 Welcome to People's Dispatch. We're so honored to be joined by Lee Kamp, the host and head writer of Redacted Tonight for eight years. He's an activist, comedian, anti-imperialist, one of the leading voices that has been speaking out about the censorship that's happened post the war beginning in Ukraine. We're so honored to have this with you today to talk some through some of these very pressing questions. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Zoe. Thanks for having me. Amazing. So, you know, you and many other journalists, you know, in the week following the war beginning in Ukraine faced some very challenging circumstances with your journalistic work. You know, the outlet you work for, RT in across Europe was banned. Of course, RT America is a different company. But, you know, there was a wave of censorship against Russian state funded projects. You ended up, you know, losing your job, your video archive. Can you talk a little bit about this experience, what happened, talk us through this, and what do you know about why it happened? Yeah, it was pretty crazy. And I really honestly feel that anyone, anyone who believes even mildly or slightly in freedom of press, freedom of speech should be furious about this. It doesn't, you don't have to agree with every word I say to feel that way. I was at RT America and made the show redacted tonight for eight years, made and hosted. And, you know, if anybody watched or actually watched any of RT America, you would have seen viewpoints that were kind of all over the map. I mean, I'm very clearly left wing Chris Hedges was there, Jesse Ventura. And then there were several right wingers that I disagreed with just about everything they said. But the one thing that, you know, I can say that it really seems to piss off people who want to say RT America was just straight up propaganda is I was never censored in any way. I was never told what to say. I was never told to say anything. I wrote all my own material. I came up with my own topics, researched all my own stuff. And many of the people that were there were there because of that, because we've been purged from corporate media. We because we are anti imperialists, many of us we are anti war. We had already been kicked out of the mainstream corporate airwaves in America because you can't be truly anti war. If you looked you could you could read a long list of rather famous people that have been kicked out of mainstream media for being anti war. Chris Hedges was a Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent for the New York Times for 10 years. And then he basically was forced out at the New York Times for coming out against the Iraq war. Jesse Ventura was going to have the main show on MSNBC going into the Iraq war, except he was anti war. So they paid him upwards of $10 million just to get out of his contract and make sure they never had to air an anti war voice on their network. They fired Phil Donahue, who was anti war in the lead up to the Iraq invasion. And you know, you can keep going down the list, but that's why many of us were were there were at RT America. It was a tremendous amount of freedom. And and I knew there would there would never be another like large scale television network where I could have that kind of freedom and not be censored. So anyway, a month ago now coming up on a month ago, we were almost told nothing like everything was running fine. Then one day they told us we're not filming today. And the next day they told us it's all over. RT America had been going for 15 years. I'd been there for eight and it ended in a day. And it clearly was somehow connected to U.S. sanctions, but I don't have the details. They didn't give us any they but there are no whispers, no no mumblings about it coming back or about our shows coming back. So but what was almost more troublesome than that is that that happened within a span of about three days of all of our past YouTube videos, thousand video clips and episodes, all being basically banned on YouTube. If you go to YouTube redacted tonight right now, you will see banned in your country and that goes for every show at RT America. Chris Hedges, Jesse Ventura, Larry King, Abby Martin's old show, Breaking the Set, all of them banned globally. And then at the same time, my my personal podcast Moment of Clarity was deleted from Spotify without any warning, any explanation. It's just gone. And several of the people that were at RT America had their Twitter's labeled state Russian state media, even though they are T America just ended. So they were no longer in any way connected to Russia. But they got their Twitter labeled afterwards, including, you know, the fairly famous newsman for MSNBC a long time, Ed Schultz, because he worked for RT America for a couple of years. He's got labeled at the same time a month ago, Russian state affiliated media, his Twitter account, even though he's been dead since 2018. Like, what level of McCarthyism is not okay? I mean, it truly is just disgusting and people should be furious. I mean, it's it's it's almost hard to believe and it happens so quickly that people kind of just saw it happen, accepted it. And now it's just de facto the reality. But really, I think all the points you're raising are so key in that it does set a really dangerous precedent, which I hope we can get into a little bit after. But I wanted to kind of circle back to the context within this censorship and this banning happened. Why do you think it was so important to censor your voice, the voice of many other journalists at this moment? Well, what we've seen over the past month is again, the manufacturing of consent for war. Now, I