This episode is sponsored by Zano, the privacy-based crypto we use right here at the Free Thought Project.
While Bitcoin's been hijacked by surveillance exchanges and institutional control, Zano stays true to what crypto is supposed to be.
Private, peer-to-peer, and censorship-free.
It's more than just a coin.
Zano is a full-blown ecosystem.
Private transactions, atomic swaps, confidential assets, escrow trades, and even a decentralized marketplace where people are already buying and selling real goods and services.
All without a third party looking over your shoulder.
And unlike that fiat that you're forced to use, every Zano transaction burns a bit of the supply, making it deflationary over time.
Imagine that.
A cryptocurrency that gets more valuable than more people use it.
And the best part?
It just works.
No KYC.
No big brother.
Just a tool for people who actually value freedom.
Zano.
Because the Free Thought Project doesn't just talk liberty, we transact with it.
People should not be afraid of their governments.
Governments should be afraid.
No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.
An idea whose time has come cannot be destroyed by armies or governments.
It's too pervasive and we still have tools to spread the message.
Free Thought Project Podcast.
A hub for free-thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability.
Here are your hosts, Jason Basler, Matt Agarist, and Dawn Vai Jr.
Hello again, Free Thinkers.
Welcome back to the Free Thought Project Podcast.
My name is Jason Basler and joining me is the Free Thought Project Editor-in-Chief Matt Agarist.
Also joining us today is TFTP writer and editor, Dawn Vai Jr.
So thank you all for joining us once again.
We have a big show today with a first-time guest joining us.
Someone who's been in the trenches of the Info Wars right alongside us for years.
So it should be an excellent conversation.
But as always, let's go ahead and start off the show with just a couple brief announcements.
And I promise, guys, I will keep it short.
Now, if you enjoy this show, please hit pause for a second, scroll up and double-check that you're actually subscribed.
It's the easiest way to make sure you never miss an episode and really helps these conversations reach more people.
While you're there, also please rate and review these actions.
Tell the algorithms that this show is worth pushing out to more ears.
So please take a second to do that.
And of course, guys, if you are a long-time listener or just understand how important these discussions are,
head over to thefreethoughtproject.com.
At the top, you'll see the tab for the TFTP membership.
And just 10 bucks a month goes a long way and keeps us moving forward.
All right, today we are joined by Lee Kamp.
He's a comedian, a writer, a journalist and a political commentator.
Now, many people probably know him as the longtime host of Redacted Tonight.
But after RT America shut down in 2022, he went independent and launched Unredacted Tonight on YouTube,
which continued his mix of journalism and political satire.
Lee also hosts the Lee Kamp show and is one of the most censored political comedians in the U.S.,
which we certainly know all about.
In fact, Lee was kind enough to join us virtually back in 2019 at the United for Common Ground All Media Summit
that myself and journalist Derek Brose hosted to push back against the Big Tech censorship.
So, Lee, happy to have you joining us today and welcome to the Freethought Project podcast.
Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks a lot for having me.
Absolutely, man. Well, we have a lot to get into today and I know I say that a lot on this show,
but it does feel like our paths have aligned quite a bit over the years,
especially when it comes to censorship, you know?
Yeah.
But besides, you know, commiserating about the challenges of indie journalism,
there is a lot to touch on when it comes to the U.S. war machine,
the ever-increasing surveillance, Panopticon and, of course, the police state, which is ramping up.
But I thought maybe we could start with the newly minted war on Iran.
And, you know, if people weren't already suspicious enough of Trump's allegiance to Israel last week
in the middle of the night, the Trump administration alongside Israel carried out joint strikes
on the Iranian military and the nuclear infrastructure,
which Trump publicly announced that it was the start of a major combat operation.
And, of course, this comes after the precision strikes on Iran's nuclear sites back in June of last year,
which, you know, we were told then that, quote, Iran's nuclear facilities had been obliterated.
But, of course, eight months later, here we are again, and the U.S. is escalating the conflict with Iran.
This time on a much larger scale beyond the proxy conflicts and the covert operations.
But this time, a war to, you know, once again, cripple Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
So, you know, obviously the U.S. relationship with Iran is complex.
And I should probably also mention that, you know, the Iranian government, certainly no angels.
They're kind of, you know, tyrants of their own flavor.
There were reports from earlier this year of, you know, thousands of dead Iranian protesters
who were killed during weeks of nationwide protests.
And, of course, that exact number of dead protesters is kind of unknown.
It's been speculated upon, but some reports say up to 30,000.
Other reports say half of that.
And a lot of outlets just say, you know, a lot less than that.
So, apparently the numbers are hard to pinpoint because there wasn't a blackout
that kind of shut down the Internet and communications for a period of time.
But all that is kind of a bigger context because, you know, I think we all recognize
that many of the justifications that we're seeing for this new war do feel all too familiar.
The government seems to have no problems recycling the same old playbook over and over again.
But, unfortunately, this time I think it'll be a lot different than what we saw in Afghanistan.
And, you know, we're already seeing kind of these big, significant retaliatory strikes by Iran.
We're seeing these mass casualty events, like 175 children that were killed on a strike
in a girl's school in southern Iran.
And, obviously, there's U.S. casualties as well.
The U.S. troops, I think there's four of them that just killed a few days ago
in Kuwait by Iranian drone.
I think this is all just the beginning.
So, with all that said, you know, we're seeing these kind of bizarre excuses
with some sort of like weird MAGA flavored spin now kind of surfaced by the Trump administration
claiming that they aren't starting a forever war,
but instead they're ending the forever war with Iran.
And so it does feel like we've entered a new era where government officials
not only lie about everything, but gaslight the public into oblivion
by, you know, asserting distrust in the American people's own senses.
So, Lee, where do you see all this going?
And like, how do we hold the line for objective reality here
when truth is treason in the empire of lives?
Yeah, well put, that's a lot to unpack there.
