It’s easy to look at a collapsing society overseas and think, “Well, at least we’re not that bad.” Americans do this all the time with Great Britain—a country now spiraling into open decline, run by a political class openly hostile to its own people. But comforting ourselves this way is a mistake, because the censorship, criminalization of dissenting opinions, and two-tiered justice system consuming Britain never stays on their side of the ocean. And here at home, plenty of Democrats don’t view Britain’s modern tyranny as a warning—they see it as a blueprint.

A perfect example comes from a recent Drop Site News investigation showing how a secret political campaign to elevate Keir Starmer to prime minister included a coordinated effort to demonetize news outlets seen as unfriendly to the Labour establishment. One of those outlets was The Federalist.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, a shadowy UK-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) teamed up with NBC News and insiders at Google to try to blacklist and demonetize The Federalist using false pretenses. NBC’s so-called “Verification Unit” proudly reported in June 2020 that Google had banned ZeroHedge and was threatening to ban The Federalist as well.

This wasn’t journalism—it was a political op. Google acted only after NBC News “notified” them of a CCDH report claiming that ten U.S. websites had supposedly published racist content about the protests and were making money from Google Ads. In other words: activists created a fake narrative, fed it to a willing corporate media outlet, and then pressured Big Tech to silence political opponents. Classic.

But who exactly is CCDH, and why target The Federalist? At the time, the group’s connection to Starmer and Labour wasn’t obvious. Now, thanks to new documents, we know CCDH was part of a larger partisan operation aimed at outlets like The Federalist, Breitbart, and ZeroHedge. The campaign was run by political operatives who helped engineer Starmer’s rise—people who wanted to crush any media outlet standing in their way.

At the center of this machine was Morgan McSweeney, now Starmer’s chief of staff. From 2018–2020, he managed an organization called Labour Together, which funded the think tank Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). SFFN pretended to be a grassroots project run by anonymous citizens, but in reality, it was an astroturf operation controlled by powerful Labour insiders, including McSweeney and senior cabinet member Steve Reed.

Originally, SFFN targeted left-wing outlets opposing Labour’s centrist faction. But its mission expanded to include right-leaning outlets—Breitbart, The Federalist—anyone standing in the way of Starmer’s political ascent. Eventually, SFFN was folded into CCDH under CEO Imran Ahmed, who had worked directly with McSweeney. Ahmed admitted that CCDH absorbed SFFN and that McSweeney handed him the shell company that became CCDH. Despite later attempts to distance himself, McSweeney was literally a director of CCDH until 2020.

CCDH’s strategy was simple: destroy the ad revenue of disfavored outlets. As Ahmed bragged to a U.S. State Department conference, eliminating a site’s ad revenue could “completely eviscerate the economic base of a website” within months. To pull this off, CCDH needed a friendly newsroom to launder the operation as “news.” Enter NBC’s Verification Unit, which gleefully attempted to push Google into demonetizing conservative outlets—and then reported on the chaos they created.

If this sounds like something out of a corrupt political thriller, remember: the Biden administration already tried its own version. Biden’s State Department funded censorship operations through the Global Engagement Center, partnering with groups like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index to target The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and others. That’s why both outlets filed a lawsuit in 2023: the U.S. government was helping outside groups suppress constitutionally protected speech.

And it doesn’t stop there. The FBI’s 2025 “pulse check” report revealed that during the Biden years, FBI agents worked with UK and Canadian intelligence services to get around due-process requirements when surveilling American citizens. The same report confirmed what conservatives already knew: the FBI remains full of left-wing ideologues who view conservatives as threats and want to use federal law enforcement to silence us.

So when we look at Britain—where political elites openly target free speech and civil liberties—we shouldn’t feel relieved that “it can’t happen here.” Democrats would love nothing more than to wield that same power. And given another opportunity, they absolutely will.

But here’s the good news: as long as Americans stay vigilant, informed, and unafraid to push back, this country still belongs to We the People—not the censors, not the bureaucrats, and definitely not the speech police.