LEE CAMP - THE MOST CENSORED COMEDIAN IN AMERICA
Comedian and commentator Lee Camp joins James Kennedy to discuss the mass censorship of his anti-war TV show, the geopolitical dynamics and propaganda surrounding the war in Ukraine, and the dangers of media echo chambers.
James Kennedy: I am so glad to have with me today, the one and only, the awesome, the talented, the funny, the clever, and the dangerous, with great hair, Mr. Lee Camp. How the hell are you, brother?
Lee Camp: Great. Thanks for that intro.
James Kennedy: Not at all, man. I mean, how are you, though, dude? Because you are going through some, shall we say, some interesting times right now. What's going on?
Lee Camp: Yeah, it's weird. I guess, when I really think about it, I never thought that my show, Redacted Tonight—the first eight minutes I was doing it, I was like, this is amazing. We can do this on television. And sure enough, we can't. Sure enough, it did take eight years and 375 episodes. But sure enough, they shut it down, deleted all the videos from YouTube because anti-war, anti-imperialist voices are anathema to the—well, they're okay if you're—
James Kennedy: Criticizing the other side. You know what I mean? You can say what the hell you like then. But as soon as you start dropping some truth bombs on what's going on in your own fucking side of the fence, then the propaganda machine is going to stomp on you pretty damn quick.
Lee Camp: Yeah, I think in times of war, the U.S. government, combined with corporations—although they're really one and the same at this point in the U.S.—they do shut down those opposing viewpoints. And it's funny to say in times of war, because, of course, the U.S. has been at war over the past 20 years endlessly. But when I say times of war, I mean the times when the U.S. propaganda machine is really ramping up to create something large. Most people—and we can get into this more—most people right now go, "Yeah, but the U.S. is trying to stop a war right now in Ukraine." But that's not actually the truth. If you actually look at what's going on, the U.S. is using people's empathy to actually continue this as long as possible. Now, that doesn't mean Russia is not the perpetrator. I've come out against Putin's invasion and all the bombing. I've come out against it multiple times. But the U.S., as we know, one of the two big players in this proxy war, wants to make sure this goes on as long as possible because it is a great propaganda win for the United States and it justifies massive sanctions. And really what we're seeing is the manufacturing of consent for a new Cold War on levels of which we had not seen before now.
James Kennedy: We are entering into some dangerous times, man. I mean, when something like this happens to somebody like yourself, I think it really signals a move in a different direction, because during the pandemic, they shut down people like Alex Jones and David Icke, the conspiracy theorist guys. And I actually don't have any sympathy with those guys. I actually defended them online because free speech is an absolute as far as I'm concerned. But at the same time, I kind of got it as well. There were very difficult times; we were going through a global pandemic. People were scared, and these guys were putting all this crazy pseudoscience up. I didn't support the decision to censor them and take them down, but I kind of understood the broader health need to do that. I think that these platforms like YouTube and Facebook are actually private companies, although we can access them for free. They're not ours, and I think we recognized for the first time that they can actually take down whatever the hell they want. But when they come after someone like yourself, I think that's a totally different thing, because you're not some kind of fringe guy ranting about shape-shifting lizard aliens or anything like that. I mean, you're on a very mainstream network on a credible show that is proper journalism. And you've been critical of power in all of its forms. So to have not just you or your show or your voice, but the entire network taken down, as well as your podcast and all of your co-hosts—everyone else who has got their own shows there as well—to have the whole network taken down, we are entering into some dangerous, dangerous times. And where does this end?
Lee Camp: When Alex Jones was deleted, Alex Jones was kind of the test balloon for whether big tech could just delete people from most of the internet. I actually did come out against that, even though I despise Alex Jones and I think he's a fucking moron. What's great about Alex Jones is he is a literal snake oil salesman—he sells snake oil pills or whatever—he is not just the analogy, he is the literal snake oil salesman. So, I hate him, but at the time that his platforms were deleted, I said this won't stop with Alex Jones. This is not about Alex Jones. This is used against certain right-wingers, but it largely is designed almost more so to stop the anti-war left, the anti-imperialism left. Those are the ones that are truly dangerous—those criticizing capitalism in a big, substantial way. And that is what we're seeing now.