What is going on is horrifying on so many levels,
whether it was predicted or not, it's still horrifying.
You know, let's start with the reasons for our supposed full-on attack
of Iran and assassinating their leader and killing so many innocent people.
You mentioned the protesters killed in the streets.
And this is not to say that the Iranian government was wonderful to their people
or the Ayatollah was wonderful, but we still need to pay attention to reality.
And I did a post on my sub-stack about breaking down the numbers of killed
of these protesters and almost all of the numbers are coming.
And, you know, this is back when people were talking about them more month ago.
But we're coming from these so-called human rights organizations
and they're titled things like Human Rights Activists in Iran.
But if you actually look at where they are, they're actually located in the United States.
One of the main ones is just outside of Washington.
It's actually within like a stone's throw of the CIA.
Another one is Washington and New York City.
And they are heavily funded by the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy,
which has publicly stated they are essentially a CIA cutout.
They don't use the term cutout, but their former head had said we do what the CIA used to do.
Basically, the CIA didn't think it looked good to be doing these soft coup techniques
under the branding of the CIA.
So they created the National Endowment for Democracy,
which now funds these things.
And so these numbers are coming from ridiculously biased sources.
And they're like, oh, the 10,000 protesters, it's a billion people have been killed on the streets of Iran.
And it is not to say that people weren't killed.
This is not to say that police forces in Iran aren't brutal.
I have no idea of the exact number.
I just know that what they're feeding us is bullshit.
That's what I can tell you.
So to just go down the list of these reasons where the Trump administration,
and I'm going to trash the Trump administration a lot, I'm sure, in this hour.
But if anyone knows my work, I have trashed all the administrations.
So it's not like I'm just an anti-Trump liberal or something.
Unfortunately, you need that disclaimer in today's debate.
Yeah, because people have been so indoctrinated by this bullshit right and left, red and blue,
that they think that you insult Trump.
That means you love the Democrats or the Kamala Harris or some shit.
And it's garbage.
And in fact, it's designed to keep the rulers in power.
If they can keep us splintered amongst these two groups, they're always winning.
Anyway, the list of reasons we've gone in, we're bombing the shit out of Iran right now.
So one is they're not treating their protesters well,
which we know Trump doesn't care about protest or anyone in his administration don't care.
Another is, like you said, the nuclear program, which, first of all,
Netanyahu has been saying that Iran's a day away from having a nuclear bomb.
He's been saying that for 20, 30 years.
Okay, it's always been bullshit.
It's never been proven through.
Furthermore, Trump, like you said, claimed he obliterated their nuclear program this past summer,
and all of a sudden it's back and it's better than ever, and we got to stop it again.
And there's been some really good reporting showing that one of the main things stopping Iran
from getting a nuclear weapon was that the Ayatollah claimed, multiple reports on this,
has claimed that it's anti-Islam.
It goes against Islam to have weapons of mass destruction.
So he has never made any effort to create a nuclear weapon.
They do have nuclear power, so of course they're going to have nuclear facilities.
But anyway, so that reasoning is, of course, laughable.
They're the largest state sponsor of terror, which is also laughable.
Oh yeah, how many countries has Iran invaded recently?
The U.S. has, Trump himself has bombed 10 countries.
The past several administrations have invaded and destroyed multiple countries,
Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, so many others.
Just recently we kidnapped the head of Venezuela.
So we know that that idea of state sponsor of terror is laughable.
The Brown University cost of war study estimates that 4.5 to 6 million innocent people
have been killed by the U.S. global war on terror.
So the low side of that is 4.5 million.
So another laughable reason, like you just try and keep up with all these reasons.
Oh yeah, the latest one that Marco Rubio said is that we knew Israel was going to attack them
and Iran would then respond by attacking the U.S.
So we're preempting all of that by attacking Iran,
which is first of all admitting that Israel just wags the dog,
like Israel controls U.S. policy, which is an interesting admission for this administration.
But anyway, all of those reasons are bullshit.
Oh yeah, and it's like Iran doesn't treat their women well,
but we're going to blow up a little girl's school.
Iran doesn't treat their pets well, I'm sure will be the next reason.
So all of that's bullshit.
And I've been talking about this for years.
I feel like not enough people talk about this.
Some don't understand it, but some not going to act like I'm the only one.
But the reason for invading and destroying Iran is a connection between the petrodollar and China.
And the U.S., the only reason the U.S. can be trillions upon trillions of dollars in debt
and have an insane monetary supply and not have inflation just run away,
not have like a dollar be worth, you know, a tip of a turd,
is because we can print all the money we want and the dollar still has power.
It is power for mainly two reasons.
One, the petrodollar, meaning oil around the world is mostly sold, bought and sold in U.S. dollars.
And that then spawned the fact that the U.S. is the global reserve currency.
So you lose one, you lose the other.
And the petrodollar, there's like basically, there's only a few main like large countries
that were and have been pumping oil outside of the U.S. dollar,
harming the petrodollar, decreasing the power of the dollar.
Those countries were Iraq, Syria, Libya, Russia, Venezuela, and Iran.
Those are the main ones.
And guess what?
You know, we've tried to undermine Russia.
We've largely failed.
But outside of Russia, we've succeeded in going after all of them and destroying all of them.
And in fact, one of the first things we did in Syria was, before we could get Assad out,
was to take over the one-third of the country where most of the oil fields were.
So essentially years before we got Assad out and collapsed Syria,
we had already taken over most of their oil fields.
Like that is the goal.
And people go, oh, it's just to steal the oil.
And it's like, well, that's a little piece of it.
But the truth is the United States is the number one exporter of oil and gas now.
So it's not, yeah, stealing it is a little bit, but it's not that important.
The bigger importance is the petrodollar.
And you will never even hear the word petrodollar said on mainstream media.
Like they can't even, it's not like they debate it.
They can't mention it.
They can't say the word.
It's so covered up and hidden.
