Marco Rubio Brags About Defending Freedom of Speech While Eagerly Undermining It

The secretary of state, who aims to "liberate American speech," nevertheless wants to deport U.S. residents for expressing opinions that offend him.

Writing in The Federalist this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio brags that he is protecting freedom of speech by ending his department's misbegotten crusade against "disinformation." Yet Rubio is simultaneously undermining freedom of speech by targeting anti-Israel activists for deportation because he deems their opinions harmful to U.S. foreign policy interests. More generally, Rubio's ringing defense of First Amendment rights is hard to take seriously given all the ways his boss has sought to punish people for speech that offends him, whether through deportation, regulation, litigation, criminal investigations, or executive decrees targeting disfavored lawyers and journalists.

Rubio says he is "taking a crucial step toward keeping the president's promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC)." Congress defunded the GEC last year based on concerns that its efforts to combat "disinformation" had targeted constitutionally protected speech. But as Rubio notes, the State Department during the Biden administration sought to keep the program alive under a new name.

"We are putting that to an end," Rubio writes. "Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return."

That is a welcome development for reasons that Rubio outlines. He notes that President Barack Obama created the GEC by executive order in 2016, renaming the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications, which was supposed to "monitor the narratives of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations and advise the American government on what counterterrorist narratives to use in response." The new name came with a broader mission: The GEC was charged with countering "foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts"—an amorphous goal that eventually entailed attempts to police online speech.

The GEC was the brainchild of Richard Stengel, a former journalist who served as Obama's undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Rubio argues that the GEC's decisions reflected Stengel's partisan understanding of disinformation. Stengel "touted his efforts to protect 'democracy' while redefining it so that 'democracy' came to mean silencing the part of the electorate he doesn't like," Rubio says. He complains that Stengel, in his 2019 book Information Wars, argued that President Donald Trump "employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS."

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Rubio notes, the GEC implied that the lab-leak theory of the virus's origins amounted to "Russian disinformation." It "tarred not only specific claims as foreign propaganda but also specific users," he writes. "It created lists of thousands of accounts that were accused of being foreign propaganda vectors simply for sharing articles or even following certain accounts. These lists were sent to social media companies for 'review,' but nobody was fooled—the purpose of this was to pressure private companies in the direction of more censorship and less free speech."

The GEC also participated in the Election Integrity Partnership, which Rubio says "pretty much exclusively singled out accounts and narratives associated with President Trump and his supporters and, in fact, directly flagged President Trump's tweets, along with [those of] his family members and friends of the administration." In addition to "flagging content," he notes, the GEC "funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting 'disinformation.'"

As an example of such taxpayer-supported meddling in the marketplace of ideas, Rubio cites the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British organization that received money from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is funded by the State Department. Among other things, the GDI sought to steer readers and advertisers away from news sources it deemed likely to promote "disinformation" based on opaque and puzzling criteria. According to the GDI, the 10 "riskiest" sites in the United States included Reason, a judgment it said was based on a lack of explicitly stated policies regarding "authorship attribution," fact checking, corrections, and moderation of reader comments.

"Every one of those 10 sites was on the political right," Rubio says (somewhat inaccurately, given Reason's inclusion). The GDI's top-10 list also included the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, The Daily Wire, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, and The Federalist, which is why Rubio says "my choice to publish this piece in The Federalist is no coincidence."

The U.S. government's support for such seemingly biased anti-"disinformation" efforts, which was first revealed by Washington Examiner reporter Gabe Kaminsky, provoked an outcry from conservatives. In 2023, the NED announced that it would no longer fund the GDI.

"Some of the third-party implementers GEC paid to fight so-called disinformation were downright laughable," Rubio writes. "One such implementer, which continued to receive funding even after Congress sunset[ted] GEC, flagged the DOGE Dog as a symbol associated with Nazi SS officers."

The problem, Rubio correctly notes, "wasn't that our government picked the wrong people and NGOs to police 'disinformation.' The problem [was] that they were picking anybody to do this at all. The entire 'disinformation' industry, from its very beginnings, has existed to protect the American establishment from the voices of forgotten Americans. Everything it does is the fruit of the poisoned tree: the hoax that Russian interference, misinformation, and 'meddling' is what caused President Trump's victory in 2016, rather than a winning political message that only he was offering. This travesty has gone on long enough."

Notwithstanding Rubio's predictably partisan spin, his point is valid. The vague and highly contested category of "disinformation" invites value judgments that tend to reflect the political and ideological biases of whoever is flagging content or assessing the trustworthiness of sources. In a free society, the government has no business making such judgments or subsidizing organizations that try to steer public debate in the direction they prefer.

