Tag: marco rubio

The Rubio Doctrine: Neocons Are Back!

According to several recent news reports, the two major Trump foreign policy shifts last week are the handiwork of Marco Rubio, the President’s Secretary of State and (acting) National Security Advisor. As with all neocon plans, they will be big on promises and small on delivery.

First up, according to Bloomberg it was Rubio who finally convinced President Trump to take “ownership” of the US proxy war on Russia, and for the first time place sanctions on Russia. Up to this point President Trump chose to portray himself as a mediator between Ukraine and Russia. But with this move against Russia’s oil sector he can no longer credibly claim that this is “Joe Biden’s war.”

The Trump move followed a confusing few weeks since the Trump/Putin Alaska summit in August. After that meeting Trump dropped the neocon position that a ceasefire in the Russia/Ukraine war must occur before any peace negotiations. It was a sign that Trump was looking more realistically at the war. He also said he did not think Ukraine would win, which is pretty obvious.

A surprise call to Putin the day before Ukrainian president Zelensky was to arrive in town just over a week ago reinforced that position and Zelensky left Washington empty-handed. He was seeking Tomahawk missiles that could strike deep into Russian territory.

Then out of the blue President Trump last week announced through his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the US would be sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies until Russia declares a ceasefire in the war before negotiations. That won’t happen, but what it does mean is that Rubio and the neocons have successfully gotten Trump to step on the escalation escalator. That is what they always do. It will be much harder to back down now.

At the same time the US Administration was jumping deeper into the Russia/Ukraine war, a long-time neocon dream was suddenly back in play. Although in Trump’s first term a “regime change” operation was attempted against Venezuela, it failed spectacularly. But the neocons have long dreamed of overthrowing the Venezuelan government – they almost got their way back in 2002 – and suddenly after several weeks of extrajudicial murder on the high seas in the name of fighting the drug war, President Trump announced that land strikes on Venezuela would begin soon.

He did mention that he might brief Congress on his plans for war on Venezuela, not that Congress can be bothered to care much one way or the other.

The neocon old guard that still dominates Washington foreign policy is taking a victory lap. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was on the Sunday shows beaming over the conversion of “no regime-change wars” President Trump to “regime change wars” President Trump.

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Report: State Department Officially Dismantled ‘Disinformation’ Agency

The State Department has officially canceled the Global Engagement Center (GEC) as part of President Donald Trump’s mission to shut down the “censorship industrial complex,” according to a report.

Paul Sperry, a senior investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations, wrote that the State Department officially closed the Global Engagement Center.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in April that the State Department would close the GEC.

“Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department 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),” Rubio wrote in an op-ed for the Federalist, stating that to protect free speech the “censorship industrial complex must be dismantled.”

Rubio contended in the op-ed that then-President Barack Obama transformed the GEC, which was meant to target international terrorism, to cover any and all “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”

He wrote at the time:

This pivot was no accident. Obama’s man in charge at GEC, Rick 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.

In 2019, Stengel directly equated President Trump’s campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda, writing, “Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.” That same year, Stengel wrote an entire article about, “why America needs a hate speech law.”

The secretary of state said the GEC was an “enthusiastic partner” in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which monitored alleged disinformation during the 2020 election.

“The EIP 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 his family members and friends of the administration,” Rubio noted.

“With its multimillion-dollar budget, paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting ‘disinformation,’” Rubio continued.

Rubio stated that one recipient of American taxpayer dollars was the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which ranked outlets based on the likeliness that they would spread disinformation.

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DISCLOSURE: Marco Rubio Confirms UFOs Are Flying Over U.S. Nuclear Sites

I TOLD YOU THIS WAS COMING!

For over 10 years, I have been telling you on this website that the “Alien Card” would be the last to be played.

I have been telling you that there will literally come a point in the future when Government officials and “Mainstream Media” would report to you that Aliens are here.

Well folks, that time seems to be now.

Here is Marco Rubio telling you point blank that UFOs have been observed flying over our military and nuclear facilities.  We don’t know what they are.  And they’re not ours.

Now allow me to explain all of this….

This is called Disclosure or at the very least “Soft Disclosure”.

Marco Rubio does not go on camera and say this unless he gets very clear permission and instructions from those higher up than him, so the fact he’s saying this on camera in a new video tells you the Government wants this information to be blasted out right now.

Also, we would NEVER reveal such a vulnerability like this unless there were a much bigger plan and ulterior motive, understand that.

The USA (and any other country for that matter) would not just admit there are things flying in our airspace that are not ours but we can’t stop them and we don’t know what they are.

We would NEVER admit that, unless there was something much bigger going on here.