And anyway, the other thing about Iran, yes, of course, Israel wants them out
because they are the most powerful enemy of Israel in the region.
So that connects to it as well.
And then China, they're very important to China and China's growth
and China's Belt and Road.
China gets a lot of their fossil fuels from Iran.
Iran is a great hub for them.
It's easier for them to ship their stuff around, their exports around the world
via Iran, via the Strait of Hormuz.
So yes, those things definitely play a role.
But I think without the petrodollar, you wouldn't have this long term
desperation to destroy Iran.
And I think most of your listeners probably know of it.
It gets mentioned fairly often.
But former general, former head of NATO Supreme Command,
Wesley Clark said in 2007 in a now famous clip
that he found out from the Pentagon days after 9-11
that they were going to invade and destroy seven countries.
They said in five years, it's taken longer than five years.
But here are the seven countries and see if this list sounds familiar at all.
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
And Iran, it's like the crown jewel on this list.
And they have destroyed essentially or ripped apart all of those countries.
With Lebanon, it's kind of ripped into two halves with Hezbollah
and then the other government of Lebanon.
And that government of Lebanon has largely just does whatever the United States wants.
So yeah.
Yeah, man, for sure.
And it's obviously been a very long process of this happening.
You know, we can look at, you know, going all the way back to 1953
when the CIA with Operation Ajax working in coordination with MI6
and what they dubbed it Operation Boot,
going in basically having some of their assets pose as like communist agitators
and then they facilitated the big coup that overthrew Mossadegh
and, you know, installed the repressive regime of the Shah, you know.
So this has been going on for a really long time,
essentially just to establish the unipolar hegemony of the western empire
against the global south.
And, you know, for some of the listeners that probably don't know a little bit
about that sort of deeper history would love, you know, for you to, you know,
just tap on that a little bit and really explain this goes a lot deeper
than just say Trump and Biden's, you know,
oh, we got to go after Iran like, no, this has been a plan in action.
As you mentioned with, you know, Wesley Clark just, you know, a moment ago,
this has been an intended plan of action for a very long time
to seize control in this region really for the history nerds out there
or can even go back to the great game that was sort of going on in Afghanistan,
you know, way back in the late 1800s of western interests attempting to seize control
in the Middle East specifically for geostrategic purposes.
So if you could touch on that a bit.
Well, I don't know at all.
But yeah, 1953, Mossadegh has kicked out by a U.S.
like you said, CIA back to, I believe that was Kermit Roosevelt, right?
But yeah, after they kick him out, they put in the repression of Shah then in 79,
there's the Iranian revolution where they basically take their country back
and kick the United States out or the U.S. backed,
sorry, not the United States, but the U.S. backed government out.
And that, you know, that was a big moment for Iran to kind of take their independence back.
And at that point, you know, the petrodollar deal is essentially inked in the later 70s,
solidified in the later 70s.
And so yeah, this is connected to oil, it's connected to power.
But at that time, China was not very powerful.
So I think there was less worry about the rise of China
and that China was going to have Iran as an important hub.
So then basically, as China has gotten more powerful
and as the BRICS nations have become really the main competitor to dollar hegemony,
all of a sudden Iran has been a linchpin.
And, you know, this all connects to Venezuela as well.
Venezuela is the largest owner of oil.
They have more oil underneath there.
You know, and damn them for putting their country over our oil.
That really is offensive.
The largest oil reserves on the planet.
So, you know, people point to like what we hate them because they have socialism.
Yeah, we don't like that, but there's plenty of countries in this world
that have some level of socialism or, you know, a mix between socialism and capitalism.
And we don't despise them and with anywhere near the vitriol we have for Venezuela.
A lot of Latin America at various times has had socialism.
But Venezuela, again, has been a linchpin because of the amount of oil
that they can deliver to China, but also that they can pump outside of the petrodollar,
outside of the US dollar.
And so Trump got into office and they said, look, there's obviously China's the main competitor.
China's getting their oil from, you know, Venezuela and Iran.
And they also view these as important hubs around the world.
And so basically we are trying to balkanize, chop apart anything that any country that works with China
and the top of that list is Iran and Venezuela.
So who have they gone after in the biggest way?
Iran and Venezuela.
Now, the reason, you know, the US Empire has known this for many years,
but prior presidents and even Trump in his first term, I guess, had enough reserve
and enough fear of, you know, accidentally sparking some sort of nuclear armageddon
that kills everyone that they didn't, you know, invade Venezuela and kidnap Maduro.
They couldn't be sure that China wouldn't fire weapons or Russia wouldn't fire weapons.
And I actually think the murder of the fishermen off the coast of Venezuela.
And by the way, I don't know whether some of them had drugs or not.
They pretend they had drugs, but let's say some of them did have drugs.
You still can't murder them.
You can't just blow up people because they have drugs.
It's like, it's so laughable on its face.
But I think the bombing of those fishermen was to see whether they would spark any kind of real response from China or Russia.
And they were like, oh, look, we can bomb Venezuela.
Nobody really gets that upset.
So all right, let's go ahead and kidnap their their leader and take over Venezuela, et cetera, et cetera.
And speaking of spawning Armageddon, you know, it's getting kind of scary to the point where maybe they don't care if they spawn Armageddon
because the the sub stack post I just put up at really camp on sub stack.
I just put up today is that there's multiple reports showing that the Pentagon has been informing soldiers.
This doesn't mean every soldier, but a significant number because there's been a hundred complaints to their freedom of religion office in the Pentagon
that they've been forming them that this this war with Iran is a war towards the end times in Armageddon
to bring about Armageddon to bring about the return of Jesus.
And, you know, Pete Exeth is a well known Christian nationalist.
He's got crosses tattooed all over his body.
And he and apparently enough of these generals view this as a essentially a holy war.
And it's kind of fascinating that you also have the religion aspect from Israel that believes, you know, that they have a right to greater Israel.
If you look at what greater Israel is on a map, it is large swaths of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt.
