Lee Camp: conspiracy theorist and grifter

A week ago, I wrote about Lee Camp (yes, that Lee Camp) looking like "controlled opposition" on Israel-Gaza.

Well, part two is at least part of "the rest of the story" about Camp.

Even though Google's AI claims he's not a JFK conspiracy theorist and doesn't have any real focus there, per his actual website, he sure as hell is and does.

For more, I quote from a Scheer Post piece he wrote five years ago:

Let's read:

December 22, 1963 — exactly one month after President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, former President Harry S. Truman published an op-ed in the Washington Post that most people, especially our perfumed ruling elite, wanted to ignore.

Truman, who signed the CIA into existence just after World War II, wrote, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—the CIA. […] For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. …There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”

Not only did that adorn the pages of the Washington Post one month after JFK’s death, Truman hand wrote the first draft just one week after JFK met up with a bunch of bullets in Dallas. Sure, one may wish Harry had sent his thoughts to John a month before the President’s televised execution. Maybe he could’ve sent a singing telegram or something. But let’s at least give Truman partial credit for the belated message.

Before his death President Kennedy also held no love for the Central Intelligence Agency. Following the calamitous Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

Point being, clearly Truman, who created the CIA, and Kennedy, who met a mysterious untimely end by professional killers, knew the agency had run amok.

There we go.

Realities?

Jack and brother Bobby were using the CIA to run Operation Mongoose against Castro long after the Bay of Pigs. If anything, they were making it even more amok. The Ba'athist coup in Iraq in 1963 was quite likely supported by the CIA. The 1964 coup against British Guiana's president was getting support from Kennedy's CIA and even the man himself:

U.S. intelligence concluded that Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan, one of the main presidential candidates in the upcoming 1964 elections, was a communist, although not necessarily under the sway of Moscow. Nevertheless, Kennedy decided Jagan would have to go and urged London to cooperate in the effort. As early as mid-1962, JFK informed the British prime minister that the notion of an independent state led by Jagan “disturbs us seriously,” adding: “We must be entirely frank in saying that we simply cannot afford to see another Castro-type regime established in this Hemisphere. It follows that we should set as our objective an independent British Guiana under some other leader.”

Whether Camp is figuratively or not some sort of controlled opposition on Israel, he's an uncontrolled, self-disinformed conspiracy theory idiot in general, and a smoker of the crack cocaine of the Camelot legend.

And, as such, he's a pseudoleftist.

Finally, like a lot of such people, a "merch" page including a coffee mug for $18 and T-shirt for $34 show he's a big-ass grifter.

Lee Camp: is he now "controlled opposition" on Israel?

Yes, THAT Lee Camp, of Redacted Tonight, brave new world former RT commentariat, who writes a column about "Top 11 Signs Israel is Collapsing." No, really. It would be funnier if not so sad. 

My response? Semi-blistering, with the following being an extended version of a Substack note.

(I should note that I pretty much, though not totally, reject a literal idea of controlled opposition. For instance, nobody in the GOP is paying Democrats to act like Republicans-lite in many cases. It's all self-chosen.)

Can I have what Lee Camp is smoking?

No. 4 and 5 are laughs; Israel’s partnerships with the EU and the US are not at all “strained.” In the US, The Donald still cuts blank checks to Israel. In the EU, states that have said they will recognize Palestine, or in France's case, have done so, have made such recognitions conditional, and also still let their countries' weapons makers sell away to Israel. (Same is true of Canada.)

To quote Mondoweiss?

The sum total is that, despite the outcry over the attack on Nasser Hospital, the beginning of the massive invasion of Gaza City, and the United Nations finally declaring a full-blown famine in Gaza, the United States and Europe remain in performance mode, with little prospect of any real action being taken.

And to quote further?

Unfortunately, with feckless leaders in Europe and the autocratic, impatient, and ignorant Trump in the White House, Netanyahu has a lot of potential for manipulating diplomatic affairs around the Middle East.

