It’s easy to look at a collapsing civil society in a foreign country and comfort ourselves that, despite all our problems, we’re not as bad off as those people. Americans are especially apt to do this with our cousins in Great Britain, whose country is now in a state of precipitous and probably irreversible decline, and whose political leadership is openly hostile to the native population.
But it’s a mistake to comfort ourselves this way, partly because the corruption of a place like Britain — the online censorship, the criminalization of disfavored opinions, the two-tiered system of justice — doesn’t stay confined to their shores but eventually makes its way to ours. Indeed, many Democrats here in America don’t see the tyranny of modern Britain as a cautionary tale but as a template to follow.
A startling case in point is a recent story from Drop Site News by Paul Holden, who chronicles how a secret campaign to elevate Kier Starmer to prime minister included a scheme to demonetize news outlets deemed unfriendly to the Starmer wing of the Labour Party. One of those news outlets was The Federalist.
In the middle of the 2020 presidential campaign, a shadowy UK-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) worked with NBC News and Google insiders to attempt to blacklist and demonetize The Federalist under false pretexts — an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful. The Orwellian-named NBC News Verification Unit reported in June 2020 that Google had banned the website ZeroHedge from its advertising platform and had warned The Federalist that it too might be banned.
But this wasn’t just “reporting,” it was part of a larger political op. According to the NBC News report itself, Google’s actions came only after the company had been “notified of research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that combats online hate and misinformation. They found that 10 U.S-based websites have published what they say are racist articles about the protests, and projected that the websites would make millions of dollars through Google Ads.”
And who notified Google about this CCDH report? NBC News did. This was a transparent effort by left-wing activists at NBC News, together with left-wing activists at the CCDH, to demonetize and silence The Federalist for the crime of noticing the hypocrisy surrounding BLM protests and strict Covid lockdowns.
But who or what was the CCDH, and why did it target The Federalist? At the time, the CCDH’s connection to the Starmer political machine and the Labour Party was unclear. But as Holden’s reporting reveals, the CCDH was part of a larger partisan political project that targeted The Federalist, Breitbart, ZeroHedge, and others. “As Keir Starmer rose to power in Britain, the political machine responsible for his rise ran a behind-the-scenes campaign to demonetize the U.S. news outlet Breitbart,” writes Holden. “The attacks on Breitbart were part of a targeted campaign against media outlets on both the left and right considered hostile to the centrist faction of the Labour Party, according to a trove of documents that expose the operation.”
At the center of this campaign was a man named Morgan McSweeney, who is now Prime Minster Starmer’s chief of staff. Between 2018 and 2020, McSweeney served as the company secretary and managing director for an organization called Labour Together that funded a think tank called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). At the time, SFFN claimed to be a grassroots effort organized and run by a group of anonymous concerned citizens inspired by the demonetizing campaigns run by Sleeping Giants, which had targeted Breitbart in the U.S. during the 2016 election.
In fact, SFFN was an astroturfing operation created and run by people in positions of real power inside the Labour Party, including not just McSweeney but Steve Reed, now a senior member of Starmer’s cabinet. The original purpose of SFFN, as Holden reports, was “to defeat the left-wing of the Labour Party and the media ecosystem that supported it.” The operations of SFFN, however, expanded to include right-wing outlets like Breitbart and The Federalist, which it saw as impediments to Starmer’s rise.
Eventually, SFFN was absorbed into a new entity, CCDH, whose CEO is a man named Imran Ahmed. Ahmed worked with McSweeney in the London office of Labour Together, which first launched the SFFN project. Ahmed has said that McSweeney gave him a “shell company” called Brixton Endeavors that later became CCDH and in early 2020 absorbed the entire SFFN project. McSweeney has tried to distance himself from all this but as Holden notes, McSweeney was the sole director of Brixton Endeavors between 2018 and September 2019, and remained a director of CCDH until April 2020.
During this time, a plan was developed to target disfavored news outlets by going after their advertisers. As Ahmed himself said in an October 2020 U.S. State Department conference on antisemitism, the CCDH “put together a program called stop funding fake news” designed to undermine ad revenue of certain news sites. He boasted that the weak points of news websites is that they’re expensive to run, so eliminating their ad revenue meant that “within a couple of months, you can completely eviscerate the economic base of a website.”
What Ahmed and his underlings at CCDH needed was a willing news outlet to “report” on its targeting of certain websites for being “hateful” or “racist.” This they found in the NBC News Verification Unit, which tried to goad Google into demonetizing The Federalist and others, and then “reported” it as news.
Take a step back and realize that this is the equivalent of people like Ron Klain or Jeff Zients, who served as chiefs of staff during the Biden administration, running secretive demonetization ops against conservative news outlets in America.
But even that isn’t very far-fetched. After all, the Biden administration’s State Department used its now-defunct Global Engagement Center to fund censorship operations by groups like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, which targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, among others. We here at The Federalist joined with The Daily Wire in a lawsuit against the State Department in 2023, claiming these groups, supported by the federal government, sought to defund and suppress our reporting and commentary in violation of our First Amendment rights.
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