BANNED: Book by Dr. Peter McCullough & John Leake
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | OCTOBER 9, 2023
I would like to open this column by stating that I have long had a great relationship with Amazon, which has sold far more of my books than have ever been sold in bookstores. I have also been extremely grateful to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program for empowering me to publish whatever nonfiction books I please, quickly and efficiently, while retaining the rights and earning the best royalty in the business.
In May 2022, Dr. McCullough and I published our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, directly on Amazon. Quickly the book became a hit and within a year it had earned over 1000 5-Star Reviews. For almost 3 weeks in July 2022 it was a top 100 seller.
In the autumn of last year, Tony Lyons, President and Publisher of SKYHORSE in New York, graciously offered to bring out a special, handsome hardcover edition with a preface by U.S. presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who warmly endorsed our work.
A bit of Covid fatigue this year caused sales to decline, but in September the book got a second wind as more and more Americans seem to be recognize that Dr. McCullough has been right all along.
To my gratitude and delight, Amazon actually supported the effort by running a deep discount promotion while still paying the same royalty to us—an act of generosity to authors that is unheard of in traditional publishing.
And then, on September 29, seemingly out of nowhere, Amazon Account Review sent me the following notice:
We have temporarily suspended your KDP account because we found offensive content that violates our Content Guidelines in the title(s) listed below:
ASIN: B09ZLVWMD9 –
Title: THE COURAGE TO FACE COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex – Author: John Leake
Upon receiving this message, I humbly beseeched Account Review to restore my account and to let me know what “offensive content” was found in our book. Amazon restored my account and published my latest book—a conventional work of true crime—but refused to reinstate The Courage to Face COVID-19. Yesterday my third appeal was turned down without answering my query about what in our book is offensive.
My question seemed especially pertinent, given that Account Review provided me with a link to its Content Guidelines, which include a section on Offensive Content.
Offensive content
We don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.
Obviously, nothing in our book even remotely touches on any of these subjects. Upon reading this description, it occurred to me that it was a perfection description of 120 Days of Sodom, by the Marquis de Sade, which contains hundreds of pages that glorify the abuse and sexual exploitation of children, violent pornography, and glorifications of rape and pedophilia. I did a quick search for the title, and voila, there it is, for sale on Amazon in three formats.
None of my polite entreaties to Content Review was answered with an explanation of what, in our book, is offensive or in violation of any other published guideline. This strengthened my suspicion that the decision was the result of a sudden imposition of power for which the Content Review staff was not prepared.
Even more stunning than banning my softcover edition was Amazon’s decision to ban Tony Lyons’s SKYHORSE hardcover edition from the site without even sending the publisher notice. He learned of his edition’s demise from me.
This is a developing story about arbitrary censorship and book banning. Generally speaking, Amazon has a robust history of resisting pressure to ban books. Even during the COVID Pandemic, Amazon bucked the censorship regime that was established at Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
I believe it is no exaggeration to state that Amazon’s decision to ban our work of medical and historical scholarship, carefully vetted by Dr. Peter McCullough—who has published over 600 peer-reviewed papers in top academic medical journals—is the most egregious act of arbitrary censorship in the history of American publishing.
Many works of literature have been banned from public school systems and libraries and censured by religious organizations. However, I cannot find a single example of a banned nonfiction book that contains zero sex, zero violence, zero expletives, zero harshly expressed opinions, and zero assertions that aren’t grounded on rock solid scholarship.
Indeed, the book is a strictly factual narrative based on hundreds of published sources ranging from academic papers to standard works of medical history to documents published by U.S. federal agencies. The longest chapter in the book recounts Dr. McCullough’s U.S. Senate testimony on November 19, 2020.
This is a developing story about a gross infringement of the freedom of speech that is enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S Constitution. Coincidentally, tomorrow (October 10) I have been invited to address the Republican Women of Greater North Texas about the critical importance of maintaining free speech for the maintenance our Constitutional Republic. I can now speak from very personal experience.
I would like to conclude by stating that I believe this decision is almost certainly the result of outside pressure being brought to bear on Amazon—the sort of outside pressure from the U.S. Executive Branch that was revealed in discovery in Missouri v. Biden.
As Jacob Siegel recently remarked in a brilliant piece in Tablet magazine titled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century:”
At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together.
I strongly suspect that the banning of our book from Amazon has the fingerprints of Biden administration or intelligence agency goons all over it.
For those who would still like to purchase our book, please visit our website by clicking on the image below.
Another Tacit Admission That COVID Mandates Were a Disastrous Mistake
By Ian Miller | Brownstone Institute | October 9, 2023
Pandemic restrictions were an unmitigated failure, and the evidence base against the politicians and “experts” who imposed them and demanded compliance continues to grow.
And it raises some substantial questions about holding those responsible accountable for their actions. Especially as mask mandates return in certain parts of the country, with hints of more on the way.
Recently a new government report from the United Kingdom was released to little fanfare, which not-so-surprisingly mirrors the fanfare resulting from the release of new data from the CDC itself, showing how vaccine efficacy has fallen to zero.
