Introduction
Welcome to The Cameron Journal Newsletter!
Each week I send out the latest headlines, the latest videos from The Cameron Journal and commentary about the week’s events. If you’re new here, my name is Cameron Lee Cowan M.A. MFA, and I’m the Creative Director here at The Cameron Journal. You can learn more about me on the about page.I do research and commentary on politics, culture, and the world around us. Remember, The World is Hard, This is Not.
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Updates
It was a long week here at The Cameron Journal! President Trump addressed a joint session of Congress this week and I live-streamed the event with commentary and we had a great group on the live! If you want to be notified when I’m going live, make sure to follow me on a streaming channel/social network. You can subscribe at cameronjournal.com/newshour.
This did lead me to doing 5 hours of streaming because I had an appearance right before so I was literally streaming and talking for 6 hours straight. I’ve been recovering all week!
This week, Dr. James Ogsbury released his new book, About Not Losing and it jumped right to the top of the Amazon charts. All versions are available now. I had a chance to zoom into a special launch party in Denver for the book and met many of the people involved with the book. It was truly delightful! Remember I said it had been a long week here at The Cameron Journal?
Before we dive into the headlines, I’d like to thank all of our new subscribers! The Cameron Journal has been growing like gang busters and I appreciate everyone who is coming along with me on this journey!
Maybe it’s time to write that book?
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The Latest
Let’s dive into the stories I’m following this week!
The Right Wing Joke Machine
My buddy sent me a video with a guy using a puppet to troll liberals a protest at the US Treasury. It’s the sort of video that the Right likes to play over and over again to prove liberals are dumb. Don’t ask me for the link, I don’t want to give the guy views.
It has its funny moments and it does it job of making liberals looking foolish and the Right always finds it funny. We got talk about the video and I mentioned something to him that I had recently had a breakthrough about regarding political communication in this country.
Here’s what I told him: I think Liberals take stuff very seriously and folks on the right do not until it affects them personally. It’s like the standard Right Wing Troll, people say stuff online just for laughs or because it seems absurd. The Right gets and understands the “joke” (which is also why they take Trump seriously but not literally and assume half of what he is talking about is fake or not going to happen) and the Left does not understand the joke or if they do, they treat it as both serious and literal. And honestly, I figured this out because of a friend. On the Left, being serious and literal is valued and on the Right, it tends not to be (humor, jokes, memes etc. is more important) and it is a fundamental difference is communication. And I think part of it is a reaction to language policing (woke, DEI etc.)
For Liberals, words have meaning and are important. For the Right, words are not important and have much less meaning. One of the things I think is interesting is that I’m old enough to remember when pastors and politicians in the 90s were bitching about rap music on the radio and sex in movies and on TV and other such stuff and nobody liked them or was on board with their whole thing and fast forward 30 years and now the shoe is on the other foot with similarly disastrous results.
Yeah and by the time it reaches the low information, median voter, liberals looks a bunch of crazy, try hard, humorless scolds and the Right looks “sane” and “normal.” I think the Right doesn’t realize how much the shit they say affects people but they don’t care because they don’t take it seriously.
And here’s what he replied, “So the right should be a little more serious and the left should loosen up a little bit.”
Spanish and Trades?
Peter Zeihan wants to teach kids Spanish and the trades so we can double the industrial capacity of the US over the next 10 years. He argues that Mexico will be our biggest trading partner moving forward and that we’re going to need people to build things—alot of things and that means we need skilled tradespeople. I’m left wondering about something, is this the end of the information economy?
One of the biggest stories from my youth was the rise of the information and the knowledge economy. It was one of the reasons Millennials were pushed toward college so much, the trend was toward knowledge over everything else. Now the push is for the trades. No one could predict back then that the US would be going through a rebuilding of the industrial base it was so quickly moving overseas thanks to opening in global trade and the rise of globalization. The US dominated in services as manufacturing moved away but service-sector economies do not tend to have the wage growth or stability of more manufacturing-based economies.
Fast forward 25 years and now the best advice we can offer the kids of today is to become an electrician because we’ll be doing a lot of building in the future. This advice seems a bit short-sighted to me. We’re moving into a time where the economy is undergoing rapid change. My question with this idea that we’re going to “double the industrial capacity of the US” is very simple—who is going to buy all these goods? China had the US to buy goods just like Europe and Japan decades before. Who will buy these goods now? What is the real opportunity here? Why would we go down the value chain? These are the questions we can and should be asking ourselves as we get ready to survive these economic upheavals that are coming our way. Again, per usual Zeihan’s advice falls flat.
Putin and Ukraine
As the situation with Ukraine comes to an end, it occurs to me that Putin mentioned something in a documentary he sat for with Oliver Stone several years ago. He remarked that Europe had become a set of vassal states for the United States and that he did not think that was a fair way for Europe to deal with the US. Much of what Trump is doing around Ukraine and the resetting of American foreign policy seems to play right into Putin’s pocket.
I think there are two ways of thinking about this. One way is to think about this as a victory for Putin. By breaking apart of the transatlantic partnership, Putin may find it far easier to bully the rest of Europe into going along with his expansionist plans. The other way to think about this is that the US imperialist policy is finally being undone and the US is embracing our multi-polar future and letting go of hegemony on its own terms. The reality is that having a global empire is expensive and while it does offer a certain stability it is not always to the advantage of the United States. Could it be that Trump is helping manage this transition rather than letting it be a chaotic mess? I covered a story on the Newshour that put this forth and as much as I hate to say it, I think Trump might be on to something.
The Left has been complaining about our global empire and our overseas commitments and perhaps letting them go in a managed way, we are doing better for the health of the country long-term. Once again, Republicans steal a great idea from Democrats and decide to do it themselves but with the worst sales pitch ever. However, I can’t help but think that this all helps Putin more than it should and that perhaps both of these ideas have some merit. Putin will be looking for opportunities to expand and Europe will be years away from offering any real resistance to it beyond diplomacy and money. Europe was already integrated with Russia before the war started and continued to buy gas for far too long. What will global trade and more look like in this multipolar world?
Maybe Zeihan is onto something more than we thought. However, I don’t think people are ready for a reduction in a standard of living that is going to come along with all of this. One thing is clear: globalization is on its way out and there is something new on the way.
From The Cameron Journal
From my new collection: What the Hell is Going On?
This week we’re talking about The Media Under Trump and how they enable him at the expense of Democracy:
Articles of Interest:
Executive Contributor Daniel Sanderson is back with his latest installment in his series on Re-Imagining Plato:
Keep up with The Cameron Journal Podcast
The Interview:
The Cameron Journal Newshour:
Discover more from The Cameron Journal
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