We saw it beginning years ago; there was heavy suppression. My Facebook's been shadow-banned for the past four or five years. It used to be a very big page with 330,000 subscribers, but starting in 2016, I basically couldn't gain any new subscribers and my posts were shown to something like 0.1% of my followers. So this has been going on for a while. But the full-scale shutting down of RT America and other great anti-war voices like Jesse Ventura and Chris Hedges, and then the deletion of our back catalog of episodes—eight years, 375 episodes I put out—and then on top of that, one of my podcasts, Moment of Clarity, got deleted from Spotify at the same time. So this is really mass censorship on an incredible level.
James Kennedy: It's fucking so scary, man. Just before we came on, we had a quick chat; my heart breaks for you as a content creator, because I know just how much passion and thousands of hours, research, and energy went into creating all of that content over the years. That's your legacy, and there's a lot of fucking truth bombs and information in there. That's a fucking snapshot of time, and to have all of that taken down, my heart breaks, man. It happened to me on a very small scale—I'm making no equivalence here at all in our stories—but I released an album during the pandemic called Make Anger Great Again, which is like a hard rock political protest album. At the time it was all about Brexit, Trump, Boris Johnson, all that sort of shit. It came out about a month before the Trump election, and the first song was called "The Power". We just had me dancing around with a bunch of protest footage, and the whole song was just inciting people to take to the streets, rise up, and do something about all this shit. YouTube took it down after one day; they said the content was shocking. We were so careful not to put anything that mildly looked like it was inciting violence, because it wasn't; that's not what I'm about. It was just protest footage, most of which came from YouTube, and they took it down. As you were saying about being shadow-banned, I've had the same problem. Every time I hashtagged "MakeAngerGreatAgain", it just wouldn't get seen by anybody. Facebook wouldn't let me advertise or boost the album; I couldn't do any sponsored posts. My whole platform just became fucking redundant, really. If they can do that to just a guy writing a fucking song, somebody like yourself has way more clout and reach. I get that you could be seen as more of a threat to them, but when you're deleting fucking songs, come on.
Lee Camp: Yeah, and part of this is just algorithms, which they know are suffocating, but they seem fine with it. You create an algorithm that gives you a negative strike for, let's say, having the word "terrorism" or "Nazi" in the title. Sure, it might take down the guy who says we need to start doing terrorism all over the world, but it's also going to take down anybody who's criticizing America for funding terrorists, or criticizing literal Nazis for violence or killing. I have a podcast called Government Secrets where we go through all of America's dirty secrets. Because we were talking about the Nazis in Ukraine, the TikTok stream shut off and they forbade us from live streaming. I don't think it's because it was us; I think the auto-bot reads the transcript, saw we were saying the word "Nazi" several times, and deleted the stream. Now that's nice that Nazis can't say, "Hey, everybody join the Nazis," but what that also does is it means you can't speak about the crimes of Nazis anymore. How fucked up is that?
James Kennedy: Yeah, that's a—I mean, you'd think they'd be advanced beyond that point by now, just to frame things in a context.
Lee Camp: Context is dead. Part of the reason my videos on RT America got deleted was just because we gave context for the war in Ukraine and Russia's invasion. If anyone ever watched RT America, we had very different voices; there were right-wing shows on there that I didn't agree with a goddamn word they said. So people thinking we had one viewpoint are incredibly mistaken. But part of the reason we got shut down was we were just giving context. That doesn't mean that I'm for it; I've already said on this platform and many others that I'm opposed to the invasion, the bombing, the war, and the killing of innocent civilians. But that doesn't mean you can't know the context. I'm opposed to how our CIA murdered John F. Kennedy, but that doesn't mean I can't sit down and give you the reasons why they did it. John Kennedy talked about crushing the CIA, fired the head of the CIA, and was cutting their funding. That doesn't mean I support the murder of JFK.
We live in such a sad, suppressive time that just giving context is more than the American empire—which is a late-stage empire with late-stage capitalism—can handle. They are afraid that if people learn the context of our reality, they will stop supporting this egregious exploitation. And it is exploitation, because the people who suffer in our Cold War, our proxy wars, and our endless toxic nationalism are average people in each of these countries. It's not the ruling elite that really suffer. In sanctions on Russia, who's going to really suffer? The average people, the average workers—people we should align with, you and me and anyone else who's not the lizard people at the top (just kidding). Anyone else should align with each other, but of course that can't happen. Instead, you need to believe in this toxic nationalism: anyone born on the other side of a line in the sand is a bad guy. It's just egregious.
James Kennedy: It seems to be this culture which has been creeping for a few years. There's goodies and baddies, right and wrong, us and them, and there's fucking nothing in the middle anymore. As you said, context is dead. There's no room for nuance, no gray areas, no complexity. If you give context on what's happening in Ukraine and you're critical of America's involvement, suddenly you're pro-Russia or pro-Putin. It's fucking ridiculous, man.