Finally, Rochelle Walensky did acknowledge publicly that the vaccines couldn’t stop transmission. However it was already far too late to matter.
But all along the agency has strongly stated that the mRNA shots were effective at preventing hospitalizations. Or at least that the latest booster was effective, tacitly acknowledging that the original 2=dose series has lost whatever impact it once had.
What The Evidence Says About NPI’s
The UK’s Health Security Agency (HSA) recently posted a lengthy examination on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions at preventing or slowing the spread of COVID-19 in the country.
And at the risk of revealing a spoiler alert, it’s not good news for the COVID extremists determined to bring mask mandates back.
The goal of the examination was laid out succinctly; the UK’s HSA intended to use primary studies on NPIs within the community to see how successful or unsuccessful they were at reducing COVID infections.
The purpose of this rapid mapping review was to identify and categorise primary studies that reported on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) implemented in community settings to reduce the transmission of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK.
Streamlined systematic methods were used, including literature searches (using sources such as Medline, Embase, and medRxiv) and use of systematic reviews as sources to identify relevant primary studies.
Unsurprisingly, they found that the evidence base on COVID interventions was exceptionally weak.
In fact, roughly 67 percent of the identified evidence was essentially useless. In fact two-thirds of the evidence identified was modeling.
Two-thirds of the evidence identified was based on modeling studies (100 out of 151 studies).
There was a lack of experimental studies (2 out of 151 studies) and individual-level observational studies (22 out of 151 studies). Apart from test and release strategies for which 2 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) were identified, the body of evidence available on effectiveness of NPIs in the UK provides weak evidence in terms of study design, as it is mainly based on modelling studies, ecological studies, mixed-methods studies and qualitative studies.
This is a key learning point for future pandemic preparedness: there is a need to strengthen evaluation of interventions and build this into the design and implementation of public health interventions and government policies from the start of any future pandemic or other public health emergency.
Modeling, as we know, is functionally useless, given that it’s hopelessly prone to bias, incorrect assumptions and the ideological needs of its creators.
The two paragraphs which followed are equally as important.
Low quality evidence is not something that should be relied upon for decision making purposes, yet that’s exactly what the UK, US and many other countries did. Fauci, the CDC, and others embraced modeling as fact at the beginning of the pandemic. They then repeatedly referenced shoddy, poor quality work because it confirmed their biases throughout its duration, with unsurprising results.
And this government report concurs; stating simply and devastatingly, “there is a lack of strong evidence on the effectiveness of NPIs to reduce COVID-19 transmission, and for many NPIs the scientific consensus shifted over the course of the pandemic.”
Of course the scientific consensus shifted over the course of the pandemic because, as we learned, it became politically expedient for it to shift.
As their paragraphs on the available evidence show, there was little solid, high-quality data showing that NPI’s were having a significant impact on the spread of the virus, a reality that had been predicted by decades of pandemic planning.
But the consensus shifted towards NPIs and away from something approaching Sweden’s strategy or the Great Barrington Declaration, simply because Fauci, the CDC, and other “experts” demanded it shift to suit their ideological aims.
The few high-quality studies on say, masking, that were conducted during the pandemic showed that there was no benefit from mask wearing at an individual or population level. And that is why the Cochrane review came to its now infamous conclusion.
Instead of acknowledging that they were relying on poor quality evidence, the “experts” operated with an unjustified certainty that their interventions were based on following “The Science™.” At every turn, when criticized or questioned, they would default back to an appeal to authority; that the consensus in the scientific community unequivocally believed that the evidence showed that lockdowns, mandates, travel restrictions, and other NPIs were based on the best available information.
After initially determining that the UK should follow Sweden’s example and incorporate a more hands-off approach that relied on protecting the elderly while allowing immunity to build up amongst the younger, healthy populations, Boris Johnson panicked, at the behest of Neil Ferguson, and terrified expert groups. Tossing out decades of planning out of fear, while claiming publicly to be following science.
Instead, a systemic, detailed review of the evidence base relied on by those same experts has now concluded that there never was any high-quality information suggesting that pandemic policies were justifiable. Only wishful thinking from an incompetent, arrogant, malicious “expert” community, and unthinking, unblinking compliance from terrified politicians using restrictions and mandates without care or concern for adverse effects.
While this new report wasn’t specifically designed to determine how effective NPIs were in reducing transmission, it’s clear and obvious conclusions give away that answer too.
If it were easy to prove that COVID policies and mandates had a positive impact on the spread of the virus, there would be dozens of high-quality studies showing a benefit. And those high-quality studies would be covered in this report, with a strong recommendation to reinstate such mandates in future pandemics.
Instead, there’s nothing.
Just exhortations to do better next time, to follow the actual high-quality evidence and not guesswork.
Based on how little accountability there’s been for the “experts” and politicians who lied about “The Science™,” there’s little doubt that when presented with the next opportunity they’ll be sure to handle it in exactly the same way.
Abandoning evidence in favor of politics.
Ian Miller is the author of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.”
