Intro
Welcome to the Newsletter. Each week, Cameron Lee Cowan wraps up the headlines with commentary that will make you sound smart to your friends and family. This week we are talking about the Supreme Court, the Department of Education, the Epstein blowback, and more.
The World is Hard, This is Not
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.
Updates
Happy midsummer everyone! This week was a long one. I had a short trip I had to make, and sitting in traffic for hours is no one’s idea of a good time. But the trip was productive all the same. Then I was sick on Friday, so I’m writing this very late on Saturday! And let’s not even get into how hot it is nationwide! I was melting this week in those temperatures and soaked through more than one shirt. The man who invited air conditioning should have a national holiday, especially one where we call stay inside and stay cool.
I hope everyone is enjoying my new series on Millennials supporting my upcoming book, America’s Lost Generation. I took some of the most important points from the book and created articles around that, and I hope that you’re enjoying them as they arrive directly to you. This week, I’m watching what happened to Millennials play out again for Gen Z and in typical American fashion, they have it worse. I would rather not do a full story on it because we talked about it on the Newshour last Monday, but more and more data is coming out showing that the job market for Gen Z, especially Gen Z males, is worse than the 2008 recession. A similar thing happened in Japan. Once economic stagnation begins, it just gets worse for each new generation coming out after. Now that Gen Z is hitting the job market, things are getting dire once again, and we have youth unemployment spiking like we’re France or Italy. This will be a huge problem moving forward. Trust me when I tell you that those lost early years in the workforce have devastating consequences over time.
Don’t forget about my new podcast! The Living Joke took a break this week (I was traveling) but we will be back on Wednesday, and we have lots of new gaming content on our Rumble and on Substack, so please check those out!
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America’s Lost Generation
My next book will be out soon, and I’m taking new pre-orders now. America’s Lost Generation catalogs the story of Millennials and what went wrong for America’s largest and most educated generation. They did everything right, and they have been net losers in today’s America. So what happened? I discuss that and more in my new book.
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Epstein Breaks MAGA: The Newsletter
The Latest
Don’t forget to join me on Monday for The Cameron Journal Newshour to catch on everything happening in the world!
Trump, Epstein, and the MAGA Movement
Well, well, well, would you look at that? We finally found the thing that will make MAGA abandon Trump: transparency on Epstein. If you haven’t been following along with the story, there have been so many new developments. As we know, Jeffrey Epstein was infamous for being a human trafficker and providing underage people (mostly young women) to a certain class of people on an island (the house has been torn down). A rather odd job for a guy who had previous taught high school math. We know that his private plane was called, “The Lolita Express” (thanks Nabokov) and he was connected to everyone rich and powerful. We also know that he was finally arrested for these activities and “killed” himself in a New York City jail several years ago.
In 2024, Trump ran on the fact that he would release everything the government knew about Epstein and his highly illegal and dangerous activities. Not that he would admit to it now, but it was a big deal during the campaign. He whipped people into a frenzy, especially when the internet had turned Epstein “killing himself” into a joke because of the suspicious circumstances.
Over the past two weeks, AG Pam Bondi closed the investigation and they have not released the files. Congress voted to order them released, but Speaker Mike Johnson whipped the votes to stop it. President Trump has issued edicts vita Truth Social telling people to move on and even calling the whole case a “democrat hoax.”
Here’s the interesting part: popular MAGA commentators like Nick Fuentes and others have broken away from the MAGA movement and called Trump out for the lack of transparency and trying to sell everyone on the idea that there is no “client list” (which everyone wanted to get ahold of to track down those people) and everyone should move on. On Twitter, I’ve watched MAGA go into full meltdown about the case and sudden lack of candor from the Trump administration. The word “cover up” has been used along the way. Of course, all of these actions adds up to more curiosity and hype. The Wall Street Journal (hardly a liberal rag) published a letter Trump wrote for Epstein’s birthday book (a book of notes from friends that was created) in 2014. In the letter, Trump appears to joke about Epstein’s propensity for girls “on the young side.” Trump promptly sued them on Friday for over a billion dollars. Because that doesn’t look guilty at all.
To placate his followers, Trump has ordered Bondi to release “everything credible” and there is an rumor that she’s supposed to release everything but right now, the only thing we’re possibly getting is grand jury testimony and some evidence from the grand jury hearings.
One aspect no one is talking about, but we mentioned on The Living Joke, is the national security aspect of this. My guess is that all this information has major national security problems and that’s why Trump didn’t release it in his first time and the Biden administration didn’t even touch the case. Whatever is there it has to be bad, and it’s more than just Bill and Hillary Clinton and a few Hollywood A-listers. That being said, Kevin Spacey has called for its release, as has Alan Dershowitz.