know that it's very similar to the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. All anti-war voices are shut down, our purge from the airwaves are ridiculed, etc. But I know that some people right now, if they don't really understand the situation would go, well, that doesn't make any sense. They're not manufacturing consent for war. In fact, they're manufacturing consent against war to stop the war in Ukraine. But the truth is that and you know, I even when this airs, there may be updates as to as to what has happened there. But still, that won't change this past month that has been the US wanting this to continue. I'm opposed to the invasion. I'm opposed to war. I'm opposed to Russian bombing. I'm opposed to all that. But that doesn't change the fact that the US government wanted this pushed for it by expanding NATO by never giving in on even the slightest security needs of Russia. And again, that doesn't justify it, but people need to understand the history here. They have manufactured consent to basically ship weapons and support neo-Nazis in Ukraine and all of these other things that are pro war. That is, it is to create endless war. The US government views this horrific war in Ukraine as a basically a win, a propaganda win, an economic win to put massive sanctions on Russia. So they would be fine with it going on for years. They would want to turn it into Russia's Vietnam or something, which means they're OK with using this as a proxy war that basically uses Ukrainian civilians as cannon fodder. And to me, that's that's repulsive. And people should find that morally just apprehensible for sure. And I mean, when you look at the way the journalists are responding in these official press conferences, you can really tell that they've kind of completely devoid of any anti-war sentiments, people who are rallying US officials and demanding that they do more, send more weapons, take harsher actions. And it's I mean, you don't see any anti-war voices. And I think that's exactly even though that puts us closer to nuclear war, the obliteration of all human existence. That seems to be fine for all of our reporters that are in that White House press corps. It's truly I mean, these are these are these are either completely ignorant human beings who have no understanding of what's going on here or they are straight up psychopaths. I mean, why would you ever want to push humankind closer to nuclear Armageddon? It's it's certainly hard to understand how one could be in those spaces and ridicule people for even questioning why actions should be escalated in that in that sense. And I think another another element of this is not only kind of the war hysteria. But, you know, going back, you said earlier that this has happened before the anti-war voices, anti-war journalists have been, you know, in a sense, canceled, have been banned, have been censored. So with this specific action of this, you know, very rapid response with, you know, coordinated effort, it seems between the EU, the UK and the US against, you know, Russian media. Is there any precedent for this? And do you think there could be further actions taken against other media projects that also have anti-war views? And, you know, what makes this so dangerous right now? Right. This started several years ago. This persecution of any journalist that are even tangentially connected or appearing on Russian state media without the acknowledgement that we have a lot of state media that we are fine with and supportive here in the United States. BBC, the British media, CBC, the Canadian media, you know, you can go down the list of all these, you know, France, the French media, Spanish. We're fine with them except for the ones that the US government has labeled are quote-unquote enemies and they lay, you know, in 2016, they had RT America sign up or whatever licensed as a foreign agent. They had to register as foreign agents, even though that act was specifically designed for lobbyists of other countries, not for media outlets and had never been used against a media outlet before. And so that was the first one they went after. Then they went after CGTN, I believe, the Chinese media. But this, of course, is an incredibly dangerous tactic that we're now seeing the ramifications of that it makes it even easier for them to just throw these outlets out of the country. And, you know, the US has a long history of doing these type of things and shutting down any type of freedom of press around times of war. Now, of course, we're in endless war these days, but sometimes that war, that belligerence is ramped up and they do it even more. But, you know, back during World War One, they purged all anti-war media. It was illegal to send socialist literature in the mail during World War One. Eugene Debs was locked up for 10 years for saying essentially that all wars are, you know, wars for the elite with the poor fighting the actual war. And that got him locked up for 10 years. We have a long history and most people view it as a sad history of purging of anti-war voices, shutting them down, discriminating, and yet we're doing it here again. And we're celebrating it. Most people in America are celebrating it. Even people that claim to be somewhat left-wing are celebrating the shutting down of dissent, the shutting down of anti-war voices. And, I mean, it's amazing that people don't view this as dangerous. You can disagree with someone's statement and still think that their viewpoint is valuable in the national discussion, the national discourse. Instead, we're at a place where the national discourse is almost completely sanitized of anti-war views. And who does that serve