Doctor Persecuted For “Misinformation” Wins Appeal
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 8, 2023
Subverting the tightening noose of censorship, the judicial system has risen, this time at least, as a defender of free expression and professional discourse in Washington State. The Court of Appeals has recently extended a lifeline to Dr. Richard Eggleston, a retired ophthalmologist, in his battle against the Washington Medical Commission’s (WMC) accusations of spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19. This pivotal ruling not only resonates as a triumph for Dr. Eggleston but also echoes across the medical community, bolstering the principle that the crucible of critical discourse should not be chilled by punitive actions.
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
Dr. Eggleston, from Clarkston, Washington, had penned a sequence of critiques last year in the Lewiston Morning Tribune, challenging the prevailing narratives around COVID-19, specifically deliberating on the safety and veracity of the vaccines. His audacity led to an avalanche of disciplinary actions spearheaded by the WMC in August 2022. Accused of unprofessional conduct and “willful misrepresentation of facts,” the retired eye doctor found himself thrust into the cauldron of a legal and professional maelstrom.
As the waves of allegations crashed down, Eggleston invoked his First Amendment right to free speech, refuting the charges with a motion to dismiss. The WMC’s refusal to honor his motion nudged him to escalate the matter to the courts. His quest for justice first encountered a roadblock when the Washington State Superior Court denied his appeal for an injunction. Undeterred, Eggleston propelled his case to the Court of Appeals, which in a moment of judicial prudence, awarded him an emergency injunction in May, halting the impending court proceedings.
The saga witnessed a fresh chapter last week when Court of Appeals Commissioner Hailey L. Landrus sanctioned Eggleston’s motion for a discretionary review of the previous court’s verdict. Attorney Richard Jaffe, representing Eggleston, lauded the decision as “very good news for all who believe that doctors should be able to publicly criticize” what he termed as COVID-19 “propaganda.” This sentiment was echoed by another counsel for Eggleston, Todd Richardson, who expressed both gratitude and relief at the verdict.
Christian Drosten: “I’ve Had Three Doses of the Vaccine and Been Infected Twice”
BY ROBERT KOGON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 7, 2023
Does anyone still remember the days when COVID-19 vaccines were reputed to do what other vaccines do – namely, prevent people from getting infected – and hence we were all taught to speak of exceptional ‘breakthrough infections’ when the unexpected, nonetheless, came to pass?
Well, Germany’s ‘state virologist’ Christian Drosten apparently does not remember them either. Drosten is a member of the German Government’s ‘Corona Expert Council’ and is treated as the absolute authority in Germany for all things COVID-19-related. He also, purely coincidentally, developed the notoriously hyper-sensitive COVID-19 PCR testing protocol, which would go a long way to create the COVID-19 pandemic based on the innumerable ‘asymptomatic cases’ it would go on to detect.
Drosten has given a new interview to the German weekly paper Die Zeit on the solemn occasion of the awarding of this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine to Drew Weissman and Katalin Kariko, two scientists who contributed to developing the mRNA technology underlying the most widely-used COVID-19 vaccines in the West. Drosten praises the decision to award the prize to the mRNA pioneers – “the technology has proven its significance thanks to the authorisation for COVID-19” – and goes on to note that “I’ve had three doses of the vaccine and been infected twice”.
Three doses and he still got infected twice? Well, why does he agree with the Nobel Committee awarding the prize to Weissman and Kariko then?
Drosten’s remark is apparently supposed to help explain why he will not be getting the new ‘variant-adapted’ COVID-19 jab this autumn or donning a facemask when out and about: since, namely, he already has adequate immunity to fend off the virus – not, it seems, thanks to his previous vaccine doses but due to having caught the bug despite them!
Further on in the interview, Drosten makes this assumption explicit. Thus, asked whether the public has to be concerned about new, more highly transmissible Covid variants, Drosten replies:
Two years ago, higher transmissibility due to new mutations always also meant that more people got seriously ill. Simply because immunity against serious outcomes was not yet complete. By now, the overwhelming majority have built up immune defences by way of infections which are directed against the whole virus, not only against the spike protein from the vaccine. Infections were required for this.
So, Drosten now speaks (and it is not the first time) as if the idea all along was for people to get the vaccine and the virus. He adds, however, that vaccination was still worthwhile, since, he claims, it reduced the severity of the illness when people got infected. Mind you, he has just said that “complete immunity” even against severe disease is only achieved via infection.
The somewhat bewildering position adopted by Drosten is, by the way and not surprisingly – he is not referred to as Germany’s ‘state virologist’ for nothing – also the official German Government position. The official recommendation of the Standing Committee on Vaccination (STIKO) of the German public health authority is that everyone over 18 years of age should have acquired a “basic immunity” by way of at least three “antigen contacts”, either in the form of vaccine doses or infections. The STIKO, however, insists that at least two of these “contacts” should have taken place by way of vaccination, thus suggesting that vaccine-induced immunity is somehow superior to natural immunity, whereas Drosten’s remarks clearly suggest the contrary.
In its latest recommendation on the new ‘variant-adapted’ jab, moreover, the STIKO notes that “the majority of the population has already been vaccinated multiple times and has acquired good basic immunity thanks to having had SARS-CoV-2 infections in addition”. This is why, incidentally, the STIKO only recommends the adapted jab for persons over 60 and members of other ostensibly high-risk groups, but not for anyone else. But the tenor is exactly the same as in Drosten’s remarks, as if getting vaccinated and then getting sick had been the plan all along.
