sounding “Global Engagement Center” was actually (in Vivek Ramaswamy’s accurate summary ) a “key node of the censorship industrial complex.” According to its mission statement, the GEC was supposed to be focused on “ foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, securi...