Misinformation is a profitable racket. Just ask Lee Camp.
In March, the former TV host found himself out of a job when RT America shut down in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. Make no mistake though: Camp does not find himself destitute. Since RT’s closure he has continually directed his followers to give to him on the fundraising platformPatreon. There he has more than 1,900 donors giving in tiers of $5, $10, $25, and $90. Even assuming his supporters mostly sign up for the lowest one, this would ostensibly net him thousands of dollars a month, possibly six figures a year.
Camp has a large following even without his platform on RT: tens-of-thousands on YouTube, over 315,000 on Facebook, and more than 150,000 on Twitter. He sometimes claims to be against the war, offering the mildest criticism of Russia, yet the vast majority of his posts are critical of Ukraine as they face invasion from a larger, stronger power. Often they feature misinformation. One of his retweets hinted at the so-called “Biolabs conspiracy theory” that has spread like wildfire across the internet. This widely debunked notion postulates that the U.S. is somehow involved in producing biological weapons in Ukraine. Another of his retweets intimated his job loss was connected to the “Great Reset,” another debunked conspiracy theory. Camp is a multi-platform kind of guy, and though he says the death of RT saw many of his videos removed from YouTube, he still has a channel and posts some of them on his Patreon.
One person Li indicated is a particularly bad actor is Sameera Khan, a former RT correspondent and a previous Miss New Jersey.
Some of the most violent, brutal dictators in the world have found in her a staunch defender. With over 90,000 followers, she has tweeted she supports Myanmar’s armed forces (known as the Tatmadaw) over Aung San Suu Kyi, the elected leader whom they deposed in a recent coup. She not only denies the oppression of the Uyghur people in Western China, she actively mocks it.
Recently, she’s railed against those trying to “feminize men” and “masculinize women,” and men who “let other dudes fuck your wife.” She says her love of Russia started when men carried her suitcase on a visit to Moscow—“anti-beta & anti-woke heaven,” she tweeted along with a Russian flag. Until very recently her Twitter banner was a portrait of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Her commentary on the war in Ukraine is littered with much of the familiar propaganda and misinformation. In her case, some of it is tinged with a heftydose of transphobia and homophobia.