And they believe, according to their 2000 year old books that, you know, long before nation states were a thing,
they believe that they have a right to all of this all of this land because because either Bible or Torah.
And it it really is like a horrifying.
I mean, I mean, once you say, Hey, my God says I can blow up, you know, children all day long.
It really is just a true horror show.
Well, now I don't think Trump believes that stuff.
But Pete Exeth likely does.
And it really is taking humanity back to a time where we really could just kill anyone we want because because Bible, because religion,
because like I'm all four people having the religion they want to have as long as it doesn't mean that they can just kill innocent people and do whatever the hell they want.
100% man.
That was pretty disturbing to see those all those reports.
It was the foundation you were talking about as the military religious freedom foundations.
And yeah, they got over 200 complaints from different service members, like including Christians, right?
And Muslims and even Jews who say that it's like a coordinated effort.
Their commanders are coming to like these these musters in the morning and they're declaring a holy war.
One NCO in particular, he told his unit that President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark the second coming of Christ.
To unpack all that is fucking crazy.
But like before we get into that, like the mechanics of that, like I have to call that out.
There's been a lot of Christians calling all this out.
We got to call the utter satanic nature of telling young Americans that it's somehow Christian to slaughter innocent women and children on the other side of the planet air quotes for fucking Jesus.
Really?
Like that's a that's a complete inversion of everything that that Christianity and faith is supposed to stand for.
And what wild is that we've seen this before before you before we started the podcast, Don and I were talking and I'd mentioned that back in the early 2000s they had this documentary called Jesus Camp.
I don't know if you remember that, but they exposed a similar like cult like environment where these mega churches they literally brought in cardboard cutouts of George Bush.
And they were, you know, saying that he was anointed by Jesus and that that's why they had to get behind and support the Iraq war.
And they kind of worshiped them.
It was it was wild.
Whoever did that documentary.
I can't remember who did it, but it was it was wild and how they showed these people like literally prostrating themselves before a cardboard cut out of George W. Bush.
I think we're in that same scenario again now.
It's like wash rinse repeat, right?
And like you said, Hegseth is Hegseth is this weird national Christian national who who wants to Christianize the chaplain corps and make it muscular is what he said, you know, is wild.
So my question is like, do you think that this like Messiah Armageddon rhetoric that's coming out again, like it just like it did in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.
You think it's just a few random crackpots like these generals are.
Or do you think that there is like a coordinated top down psychological operation because it does make people able to do things that they might not normally do based on because God, right?
Yeah, I believe you're right that we have to take it seriously and that it basically is a is some form of sigh up.
I mean, that doesn't mean Hegseth doesn't believe this garbage.
He may but they know it's useful to get because we know that less than 20% of Americans actually want to be bombing Iran right now.
Like it is a small percentage.
And I imagine that there's a fairly significant position percentage in the military that are like why am I bombing Iran right now?
Why am I in charge of even if it's not boots on the ground?
Why am I in charge of pushing buttons to kill Iranians right now?
And, you know, I think they view it as a way to get everyone in line to say, well, well, you know, the reason this is a great idea is because Jesus.
And it really is.
It really is horrifying.
And just to add to this, you know, I'm Jewish and I'm an anti-Zionist Jew and I have been screaming as loud as I can from day one after October 7th about this genocide in Gaza.
And it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what happened on October 7th, although I've picked apart that as well.
But it doesn't matter what actually happened.
You can't just murder all the children you want because whatever it is horrific.
And the idea of using religion to support this is so horrible.
But then you also have Christian Zionists and there are more Christian Zionists in the United States than there are Jews in the world.
And so Christian Zionists are some of the biggest supporters of Israel because many of them, not all of them, but many evangelical Christians believe the Jews need to be in Israel in order for the end times to come.
And the irony of that is you kind of couldn't have a more anti-Semitic view of things than let's help Israel so that all the Jews can get there so that they will burn in hell.
Like that's not a friendly thing.
But it has created this alliance between these Christian Nationalists and Israel.
And they support each other so very much.
Tucker Carlson, who is a Christian, was debating with Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador in Israel.
And one of them is very much opposed to the gods of genocide, the war with Iran.
But Mike Huckabee is all for it and loves it and things is great.
And essentially says you can murder as many children as you want in Gaza because Bible.
And it really is like just, I don't know, it really is taking such a step back for humanity to think that we can just kill each other with abandon because we believe a thing, you know, because of faith.
Like faith should be used to care for your fellow humans rather than to just destroy them.
And I think Tucker Carlson, too, his credit was trying to make that point.
But yeah, it is quite the strange alliance between Israel and the Christian Nationalists right now.
Well, if there's one thing that we can count on is the regime recycling propaganda, right?
Yeah.
I like the idea that Iran has a right to defend itself.
I mean, we heard that so much after October 7th, right?
And it kind of flips the script a little bit.
But I think one of the big tells here, especially, you know, coming from the ultra Christian, ultra nationalist administration is that there was just the four service members who were recently killed in Kuwait.
These were four American citizens who were basically just vaporized in a drone attack.
And I think I recently made a tweet here that kind of highlights how much of this really is a marketing ploy.
It really is a veneer as far as the cover story while we're there that Trump administration wants to talk about how they're doing this for the Iranian protesters and they're liberating the Iranian people.
But four Americans die and one of them was 20, by the way, quote, serving their country.
And, you know, they basically quietly vanished into the background noise of policy.
And I think it really does highlight how expendable these people are, you know, and unfortunately, I hate to say it, but, you know, I think this is a big tell.
And along those lines, I'm sure you guys have seen, I know we talked about a little bit in the chat.
There was this video that went viral yesterday across social media of the U.S. Marine veteran.
I guess he's also a Green Party Senate candidate from North Carolina.
His name is Brian McGinnis, but he basically stood up during a hearing at the Capitol and was started, you know, shouting these anti-war statements, including, you know, that Americans don't want to die for Israel.