I think this is a seminal moment for President Trump. 67% of Americans (according a Quinnipiac poll) support releasing the Epstein files. That’s a plurality of people across both parties. This is no longer about the files, it is about how powerful and connected people are held to account (or not) for their actions. Watching MAGA people step away from the movement, or at least from Trump has been interesting. We always wondered what would make them ever leave their devotion. It turns out it is this Epstein scandal. Fuentes even went so far as to say that we would look back at MAGA as the greatest scam, and that the democrats were right all along. That was a “wow” moment for me. I’ll keep an eye on this, and we’ll talk more about it on the Newshour on Monday.
Post-Law America and SCOTUS
As it turns out, according to the Supreme Court, you can abolish the Department of Education, but you cannot forgive student loans by executive fiat. As we know, Trump issued an executive order to disband the Department of Education. Over the past 6 months, this order has been tied up in court, both on the face and for the employees were summarily fired and then reinstated by district court and last week, SCOTUS handed the Trump administration a huge victory allowing the Trump administration to effectively end the department by letting people go from their jobs and reducing its budget without congressional approval. This is a major GOP victory, as Ronald Reagan first ran on gutting the department in 1980. Secretary McMahon and President Trump say that the department can fulfill its statutory duties with a fraction of the staff and budget and in an unsigned, late night order, SCOTUS has allowed this to happen.
The Department of Education funds many things, but most importantly it funds special education access for students throughout the country, and it funds civil rights protections for K-12 and higher education. It also provides funds to underfunded school districts. The department also used to administer federal grant and loan programs for higher education. Defunding the department and firing all the staff will leave the department in a state of ineffective disrepair. Rather than ending it, it will be reorganized out of existence.
The court has taken the country into interesting territory. From the outside, it looks like it is playing favorites between Republican and Democratic presidents. It also looks like the conservative majority is invested in making sure that President Trump’s agenda goes through in a way that they did not help the Biden administration. Overall, the situation doesn’t quite seem fair to all parties. President Trump has arrived in Washington again, and it appears that all the barriers he once faced to his agenda to rewrite life in this country have all come down and his agenda is steamrolling over society.
I am disappointed in how SCOTUS continues to enable him, and not just because I mostly disagree with the President but because all of this creates dangerous precedents in the future. If the courts will not defend the law, then who will? Congress is absent, and the courts are willing to go along with things. That is how you end up with a soft authoritarian dictatorship. You might have elections but what do they matter when the law has no teeth and people in authority are not forced to uphold it, even when times are tough, and we should hold it up even higher.
Immigration, ICE, and You
Thanks to the passage of the BBB, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now has $170 billion to deport anyone, anywhere, at any time or at least stash them at Alligator Alcatraz in Florida (despite the flooding). However, the other half of the story, covered pretty well by Rachel Maddow but not really reaching other corners is all the pushback from regular people when ICE shows up. I saw this post on Reddit with some video footage that was powerful. Someone has taken several Tik toks and stitched them together to show that when ICE shows up, people aren’t helping them or standing passively by, they are actively stopping the activities of ICE. I’m impressed, not because I don’t want to solve immigration, but because when faced with gangs of people trying to disappear people, all Americans have come together with once voice to say one very loud word: no.
Pulling back out from our debate on immigration, the fact that we have plainclothes thugs showing in American cities and grabbing people off the street for no other reason than racial profiling or other reasons is an affront, to our freedoms and especially to the Fourth Amendment which is a guard against exactly this scenario. Some people would point out that the prevention of illegal search and seizure is “for citizens” but that’s not how our Constitution works (it extends rights to all persons in our jurisdiction) and you can’t prove your citizenship if you’re being arrested and put in an ICE van. Indeed, this has already happened to some people. Personally, I keep my passport with me at all times now, but even that is not a perfect defense because they would have to care about looking at it first. If I get picked up, and they don’t look at my identification then it doesn’t do much good now, does it? I’m all for cleaning up our immigration issues (even legal immigration to some degree) but disappearing people is not how a civilized nation should behave.
Ultimately, this affects us all. Our citizenship and our rights are only as strong as our ability to defend them and our ability to hold authority to account for their actions. These days, it seems like those barriers, which we used to take for granted, are getting weaker and that leads to some rather frightening outcomes in the future ahead.
Interesting Video of the Week
https://youtu.be/dmpyV4Yf8b0?si=W4mFvmXDnBbs0e6y
Brightline, America’s premier private rail service, has been in the news lately for its many crashes and deaths on its service in Florida. Because it uses plenty of existing tracks and level crossings, there have been various incidences. However, that isn’t the only story here. It is often joked that America just can’t build high speed rail and the project in California is hailed as a disaster for the idea of rail (although the situation is more complex than that) but Florida of all places is building new tracks, offering new services and much more! In this video, we learn more about Brightline and its future plans for expansion.
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