Intro
Welcome to The Cameron Journal Newsletter. Each week, Cameron Lee Cowan wraps up the headlines with commentary, helping you navigate today’s media narratives, how they are affecting our Culture, Lifestyle, and Society.
The World is Hard, This is Not
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. Each week I send out the latest news narratives, the latest videos from The Cameron Journal and commentary about the week’s events.
Remember, The World is Hard, This is Not.
Update from Cameron
Hello from chilly New England this week. Everything is getting quite festive here. This week upcoming is my last working week of the year. I wanted to remind everyone that we will have The Cameron Journal Newshour on Monday and on December 22nd and then nothing until January 5th. There are some rumors of a New Year’s Eve show on The Living Joke. Keep an eye out on my socials for more about that. This schedule will hold up for the Newsletter as well. The next one will be the last of this year, and I will pop back up in your inbox in January 2026!
There are a variety of stories going around this week, and I’m eagerly awaiting to mention a few of them, but I want to start with this fun little story that always seems to happen around this time of year.
I always find it funny that the biggest voice against immigrants (Vice President JD Vance) is Catholic because that is one group where immigration is viewed quite differently than the Vice President would have you believe based on his statements. This week, St. Susanna’s Parish in Dedham, Massachusetts has put up its nativity scene, but the holy family is somehow missing and a sign saying, “ICE was Here” has replaced where the holy family should be standing. In this article from Letters from Leo on Substack, we find out a little bit more about this situation, “Pastor Father Stephen Josoma says he removed the Holy Family on purpose — to jolt his flock’s conscience about immigrant families being torn apart by deportation raids. ‘You feed the hungry, you take care of the homeless, you clothe the naked, you take care of people and their needs,” Josoma explained, invoking the Gospel’s commands. “ICE raids are the complete antithesis of that on so many levels’”
Well, well, well, to no one’s surprise, not everyone thinks deporting everyone isn’t such a good idea or even biblical. The outrage about this is a little insane, as it is every year. People will say all sorts of platitudes about it to defend their position or just be anti-immigrant. But I think it does teach us an important lesson. Just because you are enforcing the law doesn’t mean you have to be cruel about it. This country has a terrible history of being cruel to people. I’m not a fan of ICE raids. I wish we had a functional immigration system that could control the flow of people and hold companies accountable. I don’t like how immigrants are treated in these facilities, and I don’t like how anti-immigrant has become. I’m not an open borders person by any means, but I think the real message of this holiday display is quite simple: Think about the human beings. Immigrants are people too. We do all share being human, and I think that is the lesson of the Holiday season.
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The News Narratives of the Week
Don’t forget to join me on Monday for The Cameron Journal Newshour! We will have a special guest in the 2nd half of the show this week, so make sure to come on by!
Disney Goes AI
This week, Disney announced that it had licensed 200 characters from its IP to OpenAI for its Sora video tool. Anyone who is in the media was surprised at the announcement. Disney is well-known for suing at the drop of the hat (and they will drop the hat) about the misuse of their IP. Made a Mickey Mouse t-shirt that’s not licensed? Lawsuit. Put a Disney character in a YouTube video? It had better be thoroughly unique enough otherwise that’s a takedown notice. Just this week, Disney went after Google for IP. But now, Sora will produce a set of curated videos to air on Disney+ streaming service as part of a 3-year deal.
Bob Iger took this decision at an interesting time at Disney. The House of Mouse has been under fire over the past few years due to Ron DeSantis and his anti-woke campaign that even President Trump wasn’t totally on board with happening (remember Ron DeSanctimonious?). Disney has had a series of box office flops that were so bad that Bob Iger had retired and left the company and came back because the board didn’t believe his hand-picked successor was up to the job. Facing the future, things for Disney seem bleak. Is this a hail-mary pass or visionary? Iger said in a statement (from NYTimes), “The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling,”
Time will tell, but I see it as a visionary move. This kind of content is the kind that kids love and has been a big mover for YouTube and other platforms. Users will be able to use classic Disney characters early next year. I think I get what Iger is doing here. With the purchase of Netflix/Warner Discovery (and the controversy around that) media is starting to consolidate. Disney doesn’t have the cash to buy (nor do they want a new headache) but they can embrace AI in a way that the rest of Hollywood has been resisting. While everyone in Hollywood is worried about the collapse of the industry, the loss of jobs (including working-class trade jobs) and what consolidation means for getting projects made and funded, it appears to me that Iger is throwing up the white flag. AI is the future and now fan fiction is going to take an ever bigger share of the cultural pie. Where is there room for original storytelling when people can dial up AI to serve them stories of their own making with characters they already know and love? Disney is betting that owning familiar IP in this environment is a far better deal than investing the millions it takes to get audiences to love a new character.
