Editor's note: This article was originally published on TheBlaze.com.
You probably have never heard of Imran Ahmed, but you have likely been impacted by him. A figure whose identity is nearly as obscure and shrouded as George Soros, his influence has reached the deepest caverns of our government, from the heart of the White House to state-level officials. People like Ahmed and Soros tend to dwell in the shadows so that the rest of us can only see their effects rather than the person behind the curtain.
It’s high time we brought Imran Ahmed into the light.
Ahmed is the founder of the London-based Center for Countering Digital Hate. Prior to founding the CCDH in 2017, Ahmed was an adviser to Labour Party members of British Parliament. According to an in-depth report by Paul Thacker for Tablet magazine, Ahmed is persistently suspected of working for British intelligence. It is public information, however, that the CCDH has multiple connections to the British government. Past and present board members include the strategy director in the office of former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the former British ambassador to Israel, the chief of staff for former U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, and the campaign director for the Labour Party.
The CCDH came on my radar recently after the group released a report detailing how Google is profiting from “climate misinformation” videos on YouTube. The report also mentions me — an apparent “conservative firebrand” — and BlazeTV as purveyors of climate change denial. What crime exactly have we committed?
The CCDH report sounds the alarm regarding a “new denial” about climate change. In the old days, “climate denial” meant that you straight-up didn’t believe that climate change is real. But the CCDH says old-timey denial is being replaced by a new wave of nefarious denial. What exactly constitutes this new “nefarious” denial? According to the CCDH, you fall into this category if you have ever said any of the following:
The impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless.
[That] climate solutions won’t work.
[And that] climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.
How convenient that they can broaden the definition of “climate change denial” to encompass any opinion contrary to the climate overlords’ solutions. In America, we used to call that basic policy debate.
Now you can’t even question the climate science or whether the climate movement at large can be trusted. I thought asking questions was the whole basis of science, but then again, I was in school a very long time ago, so maybe science changed.
From Westminster to the White House
This is the most recent example of the CCDH’s absurd attempt to manipulate public perception of terms to benefit the leftist agenda. Yet the underlying mission of this group is insidious. It is equating perspectives other than the approved globalist narrative with “hate,” and it is using its network of political and Big Tech elites to censor those of us who don’t conform to their Orwellian Newspeak.
In 2020, the CCDH convinced Google to ban the website Zero Hedge from its ad platform. Ahmed’s group alleged that some of the comment sections on Zero Hedge contained racist statements related to the Black Lives Matter protests. The CCDH convinced Google to issue a warning to the Federalist for alleged racism in its comment sections related to George Floyd.
In 2021, Ahmed expanded the CCDH’s influence in American politics by opening a branch in Washington, D.C., as a 501(c)3 nonprofit. The CCDH has apparently received funding through the Schwab Charitable Fund, which allows donors to remain anonymous.
If that doesn’t strike you as suspicious, according to the CCDH’s 2021 tax return, Ahmed is listed as the only full-time employee, and he’s listed as clocking 80 hours a week. Either it must require a lot of hours to track down digital hate, or something else is going on behind the curtain that they don’t want you to see.
Also listed on the tax return as the CCDH’s board chairman is Simon Clark, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The Center for American Progress was started by John Podesta, who went on to run Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. The Biden administration hired more than 60 people who were either working or had worked for the CAP to fill various White House and executive agency posts. Podesta himself is now Joe Biden’s senior adviser for clean energy. Perhaps it was through those Center for American Progress connections that Ahmed and the CCDH got plugged directly into the heart of the Biden White House.
Disinformation and defamation
The same year Ahmed opened the D.C. office of his anti-hate campaign, the CCDH released a report on what it termed the “Disinformation Dozen,” a group of 12 individuals who the organization claimed were most responsible for spreading what the org — and later, the White House — deemed “disinformation” about COVID and vaccines. Jen Psaki used the exact same numbers from the CCDH report when she was still White House press secretary in July 2021. Someone was able to get that report directly into White House hands.
In late August, U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) subpoenaed the CCDH for records related to its alleged interaction with the Biden White House. When the CCDH finally complied with the subpoena, the group admitted to having direct communication with the White House about the “Disinformation Dozen” report.
The CCDH’s reach doesn’t end at the White House. As Matt Taibbi reported in the Twitter Files, 12 state attorneys general also cited the CCDH’s “Disinformation Dozen” report in their campaign to convince Twitter to penalize accounts that spread what they deemed as COVID “disinformation.”
The CCDH is also actively courting advertisers to step away from X. Elon Musk is now in a legal battle with the CCDH in a defamation case for falsely claiming that hate speech rose on the platform after Musk bought Twitter in October 2022.
The prodigious rise of the Center for Countering Digital Hate is more than a little suspicious. As Paul Thacker put it in his report:
For a tiny, unknown, nonprofit to gain so much attention in D.C.’s crowded, competitive policy space is akin to a pudgy, amateur athlete catching the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, while setting a new world record in the marathon, all in one week.
So what’s going on? Why does it appear that the Biden White House is working with shadowy nonprofits — and in the CCDH’s case, essentially one man — to suppress and censor viewpoints that clash with its agenda? What do these foreign nationals have on our government officials to have so much influence over the approved speech of American citizens?
These questions need answers, and it’s high time we bring Imran Ahmed out from the shadows to answer them.