Well, for Drosten’s and the STIKO’s benefit, the below comes directly from the European Medicines Agency summary document on what is by far the most-widely used COVID-19 vaccine in the EU: BioNTech’s mRNA-based ‘Comirnaty’.

Comirnaty was authorised to prevent COVID-19, not to prevent severe outcomes. If it does not prevent COVID-19, it failed.
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.
Facebook Censors Report On Study About Covid Vaccine mRNA Found in Breast Milk
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | October 6, 2023
Facebook has once more found itself at the helm of controversy regarding the censorship of accurate information concerning COVID-19. This is not the maiden voyage of the social media giant into the tempestuous waters of information control; earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded to having stifled truthful content about the pandemic at the behest of establishment voices.
His admission followed on the heels of both the US government and the World Health Organization declaring the curtain call on the COVID-19 public health emergency. This prompted Meta to retrench its medical “misinformation” policy, albeit the platform seemingly persists in its endeavor to silence certain narratives.
As reported by Public, the latest instance of censorship came to light when Facebook initiated a fact-check, labeled, and curtailed the visibility of an article titled “Covid Vaccine mRNA In Breast Milk Shows CDC Lied About Safety.” The scrutiny led by Facebook was not aimed at debunking the veracity of the article but instead was targeted at what it deemed as “missing context.”
The article, based on a recent Lancet study, brought to the public’s attention evidence of trace amounts of vaccine mRNA in breast milk, a finding that contradicts previous assurances by the CDC.
Despite the fact that these women were side-stepped in the original vaccine trials, they were given the green light for vaccination, based on the CDC’s now-questionable advice.
Facebook’s audit extrapolated the “context” that pregnant women ought to proceed with vaccination, thereby sidelining the primary discourse of the article which was to shed light on the misleading information dispersed by the CDC.
The methodology employed by Facebook in this instance extends beyond a mere examination of facts. By reducing the spread of the article, the platform effectively stifles a critical examination of the claims made by government health authorities, thereby undermining the public’s right to be informed and to engage in crucial discourse.
Facebook’s ongoing dalliance with censorship, especially of critical health-related information, raises significant questions about the role of social media platforms in the contemporary information ecosystem. The unfurling narrative underscores the necessity for a transparent, decentralized, and accountable framework for information dissemination, one that is immune to undue influence and serves the collective endeavor for truth.
The High Stakes in the Legal Battle for Free Speech
Brownstone Institute | October 6, 2023
The ongoing war between the US Security State and the First Amendment is perhaps the most underreported development of the 21st century. Now, Missouri v. Biden may bring it to the Supreme Court.
Just two decades ago, the internet promised liberation as dictatorships would cave to the emerging swell of information. That was the hope, at least.
“There’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet,” President Clinton said in 2000. “Good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
That optimism did not come to fruition. Instead of Westernizing the Orient, technology laid the foundation for the US Security State to pursue unprecedented social control.
At first, the conflict appeared to be between rank-and-file military members and transgressive cyber actors. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden seemed like mere hackers, not harbingers for the impending suspension of American liberty.
The battle suddenly became a civilizational struggle in 2020. A highly efficient technocracy declared war against the Bill of Rights. The US Security State shut down American society, eradicated due process, and captured the public health apparatus. The CIA bribed scientists to cover up the origins of Covid, and the Department of Homeland Security dictated what Americans could and could not see in their newsfeeds. The FBI helped banish the country’s oldest newspaper from Twitter for reporting on its preferred candidate’s son.
When Clinton made his “Jell-O” comment, few of us could imagine that we’d live in such a country. We trusted our courts and our elected government to protect us. We thought the rule of law was sacrosanct. We were wrong.
Now, however, the judiciary has the opportunity to reclaim the First Amendment from the tyranny of the Security State in Missouri v. Biden.
Missouri v. Biden and the CISA Injunction
Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit reinstated an injunction against CISA, an agency in the Department of Homeland Security, that prohibits its agents from colluding with social media companies to promote censorship of any kind.
The case demonstrates how far the United States has strayed from its former free speech ethos. CISA held ongoing meetings with social media platforms to “push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech,” according to the Fifth Circuit. This included criticism of lockdowns, vaccines, and the Hunter Biden laptop. Through a process known as “switchboarding,” CISA officials dictated to Big Tech platforms what content was “true” or “false,” which became Orwellian euphemisms for acceptable and prohibited speech.
CISA’s leaders reveled in their usurpation of the First Amendment. They overturned hundreds of years of free speech protections, appointing themselves the arbiters of truth. Without freedom of “election-related speech,” we no longer live in a democracy. They pursued a faceless dictatorship.
They sought to eradicate dissent surrounding the policies that they imposed. CISA had been responsible for dividing the workforce into categories of “essential” and “nonessential” in March 2020. Hours later, the order became the basis for the country’s first “stay-at-home” order, a process that quickly spiraled into a previously unimaginable assault on Americans’ civil liberties.