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State Department Official Fired by Rubio for Concealing Relationship with CCP Affiliate

Forget the battles you see on the news. The real war for America’s soul is being fought in the shadows, and the playbook our enemies use is shockingly simple: find the weak link. These countries don’t need to outgun us when they can simply outwit us, exploiting the moral rot that has seeped into our most trusted institutions.

This modern warfare preys on bureaucrats who have forgotten what it means to serve—those who see a government paycheck as a ticket to a life free of accountability. It targets officials who prioritize their personal dramas over their sworn duty. When loyalty becomes a suggestion instead of a requirement, the door to our nation’s secrets is kicked wide open.

From ‘The Post Millennial’:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has fired a State Department Foreign Service officer who admitted in an undercover video from O’Keefe Media Group, that he had a romantic relationship with a woman linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

A statement from the State Department confirmed that Daniel Choi, a Foreign Service officer, was terminated following presidential approval from Donald Trump.

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Larry Ellison Vetted Marco Rubio for Fealty to Israel, Hacked Emails Reveal

Everything is coming together for Larry Ellison. The billionaire co-founder of tech giant Oracle, on-and-off-again the richest man in the world and a staunch supporter of Israel, is set to take a lead role in reshaping TikTok in the United States. His son, David Ellison, is moving to take over large swaths of the media, including CBS News, CNN, Warner Brothers, and Paramount, reportedly bringing in the Free Press’s Bari Weiss to shape editorial direction.

“The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the same way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil,” as Wired recently characterized it. How they plan to operate that monopoly is on course to be tested out in what President Donald Trump is calling “New Gaza,” the techno-dystopian free trade zone that is to be administered by a Board of Peace led by Trump and Ellison’s longtime political and business vehicle, Tony Blair. Ellison has given or pledged more than $350 million to the Tony Blair Institute, which Blair has used to advance Ellison’s vision of a marriage between government, corporate power, and tech surveillance. Oracle, by providing database infrastructure and cloud-computing services to other huge enterprises like FedEx and NVIDIA, has quietly become one of the most powerful companies in the world.

As the nation’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also played a role in the TikTok talks that steered the company toward Ellison, after playing a lead role as a senator in demonizing the app; he was also closely involved in the rollout of Trump’s plan for Gaza’s future, which hands the enclave to Blair. Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner tasked the Blair Institute in the spring with coming up with a post-war plan for Gaza, which was recently completed, the Times of Israel reported.

That Rubio finds himself in such a central position is in part thanks to Ellison, who has been a major patron of the Cuban-American former senator from Florida. Ellison first vetted Rubio for his fealty toward Israel back in early 2015, according to previously unreported email correspondence reviewed by Drop Site. Rubio rose to prominence as a Tea Party-backed conservative Senate upstart in 2010, launching a presidential campaign in the 2016 cycle. As secretary of state, Rubio launched an unprecedented crackdown on speech, detaining and attempting to deport critics of Israel precisely for the crime of their criticism of Israel.

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State Department finally shuts down ‘framework’ behind ‘censorship nerve center’ Rubio shuttered

The State Department confirmed it formally removed the “framework” underlying both the Global Engagement Center, deemed the government’s “censorship nerve center” by a first-term Trump administration official and defunded by Congress after the 2024 election, and GEC’s surreptitious successor Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, which Secretary Marco Rubio shut down in April.

Acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Darren Beattie told The Daily Wire there were “loose ends” to tie up, including GEC’s agreements with other countries to “facilitate and provide a framework for cooperation on mutual objectives, including principally combating so-called ‘disinformation,’” which sometimes turned out to be domestic and often consisted of disfavored narratives.

Beattie said GEC used an “indirect approach to censorship whereby they would fund third-party organizations that would engage in activity from facilitating the demonetization of conservative sites to generally castigating certain narrative perspectives on COVID, on immigration, on foreign policy, as simply malign as a matter of foreign influence when in fact these were entirely legitimate points of view that often came from Americans.”

His office is conducting a “meticulous transparency review” whose “very first tranche” will come out this fall, reflecting “the extensive review of hundreds of thousands of emails that will more specifically and systematically document exactly the kinds of nefarious activities that the GEC was involved in[,] in this unfortunate chapter of America’s history.”

Beattie wouldn’t say if that would be released through a vehicle like the Twitter Files, just that its approach would be “entirely appropriate and very satisfying as well.”

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Marco Rubio: U.S. Will ‘Respond Accordingly’ to Brazil Jailing Jair Bolsonaro

Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a statement on Thursday, immediately following the news that former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro had been sentenced to 27 years in prison, vowing that America would “respond accordingly” to what he deemed a human rights abuse.

