This is really a disgusting but unsurprising piece of news. And all about a mewling mouthed closet fascist who is ruining his own country.
No. Let me be stronger – destroying his own country in real time while also trying mightily to extend his authoritarian powers beyond his now fetid shores to any land where the message cannot be controlled.
Like the United States.
Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge put his story up yesterday, and I hadn’t seen it yet, but what I did see today was what the European Union is attempting to do to Elon Musk and X.
NEW: After threatening American tech companies for years, the EU just slapped X with the first-ever penalty under their Digital Services Act. @HarrisSockel on what’s really behind this fine, and what it means for U.S. tech companies going forward 👇https://t.co/hGdDhSKpco
— Pirate Wires (@PirateWires) December 5, 2025
The EU has an issue with how X verifies its blue checks, and it’s fined the company for something Musk and X have never agreed to,
The European Commission offered 𝕏 an illegal secret deal last year. If 𝕏 quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine 𝕏.
The other platforms accepted that deal.
𝕏 did not. pic.twitter.com/YFRq0ZXF6F
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) December 5, 2025
This is only the first shot across the bow. The EU is moving to break X.
Meanwhile let’s get the Granite Act passed and make every EU regulator personally liable when they try to censor Americans.
Big thanks to @prestonjbyrne for drafting it, and to @cantbesilentcal & @RepKeithAmmon for having the foresight.
No more foreign bureaucrats fining…
— Rep. Donald McFarlane (@donald4nh) December 5, 2025
You’ll remember Mr Whiskers, Preston Byrne and the Granite Act? After that news broke today, the Granite Act is suddenly looking very popular to protect Americans and American businesses from punitive and restrictive European interference with our freedoms.
THEY HAVE NO POWER OVER US
The GRANITE Act would allow X to sue the European Commission in U.S. federal court for three times this amount, and get injunctive relief against the Commission’s orders.
Congress should enact it ASAP to head off this European censorship attempt. https://t.co/V9evaPhEME
— Preston Byrne (@prestonjbyrne) December 4, 2025
With the story of what was done to the three American sites at the behest of Kier Starmer’s online Starmtroopers, the passage of the Granite Act becomes even more critical to protect American freedoms in the face of European oppression and censorship.
This is the case of a foreign government party seeking to debank and destroy online, independent American journalists and opinion sites.
Very early into the COVID-19 pandemic, ZeroHedge suggested that a little-known Chinese lab in Wuhan might know something about the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe. As a result, and as you know, we were subject to an intense demonetization / deplatforming campaign that included getting kicked off of Twitter, PayPal, Facebook and other platforms, dropped by our advertisers, and targeted by MSM hit pieces which colluded with foreign ‘watchdogs’ to inflict maximum damage.
These same groups also targeted outlets including The Federalist and Breitbart over various reporting, which suffered similar fates.
Now, thanks to a new book by investigative journalist Paul Holden that builds on reporting by Matt Taibbi, Paul Thacker and others, we learn that the origin of these campaigns, launched years before the pandemic, was none other than UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s political machine, which began targeting left-wing outlets speaking critically of Starmer such as The Canary, and then went after conservative outlets in America – just in time for the 2020 US election.
Another creepy subversive progressive machine with another juvenile-sounding name, cooked up and funded to take down the opposition – not for misinformation, but for the inconvenient truths.
…This murky operation known as the Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) was launched and resourced through a think tank, Labour Together, that would later be fined for failing to declare £739,000 in donations between 2018 and 2020. Said funds helped underpin this clandestine anti-media strategy which affected news outlets from the UK to the United States.
At the center of the effort was Morgan McSweeney, a political strategist who has since become Starmer’s chief of staff and, according to public commentary by prominent journalists, one of the most powerful unelected figures in the modern Labour Party.
There are no roots like phoney ‘grassroots.’
…The newly disclosed materials reveal that SFFN was not in fact some grassroots, anonymous activist collective it claimed to be, but a political weapon forged by senior Labour figures and funded by millionaire donors, including individuals active in pro-Israel political advocacy.
The goal: destabilize independent media ecosystems aligned with Labour’s left under Jeremy Corbyn, elevate Starmer’s leadership bid, and delegitimize outlets – domestic and foreign – that threatened the faction’s consolidation of power.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) – why do their names always sound like these Orwellian constructs? ‘Truthwatch’ etc.
They went after Durden and ZeroHedge.
…SFFN’s most aggressive project was an astroturf campaign against media outlets perceived as ideological threats. Targets spanned both the left (such as The Canary and Evolve Politics) and the right, as noted above.
In each case, the tactic was the same: identify advertisers appearing on targeted sites, publicly shame them through social media threads, and provide tools – including downloadable blocklists – to automatically exclude those outlets from programmatic advertising networks. The effort succeeded in devastating the business model of some targets; others survived but saw sustained pressure.