And Capitol Police intervened within seconds. Even the sitting senator was there.
He joined them in ejecting them from the room.
And I guess his arm was broken in the process and, you know, it was pretty brutal. It was pretty nasty looking.
But during that whole thing, you could see a moment where the officers like forcefully, you know, take him down and they're pretty aggressively trying to take him out of there.
And I think if, you know, that old kind of myth that, you know, if you ever wondered who the cops would side with or the military would side with, and when shit hits a fan, I think this video was kind of also a big tell.
You know, if they do this to a Marine, imagine what they're going to be doing to you.
So I wanted to ask, like, you know, we often hear from the normies that if the government were to explicitly turn on us, you know, or put us in reeducation camps, for instance, that, you know, that the military probably wouldn't fire on Americans.
But do you think that's true now seeing how deep the level of propaganda has gotten?
And maybe it was never true, but watching that video and just how aggressive and enthusiastic those officers were, it was kind of disturbing to me.
And so, like, do you think that, you know, policing has evolved in the U.S., especially when it comes to Americans exercising their rights?
I mean, I don't know. You look at the history of policing in the United States and there's been a lot of horrific shit.
So I don't want to say it's worse now. I mean, you know, you look at the assassination of Fred Hampton, for example, or Medgar Evers or all these people, and there's generally police involved.
There may have been police involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King, you know, probably not involved in the shooting of JFK, but quite possibly involved in the cleanup after the killing of JFK.
So I don't want to say the police are worse now. They're just kind of horrific for a long term.
Well, sure, of course. I mean, that's something that we've been focused on for a long time.
I just mean, as like the psychology, the mentality of both arms services, the troops, the military and police.
Is that kind of like, in your opinion, from where you're at, kind of maybe shifted in a direction that seems, I don't know, unrecoverable?
Like these people have become more propagandized than ever. They truly feel like they're serving the regime.
And therefore, like we were just saying that because God or whoever, Trump says it, therefore, it's right.
Well, part of the key, you know, whether they're doing it for Trump or other reasons, part of the key to having a police force that is willing to be brutal and horrific to certain segments of the population is usually to convince them that those
segments of the population are the others, the great other. You know, it's immigrants or it's leftists or it's Antifa or it's Marxists or whatever the term is.
Oh, everyone, you know, you could have 10,000 people at a protest in Minneapolis and it's like, oh, well, those are all the crazy Marxists and they're being paid.
They basically try and act like these are not average citizens, whereas when you have that many people in the streets, most of them are just your mailman.
Or like, it's not some kind of crazy, you know, as they say, full-time activists.
But yeah, getting the police to behave like that is usually part and parcel to this propaganda, to the indoctrination, long-term indoctrination.
And, you know, there's some police that have spoken up about this over the years.
Captain Ray Lewis interviewed him a couple of times and he's one of the few willing to stand up and say, yeah, we were basically told, you know, you could treat these people like shit, especially non-white people.
And if you kind of joined the police force and you weren't willing to get in line behind that kind of thinking, then you didn't stay there long.
You generally were drummed out.
And so you ultimately get a type of police force willing to perpetrate brutality on American citizens.
You know, would the military fire on American citizens?
I think a lot of them would because of whatever propaganda is used to, you know, to set up that type of scenario.
Like, if Trump sends the National Guard to an area, he tells them, oh, it's all horrific terrorist Marxists or whatever terminology he uses to try and get them to think these are not regular Americans, when of course they are.
Yeah, I want to interject right here on that.
I was in the Marine Corps and I'm still in all these groups with veterans and active duty Marines and it's kind of split down the middle.
There's a bunch of fighting going on in these Facebook groups that I'm in where some people support it and some people don't.
When you say it, you mean war with Iran?
Yeah, well, I meant like the police state in general and the military industrial complex, right?
The high shootings.
I mean, I know it's more nuanced than that, but it is aggressing against others who haven't done anything to you.
And unfortunately, the ones that are the loudest are the ones who do support aggression against people that didn't do anything to them.
And it's like that.
I know that it's like that with police too as well because they're in the same mindset.
They went through the same or very similar indoctrination processes and it's very difficult to break free from that.
But I know that I did and I know that so many other people that I was in the military with did too.
So that's what kind of gives me hope.
And seeing that Marine veteran yesterday get carted off by the Capitol Police was pretty shocking, man.
And then you had Laura Loomer come on Twitter and say that this is see how violent the left is.
And Laura Loomer has been begging for a strike on our brand for years to help innocent people.
And 160 innocent little girls were killed the first day there and she doesn't see that as her violence, man.
The hypocrisy in that is overwhelming.
Glad you bring this up.
Some of my good friends and some of the most impressive activists are veterans that have woken up to the reality.
I'm friends with Mike Prizner and Matthew Ho.
Matthew Ho ran for Congress and also in North Carolina on the Green Party ticket.
But they do amazing work and I think it's because they feel they were abused by the system.
They were lied to by this system.
They were propagandized by this system and they woke up out of that.
And once they did, it was kind of like, fuck these people that did this to me and did this to my friends.
And yeah, so some of the most amazing activists, I've worked with veterans for peace as well.
Some of the most amazing activists are people that were in the military.
Absolutely.
I think people are just in general starting to become more in tune with the fact that they're tired of being exploited.
They're tired of being lied to, even surveilled.
And we can start getting into the surveillance state conversation as well.
But before that, I did want to get into your article that we actually recently aggregated.
One of the reasons why we wanted you on the show is that last month we aggregated your article entitled
How to Win Every Debate About Police and Debunk the Myths They Rely On.
Which I absolutely loved as somebody, as we mentioned,
had been in the police accountability movement for 14 years matters as well.
And trust me when I say I've heard every tired cliche in the book from these police apologists and bootlickers.
And so this one really hit home to me.
And the part that I enjoyed wasn't just like these kind of clever quips,
but you actually sourced real data to back your points,
which debunked a lot of the myths that people have for publicly funded police.