CISA betrayed the country’s founding principle. A group of unelected bureaucrats hijacked American society without ever having a vote cast in their names. They disregarded the First Amendment, due process, and elected government in their pursuit of power.
The Framers understood that liberty relied on the free flow of information. They were well aware of the dangers of widespread lies and an incendiary press corps, but tyranny presented a far greater risk to society. Government could not be trusted to wield power over the minds of men, so they enshrined freedom of press, worship, and speech in our Constitution.
The Security State unwound those liberties. White House officials used the power of the federal government to suppress dissent. The Biden Administration launched an interagency attack on free speech. The Covid regime’s coup d’etat continued unimpeded until Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 injunction.
Now, the Fifth Circuit has remedied its previous error by reinstating the injunction against CISA. The case may now head to the Supreme Court, where the Justices would have the opportunity to dismantle the technocratic censorship operation at the heart of the Covid response.
The war is far from won. Julian Assange remains in jail alongside terrorists for publishing news reports that undermined the Security State’s deceit surrounding the War on Terror. Edward Snowden is banished from his homeland for exposing the lies of James Clapper.
President Biden’s “misinformation” crusade shows no signs of retreat entering the 2024 election cycle. Social media is still censored. Your Google results are still gamed at the behest of powerful state actors. YouTube has proudly announced that it will censor content based on the diktats of the World Health Organization. Say the wrong thing on LinkedIn and you are toast.
Among the large players, only X, formerly known as Twitter, is eschewing routine takedowns of speech deemed oppositional to regime priorities. That is truly only because one man had the means to buy and the drive to liberate it from the Censorship Industrial Complex, for now.
Tuesday’s decision reaffirmed what the Supreme Court called the “bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment” in 1989: “that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
Rebuilding from the wreckage of Covid will require reclaiming those fundamental pillars of American society. The freedom to speak was not the first right earned by a people in revolt against ancient-world forms of statism but it might be the most essential. That’s why it is instantiated in the very first amendment to the Bill of Rights.
If the regime can control the public mind, they can control everything else too. A loss here is a loss everywhere.
Fifth Circuit Expands Injunction Against Government Online Censorship To Include CISA
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | October 4, 2023
A ruling on Tuesday by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit marks a leap for the safeguarding of free speech within the social media arena. This decision sees the addition of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to a preliminary injunction in the ongoing legal contest of Missouri v. Biden.
Initially, a host of prominent agencies, including the White House, US Surgeon General’s office, CDC, and the FBI were barred from manipulating social media platforms in a manner that obstructs constitutional freedoms of speech.
The fight against censorship is far from novel, with the tale of Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty, and Ms. Jill Hines circulating in the public domain for several years. Their experiences of being censored and throttled on social media platforms form an integral part of a broader governmental agenda to curb free speech for independent thinkers and intellectuals.
This latest ruling by the Fifth Circuit punctuates a series of preceding actions, including its September 8 ruling upholding an earlier order by District Judge Terry Doughty. Doughty’s order on Independence Day caused shockwaves by banning government officials from using their offices to manipulate social media companies into surrendering the First Amendment rights of citizens.
This persistent governmental interference has been described by Judge Doughty as perhaps “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” Indeed, it beautifully mirrors a dystopian reality, where a government body, akin to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth, suppresses intellectual discourse and emulation.
The suppression campaign under the Biden administration is far from prejudiced; it has methodically targeted any view conflicting with government narratives. Subjects like natural immunity to Covid-19, vaccine efficacy, origins of the virus, and the effectiveness of mask mandates have become taboo, leading to a wilful silence of experts and common citizens alike.
Such tactics have seen CISA act as a bridge between third parties, flagging potentially problematic content. Having regular interactions with social media platform representatives, they have exploited their authoritative position by pushing them to adopt practices aligned with their censorship agenda.
This has led the Fifth Circuit Court to reassess their previous position. Contrary to their September ruling which stated that communication between CISA and social media companies was constitutional, they now acknowledge that CISA had crossed the line of mere information sharing and actively influenced content moderation policies, leading to the demotion and removal of posts.
While the court order stands, a 10-day stay allows the government to seek permission for a review of the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Group Behind ‘Disinformation Dozen’ Has Ties to Hollywood, Corporate Dems
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 3, 2023
The latest series of revelations by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker concerning the organization responsible for creating the list of the “Disinformation Dozen” confirm connections to more dark money sources and to key political and Hollywood figures.
In an article published Monday in Tablet Magazine and on his Substack, Thacker also revealed the organization — a nonprofit called Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — received anonymous donations of upwards of $1 million and hired a lobbying firm.
Prior to coming up with its “Disinformation Dozen” list, Thacker said, CCDH was part of a campaign to silence independent media and prominent political opponents.
CCDH has since turned its attention to attacking X (formerly Twitter) and its owner, Elon Musk, and supporting the recent passage of a sweeping new censorship bill in the U.K.
According to Thacker, the influence of CCDH and its founder and CEO, Imran Ahmed, on the Biden administration, policymaking circles and mainstream and social media is disproportionately large for a small organization founded and managed by a non-American — raising questions about who, or which entities, are backing CCDH.