Lee Camp: Absolutely. That is what they also used even before RT America was shut down. It was useful to America, the UK, and many other countries to make people think that anything mildly connected to Russia was evil, dastardly, or nefarious—that Russian salad dressing was spying on you. That succeeded in harming our ability to reach an audience. In case anyone hasn't really been following this, RT America was funded by the Russian government, but I was never told to say anything and I was never censored. I wrote and researched all my own words. No one ever censored a word I said, and that's why I was on that network. It was literally the only television network in the United States where you could be anti-war, anti-imperialist, and not be censored. That is also why it was dangerous.
Until they started suppressing it, it quickly became the number one international news channel in America because it was willing to allow these voices that had been purged from other networks. Chris Hedges was a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for The New York Times, and when he came out against the Iraq War, they basically booted him out. Jesse Ventura, even though he's a former governor in Minnesota, was kicked out of MSNBC even though he was going to be the face of the network. They paid him upwards of $10 million just to get out of his contract because he was anti-invasion of Iraq, and they could not have that anywhere near their airwaves—and that's supposedly the liberal network in the United States. Those are the type of people that ended up at RT America: people that wanted freedom of speech. That's what made it dangerous, and that's why it's now been shut down.
James Kennedy: We've got a state-sponsored TV broadcaster in the UK, the BBC. The only shit you get on there is the stuff that conforms to the mainstream narrative; there's nothing outside the establishment viewpoint. Back in the '60s and '70s it was apparently way better, and then it took a nose dive in the '80s like everything did, but ever since then it's basically been an establishment mouthpiece. Am I right in guessing RT functions very similarly within Russia, and the reason it provided a platform for dissenting voices in other countries is because those voices weren't critiquing Russia as a priority, but rather their own governments?
Lee Camp: In a sense, yes. It was not my priority. I've stood for the same things before and after I joined RT, so they knew what they were getting. If you're an American in America covering American news—and actually, I'm an American comedian—America was what I wanted to focus on because it's who I am. I was born in America, so I understood it and wanted to talk about it. Beyond that, America, let's be honest, is far more powerful than Russia. America owns the globe in many respects in terms of both wealth (although China is starting to compete) and military might. It's the most powerful military in the world, spending a trillion dollars a year—an unfathomable amount of money—on military, death, and destruction, with 800 to 900 military bases around the world. You know how many Russia has outside of Russia? Something like 18, and almost all of them are in former Soviet bloc countries. China has one outside of China. Compare that to 800 or 900 around the world. So there's a reason to critique America, because America is the imperialist entity. Russia doesn't light a candle to compare to the American empire. I do think that's why RT America was willing to pick up certain voices, but if they're willing to give me a platform where I'm not censored at all, then—
James Kennedy: I'll take it. Fucking right, yeah! Hell yeah. The fact that that's now gone—what's the situation with that? Is it just in America and Europe, and how does that affect your personal podcast? Because that was separate, wasn't it? Was it a decision made by Spotify, or because you were connected to RT?
Lee Camp: Spotify gave me no reason. My podcast Moment of Clarity has been going for years, since before I started Redacted Tonight. I assume they deleted it because I used some of the audio from Redacted Tonight—my own words, basically. But it has no connection, funding, or anything to RT America other than me using a little of that audio. So I guess a bot found RT America audio and just deleted it. It's still egregious.
In terms of where RT America stands now, as far as I know, it's completely shuttered and done. I had been there eight years, but it had been going for close to 15 or more. There were a couple of articles about it shutting down that seemed to just say it lost some of its platforms and shut down, but to me that's a load of shit, because America doesn't want to admit that they just shut down a foreign press outlet. They didn't tell us anything, but how quickly and fully it happened leads me to believe it was absolutely U.S. sanctions in one degree or another. RT America likely had enough funding to go for months, if not a year, and plenty of staff. Yet there were no mumblings of "we might be back in two weeks" or "a month"—it was over and done in the span of a day. It had to be U.S. sanctions.
James Kennedy: Wow. Well, the timing is very convenient, isn't it? In a hot war you would expect to see this kind of shit, but in a far-away proxy war, this seems like a very extreme move to completely close down an entire network and all of people's content from previous work. That's a massive move, man.