Bolsonaro, a conservative who governed from 2018 to 2022 after suffering a debilitating assassination attempt that continues to cause severe health problems today, stood accused before the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) of Brazil of attempting and failing to stage a coup following his defeat in the 2022 election. Bolsonaro lost that election narrowly to incumbent socialist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose participation in that election many Brazilians challenge as illegitimate given his conviction on corruption charges in 2017. The STF overturned Lula’s conviction on dubious procedural grounds and its election oversight analog, the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), heavily censored the Bolsonaro campaign while allowing Lula to spuriously disparage Bolsonaro as a “cannibal” and a “pedophile.”

The STF and TSE’s interference in the election, both under the auspices of Justice Alexandre de Moraes, prompted many Bolsonaro supporters in Brazil and around the world to question the integrity of Lula’s victory. The STF turned these questions into a prosecution of Bolsonaro and several others in his inner circle, who it claimed had attempted to violently overthrow the Lula administration following the president’s inauguration.

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US lawmakers introduce ‘thought police’ bill to strip citizens of passports over Israel criticism

A US congressman is introducing a bill that could potentially be used to deny US citizens the right to travel based solely on their speech, including for criticism of Israel, the Intercept reported on 13 September.

Introduced by Florida Congressman Brian Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the bill would grant Secretary of State Marco Rubio the power to revoke the passports of US citizens in the same way he has revoked the green cards and visas of foreign nationals in the US for criticizing Israel.

In March, Secretary of State Rubio revoked the visa of Turkish doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk after she wrote an opinion piece critical of Israel in the Tufts University student newspaper in 2024. 

The op-ed did not mention Hamas, but called for boycotting and divesting from Israel.

One section of the bill grants the Secretary of State the ability to deny passports to people determined to have “knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”

The reference to “material support” disturbs civil liberties advocates because it is vague and can be interpreted to include speech and anti-war activism.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which functions as a front for Israeli intelligence in the US, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law suggested in a letter last year that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was providing “material support” for Hamas by organizing campus protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The provision regarding material support to terrorism poses a threat specifically to journalists, The Intercept noted.

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Marco Rubio Slams the Brakes on Employment Visas for Foreign Truck Drivers After Fatal Crash Involving Illegal Alien

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued an immediate freeze on all employment visas for commercial truck drivers, declaring that the growing number of foreign drivers on American roads is “endangering American lives and undercutting the livelihoods of American truckers.”

The directive follows a shocking August 12 crash on the Florida Turnpike.

Harjinder Singh, a 28-year-old Indian national who reportedly entered the U.S. illegally in 2018, performed an unauthorized U-turn through an “Official Use Only” zone.

His tractor-trailer blocked traffic, resulting in a fatal collision with a minivan that claimed the lives of three innocent Americans.

State and federal investigators later confirmed that Singh lacked English proficiency, failing to correctly identify road signs or answer basic language questions.

According to Homeland Security:

“Harjinder Singh, an illegal alien from India who killed three innocent people, FAILED an English Language Proficiency assessment. Singh provided correct responses to just 2 of 12 verbal questions and only accurately identifying 1 of 4 highway traffic signs.

And yet, Gavin Newsom’s sanctuary California gave this illegal alien who cannot speak English a Commercial Drivers License to drive an 18-wheeler.

DHS will work with [U.S. Department of Transportation] to root out and prevent illegal aliens from obtaining these licenses from sanctuary jurisdictions that put American drivers and passengers in danger.”

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Marco Rubio Calls New Israeli Bombing ‘a Misunderstanding,’ Calls for ‘De-Escalation’

As a wave of Israeli attacks on Syrian forces rocks the fragile crust of a Middle East peace, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is trying to stop a full-scale war from erupting.

After two days of Israeli attacks on Syrian forces, Rubio said he was hopeful the attacks would stop.

“It’s complicated, obviously. These are historic, longtime rivalries between different groups in the southwest of Syria — Bedouins, the Druze community — and it led to an unfortunate situation and a misunderstanding, it looks like, between the Israeli side and the Syrian side,” Rubio said in a video posted to X.

“So we’ve been engaged with them all morning long and all night long, with both sides, and we think we’re on our way towards a real de-escalation,” he said.

“And then hopefully get back on track in helping Syria build a country and arriving at a situation there in the Middle East that’s far more stable. So, in the next few hours, we hope to see some real progress to end what you’ve been seeing over the last couple hours,” he said.

Most of Syria is Muslim, but the Druze have their own faith. Last year, after a Muslim-controlled government took power, Druze communities expressed their fears that they could become targets of the new regime, which has said it seeks to respect all faiths, and sought to be annexed by Israel, which has its own Druze communities.

On Wednesday, as Rubio spoke in Washington, Syrian and Druze leaders said they had reached a cease-fire, according to NBC. That came after Israeli air strikes hit targets in the Syrian capital of Damascus.

Announcement of the cease-fire drew skepticism from Druze leaders in Syria, according to the Times of Israel.

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