We took matters into our own hands, launching our premium service and later the ZeroHedge store in order to keep the lights on (thank you).
They went after Breitbart.
…Holden reports that SFFN then set their sights on Breitbart in October 2019 – after an anonymous X account tagged the UK Parliament and likened its ads on Breitbart to funding extremism. SFFN ran hard with this – promoting the allegation and labeling Breitbart a “bigoted, conspiracist fake news site.”
Later that day, the Press Association contacted Parliament for comment. Within hours, Parliament suspended the ads. To further legitimize the operation, anti-Corbyn MP Mary Creagh publicly leaned on the Conservative leadership to formalize the ban, citing a list of SFFN-identified sites.
Two weeks later, SFFN announced another victory: the UK Cabinet Office had implemented a “whitelist” that barred Breitbart, The Canary, and a long roster of other outlets from receiving government advertising.
They pressured the British government into a ‘whitelist’ ban list, which made its way into the private sector as corporations started to use the SFFN whitelist as their guide for ‘approved’ advertising.
…The campaign extended into the private sector. In 2020, Ford UK publicly stated it was investigating ad placements on Breitbart. By 2021, SFFN was targeting Breitbart’s YouTube monetization and urging advertisers to block the site across Google’s ad infrastructure.
The group’s blocklist eventually included 28 domestic and international sites, among them U.S. outlets aligned with the alt-right and the British far-right figure Tommy Robinson.
This was also part and parcel of the advertising blacklist used to try to destroy Twitter, which Elon had just purchased.
KILL MUSK’S TWITTER
…The political sensitivity surrounding SFFN resurfaced in 2024, when leaked emails from CCDH showed repeated internal discussions about targeting Elon Musk’s Twitter. Amid the backlash, CCDH sources insisted McSweeney had played no operational role in the organization – a claim contradicted by company records showing he was the sole director of its precursor entity for more than a year and remained formally involved until April 2020.
In 2024, Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker reported on emails leaked from within CCDH. They showed that, for over a year, CCDH’s internal team meetings included the action item: ‘kill Musk’s Twitter.’ ‘This is war,’ Musk posted in response. In the furor that followed, The Guardian was told that McSweeney had played no operational role in CCDH, which now claims ownership of the SFFN project. Imran Ahmed, who later claimed credit for both SFFN and CCDH on Twitter, claimed that McSweeney had simply gifted him a “shell company” (Brixton Endeavours) that was then converted into CCDH, and which later absorbed SFFN . The response was canny in not stipulating whether McSweeney had any operational role in SFFN. –Paul Holden via Drop Site
CCDH’s later retellings cast SFFN as an example of its “global” anti-hate strategies. One of its leaders described the financial approach explicitly: if news sites rely on advertising, “within a couple of months, you can completely eviscerate the economic base of a website.” SFFN had been the proving ground.
Paul Holden, who did all this tremendous reporting, lays out the entire story here.
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. 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. Many of the documents were revealed for the first time in my recent book – called “The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy” – and are expanded on significantly there.
The campaign succeeded in effectively destroying the left-wing British outlet The Canary, which is only now recovering. Breitbart News persists.
The project was run through an organization called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). SFFN was incubated and resourced by a think-tank called Labour Together under the guise of fighting misinformation and “fake news.” Between 2018 and 2020, the anodyne-seeming think-tank received £739,000 in donations that it failed to report to the UK Electoral Commission, in violation of electoral law. Labour Together was found guilty and fined in September 2021 for the offense.
Morgan McSweeney, now Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, was Labour Together’s company secretary during this period. He also listed himself on LinkedIn as Labour Together’s “Managing Director.” In October 2024, the prominent UK journalist Andrew Marr commented that McSweeney held a position “of unparalleled power in Labour Party history.”
Before it was unmasked as a partisan political project, SFFN claimed to be organized by an anonymous group of concerned citizens who were inspired by a project in the United States called Sleeping Giants, a demonetizing campaign launched against Breitbart by workers in the U.S. tech industry in 2016.
Juvenile organisational names, and if it’s not ‘for the children,’ the next tell is when it’s ‘Concerned Citizens.’
Of course they are. There would never be any lurking malignancy or authoritarian ulterior motive beneath the furrowed, concerned brow.
I believe this was where Elon’s famous NSFW rejoinder concerning using the blackmail of advertisers to institute censorship at X was born, and it’s as applicable today as it was then.
This never gets old…
“Go fuck yourself…” -Elon Musk pic.twitter.com/N5H35gwUao
— Liz Churchill (@liz_churchill10) August 12, 2024
Thanks to him, we all survive, and we learn daily what we faced, who we fought, and who we are still fighting.
And I pray to God that with every single one of these ghastly, terrifying, infuriating revelations, we learn daily what we must do to protect the freedoms we have.
No quarter to these ‘concerned citizens’ when their machinations erupt in public.
No bending the knee to the global cabal.
They have no power over us.
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