Lee Camp: Yeah, and it shows the connection between these corporations, big tech, and the American government. YouTube is owned by Google, so let's be honest, it's Google. If Google were actually free of the American government—which we know it's not—it wouldn't have much benefit in shutting out whole viewpoints. But because the American government and Congress could break up Google or Facebook, they are bending over backwards to try and make the government happy. When the government says it's time to shut down these platforms, they do it with gusto.
To have eight years of videos—over 500 episodes if you count my interview show, and thousands of clips—banned worldwide is unbelievable. I've heard people trying to use VPNs to get around it through various other countries, and they say it's basically banned everywhere. Literally, you go to the Redacted Tonight YouTube page and it just says "banned in your country," which is beyond Orwellian. Why is it that your country can't learn these things?
James Kennedy: Fucking hell. I want to get into all this stuff and the content you'd be talking about on your show. We'll see how long we last before they take mine down. I'll be banned by association! Seriously though, for the three douchebags who don't know who you are, how would you describe yourself? Would you say satirist, political commentator, journalist? I know you've had the show with RT for eight years, but you've been doing this a lot longer, haven't you?
Lee Camp: I've been a full-time stand-up comic and commentator for 22 years or so. I was a touring stand-up comedian and doing YouTube videos before I got the RT America show.
James Kennedy: And I'm guessing that took up a lot of your time as well. To have that suddenly snatched away from you overnight after devoting the last eight years of your life—it's not just the screen time, it's the research, recording, editing, and all that. What are you doing to stay afloat and with your time now?
Lee Camp: I've been doing roughly nine billion interviews, trying to get the word out about this censorship, but I'm also trying to build up patreon.com/leecamp. I'm hoping if I can get enough small-dollar members over there, I could create something that at least has the feel and sensibility of Redacted Tonight and bring that back. People can check out Patreon, but I have a lot of other things I was doing outside of Redacted Tonight that I will keep doing: working on another book, continuing my Moment of Clarity YouTube videos, and I have three podcasts—Government Secrets, Common Censored, and Moment of Clarity. So all of that continues.
James Kennedy: Brilliant, glad to hear it! Your Patreon link is patreon.com/leecamp, right? Awesome. Everyone get over there right away and show the brother some fucking love.
I want to grill you on a few things because I've been looking forward to picking your brain for the past week. I know you've got a gazillion of these lined up and you're probably sick and tired of answering the same questions, but I want to jump straight into the deep end. What is your take on what is happening in Ukraine right now?
Lee Camp: People have to understand that in most conflicts, especially geopolitical conflicts, there are multiple levels of reality. It doesn't make any level false; it just means that you should look at what's going on deeper.
The surface level is Putin invaded Ukraine and Russia is bombing. The propaganda would have you believe they're just indiscriminately bombing hospitals, but the reality is probably that Russia is going after Ukrainian troops and military. Either way, the surface level is Russia is bombing Ukraine. What does Russia want? They want Ukraine to say they're neutral on NATO, and they want the Donbas region to be independent. Many people in the Donbas region consider themselves Russian, not Ukrainian, and there's been an ongoing war for eight years in that region with neo-Nazi troops—some with swastikas on their helmets—killing, murdering, and maiming people who are native Russian or consider themselves culturally Russian. 15,000 have died over those eight years. The U.S. and CIA have been funding and arming some of these Nazi battalions, like the Azov Battalion. You can read some of this at Yahoo News; this is not hidden truth. PBS, the partially U.S. government-funded outlet, did a fawning interview with a mayor in a city in Ukraine about how tough things are, and they blurred out the framed painting behind him of a famed Nazi collaborator. That shows you how bad this is.
So that's the surface level: Russia does not want NATO expansion, they want that region independent, and they want their ownership of Crimea acknowledged.
Now you get to a deeper level: Russia has been surrounded by NATO, a military alliance. NATO sounds nice and fluffy to a lot of people that only watch BBC and CNN, but NATO is a military alliance. They have been behind gut-wrenching wars and bombings, like destroying all of Libya and turning it into warring warlords and open slave markets. Don't kid yourself that NATO is friendly, happy, and unicorns; NATO is brutal, warmongering, and a military alliance. NATO has expanded over the years closer and closer to Russia. It now involves 30 nations, 17 of which basically encircle Russia. There are discussions of bringing Ukraine into NATO or having them have some kind of agreement. To Russia, that is a national security red line. Even though I'm opposed to Putin's invasion, they say they cannot have NATO on their border or their national security will be shot, with NATO missiles pointed at them from miles outside their border.