One of them was about how they stop violent crimes.
And you were like, nope, they only stop 4% of violent crimes.
And I think that goes hand in hand with another study that I saw from the University of Utah that said
they only solve 2% of crimes, which is absolutely crazy.
So I wanted to ask you about the article and how you kind of got into these baked in myths.
And maybe when you zoom out and look at the bigger picture,
what do you think about these myths?
How they reveal about the role that police actually play in our society?
And here's another part, which is kind of a big question.
But do you think law enforcement could actually be reformed in this country?
And if not, where do we go from here?
Yeah, I mean, the term reform is so heavy.
To me, that reform would be eliminating some crazy percentage of police forces.
You know, 96% or something.
So it really would look more like scrapping it and starting over in a lot of ways.
People love to, there's so many levels of this of like, I'm glad you like that article.
I love doing those pieces where it's like, let's think about how we think about these things.
Because the debates don't even, like the debates are like,
just such on the surface level, it's not digging deeper at all.
I mean, the term crime is almost always used to just talk about street crime,
when in fact, white collar crime is a much larger percentage of theft
and destruction of life in this country than a guy taking your wallet.
I mean, just wage theft alone takes way more money than street theft,
than like people stealing your wallet or breaking into your house.
And yet wage theft is like the polite kind of crime where it's okay
because it was done by a guy in a tie.
So yeah, I really hate how these discussions are had.
But in terms of the 4%, yeah, it's like, so initially I saw this was
when I first wrote about that, first talked about it, I guess,
several years ago was the percentage of time police spend on various issues,
various crimes, various things.
And it was actually put up by a pro policing, I don't remember his name,
but a pro policing professor who was like,
everyone thinks that police are just tackling you or whatever,
but here's how they actually spend their time.
And he puts up this bar graph or whatever that shows how much
they spend their time on responding to non-criminal calls
or on traffic or on property crime.
And it turns out that the amount they spend on violent crime
dealing with violent crime is 4% of their time.
It is a tiny fraction of their time.
Now, here's the thing, I would be okay with starting a debate with,
okay, so 4% of police hours will keep that policing the same,
just for debate.
Let's say we keep that the same.
But that means we change 96% that has nothing to do with violent crime.
And we send dudes with guns, often unhinged dudes with guns,
but I realize they're not all unhinged.
But dudes with guns to go deal with a guy who pissed in a fountain
or someone's drunk outside a bar,
let's get some people with guns involved
or my neighbor's playing loud music.
I'm gonna see if I can call some guys with guns.
It's utterly insane.
And yet we can't even have that discussion.
And in some areas, usually the very left wing cities
like Portland or Oregon and I think maybe Denver, Colorado
has done some of this as well,
they have actually started to have a separate service
that gets the calls for like mental health problems.
Like, oh, someone is wandering around the street
trying to hump every person that walks by.
Let's not call guys with guns,
let's call mental health professionals,
and they show up unarmed and try and deal with the situation.
And guess what?
Every time they try this and they study it,
those people who are called for most of the mental health issues,
they almost never have to call the police.
The issue is almost never big enough that they can't handle it.
And they have yet to have one of them get killed.
So the idea that we have to just send police with guns
into every situation is just so nonsense.
And yet it feels like it can't even be discussed,
like you can't even get into it without someone going,
oh, you just want criminals running around?
I was like, no, that's not what I'm saying.
You want to get rid of all police and see what happens?
No, we would replace a lot of police with a different version
of doing the same job,
meaning dealing with these things.
If it's a property crime where the perpetrator,
whoever did it, is no longer there,
like my bike was stolen or my house was broken into
and the people are gone.
Well, you also don't need guys with guns.
Someone can come and write down
like that you had your TV stolen
without inserting a police officer into the situation.
And the reason that's so important
is because lots of times police show up
and they amplify a situation.
Sometimes they murder the person that called them.
I always forget her name,
but the famous one recently where the woman called the cops
because she heard something outside,
they then start, they never find anyone outside,
but they start investigating her.
She goes to turn off the boiling water on her stove
because she's like, I need to turn this off
and the guy shoots her and kills her.
And it's like, that's why you don't call guys with guns
to deal with, I heard a noise, you know?
Yep.
Right, absolutely.
And you know, it's one of those things
where like if we zoom out and look at it,
it's very clearly like the modern American police state
has absolutely become,
as we have said at the Free Thought Project for a long time,
they've become the standing army
that our founding fathers very explicitly warned us
not to let happen.
But you know, beyond that,
we also see, because we kind of want to pivot to, you know,
in addition to the police state,
there's this incredible influx of illegal domestic surveillance
that's happening,
so much so that we just at the fucking Super Bowl,
they had the commercial about the ring cameras
with, oh, we'll help you find your dog
with integrated AI facial recognition bullshit.
And of course, everyone knows that the Amazon
has a $600 million contract with the CIA,
but when it comes to that specifically,
it always reminds me that there are the way in which
the Israeli government sort of trying to bring it back
full circle to what we were talking about earlier
is so heavily integrated into the surveillance apparatus
and even with the training of multiple police departments
around the country with, you know,
especially with what the fuck we just saw happen
in Minneapolis.
I mean, they're using IDF tactics in American streets.
So to, in your view,
like what is the extent of Israeli influence
IDF training of American policing
in the way that it affects the current American police state
as well as their involvement in the,
because I remember some years ago
was actually through your show that I learned about this
that there was a whistleblower that came out
and exposed a huge fucking Israeli spy program
that was integrated through a bunch of American tech.
So what's like the extent to their influence
within all of that?
Yeah, so I guess there's kind of two things there.
There's Israeli tech and surveillance
and then there's the Israeli IDF connection
to our policing.
And there are some great articles out there
about the connection between U.S. policing and the IDF.
And it's not like every cop in America
has gone to train in Israel.
