The Censorship Empire Strikes Back

Our newsletter has been blacklisted by SPAMHAUS SBL.

Dear Subscribers,

In October 2022, Dr. Peter McCullough and I founded our Substack newsletter. At that time, we were being heavily censored on all other social media platforms, while Dr. McCullough had just endured being fired, sued, and stripped of his professorships and editorships.

Because exercising our right to free speech was so heavily punished at the time, we perceived that speaking out required mustering a fair amount of courage. And so, we initially called our Substack newsletter “Courageous Discourse.”

We were (and still are) profoundly grateful to Substack for providing us with a free speech platform. However, I noticed that none of my most popular Substack posts and video interviews were being shared in Google search results for “Author John Leake.” Posts and videos that received over 100,000 views on Substack were nowhere to be found in Google search results.

Moreover, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were also (apparently) blocking or shadow-banning links to our Substack posts and videos.

In light of this, we perceived Substack to be something akin to the old Jewish ghettos of Europe. While ghettos in cities such as Venice, Rome, Vienna, and Krakow were large and flourishing neighborhoods, they were still more or less walled off from the rest of the city. Such ghettos were also vulnerable to occasional pogroms.

With so many “dissident” writers moving to the Substack platform, I grew concerned that the entire free speech movement could be imperiled if Substack came under attack or was taken over by pro-censorship interests.

In a gambit to try to expand beyond the digital walls that had apparently been erected around Substack, we changed the title of our newsletter to “The Focal Points” and adopted the domain thefocalpoints.com.

We made this change on February 14, 2025. Though it may just be a coincidence or a result of shifting trends and interests, the total number of our paid subscribers peaked on February 14 and has been precipitously declining ever since.

Recently a tech-savvy reader informed us that thefocalpoints.com domain has been flagged as Spam by a digital organization called SPAMHAUS SBL. According to a blogger who studies online censorship:

Spamhaus SBL, or Spamhaus Block List, is a real-time database of IP addresses that have been flagged for sending or facilitating spam. Managed by the Spamhaus Project, a global organization dedicated to tracking spam and related cyber threats, the SBL is widely used by email providers and networks to filter out unwanted emails. When an IP address is listed on the SBL, it indicates that the IP has been involved in spam activities or is part of a network that allows spam to be sent.

The situation is confusing because our subscriber newsletter e-mails are still sent by:

petermcculloughmd@substack.com

However, it seems that when people try to share a link to any of our posts (which have thefocalpoints.com URL) the link to the post is sent to the email recipient’s spam folder. This is hindering our content from being shared beyond our existing e-mail subscribers.

According to an AI search:

The Spamhaus Project, which is the organization that maintains the Spamhaus Blocklist (SBL), is headquartered in Andorra la Vella, Andorra.

While the organization was founded in London, England in 1998, its primary base of operations and registered office are now in Andorra. … the commercial arm, Spamhaus Technology Ltd., is based in London, UK.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of the so-called “Haus der Gestapo” or “Gestapo Haus” in Vienna, whose monument was located a few blocks from my former apartment in the city. I used to walk past it almost every day.

Translated into English, the memorial reads:

Here stood the House of the Gestapo. It was hell for Austria's confessors. For many of them, it was the antechamber of death. It has collapsed into ruins like the Thousand-Year Reich. But Austria has risen again, and with it our dead, the immortal victims.

It seems that censorship is not a simple ravening beast, but more like the Hydra depicted in the Second Labor of Hercules—that is, a creature with multiple serpent heads. When Hercules cut off one head, two more would grow back in its place, and the central head was immortal.

To defeat the Hydra, Hercules cauterized the necks of the severed heads with a torch, thereby preventing them from regenerating.

Now we must now contend with SPAMHAUS—just as we were obliged to contest AMAZON when it suddenly banned our first book, The Courage to Face COVID-19, in the fall of 2023. After we enlisted the help of free speech advocates —an endeavor that took considerable time and effort—we persuaded Amazon to reinstated our book.

Now we must labor to persuade SPAMHAUS to remove us from its blacklist.

In the meantime, we humbly request that our subscribers who receive this e-mail do the following:

1). Mark this e-mail as “Not Spam” to prevent it from being marked as spam.

2). Enter the e-mail address petermcculloughmd@substack.com in your contacts.

I welcome tips from tech savvy readers, as I personally find all of this bewildering.

Finally, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our Focal Points newsletter. For just $5.00 per month, you can support us in our considerable effort to investigate and report what is going on in our world. In addition to our labors as investigative scholars, we must also fight the Censorship Hydra. We would be most grateful for your support!

If you are already a paid subscriber, please consider renewing your paid subscription before it expires.

Many thanks and best regards,

John Leake