Those questions led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to subpoena CCDH in late August. Jordan gave CCDH until Sept. 29 “to produce its communications with the executive branch related to content moderation, the accuracy or truth of content, and the deletion or suppression of content.”
CCDH responded to the subpoena on Sept. 29, claiming it “produced all documents and communications” which were requested. Notably, the letter came on the letterhead of a law firm representing CCDH, instead of from the organization directly, while the publicly viewable online version of the letter does not include the accompanying documents.
‘Disinformation Dozen’ list led to censorship of Kennedy, others
In March 2021, CCDH drafted a report and accompanying list of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” which included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman on leave of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), Dr. Joseph Mercola, and Ty and Charlene Bollinger, founders of The Truth About Vaccines and The Truth About Cancer websites.
The report claimed, “Just twelve anti-vaxxers are responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media platforms,” and concluded social media “platforms must act” against these individuals.
The White House and social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook used the report to censor the individuals on the list.
In one example, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki cited the CCDH report during a July 2021 press briefing to pressure Facebook into censoring the accounts in question. “There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms,” Psaki claimed.
Legacy media outlets such as NPR, The Guardian and others also cited the report, in an attempt to discredit the people on the list.
Thacker, writing for Tablet, said Twitter specifically took action against Kennedy after it received the “Disinformation Dozen” list — and was subjected to White House pressure:
‘“COVID-19 misinfo enforcement team is planning on taking action on a handful of accounts surfaced by the CCDH report,’ a Twitter official wrote on March 31. One account they eventually took action against belonged to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now running against Joe Biden for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.”
CCDH provides White House with ‘powerful weapon to use against critics’
“What, then, do we know about the CCDH?” Thacker wrote Monday in Tablet. “In effect, it seems, the organization provides the White House with a powerful weapon to use against critics including RFK Jr. and Musk, while also pressuring platforms like Facebook and Twitter to enforce the administration’s policies.”
“While few journalists have bothered to investigate the opaque group, the available evidence paints a picture that is likely different from what many in the public would expect of a ‘public interest’ nonprofit,” Thacker added.
As part of his July investigation leading to the release of the CCDH-related “Twitter Files,” Thacker was unable to discover who funds and supports the organization. He told The Defender in July that he believed CCDH was a “dark money” group.
Kennedy, testifying at a July 20 hearing organized by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, also called CCDH a “dark money” group.
A subsequent investigation by GreenMedInfo’s Sayer Ji was able to trace some of the organizations that financially support CCDH, including several U.K.-based nonprofits affiliated with legacy media organizations, the U.K. government and major philanthropic organizations such as the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation.
Yet, unanswered questions about CCDH and Ahmed remained for Thacker, who wrote on Substack:
“How did some guy from London with no D.C. political experience get noticed by the White House and attract so much media attention? Where does he come from? What’s his background? Where does he get his money? Who is behind this?”
As part of his latest investigation, Thacker wrote that he “lucked into finding a critical, anonymous donor who dropped $1.1 million into CCDH’s coffers.”
A search of the 2021 tax filings of the Schwab Charitable Fund — a donor-advised fund that allows anyone to donate anonymously — revealed a $1.1 million donation to CCDH.
This represented “around 75% of all the funds they took in that year,” Thacker wrote on Substack.
Writing for Tablet, Thacker added, “According to tax records, Ahmed began to run CCDH from D.C. in 2021, and CCDH took in $1.47 million in their very first year operating in the United States.”
‘CCDH functions as an arm of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party’
This was not the only interesting insight into CCDH’s operations. Thacker also discovered CCDH’s chairman is Simon Clark, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP).
According to Thacker, CAP is a “D.C. think tank aligned with the corporate arm of the Democratic Party.” It was founded by John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Donald Trump. And yes, CAP has close ties to the Biden administration,” Thacker wrote.
Clark was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, Thacker wrote in Tablet. In a previous “Twitter Files” release, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi reported that the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab was funded by various U.S. government agencies and defense contractors and “remains a central piece in the ‘censorship-industrial complex.’”
Thacker quoted Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department official who runs the Foundation for Freedom Online, a free-speech watchdog. Benz told Thacker the Atlantic Council is “one of the premier architects of online censorship” and has, in recent years, “had seven CIA directors on its board of directors or board of advisers.”
“One might conclude that CCDH functions as an arm of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, to be deployed against the perceived enemies of corporate Democrats, whether they come from the left or the right,” he added.
CCDH spent $50,000 to lobby Congress on COVID ‘misinformation’
Thacker also uncovered ties between CCDH, Ahmed and Hollywood.
“Go a little deeper and you find the other members of the [CCDH] board,” Thacker wrote on Substack, adding, “The one who caught my attention is Aleen Keshishian.”
Keshishian, who is also an adjunct professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, lists clients including actor Mark Ruffalo, who according to Thacker, “tweets support” for CCDH.
Her other clients include Jennifer Aniston, Selena Gomez and Natalie Portman.
“Ahmed’s connections to Hollywood actors could account for some of the money he has raised from anonymous sources, as wealthy celebrities sometimes wish to keep their political donations hidden from fans,” Thacker wrote in Tablet.
