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Democrats Would Like To Suppress Free Speech The Way Britain Does
The Federalist ^ | 4 Dec, 2025 | John Daniel Davidson

Posted on 12/04/2025 11:35:59 AM PST by MtnClimber

The American left doesn’t look at the United Kingdom and see a cautionary tale, it sees a template to follow.

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.

And just this week came revelations from the FBI’s 2025 “pulse check” report that during the Biden administration FBI agents were working with UK and Canadian intelligence services to circumvent due process requirements in surveilling American citizens. That report also confirmed that the FBI is still full of left-wing ideologues who see conservatives as a threat and want to use the power of federal law enforcement to silence our voices and shut down our publications.

So when we look across the pond to Britain and see the way the government and political class are targeting free speech and basic civil liberties, we should understand that Democrats here in the U.S. would like nothing more than to be able to do that to us. And as soon as they get another chance, they will.


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: censorship; democrats; leftism; sedition
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To: MtnClimber

https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1996375177580708066

Suppress this


21 posted on 12/04/2025 2:10:15 PM PST by TornadoAlley3 ( I'm Proud To Be An Okie From Muskogee)
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To: RatRipper
More like suppress speech and freedom the way Stalin did, not to mention 2nd amendment suppression to the point that ONLY Democrats have guns. . . then there is the old Stalinesque tactic of starving groups that he didn’t like. . . that means US, fellow Christians.

I predict the left will continue to do more of a slow boiling frog approach to control Christians a little more than an abrupt approach. They don't want to stir up the young adults to fight back against the real fascists (i.e. they don't want more young adult men becoming Christians and attending church and young adults setting up more TPUSA chapters like what's happening now). Think creeping dhimmi status instead of concentration camps...at least for now.

I also predict that the Dims will drop the "nationalists" from their new bogeyman catchphrase "Christian nationalist". Soon it'll be just "Christians" that they'll blame as the bogeyman. Much like they quit saying "white supremacist groups" and now blame whites in general -- and they quit saying "male chauvinist pigs" and now just demonize men in general (at least straight men). But again, I don't see them calling anytime soon for all Christians to be rounded up. More like a constant demonization of Christians to make it harder and harder to be accepted in professional jobs or "polite" society if openly stating faith in Jesus.

I do, however, see a lot of "oops" problems in areas in general in things the Dims over-regulate. Much like in tyrannical countries the regions that often criticize the govt have problems, just by chance I'm sure, with the power grid being dependable in those areas. Or only a few gas stations can get permits to sell in those areas, etc. I can see the Dims implementing that kind of thing more against areas that don't vote Dim (and/or areas that are openly evangelical).

Which, by the way, is one of the reasons I started experimenting with decentralized solar and swapped out one of our old gas cars for an EV. What I have going on is not enough to be entirely off grid (it doesn't help survive a Mad Max dystopian scenario). But with only 20% of my power having to be pulled from the grid, it would greatly reduce the slow boiling effect of the Dims pressing my wife and me to bow to the Dims' cult. (Particularly since the Dims have made it clear that their warmageddon doomsday cult energy policies are a favorite way for them to try to control the masses. Thus, those polices impact us directly only 1/5th as much.) I figured it was time for at least one of us American Christians to begin experimenting how to give us Christians a cushion against that tactic.

22 posted on 12/04/2025 2:10:53 PM PST by Tell It Right (1 Thessalonians 5:21 -- Put everything to the test, hold fast to that which is true.)
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To: MtnClimber

“The only way to make a bad idea sound like a good idea is to Silence the good idea that shows just how bad the bad idea really is” L.Star


23 posted on 12/04/2025 2:24:47 PM PST by Qwapisking ("The left will rue the day they cheated Trump out of the 2020 election forever" L.Star )
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To: MtnClimber

In general, what ails the UK is a more advanced case of what ails the USA.


24 posted on 12/04/2025 2:38:03 PM PST by Salman (Trump is good, but we need Pinochet. )
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To: MtnClimber

Revoke nbc’s broadcast license and breakup google into little bits.


25 posted on 12/04/2025 7:42:26 PM PST by minnesota_bound (Making money now. Still want much more.)
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To: sauropod

We had that cold chill under O’Boraxo and even worse under FJB.

It was like the smokers in the Hitler Bunker were free to choose once AH suicided.

PDJT earned our reprieve or we would still be repressed.


26 posted on 12/05/2025 12:44:16 AM PST by Surrounded_too (LE)
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To: MtnClimber

An update. And a question I would second, but I’m still banned on Twitter/X...

TR G - The Royal Grift
@TheRoyalGrift

I would like to know @elonmusk, why is this post flagged for hateful conduct? Are people not to know about the grooming and abuse of these British Girls?

Or do we have the Royal Family Comms team censoring Americans again, as they did with anyone talking about Meghan Markle’s moon bump?

Why is the UK so desperate to pretend this horror is not happening?

If this makes you angry, repost and let people see what’s going on.

11:09 AM · Dec 13, 2025 193 Views

https://x.com/TheRoyalGrift/status/1999874412074484216

More at the link.


27 posted on 12/13/2025 8:31:58 AM PST by mewzilla (Swing away, Mr. President, swing away! 🇺🇸 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 )
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