other than the military-industrial complex and the ruling elite? It doesn't serve 99% of Americans who are being forced closer to nuclear war, closer to, even if it's not nuclear war, closer to war with Russia that would kill millions. It's just amazing. I mean, and yeah, it's a sad time. I've tried to, you know, move on with a Patreon account, patreon.com.com.com.com.com.com.com. And hopefully I will keep being able to create the type of comedy and journalism that I did for eight years. But, you know, people should be worried that anti-war voices are being stopped. That's exactly right. I mean, it's whose next kind of thing, because I don't know if you saw the YouTube explanation that they put out or their kind of warning, but who, you know, to justify banning accounts, but it really opens a very broad net. And it's not just people who receive funding from who they declare as enemy states. It can really affect anyone, which is why... I think it said something like we can shut down anyone who minimizes violence, which basically means if you don't give the U.S. government propaganda view of something, then you're quote unquote minimizing violence. Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, with that kind of justification, you can slap it on anyone. It really should be used for the New York Times, which, you know, refuses to report on the Saudi-led war in Yemen or any of the other atrocities committed and supported by the U.S. government, but... Well, and also if you go back, like, I happen to still have a 2003 New York Times, like the actual hard copy from when in the build-up to the Iraq War, and you just read the front page of that. And it's like the New York Times has gotten it wrong again and again and again because it's not really wrong, right? It's manufacturing consent for our invasion. So in that way, it's correct. But, you know, warning us about WMD and how Saddam has WMD and he's going to use them on us and all that garbage. And he, you know, was connected to al-Qaeda and he's connected to anthrax and all that crap. And it was all used to ultimately kill a million people in Iraq. And it's like, when something like that happens, we should ban all of those media outlets that put forward that trash. But instead, we just hold them up as the legacy media and they keep doing it again and again. I mean, the New York Times was involved in, like, the Spanish-American war lies that got us into that war. I mean, they go back a long way of just helping create war and death. Yeah, it's pretty tremendous, the legacies of these institutions of U.S. imperialism. I mean, to kind of bring us to the end, I'm just wondering what is next for alternative media? What is next for anti-imperialist media in the U.S. where, you know, it seems like unlikely that these outlets which have provided a space for so many journalists like yourself, like, you know, people that by any means necessary. There are so many journalists in the U.S., as you said, who have been squeezed out of mainstream media and have been given a voice to talk about unemployment, to talk about inequality in the U.S., not even, you know, international topics. So what is next and how do we continue to build this anti-imperialist media? Well, over the span of 375 episodes on Redacted, tonight I ended every show with Keep Fighting. So I think we just need to keep fighting. We need to still use these big tech platforms that are suppressing us and banning us. I don't recommend that everybody just deletes all of the big tech platforms because they are so huge that deleting them basically puts anti-war voices. Or like you said, many people that are just pro-worker, you know, talking about worker issues, talking about survival, talking about humanity. It pushes all those people to platforms where there's nobody there, which is not really the answer. I think the answer is to build up the alternatives while we continue to use the tools that a little bit still exist, you know, like I have a separate YouTube channel that I'm still putting stuff on, even though I am trying to build up alternatives like my Patreon and my website, leakamp.com. I also created a not-for-profit media site called radindymedia.com that kind of just grabs a lot of great left-wing, independent media, anti-imperialist, anti-war media, and it just puts it all there for people every day. And, you know, the goal of that was to try and minimize the impact of people being deleted from these platforms. You know, if you can find them at radindymedia, then if their YouTube is deleted, hopefully you can keep finding them. I didn't know when I helped create it that that site would then be useful for me who's been deleted from these platforms. But yeah, we have to build up alternatives while we still use the tools that have been given to us because those tools, as we're seeing, will not last forever. As long as they get powerful and as long as they're used by anti-war voices and anti-corporate extraction, corporate destruction of the world voices, then those voices will eventually be shut down on those platforms. So we've got to build up the alternatives. Well, that's exactly right. We have to keep fighting. We have to keep building together. And fighting this hegemonic media crackdown, this manufacturing of consent and support of war, these are very necessary conversations. And as anti-imperialist journalists, we need to keep fighting to make sure our voices are heard. So Lee Camp, thank you so much for joining us here at People's Dispatch. We're so honored to share this space with you and to continue building with you. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate you having me.