My Comedy Show Is Now Canceled — Thanks To Corporate Censorship

New column by Lee Camp

Column and voice over by Lee Camp

The chase continues.

I’ve been chased from one platform to another. From one show to another. One from one genre to another. It makes me dizzy to the point that I’m not quite sure who I am or what I do. But I know one thing — I won’t give up. I will continue to juke and jive, duck and dodge around the censorship, the suppression, and the efforts by the US imperial corporate slime molds to shut down my voice.

Those same slime molds have now succeeded at causing the end of my new(er) comedy show Unredacted Tonight. This time it only took them 14 months.

For those of you who need a quick refresher:

I had a very popular weekly comedy news TV show called Redacted Tonight for 8 years. It was on the RT America network. I wrote all my words myself (unlike every other comedy news host you’ve ever seen), and I was never told what to say or what not to say. It was the craziest amount of free speech ever seen on American television. We achieved so many important things at that show.

I revealed the rigging of the 2016 primary against Bernie Sanders. I created the hashtag #ExitPollGate on Twitter, which went viral and alerted millions to the corruption of our so-called democracy. I, and the others on the show, made up a small piece of the energy and information that helped build the Bernie movement into what it ultimately became in 2016.

We were also one of the earliest national shows to cover the Standing Rock protests and reveal the truth about Russia Gate. Redacted Tonight was also one of the earlier national shows to cover the story of a person almost no one had heard of named Jeffrey Epstein. I covered accusations by a young woman who said in legal filings she had been assaulted at an Epstein party by Donald Trump. At the time Trump was a “no chance in hell” GOP presidential primary contender.

For covering these topics and countless others, my show had to be stopped by the powers that be.

• In 2016 the Justice Department greatly restricted the ability of the channel to be seen, getting it banned from most distributors. At that same time, my personal Facebook page with 330,000 followers was shadow-banned — going from gaining thousands of followers a week to never gaining any.

• In 2018 I had attack pieces filled with falsehoods written about me by the New York Times and NPR.

• Then in 2022, the US government shut down the channel entirely with economic sanctions. The US empire is super strong and super awesome but evidently can’t handle a single channel out of 350 reporting the truth about the US empire.

• At that same time (within a week), my main YouTube channel was banned around the world, my Spotify podcast was banned, my Twitter account was heavily suppressed and my Facebook continued to be suppressed.

• I created a new YouTube page (having no connection to RT America), and a new podcast. Of course, starting from scratch on a platform is like taking a nuclear bomb to any kind of growth or fanbase.

• I next started a new comedy show with MintPress news. But it was extremely suppressed on YouTube, and therefore I only continued there for a year.

• In 2023, after two months of speaking out about the genocide in Gaza, my TikTok was banned with no reason or right to appeal. This happened before Larry Ellison had bought it and while Biden was still in office.

Finally, last year I created my own independent version of Redacted Tonight. I called it Unredacted Tonight. It was not connected to any TV network nor corporate entity. It was just me doing what I’m good at — comedy that speaks the truth and fights for peace, justice, sustainability, and a better world.

At first it seemed that Unredacted Tonight would be allowed to grow organically on YouTube, which was all I was hoping for. For the first three or four months the numbers grew and the more people saw it, the more they shared it and the better it did. It wasn’t anywhere near profitable yet, but that was okay at the time. All I wanted to see was some kind of steady growth.

But then, it happened again. The same thing that happens to me whenever anything I do starts to gain traction. The numbers cratered. None of the videos could grow or do well. Nothing I tried made any difference.

Haters would love to say, “Dude, it’s not suppression. It’s just that people don’t like your shit! YOU SUCK!” But here’s why that’s provably wrong. (Also, stop being a dick.) It’s obvious from the analytics that the crushing of my show was a concerted effort by YouTube. I can’t tell you whether it’s an algorithm or a human choice, but the data makes clear that YouTube (for a brief period) recommended my videos to people who were likely to enjoy them as well as recommending my videos to subscribers of my channel. That’s how YouTube is supposed to work. Then YouTube stopped doing that. Neither new viewers nor big fans were being alerted to most episodes.

In a better world, it might not matter. I would simply think, “Well, I gotta keep working at this whether it’s suppressed or not.” But Unredacted Tonight costs me a lot of money to produce. Since it has no big-time backers and can’t generate ad dollars without loads of YouTube views, I lose a great deal every month on it.

While my comedy show is ending after two upcoming episodes, I want you to know I’m not giving up. My livestreams called “Dangerous Ideas” will continue every Mon, Wed, and Fri. My podcasts called “Moment of Clarity,” “The Lee Camp Show,” and “Common Censored” will continue three or four days a week as well. And my substack columns will continue to come out every week.

…that is assuming I can find enough people willing to throw me the cost of a beer per month. I hope you see fit to support my work either by clicking subscribe below or at Patreon.com/LeeCamp or LeeCamp.net.

Ever since that first night of Occupy Wall Street, standing on that dark but energy-filled street in lower Manhattan, I knew we were up against the most powerful entities on the planet. I felt more alive than I’d ever felt — but I could see the coming storm. We were then and are now trying to shift society away from the psychopathic genocidal pedophiliac greed monsters that own and run nearly everything. If you’re one of us and you stick with this path, it never gets easy. And perhaps that’s why so many of the activists I used to know have fled to either the warm waters of apathy or the loving embrace of the two corporate oligarchic parties.

Why keep fighting for a better world when it’s so much easier and more profitable to join the villains?

Because the success we achieve has nothing to do with money or fame or ease or comfort. Our success is seen in a new awareness. It’s made up of a growing desire for a world outside of imperial cancerous capitalism. A world with a future. A world without war. It’s a success that can’t be measured with dollars or clicks or followers or ticket sales.

Maybe I’m stupid. Maybe I’m naive. But I’m gonna keep fighting.