The U.S. has helped fund this neo-Nazi empowered coup. That doesn't mean the entire Ukrainian government is neo-Nazi—the president is in fact Jewish—but the neo-Nazis are basically the powerhouse of the Ukrainian government and military right now because they're so violent and willing to kill. Many of the politicians and people have to answer to them. They have an immense amount of power even if they don't have the presidency.
In 2014, the U.S. helped create a coup in Ukraine—the Maidan coup. That doesn't mean there wasn't popular discontent against a corrupt president, but the U.S. helped do it and put in place a U.S.-favorable government. To create that coup, they empowered Nazis, giving them money, training, and arms. That government continues to this day, and during this time in the Donbas region, an ongoing war has killed 15,000 people. These Nazis grab Russian speakers and sometimes murder or severely beat them. If you talk to refugees in the Donbas region, they say they've been at war for eight years. Russia views this as completely unacceptable.
Not that you need to explain to people why they should dislike Nazis, but Russia lost 27 million people in World War II to Nazis invading their country, while the U.S. lost 500,000. Let's just say Russia is not very favorable to Nazis on their border.
The analogy that works is: imagine if the U.S. were surrounded by a Russian military alliance similar to NATO—30 countries, 17 of them encircling the United States. Then Russia created a coup in Mexico, put in a Nazi-backed, Russian-favorable government, and on the border of Mexico and Texas, these Nazis were running around killing anyone who spoke English and was American. And Russia was sending missiles to Mexico to point in the direction of the United States. How would the U.S. respond? Do you think we'd respond favorably?
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James Kennedy: I think the world would be on fire if that was the case right now.
Lee Camp: Yeah. So, again, it is not that I endorse Russia's invasion, which is seeming increasingly brutal, even though a lot of what we're hearing is propaganda and bullshit. War is never nice or polite. There are never wars or bombings that go perfectly where no one innocent dies. That's why I'm opposed to it, because I'm anti-war. But you can be anti-war and understand why Russia is behaving this way, and not just be a child and go, "Oh, it's because Putin's a maniac and he's Hitler." That is just incorrect and ill-informed.
James Kennedy: Wow, fucking hell. As you were talking, I saw similarities between the sponsorship of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and how that turned into a whole fucking mess. Am I right in thinking that America's interest in this is to have Ukraine as basically a NATO satellite right on the border of Russia, controlling the resources and infrastructure in America's interest and the interest of the empire—not the interest of Ukrainians? Is that the extent of their interest here, or is there more? Is this just a standard imperialist move where they want as much landmass under their control as possible?
Lee Camp: You're right in that, but it is larger in that the U.S. is a waning empire, economically waning while China is on the rise with far more people and industrial base. The U.S. is a late-stage capitalist society that has exploited the vast majority of our resources. To keep our dominance over the world, it's almost purely military-based. So we use or fund others to use militaries to try to undermine the Russia-China alliance. Keeping this proxy war running and making sure it doesn't stop with a peace agreement stating Ukraine is neutral serves the purpose of allowing the U.S. to put gut-wrenching sanctions on Russia.
As I covered on Patreon, former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter said the U.S. has not really gamed this out far enough. These sanctions on Russia will hurt the Russian people, but they will have crazy ripple effects that will hurt all of Europe immensely. Gas prices in the U.S. are already going up. I'm opposed to fossil fuels, but that doesn't mean I like to see an average worker scraping by unable to feed his kids because we need a proxy war in Ukraine. The ramifications are tough to know. Because we've supported this, we've put the whole world on the brink of nuclear war. This is as close to nuclear war as you can get.
This is also so the United States can maintain global dominance. We don't care how many people die in Ukraine to maintain that dominance; they are cannon fodder. Our goal is to undermine Russia to such a degree that ideally Putin would fall and we'd put in a U.S.-backed government. That's ironic, because Putin is the result of a U.S.-backed government in the Soviet Union—we considered Yeltsin "our guy". There were magazine covers saying "Our Guy in Russia". We put Yeltsin in, Russia became capitalist, and we figured they were on our side. For a while there was a bit of a bromance, but Putin ultimately comes to power, and despite being a strong capitalist who hates communism, Putin does not want to be a subservient feudal state of the United States.
James Kennedy: Oh, my God. It makes your fucking head boggle, doesn't it, man? What can we do about this? The sad fact is that whilst we're talking, people are being bombed, killed, losing their lives, and whole cities are being destroyed. Within Russia, people are being imprisoned for years for protesting against this. The sad fact of the matter is that this only ever really affects the ordinary working people on the ground going about their daily lives. Power isn't affected by this, the oligarchs aren't affected, and even the likes of ourselves who are privileged enough to have these conversations aren't affected by it. It's fucking real for millions of people in the most brutal way possible, so it's urgent and needs to be stopped. What can we actually do about it?