But there are some of the most brutal police departments
did go train in Israel
or had IDF and Israeli security officers
come work with them in the United States.
And it often is like the most,
the most horrific, brutal, you know, surveillance techniques.
Many of them are coming from Israel.
Now, it's a back-and-forth pipeline.
So some of the stuff we come up with
and then Israel ends up using it.
But a lot of the things, you know,
it may be something like, hey, Neil on the guy's neck
when you put him down, those type of tactics
often come from Israel.
The roll down, you know, streets,
streets that you think are problem streets,
just roll down them with all of your lights on,
just like interrupting everyone's lives,
just to show that you're there and you're the police
and you could kill them if you wanted to.
And just to kind of create a low level of trauma
and terrorism in certain neighborhoods,
that came from the IDF.
So there's a bunch of techniques
where it may not be that every cop is training in Israel,
but the techniques came from a brutal Israeli military
and surveillance system.
And then there's the tech where I'd say
the source that doing some of the best work on this
is Mint Press.
I worked there for a year.
And they and Alan McLeod have discovered
just how many of the people working in
some of our biggest tech platforms,
Facebook, Google, YouTube,
it's a shocking number that are XIDF,
X is XMASOD, many of them.
And much of this Alan McLeod is just finding out
via their LinkedIn profiles.
So it's not even that tough to find.
So it begs the question,
what about the people that aren't revealing it publicly?
And then there's some of the biggest VPN networks
are actually Israeli tech.
And you've got to assume that Israel's not creating any tech
that they don't have back doors to,
whether they deny it or not.
So if you're using,
I think what ExpressVPN is one of the biggest ones,
I think that might be Israeli.
And so it's like, if you're using one of these VPNs
that claims to cover up your data,
if it's Israeli, it's almost definitely got
at least a back door for Israel,
if not funneling all the data back to Israel.
Yeah, so there's just Israeli connections
through and through all of the surveillance
in the United States.
And they use Gaza as kind of a test zone
for a lot of this.
They want to create,
Trump has put forward these plans,
him and Jared Kushner to create essentially
full panopticons in Gaza to monitor the biometrics
of every single human being walking around.
And sure, a lot of Americans go, well, that's Gaza.
And yeah, I wish they weren't doing that.
But who cares about Gaza?
Well, these are all tests.
They're tests to see whether this type of thing
could be done in the United States.
And this is quickly where we're going.
Now, we're not to biometric monitoring yet,
except in maybe very specific places.
But glad you mentioned the ring camera situation.
I wrote an article about that on Substack as well.
Really camp on Substack.
But it's so leaked emails came out where,
well, first I should remind people what this was.
So yeah, there was a Super Bowl ad that created
a lot of fury from a lot of people where Amazon said,
oh, your ring cam can now you can type in
that your dog's missing.
And then AI search bot will search every ring camera
in the area and find your dog.
Now, ironically, I feel like when we were growing up,
our parents said, never go with a man who tells you
he needs help looking for his puppy.
Well, literally Amazon ring told the entire nation
we need help looking for our puppy.
But people were pissed off.
And here's why.
Because guess what?
They absolutely, if you just watch the 30 second ad,
you can be like, oh, perhaps that could be used
for things other than dogs.
Perhaps this means they can literally type in anything
and use every ring camera to monitor anywhere
in your neighborhood or conceivably across the nation.
And sure enough, a leaked email I was reported on
by 404 media from the CEO and founder,
or I think he's not CEO now, but founder of,
or maybe he did come back, I don't know,
but founder of ring cam and internal email
that went out to all employees saying that
this new AI system called search party
will quote, zero out crime in neighborhoods.
Now, do you think he's talking about just doggy crime?
He's talking about monitoring everyone all of the time
to stop crime in neighborhoods.
But of course that means monitoring everybody all of the time.
And every intrusion into our rights,
into our privacy, into anything that we want to keep private,
it is always, always, always done with a slogan
of we're going to stop filling the blank bad guy.
We're going to stop terror.
So give up all of your rights going into an airport.
We're going to stop.
I remember when drones first started flying in American airspace
because remember when drones first came out,
they were like, oh, but not in American airspace.
We won't allow that.
And then when they first started allowing it,
they said they had used it to catch a pedophile
who kidnapped a kid.
And sure enough, it's like, oh, yeah,
we're using it to catch pedophiles.
Oh, well, that's fine.
Well, guess what?
That's just a test balloon to then use it for everything else.
These things are always fed to us in like,
we're going to stop filling the blank horrible person.
Lex Luthor's on the loose and we're going to get him
with our ring cam.
And it's all, it's all just, you know,
moving towards full surveillance.
And then of course you got the connection of monitoring
all of our purchases and digital currencies and et cetera.
Yeah, man.
It's kind of crazy.
But did you see what,
what I found pretty hopeful was that ring,
they did a 180 as soon as they got all the backlash
from that Super Bowl commercial.
At least publicly, right?
And I mean, they had to because they saw that there was,
they saw the sentiment about it.
So like they are aware that there is public pressure
and that the public pressure is a good thing.
Yeah.
Public pressure can achieve things,
but if you look at what they actually did,
they went back on their contract with flock security.
Flock is of course the horrible anti privacy company
that monitors all of your license plates.
And they have admitted to, to basically they're,
they're not like just looking at certain license plates.
They are keeping track of every single license plate
wherever there are flock cameras.
And that can be used to monitor where anyone goes
any of the time, all the time.
Now Amazon ring signed a contract with them.
Flock of course has contracts with police stations
and police departments across the country.
After the people got furious,
they Amazon publicly announced
we're cutting off the contract with flock.
Now here's the thing, that is nice.
That is great.
That is better than having the contract with flock.
The problem is what people were upset with
were search party was not actually the contract with flock.
It was this AI tech that can monitor anything
using your ring cam.
So I don't think they've actually undone
the worst part of this.
Also this guy, Jamie Siminoff,
who is the founder of ring,
he loves deals with police agencies.