And, it's not just Israel vs Gaza, it's Israel against Palestinians, period. In what is surely against international law, Trump has had Lil Marco Rubio revoke the visas of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and 80 other Palestinians in advance of the kickoff for a new session of the UN General Assembly. 

Mondoweiss ALSO reports that the Washington Post has a leaked document about Team Trump officially backing ethnic cleansing in Gaza, part of Trump's "Gaza Riviera" idea floated this spring.

A leaked 38-page document details the Trump administration’s “Gaza Riviera” plan to forcibly relocate 2 million Palestinians and place Gaza’s territory in U.S. trusteeship for over a decade. 

The Washington Post reported on the prospectus for the plan, which calls for “temporary relocation” of Gaza’s population so that “AI-powered smart cities,” and a manufacturing hub named after Trump-donor Elon Musk could be erected. 

“Gaza can transform into a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets… resources, and a young workforce all supported by Israeli tech and [Gulf Cooperation Council] investments,” states the document.

But, Lee Camp would have you believe the US partnership with Israel is "strained." 

No. 2? The US will bail out Israel’s economy if it really goes that far in the dumpster. Otherwise, this sounds like a #BlueAnon Democrap saying Russia's economy will collapse at any moment.

No. 6? The UN case for genocide? Rather, the ICC’s head is facing hasbara-like charges and it’s otherwise largely being ignored by the US, the EU, and even the Gulf Arab states, at least for public consumption. Ditto on the ICC arrest warrants. Hasn’t Bibi been in Merikkka since then? Survey says yes and less than two months ago.

No. 10? BDS having a profound impact? Most Western multinationals facing boycotts in Muslim-majority nations know those nations’ elites still buy a Starbucks latte. Also note that, per Lee’s own story, we’re actually talking about franchises that aren’t owned by Star Bux or McDonald’s and in many cases franchise only in Israhell. That's Economics 101, and I was getting hits on that with 30 seconds of searching.

Small companies may be avoiding Israel, and certainly academics? Fortune 500 types? Not so much, and of course that doesn’t count the defense contractors eating this up.

Also, this column may be a recycled and updated version of an earlier one, or else he pulls some stuff out from behind the paywall after a month or two, which adds to the idea that he's become controlled opposition, relatively speaking. 

If THAT's the case, as the original is from nearly three months ago, he looks stupider yet. 

He's also a liar. 

The first two words of the header are "New Column." If all he did pull out an old column from behind a paywall and spiff it up around the edges, it's not new.

That's also self-plagiarism, and yes, that's a journalistic issue.

As a member of the media, I respect that issue. I may, at certain points on the calendar, write about a subject that is time-sensitive about which I have written before, even a theme related to that. But, I don't pull up an old saved column to that end on my computer and give it some tiny tweaks, not even if it was several years ago.

Per Stravinsky, on a long-ago column, I may "steal" some of the talking points, but it still gets a rewrite. 

Finally, it's intellectually lazy. In this case, the talking points weren't true in the original paywalled version and you did nothing to defend them in the un-paywalled one.

Some national and global tidbits from Texas Progressives

Omaha has seriously cut gun violence. Here's how. For people like me, who ardent on gun control, I think this demonstrated that a multifaceted, community-based approach is needed.

The London Review of Books has a great longform on "the reaction economy." In other words, there's advertising and other money to be made off trolling.

China impersonating journalists? Shock me. And, it's COVID-related, too? Alert the fake leftists like Rainier Shea, Max Blumenthal, and Howie Hawkins + Margaret Flowers. And, it was past time to add "pseudoleftism" to my list of labels.

Great piece at Counterpunch by Sam Husseini on possibly the Senate's most maverick member in at least 50 years. No, not Fred Harris. James Abourezk.

And, another good one, by Melvin Goodman, about how Warmonger Joe and his former boss, Dear Leader, have liked to personalize Cold War 2.0 against Russia and Putin.

Lula tells Warmonger Joe to fuck off.