Lee Camp: One thing is to not fall for the propaganda. People need to be demanding that Ukraine and Russia sit down at a peace table and hammer it out, and don't walk out of the room until it's done. Then the murdering at least will be over. But the U.S. doesn't want that, and Zelensky and Ukraine are basically answering to America. People should demand endless peace talks until this is over.
Instead, you have people demanding more sanctions on Russia, which is economic war—and economic war kills people too, often resulting in hot war. Economic war is not friendly, like a no-fly zone sounds. People should not be demanding more sanctions, a no-fly zone, or that missiles and guns be sent to Ukraine. They should not be demanding that guns be put in the hands of grandmas in the streets of Ukraine, because all that does is get more Ukrainians killed.
There are policy papers from the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense from several years ago saying we should keep funding and arming Ukraine even though they have no hope of defeating Russia in a hot war. The U.S. knows it's hopeless for Ukraine to defeat Russia, so the longer it goes, it's just more people dead. The idea that sending guns to Ukrainians because you care and changed your Facebook thumbnail colors to blue and yellow is going to make things better—no, it won't. It'll just be a lot more death and keep everyone at the foot of nuclear war. What people need to be demanding is just peace talks.
James Kennedy: And what's your take on Zelensky?
Lee Camp: I can't claim to know all that much about him. He was a comedian who starred in a popular Ukrainian comedy series where he played the Ukrainian president, and then he won an actual election by a landslide. The comedian becomes the president—I'm a fan of that idea; the United States should put me in as president! But I have heard—and I haven't verified this, but Scott Ritter and others have said—that he's funded by a Ukrainian billionaire. There's not much difference between Zelensky and your standard U.S.-favorable Ukrainian president. All this propaganda of him being a bold warrior trying to defend his people seems to be largely bullshit to me, because if he wanted Ukrainians to live and have peace, he wouldn't be running in the streets with guns. That's not the answer. Hilariously, many photos circulating of him in military garb on the front lines were actually from two years earlier during a training exercise.
James Kennedy: The propaganda on all sides is at an all-time fever pitch right now. It's impossible for people to decipher what's bullshit and what's real, especially when they're pressing all the emotional hot buttons. It's really over the top at the moment.
Lee Camp: My favorite propaganda piece that's been flying around with thousands of retweets is a short video of a blonde, white-looking little girl screaming at a soldier to get out of her homeland. People are passing it around saying a little Ukrainian girl is telling Russia to get out of her country. It's actually a video of Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian girl telling the IDF to get out of her home.
James Kennedy: People have been sending me loads of shit like that on WhatsApp. Like, "Look at this, they had a fistfight with a tank and won!" Who sent you that, man? "One of the boys sent it to me on WhatsApp." Oh, so it must be fucking true then!
Lee Camp: Yeah, you're like, "That's a clip from the Brad Pitt movie Fury."
James Kennedy: It's so true. Where can people go to get some clarity and sense in these mad times? Even the left-leaning, usually critical papers have gone straight into war propaganda mode. What sources can you recommend? Where do you go?
Lee Camp: I could give a long list of great outlets, but I created a website along with Eleanor Goldfield intended to feature accurate, independent journalists on the web all in one place: radindiemedia.com (rad as in radical). It's a small site, not a money-maker—no ads or sponsors—and it links you directly through to a lot of great outlets struggling due to suppression.
The idea was twofold: first, to create a great left-wing digital independent newspaper that people could check every morning for news that isn't corporate garbage. Second, if any of these journalists or outlets get deleted from their platforms, people still have a place to find all their content without running around. When we created it, I wasn't thinking it would be me that got deleted, but here we are. Literally redacted.
James Kennedy: Yeah, an appropriate end for Redacted Tonight! I know the irony of that. When you said maybe you should be the next president of America, I thought, well, we've actually got a comedian in power in our country at the moment. I don't know if you've seen him—a guy called Boris Johnson. He's fucking hilarious, like a clown character.
Lee Camp: Oh, he's brilliant. I was living in England when he had just become Mayor of London, and everyone was like, "Oh my god, this is atrocious, can you believe this idiot is Mayor of London?" And here we are.
James Kennedy: These are the times we're living in, man. For a while we had the comedy duo: you had Trump over on your side, we had Boris over here. It sums up the times, and if you thought it couldn't get any worse, here we are.