So they are working on signing
all kinds of deals with police agencies.
Don't forget that this is all coming off the heels
of facial recognition also being rolled out
on ring devices in December,
just a couple of months ago.
So yeah, there's, there's a lot going on.
Yeah.
It popped out.
Is it, don't you gonna love the irony of
we've all decided to panopticon ourselves?
Like we put the shit up ourselves.
We're paying the monthly fee to build the panopticon.
That's fucking wild, man.
Man, so we're at the end of the show here, Lee,
but before we go, man,
I want to take a second to thank you for coming on.
You know, you like us at the Free Thought Project,
you've been through the Ringer, man.
Yeah.
We have not in common.
Yeah, yeah.
And the most egregious manners too, you know, like smeared and for just telling the truth
and and it would have been easy to just walk away and get defeated
But you stayed in the fight man, and that's noteworthy and that bravery is exactly what we need right now, man
Thanks, you know, what's even more important and I think everybody here is gonna agree to that is that we're having this conversation at all
Right like it's no question. You lean to the left and we're anarchist libertarian cap capitalists, right?
But on on the issues that matter, right?
Like the slaughter of Iran and and innocent school children and the rise of the domestic police state here at home
We're standing on the exact same ground. Yeah, you know, we have this fucking hellish divide
It's being pushed down the collective throats of humanity right now and it's it's depressing
But it's vital that we get we get over these petty differences, you know
And it's like we just look at these little bitty political philosophies that that are
Irrelevant on the surface right and they blind everybody to this two-headed hydra of the uniparty
Like if an anarchist and a socialist can agree that dropping bombs on fucking kids for the Messiah is insane
Then yeah, the division. They're selling us as a fucking lie. Yeah, right?
Yeah, I mean we've we've seen this regime change playbook fail a hundred percent of time fucking Libya Afghanistan Iraq
They sell open it's a open-air slave market in Libya now
It's fucking crazy and all of it is used to tighten the screws here on the police state at home
You know, but as we always say here like it's the state's greatest fears if we withdraw our consent and refuse to go along with their
partisan games so you know, you know as someone who's stared down the machine and kept your wit intact
What is the white pill here? So we always end on a white pill question for our podcast
I'm not sure if you're familiar with that
But it's like a hopeful question like we want to end on a positive note because oftentimes
Our podcast can take a dark turn like this one kind of did
So like how do we convince people to stop being these foot soldiers for this uniparty and start seeing past their petty differences
And have important conversations like this one without
Wishing death and destruction on the person they're talking to
Yeah, well first I'll start with what you just said
Which is we definitely have to put our differences aside and work together where we can work together
And this doesn't mean you can't have a red line like I don't really want to work with anyone that
Supports genocide in Gaza. It's like, you know, okay, you and I both hate factory farms
But I'm really opposed to genocide. So that'd be a pretty tough
meeting with you every Sunday, but
You can have red lines
I'm not like opposed to that
But most of most of us are not beyond that red line
And so most of us should be working together
In so many ways to create large-scale change and
Yeah, it's like you said
You and I are
Opposed mass surveillance. We're opposed to the slaughter of innocent people around the world
So there's a lot we can work on together
And to me that is one of the the most hopeful things and of course divide and conquer has worked forever
It's one of the greatest tools they have is divide and conquer
But yeah, the the other hopeful thing I I'd say and I I
really need to write a column about this sometime is
It really feels in a lot of ways we while things are so dire
I'm not going to act like things are good, but it feels like we have
succeeded in
somewhat moving the overton window like the allowable discussion now
Is moving much towards the one you and I are having right now than like what it was 20 years ago
You hear discussion about whether uh, the u.s. Policing at writ large is a major problem
You hear discussion about u.s. Police murdering thousands of people every year
Like many of these discussions were not being had it feels like except in really tiny corners of
But in dark basements 20 and 30 years ago
The number of people that understand corporate media is just a sack of shit like is
massive
The number of people opposed to bombing iranians like the fact that that percentage in america is 20 percent or below is
Pretty incredible if you look at the fact that like whatever 97 supported bombing iraq
That's a big shift in the american populace. This doesn't mean that
So many america, you know all of america is brilliant or knows
Everything it just means like we have shifted
The the average debate in many ways and it's nice to see people waking up to that or you can look at these like
Specific topics like the number of people who now understand that lee harvey oswald did not kill jfk
It's a massive number of people in this country
And that did not use to be the case it used to be like a tiny percentage
So you're just seeing a lot of shifting of the overture window and i wish that would manifest in much more
change
In a larger way, but maybe this is the awareness that comes before the great shift
Hell yeah, man. I I whole hardly agree. There's more people awake today than ever and it's
I guess it is a sign that what we've been doing for the last decade and a half is is kind of working
It just needs to we need to open our eyes a little bit further and get past that blindness that
That everybody has or so many people have when it comes to partisan the ship and it's
That's that's keeping us down a big time man
Lee dude, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed this conversation
I know that jason and don did too. I bet like we're
I'm i'm blown away that it's already been an hour. Uh, yeah
Before we go, how about you? Uh, give any plugs or tell everybody where they can uh follow and support your work, buddy
Yeah, thanks a lot. If you guys are fans of sub stack
I'm at real lee camp on sub stack pretty much everything there is not behind a paywall
So I'd love if you'd go subscribe there
That's really camp and then I have podcasts. It's my my main podcast was deleted by spotify
So it has a new name. It's called the lee camp show on spotify everywhere else
It's called moment of clarity clarity. I my main youtube channel was deleted. So I have a new youtube channel youtube
dot com slash moment of clarity
And and yeah, that's the you know the and then of course there's lee camp dot com if you forget any of this stuff
But I'd say sub stack is probably the place. I've been uh building and writing the most recently
We are all readers man. Thank you for doing that and thanks for coming on brother. Appreciate it
Thanks for watching. Thanks lee
Peace, peace