UK PM’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney Ran Secret Censorship Campaign to Destroy Breitbart News: Report

The crackdown on freedom of expression and dissenting thought by the UK’s Labour government was hard-baked into its DNA long before it took power, with the “the most powerful unelected official in British politics” having run a shadowy astroturf organisation working to destroy unaligned news outlets including Breitbart, a report states.

A Labour Party thinktank cutout posing as a grassroots anti-“Fake News” group worked to kneecap left-wing outlets that were a threat to its globalist-left worldview, and right-wing outlets that positively covered U.S. President Donald Trump and ‘Mr Brexit’ Nigel Farage, it is claimed. The revelations come in an article published by Dropsite News by South African investigative journalist Paul Holden, citing “a trove of documents that expose the operation” and promoting his forthcoming book.

Crucially Morgan McSweeney, the British political activist who propelled Sir Keir Starmer to the office of Prime Minister, went on from leading this well-funded “quintessential example of astroturfing” and became Starmer’s chief of staff in government, making the alleged censorious schemer “the most powerful unelected official in British politics”.

Holden claimed:

McSweeney and his allies blew up British politics, with a blast radius that extended across the pond to the United States… to launch an astroturf campaign that mounted a ferocious attack on non-conformist media and free speech on both sides of the Atlantic.

The campaign was catalyzed by a desire to demonetize and delegitimize outlets who reported sympathetically on factional opponents of McSweeney and his allies… That campaign directly sought to “cancel” outlets reporting favorably on Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party.

It also made several ad-hominem attacks on U.S. President Donald Trump personally and sought to ensure that Breitbart was barred from receiving any advertising at all from the UK’s Cabinet office. This was all conducted behind a veil of misdirection and secrecy.

The revelations are a blow for the now years-long bid to woo President Trump by Sir Keir and those around him, despite their very deep ideological differences, as it makes clear the “Starmer Machine” worked diligently to destroy the new media ecosystem around the now two-times President.

It is stated that McSweeney’s well-funded Labour Together ‘think tank’ created undeclared cadet organisations including Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), homologues of Sleeping Giants in the United States. That Labour Together was less than open with its funding was later exposed and proven, and the report noted:

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.

As reported by Breitbart News last year, the CCDH was the organisation exposed as having internally identified its key mission as “Kill Musk’s Twitter”.

The SFFN, meanwhile, was portrayed in public as a grassroots organisation created by “a small group of friends and activists” who wished to remain anonymous because of a “fear of reprisals”. In fact, Holden states, the organisation was created, funded, and led by some of the most senior and influential figures in British centre-left politics who themselves used the “fake news” of a “veil of misdirection and secrecy” to astroturf the campaign to “demonetize the U.S. news outlet Breitbart” and others.

The organisation was, it is stated, originally conceived to destroy news media in the United Kingdom that sat to the left of the globalist centre-left faction that McSweeney wanted to see capture the Labour Party, but this mission quickly crept onto attacking the right as well.

Holden noted in his report that through creating advertiser boycotts of dissident news, the campaigns were able to actually destroy UK hard-left news outlet The Canary, a key supporter of McSweeney and Starmer’s main rival on the left, Jeremy Corbyn, who was Labour’s leader at the time. He characterised this work as “astroturf campaign that mounted a ferocious attack on non-conformist media and free speech on both sides of the Atlantic”.

While McSweeney failed to “demonetize and delegitimize” Breitbart News, the campaigns were successful in preventing any of the UK government’s advertising budget being used to buy space with the network. The SSFN also pressured businesses to block their advertising appearing on websites with “plainly defamatory” claims, with Holden claiming:

The attack went far beyond government spending. In June 2020, a booster of SFFN’s campaign tagged Ford’s UK twitter account, noting that its ads were appearing on Breitbart. Ford UK’s twitter account responded that it was “investigating the ad placement” and confirmed that Ford “does not share the views expressed on the website.” By 2021, SFFN expanded to target Breitbart’s YouTube account. “Breitbart, who have: consistently denied climate change, promoted sexism, published racist conspiracy theories have a monetised YouTube channel,” SFFN complained in July.

SFFN encouraged advertisers generally to block their ads from appearing on Breitbart’s YouTube content. In order to scale up its demonetization campaign, SFFN hosted an excel spreadsheet “blocklist” on its website for years. It listed the URLs of “fake news” websites that advertisers could import into their Google AdSense profiles to block sites en masse from receiving their advertising… SFFN also provided a handy “how-to” guide for advertisers and brands, walking them through how they could add SFFN’s targets to their own personalised blocklist.

While efforts have allegedly been made to hide Chief of Staff McSweeney’s role in these organisations, Holden states it is now “incontrovertible” that “an astroturf campaign set up by the current chief of staff to the UK Prime Minister was responsible for “cancelling” news websites reporting sympathetically on their views” and this is a “huge political gift” to both President Donald Trump and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.

For Trump, Holden purports to offer evidence that a carefully concealed foreign influence operation attempted to remake the U.S. media landscape, and that this operation has now managed to capture the government of a key military ally. For Nigel Farage, the claims are further grist for the mill demonstrating the degree of clear-out at the top of government required if basic concepts like free media and freedom of expression are to be preserved.