Lee Camp: It's the best comedy duo since Thatcher.
James Kennedy: Except literal fucking comedians like these guys don't even have to try and pretend they're not lying. They don't give a shit; the brakes are off now.
Lee Camp: Yeah, and I was one of those people trying to get everyone to understand that yes, Trump is atrocious, fucking garbage, but Biden is no better. Biden helped create the prison industrial complex that is now the largest in the world and phenomenally racist. He supported all the wars we've been in and helped create the Patriot Act that gutted everyone's rights across the United States. I was saying this isn't any better, it's equal garbage. And here we are under Biden actually seeing, in many ways, more war and more death.
James Kennedy: The Democrats do love a good war, though, don't they?
Lee Camp: Endless war now. Endless war.
James Kennedy: How the fuck did we get here? For that reason, the work that you and others are doing is vital and urgent. We can't let this attempt at censorship stop this information from coming out. It's important that we don't get caught up in the spin and that we work as one movement to effect change, because we are heading off a cliff if we don't.
You can start by following Lee on patreon.com/leecamp and checking out radindiemedia.com. Start searing through the bullshit, get involved, and we've got to get our hand back on the steering wheel because we are losing it.
Thank you, Lee. You are truly a light in a time of darkness and we appreciate you. I know this is going to be short-lived and you'll be back louder, brighter, and stronger than ever before.
Lee Camp: Yeah, I really appreciate that. I love your work, so I'm going to keep at it. Keep at it.
James Kennedy: Thanks so much for your time. Before you go, quickly: what's it going to take to get you to kiss and make up with Alex Jones?
Lee Camp: Luckily, I've never actually met him. I've met many of these other guys—I've been on Joe Rogan's podcast and things like that—but I've never met Alex Jones and hope I don't have to. I think the smell alone probably peels the paint off the walls.
James Kennedy: I have met him, and I can concur that you're right about the smell. Apart from a quick "Hey, how you doing," he basically spent the rest of the conversation barking up at his selfie stick for the entire weekend from what I could gather.
I was a full-on conspiracy theorist for about eight years and basically lost a decade of my life to this shit. Luckily I came out the other side, but I got quite deep into it. I was supposed to be performing at a Bilderberg meeting protest in London. David Icke was giving a speech and Alex Jones was going to talk. They decided music wasn't going to be allowed on the day because of the volume, which I took as confirmation that they were trying to shut us down, man! Because I was performing, I was in the press area, so I got to meet all these guys. That whole world is as fucking mental as you think it is.
Lee Camp: My favorite David Icke moment: before Jesse Ventura had an RT show, he had another show where he would interview people. He sits down with David Icke and says, "Look man, I'm willing to suspend disbelief and believe you, but show me the proof of the lizard people. Show me the photo or video." He kept asking until David Icke took off his mic and walked out.
James Kennedy: It's fucking mad. I was big into David Icke for a long time. Even when I was a full conspiracy theorist, I never really resonated with Alex Jones because he was a shouting-at-the-screen sensationalist, whereas Icke was more like a friendly uncle—a lot more calm and articulate. I actually became good friends with his son Gareth, who is a musician as well.
Lee Camp: Those type of movements do a good job of taking people who naturally question what they're being told and taking them too far, to a place where you don't believe anything that is reality. You start off going, "We were lied to about the Iraq War; there were no WMDs," and before you know it, you're like, "Maybe the Earth is flat." At some point you have to stop, recognize reality, and not just say nothing is true.
James Kennedy: It made me very apathetic, because I was a hardcore political activist, and within a few years I was completely pacified. All sides are evil, they're all connected, and you just have to keep going deeper into the rabbit hole. Even if you think you're going to pursue a course of action, you realize they're bought out by these guys, and it's fucking endless. You end up caught in a web of bullshit that you can't prove, bombarded with high-speed, high-frequency stuff that sounds like facts, dates, and names, but you haven't got a clue how it fits together.
That's where we're at now with the mainstream media: we're getting bombarded with actual conspiracy theory-type stuff, like the fake footage of Zelensky. That's the sort of stuff David Icke would have said years ago and we would have thought he was a crackpot, but now it's actually happening.
Lee Camp: Out of curiosity, because you don't see a lot of people who succeed in coming out the other side of the lizard people / flat Earth area, what got you out?