Perhaps, we will enter a hybrid area where originals are lined up right alongside user generated content. Writing has been like this for 20 years or more. Famous books like 50 Shades of Grey began as fan fiction. Even some things we call great literature are this way. But film and TV have had high barriers to entry and that has kept people out of using those characters for their own creation. Now that the barriers dropped (see YouTube) and with AI, completely dropped, how creativity is used and what it includes has now encompassed everything.
AI is coming and even the House of Mouse is starting to slowly embrace it.
$1 Trillion Can’t Buy Your World’s Best Military Anymore
In certain circles, there’s been a bit of a hubbub this week because of a new military readiness report out from the Pentagon. Normally, I don’t pay these reports much mind. In a place as large as the Department of Defense (War) you can always find someone unhappy with something. However, this time, this was more than just a normal report. It was a complete takedown of the entire American military structure. This report started to spread around, and I saw people talking about it who don’t usually talk about such things. There was also a splashy article in the New York Times about it. There are a few things in it that surprised me:
1) Drones
Even above AI, the report mentions our lack of a real drone capability and the fact that while in Ukraine, they are fight a hot war with commercially available parts and making new units for a few hundred dollars, all the current drone development going on at the Pentagon are for more expensive and complicated units that are expensive. Ukraine has used drones by air, land, and sea to fight the Russian invasion. They have done significant damage to the Black Sea fleet using remote controlled boats. Ukraine doesn’t need a Navy because it can compete with Russia’s Navy using commercially available boats and explosives. Drones are cheap and expendable, or at least they are supposed to be. The report wants more drone capabilities, but not in an expensive format. Speaking of that word, expense, that’s important.
2) Expense
Money drives defense. One of the leading headlines from this report that was interesting was how little the US spends on defense (3.4% of GDP) and they recommended that number grow exponentially but not necessarily on more modern or expensive, large platforms. In fact, that’s the biggest takeaway, it’s about spending more money on cheaper equipment and developing strategies and procurement around that new equipment and leaving behind the model of ever-larger and more technologically sophisticated platforms. This was highlighted as a little story started circulating about how the Pentagon was admitting that China could well strike and kill a US carrier group and could even strike and kill the Navy’s newest carrier, the Gerald R. Ford. The report says that this is a huge liability and that it is time to look at cutting costs and making equipment cheaper and a great deal more of it.
3) The Big Reset
The last point I think is vital from this report and this whole idea around military readiness, China, and the changing nature of warfare is that they recommend a top-down recalibration of how the military is run and how it does basically any task. War fare is changing. Russia stopped using tanks in Ukraine when they found that they were sitting ducks to small drones that could attack them. China has drone carriers whose job it is to sail around and be a base for drones to do the fighting. The message is clear: semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles are the future of fighting and war, and the US is stuck in the past. During the early days of the Global War on Terror, VP Cheney led a recalibration of the military that was stuck in the patterns and routines of the Cold War and needed to change to fight insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. It looks like a similar reset is needed to change how wars are fought and how equipment is acquired.
This report also came out in the shadow of the Trump administration announcing that they are shifting strategy on national security and they are prioritizing certain areas of the globe and certain capabilities instead of being a global force of the past. The US military has been able to deploy anywhere on the globe within 48 hours since the Bush years, but now it appears that the Trump administration is ready to pull back on that to save money, manpower, and other resources. Can the new war of drones and increased military budgets be in alignment with the changing nature of US power projection and a government that is content to shrink the size and scope of US national security? To me, these things seem to be in conflict. If we can’t take on China over Taiwan, are we preparing for other kinds of war? Are we content to let China annex another democracy? What does that mean for allies? What does that mean for global trade?
Some of these questions we already have some answers for, but these ideas seem to be at cross-purposes. Which means I doubt that the Pentagon is going to take the readiness report seriously if the Trump administration is already content to focus on the North American and South American landmass and leaving the rest of the world alone or at least farther distant than it used to be. That has profound consequences.
Something…something…..collapsing empires……
America’s Lost Generation is Out Now! Get Your Copy!
I’m excited to announce that America’s Lost Generation is out now! It’s available everywhere books are sold or through The Cameron Journal directly. You’ve been hearing me talk about this book for a long time, and you’ve read the Millennials collection on The Cameron Journal. Looking to Japan for guidance (and a cautionary tale), I told the story of Millennials through their voices.
Articles of Interest
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