It's long been painfully obvious that the party that once championed free speech in the United States with full-throated ferocity has "evolved" (devolved?) and become the party of narrative gatekeeping and outright censorship. As someone who was raised a liberal Democrat and remained a liberal Democrat until my mid-thirties, the 180 my former party has done on the First Amendment and free speech has set my head spinning. I left my party roughly 20 years ago — but had I not done so first, it would have left me completely in the dust on matters of civil liberties in the interim.
Despite my not-all-that-recent migration from "the left," I've still been stunned at the zeal with which "mainstream" Democrats have, in recent years, embraced the notion that our "betters" know better and we lowly everyday schmoes ought to shut up and listen — and if we don't, the power of the government should be brought to bear upon us. No more "agree to disagree" — it's "agree or be silenced."
I must admit, as we trudged through COVID, I became quite discouraged. We seemed to be sliding down a slippery censorship slope at an ever-increasing velocity, with nowhere to grab a foothold. And then...Elon Musk bought Twitter. Musk did so under the guise of protecting/restoring free speech. I didn't know much about him at the time other than he was extraordinarily rich and seemed rather eccentric, but I did like his stated aims. And then, the Twitter Files broke, compliments of Matt Taibbi and several other independent journalists. And those revelations, combined with the layers slowly peeled back by Murthy v. Missouri (f/k/a Missouri v. Biden), seemingly lifted a huge weight off the public discourse. It felt a bit like we could breathe again.
It was clear from the reaction of many on the left — and particularly in the legacy media — when Musk first made overtures toward Twitter that the prospect of a platform that allowed for free (or freer) speech was anathema — which made it all the more critical that the purchase proceed. It did, of course, and Musk faced all manner of roadblocks in the form of regulations and lawfare lobbed at him, along with advertising boycotts. And the animosity aimed at Musk and the social media juggernaut has only accelerated in the face of his endorsement of former President and current GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Now, thanks to an exclusive report from Paul Thacker of The Disinformation Chronicle and Taibbi/Racket News, we know some of the major players behind the push for those boycotts (UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour Party, the Biden/Harris administration, the Kamala Harris campaign, to name a few) — and their ultimate aim: to "kill Musk's Twitter."
In an explosive leak with ramifications for the upcoming U.S. presidential election, internal documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate—whose founder is British political operative Morgan McSweeney, now advising the Kamala Harris campaign—show the group plans in writing to “kill Musk’s Twitter” while strengthening ties with the Biden/Harris administration and Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has introduced multiple bills to regulate online “misinformation.”
I encourage you to read the entire report, but Thacker lays out the broad outlines on X/Twitter:
This isn't our first introduction to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). In fact, after Musk threatened to take legal action against the outfit, X/Twitter filed suit against it in July of 2023.
In April, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the suit was itself an attempt to silence the CCDH.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer dismissed the lawsuit and wrote that it was an attempt to silence the center for its reports about rising hate speech and conspiracy theories on X.
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Musk, who has called himself a free speech absolutist, targeted the Center for Countering Digital Hate after it released a report called “Toxic Twitter” last year, when X was known as Twitter. That report said that Twitter under Musk’s ownership had reinstated the accounts of previously suspended “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists and spreaders of dangerous conspiracy theories,” and that Twitter stood to profit from additional advertising as a result.
X sued the center and a separate nonprofit, the European Climate Foundation, which X’s lawyers said conspired with the center to illegally obtain data about the platform’s advertising. The lawsuit said that the organizations had “cherry-picked” information and that they were unlawfully interfering with X’s relationship with advertisers.
X/Twitter appealed the ruling, and the appeal is currently pending before the Ninth Circuit.
But now, with the whistleblower documents obtained by Thacker and Taibbi, the agenda of the CCDH and its Democrat compadres on this side of the pond is laid bare. As the report demonstrates, the goal is to kill the platform — and with it, one of the last bastions of free speech.
That Labour is arm in arm with the Biden/Harris administration and the Harris campaign has already been quite obvious.
But now we have an even clearer view of the connections between them — and the inescapable whiff of election interference from a purported ally.
The CCDH documents carry particular importance because McSweeney’s Labour Together operatives have been teaching election strategy to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, leading Politico to call Labour and the Democrats “sister parties.” CCDH’s focus on “Kill Musk’s Twitter” also adds to legal questions about the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) organization.
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In the last two months, the Washington Post and Politico, among others, have run a series of features about British advisors from Labour Together rescuing the distressed political damsel that is the Harris/Walz campaign. Politico casts McSweeney as the “election mastermind” who first helped Keir Starmer defeat leftist Jeremy Corbyn to become the head of Labour, all the way to Starmer’s “landslide” win over Conservatives to become Prime Minister this past July, implying that McSweeney and his team can perform a similar miracle for Harris.
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McSweeney’s Labour Together colleague Imran Ahmed opened a CCDH office in DC three years ago and began working with American journalists to suppress dissent and enforce narratives friendly to Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration.
Musk reacted to the revelation as one might expect:
One of the best aspects of X/Twitter is its free-wheeling nature — not that there are no guardrails at all, but that its users are much freer to express their thoughts and, more importantly, their opposition to those in power. Whether via straightforward discourse or meme-filled mockery, X/Twitter plays a critical role in the ability to exercise one of our most fundamental rights.
CCDH and its censorious cohorts may have aimed to kill the mocking bird, but with their agenda exposed, they've shot wide and bought themselves a war.