In the halls of Westminster, where the Magna Carta once breathed life into individual liberties, a new breed of tyrant has emerged, not with guillotines or gulags, but with spreadsheets and shadowy NGOs. This week, the veil lifted on a chilling operation: the British Labour machine, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer's right-hand man, Morgan McSweeney, orchestrated a clandestine campaign to demonetise and delegitimise Breitbart News, The Federalist, ZeroHedge, and a slew of other conservative outlets. It's not hyperbole to call it tyranny; it's a calculated assault on the free flow of ideas, exported from London to suffocate American voices daring to challenge the globalist orthodoxy.
The revelation, broken by investigative journalist Paul Holden in Drop Site News and detailed in his explosive new book The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy, exposes McSweeney, the unelected puppet master behind Starmer's rise, as the architect of this digital inquisition. What began as an internal Labour purge against Left-wing rivals like Jeremy Corbyn's supporters has metastasised into a transatlantic censorship blitz, targeting outlets that dared amplify Brexit, Trump, and unfiltered truth. As Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow thundered on Stinchfield Tonight, "This guy McSweeney was orchestrating a massive anti-speech campaign to silence American outlets in the UK." In an era where Big Tech already bends the knee to elite pressure, this is statecraft as sabotage — tyranny dressed in the Union Jack.
To grasp the rot, rewind to 2017. Labour, under the populist-Left firebrand Corbyn, stunned the establishment with a surge in the general election. Enter McSweeney, a slick operative who transformed the innocuous-sounding "Labour Together" think tank into a war room for centrists hell-bent on neutering the party's radical wing. Funded by over £700,000 in unreported donations, a scandal that later drew fines, McSweeney's outfit spawned astroturf fronts like Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) and the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Posing as grassroots watchdogs, these groups mimicked the U.S.-based Sleeping Giants, which had hounded Breitbart during the 2016 election.
The playbook was brutally effective. SFFN compiled blocklists of "fake news" sites, pressuring advertisers to blacklist them en masse via Google AdSense. UK Lefty rag The Canary, a Corbyn cheerleader, was financially crippled and shuttered. But McSweeney's ambitions were borderless. By 2019-2020, as Starmer maneuvered for Labour leadership with McSweeney as campaign chief, the crosshairs shifted to American conservatives. Why? These outlets, Breitbart, Zero Hedge, The Federalist, were amplifying voices like Nigel Farage's Brexit insurgency and Donald Trump's unapologetic nationalism, threats to the centrist-globalist vision Starmer embodied.
Documents unearthed by Holden reveal SFFN's "how-to" guides for brands, urging them to shun 28 sites by December 2020, including Tommy Robinson's platforms and U.S. stalwarts like American Thinker and Gateway Pundit. The UK Cabinet Office, under Tory watch but influenced by Labour lobbying, implemented a "whitelist" barring government ads from these "objectionable" outlets. McSweeney, then Labour Together's company secretary and self-listed managing director, pulled strings from a cramped South London office suite shared with his fronts. By Starmer's 2024 election triumph, McSweeney had ascended to chief of staff, the most powerful unelected figure in Britain, per journalist Andrew Marr. What was once partisan sabotage had become state policy.
The audacity peaks across the pond. In June 2020, amid BLM riots and election fever, CCDH, McSweeney's spawn, teamed with NBC News to feed Google a hit list of "racist" sites. ZeroHedge was outright demonetised for questioning Soros funding of protests; The Federalist escaped only by nuking its comments section. NBC's Adele-Momoko Fraser, who penned the exposé, even thanked CCDH for "collaboration" — a cosy collusion between U.S. media and foreign operatives to kneecap domestic dissent.
This wasn't isolated. CCDH, flush with $250,000 from George Soros's Open Society Foundations, targeted The Gateway Pundit, The Daily Wire, and others for "hate" and "disinformation." Fast-forward to Starmer's reign: the Online Safety Act empowers Ofcom to fine platforms 10% of global revenue for "harmful" content, a vague cudgel wielded against everything from baby name stats to anti-war posts. Even 4chan caught a fine for First Amendment-protected speech. X users seethe: "The UK has lost its mind... American Democrats are jealous," one quipped.
Marlow nailed it: With Trump out of power in 2020, "no one in Trump's government who can say anything that really matters... Biden is the president." The Starmer Machine exploited the vacuum, turning "anti-fake news" into anti-truth weaponry. Now, as Trump returned, the irony bites: Starmer's wooing of the White House crumbles under revelations his regime targeted the President's media allies.
This isn't rogue vigilantism; it's a template for modern despotism. McSweeney's operation thrived on deception: undeclared funds from donors like Steve Reed (now a Starmer cabinet minister), hacked emails, smear dossiers, and hypocritical stitch-ups. Labour Together funnelled cash to "neutral" fact-checkers who were anything but, echoing Biden's Global Engagement Center, which bankrolled NewsGuard to throttle The Federalist and Daily Wire.
The human cost? Outlets like The Canary folded; Breitbart lost UK government ad revenue, a petty but symbolic gut punch. Broader still: it normalises foreign meddling in U.S. discourse, eroding the First Amendment's firewall. As X erupts — "BUSTED: UK PM's Chief of Staff... Destroy Breitbart, Zerohedge and 28 Other 'Objectionable' News Outlets" — the outrage builds. Even Left-leaning Ryan Grim, who co-broke the story, couldn't ignore the "quintessential example of astroturfing."
Marlow's call rings clear: Expect Nigel Farage to roar, his Reform UK already rails against Labour's "culture war on free speech." Jim Jordan's House Republicans, ever vigilant on censorship, should subpoena CCDH anew. And Trump 2.0? Invoke Executive Order 13848 against foreign election interference; BBC doctored J6 footage alone warrants it. Deport CCDH-linked agitators; sanction McSweeney's network. As one X warrior put it, "A foreign political machine secretly targeting U.S. conservative media? ... all hit by a coordinated censorship op tied to Kier Starmer's network."
This is no British anomaly; it's a warning shot. From Canada's trucker crackdowns to EU's Digital Services Act, To Aussie online censorship, elites worldwide covet McSweeney's model: cloak censorship in "safety," fund it with dark money, execute via proxies. But tyrants falter when exposed. Holden's The Fraud isn't just a book; it's a blueprint for resistance, hacked emails, donor trails, the lot.
Breitbart endures because truth is indemonetizsable. Free speech isn't a luxury; it's the oxygen of democracy. Starmer's machine choked it abroad; now, let the backlash restore it. The tyrants targeted Breitbart first. Who's next?