Unusual for a nonprofit, CCDH also hired a PR and lobbying firm, Lot Sixteen, to work on its behalf.
“Very few activist groups have the financial means to hire private lobby shops — even those with an established presence on Capitol Hill — but during a few quarters of 2021 and 2022, CCDH paid Lot Sixteen $50,000 to lobby congressional offices on COVID-19 misinformation and ‘preventing the spread of misinformation and hate speech online in social and mainstream media,’” Thacker wrote.
Thacker told The Defender that even large and well-established nonprofit groups such as Greenpeace and Public Citizen have not hired PR firms to work on their behalf.
“None of those groups that I’m aware of, the longest-established groups in D.C., have ever had the money to hire a private lobby shop like CCDH did. It’s just bizarre,” he said, adding that this is because CCDH is “a political campaign designed to look like a grassroots public-interest organization.”
Thacker said he contacted Lot Sixteen and “asked them how they confirmed that Imran Ahmed was compliant with FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act],” noting that “This guy’s a foreigner. No one knows where his money comes from. How do they know his money’s not coming from overseas and he’s not in violation of foreign lobbying laws?”
“They didn’t get back to me,” Thacker said. “My guess is they didn’t do due diligence.” He also told The Defender that while CCDH “lists only four or five employees” on its website, “if you go on LinkedIn, there’s about 20 other people working for him.
“What nonprofit does not list all their employees? It’s just bizarre,” Thacker said.
CCDH ‘rarely disclose funders’
According to Thacker, CCDH and associated groups have operated in secrecy and under multiple identities for several years.
“Ahmed’s history is hard to track,” he wrote for Tablet. “The two groups he has run — Stop Funding Fake News [SFFN] and CCDH — seem to pop up out of nowhere, switch addresses, rarely disclose funders, omit naming all employees, and feature websites that change names or disappear from the internet.
“While Ahmed eventually acknowledged in 2020 that he helped launch both [groups] … his involvement remained hidden for some years. Stop Funding Fake News started in February 2019 claiming to be a ‘social movement’ too frightened to name its own grassroots activists,” Thacker added.
Thacker said that by searching archived versions of CCDH’s website on the Internet Wayback Machine, he was able to find out more information about the organization.
“One of the first things I ran across was reports about CCDH incorporating in the U.K. back in 2018,” said Thacker who looked up their filings in England to find their address and who was on their board. “One of CCDH’s first directors is a guy named James Morgan McSweeney,” he wrote on Substack.
According to Thacker, McSweeney “is a power broker in UK politics, and a top staffer to Keir Starmer, who is now the head of the British Labour Party. So CCDH is not really some disinterested, public nonprofit, it’s a political campaign by British Labour.”
Writing for Tablet, Thacker said that CCDH “registered in late 2018 in London, first as Brixton Endeavours Limited” and when it incorporated, its “only director was a staffer for Keir Starmer.” The group also “shared an address with an organization that supported Starmer,” while Damian Collins, a member of the Tory Party, later joined as an officer.”
Thacker wrote on Substack that CCDH, SFFN and Ahmed have often operated as “political operative[s] for conservative members of the British Labour party,” including on behalf of Starmer, to help “destroy the Left in the United Kingdom.”
Starting in 2019, SFFN “claimed some very sizable left-wing scalps in London, mostly by lobbing vague accusations of fake news at political enemies. The group helped to run Jeremy Corbyn out of Labour Party leadership while tanking the lefty news site Canary, after starting a boycott of their advertisers,” Thacker wrote in Tablet.
In one instance, SFFN claimed that they convinced 40 major brands, including Adobe, Chelsea FC, eBay and Manchester United, to stop placing their advertisements on the websites of such news outlets, a tactic SFFN called “demonetizing.” They also claimed that they were “educating” advertising agencies.
“Essentially, SFFN and [CCDH] were front groups created by conservatives in Labour for an internecine battle against leftists in their own party. The Canary reported that CCDH’s address linked the group back to Keir Starmer’s people,” Thacker wrote on Substack. SFFN reports were also cited in the British Parliament.
Having accomplished this, SFFN “became moribund, rarely tweeting from their social media account,” Thacker wrote in Tablet, noting that this did not matter as Ahmed “pivoted his focus” to the U.S., where his list of “‘disinformation’ targets just happened to be critics of the Democratic Party establishment” — including Kennedy.
“Just as he had done for the Labour Party, Ahmed used the CCDH to attack as ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’ various critics of the Biden arm of the Democratic Party,” Thacker wrote.
Association with Democrat-affiliated groups helped CCDH’s ‘unusual’ ascent
According to Thacker, CCDH now primarily operates in the U.S., based out of a virtual office that hundreds of D.C. nonprofits list as their residence. This is despite the fact that CCDH is still based in the U.K.
The site lists CCHD as a broad nonprofit devoted to “Civil Rights, Social Action, Advocacy / Research Institutes and/or Public Policy Analysis (NTEE).” It lists Ahmed as CEO with a 2021 base salary of $126,333 and Simon Clark from the Center for American Progress, the think tank of the corporate Democrats, as chair of the board.