"Our Founding Fathers took the bold step of believing that ordinary citizens can sift through information, decide which policies and candidates are best, and vote accordingly," Rubio writes. "Our 'disinformation experts' reject this thesis and, in the process, reject our democratic republic itself." He rightly decries "the weaponization of America's own government to silence, censor, and suppress the free speech of ordinary Americans."

Rubio is on shakier ground when he claims "the Trump administration rejects this anti-American attitude," adding that "this administration will fight false narratives with true narratives, not with heavy-handed threats decreeing that only one 'truth' be visible online." Rubio's boss, after all, is quite keen on "heavy-handed threats," which he regularly deploys against speech he does not like.

The deportation crusade against students whom Trump describes as antisemitic "terrorist sympathizers" epitomizes the president's casual disregard for freedom of speech. The legal basis for deporting people he thinks fall into that category is a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives Rubio sweeping authority to deem noncitizens "subject to removal" when he unilaterally decides that their "presence or activities" could "have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States."

Rubio notes that fear of malign foreigners drove the State Department's campaign against "disinformation," which he sees as plainly inconsistent with the First Amendment. Yet he deploys the same fear in defending speech-based deportations.

Rubio rightly complains that "disinformation" is a dangerously vague concept as a justification for government attempts to suppress online speech. But he sees no problem with ejecting people from the United States based on the equally vague assertion that allowing them to remain here "would have potentially adverse foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest."

Specifically, Rubio says, activists such as former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil undermine the government's interest in "combat[ting] anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States." Even if Khalil openly praised Hamas or expressed hatred of Jews (positions he disavows), those opinions would be protected by the First Amendment. Rubio implicitly acknowledges that point in his Federalist essay, which criticizes Stengel for writing "an entire article about 'why America needs a hate speech law.'"

In that 2019 Washington Post op-ed piece, Stengel suggested that states "experiment with their own version of hate speech statutes to penalize speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation." He argued that the First Amendment "should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another." The Supreme Court has unambiguously rejected that argument.

In the 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Court overturned the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who was charged with advocating "criminal syndicalism" based on a racist and antisemitic rant in which he said "it's possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken" if "our president, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race." Even advocacy of criminal conduct, the Court unanimously held, is protected by the First Amendment unless it is both "directed" at inciting "imminent lawless action" and "likely" to do so.

In the 2011 case Snyder v. Phelps, the Supreme Court overturned a civil judgment against members of the Westboro Baptist Church based on their picketing at soldiers' funerals. "The picket signs reflected the church's view that the United States is overly tolerant of sin [in particular, homosexuality] and that God kills American soldiers as punishment," Chief Justice John Roberts noted in the majority opinion. "The question presented is whether the First Amendment shields the church members from tort liability for their speech in this case." The answer, eight justices agreed, was yes.

"Speech is powerful," Roberts wrote. "It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."

Rubio recognizes that danger, which is why he cites Stengel's support for criminalizing "hate speech" as evidence of his hostility to freedom of expression. Yet Rubio's justification for deporting Khalil, a legal permanent resident, hinges on the allegation that he engaged in "hate speech"—specifically, the antisemitism that Rubio claims Khalil promoted by participating in anti-Israel protests at Columbia University.

Rubio is keen to defend "the free speech of ordinary Americans," even when they are accused of promoting disinformation or bigotry. But his concern extends only to U.S. citizens. If you are living in the United States on a student visa, or even if you have started the process of becoming a citizen by obtaining a green card, he argues, you cannot claim the First Amendment's protection when you are threatened with deportation based on "past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful."

As Khalil's lawyers note, several federal courts have disagreed, holding that "the First Amendment protects noncitizens who are detained and threatened with deportation as a result of their protected speech." The Supreme Court has not definitively resolved that question. But in the 1945 case Bridges v. Wixon, it held that "freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country." That case involved a longtime legal resident from Australia who was deemed deportable based on the allegation that he had been affiliated with the Communist Party.

At the height of the Red Scare in 1952, the Supreme Court nevertheless rejected the First Amendment claims of several immigrants who were threatened with deportation because they had been members of the Communist Party. But that decision in Harisiades v. Shaughnessy was based on an understanding of the First Amendment that the Court repudiated in Brandenburg.

Under that earlier, narrower view, the Court had ruled that Communists, including U.S. citizens, could be criminally punished for their political affiliations. Since Rubio plainly does not favor reviving that approach to the First Amendment, it is hard to see how he can insist that his deportation campaign is "not about free speech." Yet that is the only way to reconcile his avowed principles with his actions.