Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
A foreign left-wing organization that worked to de-platform The Federalist was inappropriately declared a U.S. tax-exempt non-profit operating in the public interest, a recent investigation found. According to Racket News on Wednesday, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a disinformation group based in the United Kingdom, provided false information to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to escape taxes on donations.
“The status allows donors to CCDH to treat donations as a write-off and indicates that US authorities have determined the organization is involved in non-profit activities in the public interest,” Paul Holden writes for Racket. The CCDH has been integral to the left’s dystopian censorship regime and “gained renown during the pandemic for efforts to remove the so-called ‘Disinformation Dozen’ from Internet platforms, a group that included Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.”
IRS documents Holden obtained show CCDH claimed to the U.S. agency that it was a registered charity in the United Kingdom. Yet, according to the U.K. Charity Commission and the U.K.’s public charity register, it is not. This suggests the censorship organization obtained tax-exempt status from the IRS on false pretenses.
In June 2020, NBC News colluded with the foreign disinformation group to pressure Google into demonetizing The Federalist and Zero Hedge. Both websites were reinstated following blowback from conservative media and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“[T]he CCDH was and is a pioneering effort in a new form of ‘non-governmental’ pressure group that hides its ties to major-party politics as it pushes for the removal of ‘hate’ speech, often the critics of mainstream politicians,” Holden notes.
The Center became the target of a lawsuit in July from X under CEO Elon Musk. The California tech company sued the group for scaring off advertisers with allegedly baseless claims of rampant “hate” speech on the platform, otherwise known as content with which left-wing censors disagree.
“CCDH has done this by engaging in a series of unlawful acts designed to improperly gain access to protected X Corp. data, needed by CCDH so that it could cherry-pick from the hundreds of millions of posts made each day on X and falsely claim it had statistical support showing the platform is overwhelmed with harmful content,” the lawsuit says.
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The Center for Countering Digital Hate is hardly alone in “cherry picking” content to depict non-leftist websites as dangerously extreme for presenting information that contradicts regime-approved narratives. CCDH boosts a growing ecosystem of left-wing disinformation groups colluding to cement a collective monopoly on information.
There’s the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), VineSight, Ad Fontes, and NewsGuard, to name a few, often operating with government subsidies. GDI and NewsGuard alone have received hundreds of thousands in taxpayer funding. In December, The Federalist sued the federal government with The Daily Wire and the state of Texas to stop this taxpayer funding of “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.”
Another group called Automated Controversy Detection, Inc. (AuCoDe) received more than $1.2 million from taxpayers between 2018 and 2022 to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) in the left’s dystopian censorship crusade.
House Republicans’ Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has centered on the federal censorship regime with two hearings last year that featured Substack journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, two principal authors of the infamous “Twitter Files.” Shellenberger and Taibbi found broad collusion between the Silicon Valley tech giant and federal officials who cracked down on dissident content on X. Shellenberger testified that both the United States and United Kingdom have deployed “sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed abroad against the American people.”
“The First Amendment prohibits the government from abridging freedom of speech, the Supreme Court has ruled the government may not ‘induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish,’” Shellenberger said. “And there is now a large body of evidence proving that the government did precisely that.”