US Department of State, Apr. 17, 2025
“No one is entitled to a student visa to the enter the United States. No one. It’s not a constitutional right. It’s not a law.”
QUESTION: Joining us on the line, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Secretary Rubio, thanks so much for joining the show. Really appreciate it.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
QUESTION: So let’s talk about this major move that you just made at the State Department getting rid of a big chunk of the censorship bureaucracy that had been created and pushed a while back but then exacerbated over the course of the last few years, hidden. What’s the story with what you are doing over at the State Department to get rid of the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Yeah, I think you have to understand the history behind it. It’s real brief. They started it by saying al-Qaida, ISIS, all these terrible groups are radicalizing people online, we should do something about it. Back when they came up with that 12 years ago, whatever it was, people were like, well, whatever, it makes sense.
And then it metastasized and it’s like, oh, there’s foreign interference in our elections, we need to start going after that. Well then, by 2020, it became a moment to go after voices inside of American politics and begin to label people. And they put a guy in charge who basically was going around saying Trump is – Trump speaks just like these foreign terrorists, his supporters speak just like these foreign terrorists – so now you have an individual running a State Department entity that was labeling American speech by Americans as foreign interference.
And then really, the kicker was not only were they doing all that formally from the State Department, but they were taking State Department money and they were giving it to these third-party groups who are supposed to be like independent, verified arbiters of what’s true and what isn’t, what’s good and what’s bad. And these groups were deliberately targeting – I believe you were one of the ones they targeted, I think the Federalist – began putting labels on people. …SOURCE