James Kennedy: Good question. I got so immersed in it that I saw how it was built up. You have to buy the whole thing. If you slow down and analyze one element they're talking about, none of it stacks up unless you buy the whole package, and I wasn't prepared to go as far as lizard people.
Conspiracies do exist, governments lie, and there are covert operations. That's the door I went through. The deeper I went, I was willing to buy this much and that much, but then it got weird. I took a step back to form my own opinions and realized it's like a cult: you're either a fully signed-up member or an unbelieving sheep. Fuck this, man. I'm a truth seeker, and once I realized I was being led down an endless tunnel of pointlessness, I had to back out fast and regain my grasp on reality. I can see how tempting it is and how some people never get out.
Lee Camp: For years, one of Alex Jones' big focuses has been that climate change isn't real. It almost seems comfortable to believe that—like, "Thank goodness this existential threat to the entire globe is not real, so at least I don't have to worry about that."
James Kennedy: There's a lot of comfort to be gained from thinking they're all cunts, as well. It's nice to have an answer, know who the bad guy is, put a face to it, and have that figured out. There's a comfort in that in a strange way. Accepting that the world is messy, complicated, and that there aren't clear divisions between right and wrong, goodies and baddies takes a lot more work. Some people aren't comfortable with uncertainty; they prefer the certainty of "it's all shit and they're all bad guys." The true reality of the world is unfair, difficult, and complicated.
Lee Camp: Yeah. Rather than "this group owns everything so there's no chance," I think we've created a system—speaking for the United States—that makes it incredibly difficult for non-sociopaths to get any level of power. If you're not willing to step on throats and collect all the money needed to run, you're not going to get there. It's not that the Rothschilds own everything; it's that you have a system that makes it incredibly difficult to achieve anything unless you're a sociopath.
James Kennedy: I think of it like the propaganda model Noam Chomsky talked about in Manufacturing Consent, where the system is set up in such a way that you're always going to get the same thing out of it. What's coming out of our system is sociopathic.
I know you've got to go. I've managed to keep you for a whole hour, and I'm thankful for you staying this long. Everybody, please continue to check out Lee's ongoing work at patreon.com/leecamp, follow him on Twitter @leecamp, and his website is leecamp.com. Lee, it's been an absolute pleasure and an honor to speak to you today and get your insight and wisdom. I'm a big fan of what you do, and I wish you the best of luck with everything moving forward.
Lee Camp: Thanks so much, James. Keep fighting.
Key Points:
Comedian and political commentator Lee Camp had his show "Redacted Tonight" shut down after eight years and 375 episodes, with all YouTube videos deleted and his Spotify podcast removed.
Camp argues that anti-war and anti-imperialist voices are systematically censored by big tech platforms acting in coordination with the U.S. government.
The censorship extends beyond Camp to other anti-war figures like Chris Hedges, Jesse Ventura, and the entire RT America network, which was shut down in a single day.
Camp contends that the U.S. is using the war in Ukraine as a proxy conflict to weaken Russia, maintain global dominance, and justify massive sanctions that harm ordinary people.
The conflict in Ukraine has deep historical context, including NATO expansion toward Russia's borders, the 2014 U.S.-backed coup, and eight years of war in the Donbass region involving neo-Nazi battalions.
Camp opposes Russia's invasion on anti-war grounds but insists that understanding the context of the conflict is essential and does not equate to supporting Putin.
Algorithmic content moderation disproportionately suppresses legitimate journalism by flagging keywords like "Nazi" or "terrorism," silencing those who criticize rather than promote such things.
Camp is rebuilding his platform through Patreon and independent media ventures like radindiemedia.com, urging people to demand peace talks rather than more sanctions or weapons.
Summary:
Lee Camp, a comedian and political commentator, discusses the shutdown of his show "Redacted Tonight" after eight years and 375 episodes, along with the deletion of his entire YouTube back catalog and Spotify podcast.
Camp contends that platforms like YouTube and Facebook, despite being private companies, act under government pressure to suppress dissenting viewpoints.
Camp calls for people to demand peace talks rather than more sanctions or weapons, and to resist propaganda from all sides in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Host James Kennedy discusses his past involvement in conspiracy theories and how he escaped that mindset.
The interview concludes with Camp promoting his Patreon and independent media website as alternatives for uncensored journalism.
The James Kennedy Podcast is a podcast hosted by musician and author, James Kennedy. Exploring the big questions around health, social issues, politics, mental health, art, the human condition and how to navigate this thing called life through casual conversations with scientists, activists, rock stars, philosophers and academics. Please subscribe, leave a rating and support the show.