According to Thacker, the prominent ascent of CCDH and Ahmed in U.S. policy and media circles is unusual.
“I want to point out how odd it is that a British political operative is now running a partisan campaign in the United States. This rarely happens,” Thacker wrote on Substack. “For a variety of complex reasons, British political operatives don’t come to the United States, Americans go to England [and other countries].”
“It doesn’t happen,” Thacker told The Defender. “That was my question from the beginning. This guy is quoted from the White House podium, has all these Congressmen sending letters on his behalf, who has appeared in front of Congressional hearings run by Democrats when they had the House of Representatives.”
“Probably what it is, is Simon Clark from the Center for American Progress,” Thacker said. “That’s the think tank for the corporate Democrats. That’s probably his entryway.”
Writing for Tablet, Thacker said, “One rumor that came up often in the dozen or so conversations” he had “with people who have observed Ahmed for years, is that he works for British intelligence,” although this has not yet been confirmed.
Thacker told The Defender that Ahmed and CCDH have played “the same game” in the U.S. and U.K., except that “instead of it being directly ‘Republicans are bad, these people are good,’ they find some way that they can say, ‘aha, hate!’ So, it’s taking this idea and rebranding it for political purposes.”
Writing in Tablet, Thacker said that “Ahmed’s story is critical to understanding the new push for censorship under the guise of combating hate.”
‘Obsession’ with Kennedy, Musk, vaccines
Having become fully embroiled in U.S. politics, Thacker said that Ahmed and CCDH have developed an “obsession” with figures such as Kennedy and with issues such as COVID-19 vaccines — receiving broad media coverage in the process.
Writing for Tablet, Thacker said, “After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he was running against Biden for the Democratic nomination and appeared on Joe Rogan, Ahmed told the BBC, “He’s working really hard to keep people from knowing he’s a hardcore anti-vaxxer.”
Thacker told The Defender that “every one of these ‘disinformation experts’ out there — I don’t care if they’re a fact-checker, a think tank, a journalist, an academic, they’ve all done work on elections and on vaccines. So, they’re all election ‘experts’ and vaccine ‘experts.’ How you become an expert in both, I don’t know, but that’s what they are.”
“It’s a complete and total obsession,” Thacker added. “There’s not a single ‘disinformation’ expert out there who I’ve not seen do something on vaccines. They’re obsessed … why, out of all the things that you can target, why do you target vaccines? I can only think that there’s some kind of funding behind it, where that funding comes from, what it’s about. That’s the only reason that makes sense to me.”
Thacker also said “it’s just bizarre” that someone like Ahmed can come in and be obsessed about vaccines and not have a single tweet criticizing Pfizer or Moderna. “He’s not found any problems with the Biden administration’s vaccine policies. Not one … Ahmed appears where the corporate Democrats need expertise.”
Musk recently became a new target for CCDH and Ahmed. Writing in Tablet, Thacker said, “Ahmed is now trying to drive away Elon Musk’s advertisers on X, this time based on dubious claims that the … site is a playground for racists,” including claims made in interviews with The New York Times, the Financial Times and The Guardian.
“Once again, these efforts have been uncritically amplified in the press and in a letter to Musk from House Democrats that reiterates Ahmed’s claims, and cites him and CCDH,” Thacker wrote in Tablet.
These attacks led Musk and X to sue CCDH and Ahmed in July, accusing them of making false and misleading claims about hate speech on the platform, and illegally accessing the computers of Brandwatch, a company that works with Twitter — a potential violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
In response, MSNBC published an Aug. 1 op-ed by Ahmed, claiming CCDH “has been at the forefront of cataloging and reporting on the hate proliferating on the platform owned by Elon Musk.”
“All of his targets just happen to be the people who the corporate Democrats don’t get along with, so that’s Elon Musk right now,” Thacker told The Defender, noting that Ahmed and CCDH have not targeted other social media platforms to the same extent.
Yet, Ahmed continues to enjoy a platform in the establishment media. Thacker told The Defender this is “because none of those reporters have bothered to look into his background in the U.K. or to look at where his money’s coming from, or to look at what’s inside the [Musk/X] lawsuit against him. It plays into their weird obsession with Musk.”
In parallel, CCDH board member Damian Collins “led a series of inquiries” in the British parliament “into ‘disinformation’ and ‘fake news’ on social media,” helping promote the “Online Safety Bill,” intended to purge online “disinformation,” Thacker wrote in Tablet.
“When Collins held hearings on the bill — which was passed into law just weeks ago — the first person to give testimony in support of online bans was Imran Ahmed,” Thacker added.
On Substack, Thacker previewed more reports about CCDH and Ahmed he will soon release, including regarding ties “to Peter Hotez, an American physician, an ardent proponent of Anthony Fauci and cheerleader in the national media for vaccines and Biden administration pandemic policies.”
“I hope this helps people understand how to do their own digging into dark money groups,” Thacker wrote on Substack.
In Tablet, he wrote that Ahmed has “been a servant to the power of political parties who deployed him and the CCDH to weaponize the charge of hate speech and misinformation against their enemies.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

