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’re talking about Israel and Iran, the Trump administration’s latest legal setback 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
Here in New England, we finally got the summer time, sunshine download for our region. We’ve been experiencing clouds and rain since spring, but this week we hit 90 for the first time, and now we’re having a heatwave. Just as it never rains, it pours, it also seems to work the same way with sunshine now, too.
Thank you to everyone who sent me such lovely feedback from last week’s crash-out regarding community and the people you have around you. I learned a great deal from everyone, and I appreciated the encouragement from each and every one of them.
Meanwhile, this week was relatively quiet in the news. Some people have pointed out that last week we had a political assassination, and we’ve already moved on. That’s mostly because no new information has been released about the gunman or the condition of State Senator Hoffman and his wife. In any case, as I said in January, we are in “the time of lead,” and I don’t think we can do much to escape it now, and there is little political incentive to calm heads and temperatures.
Chairman Powell signaled that interest rates are probably staying steady as they wait for the effects of Trump’s trade war to really take hold and see how inflation will be with extra taxes on most goods and rising prices. We’ll get an official decision in July. Let’s turn to the other headlines.
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America’s Lost Generation
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The Latest
Don’t forget to join me on Monday for The Cameron Journal Newshour to catch on everything happening in the world!
Is It World War III Yet?
I always love it when That Intel Guy (a previous guest on the show and a popular TikToker) starts his videos like that. Everyone is convinced that World War III is starting. It seems like it based on the current state of international relations, but the reality is that the Great Powers are not interested in any protracted conflict. We are living in the world as conceived by Samuel Huntington in 1992, where we have lots of small conflicts breaking out around the world. In a world without a dominant hegemon, and one could argue that right now the US is in retreat and China has not yet risen, these conflicts break out everywhere. Right now, the big story is Israel and Iran.
This week, Israel and Iran exchanged more missiles as Israel strikes their nuclear sites and Iran responds by striking installations around Israel. Iran’s missiles are getting bigger and more sophisticated. There are videos of the Iron Dome consistently failing to stop the missiles incoming from Iran. Twitter even has Iran booster accounts that are trying to show that Iran is a modern and normal country and not a backwards theocratic hellhole. The Crown Prince of Iran (who would be Shah if the monarchy were restored) posted a video this week as well, encouraging people to overthrow the Ayatollahs. So, is regime change in Iran possible? And before that, another question looms over us: will the US join Israel? Today, 2 B-2 bombers moved to a forward base in Guam, which is the ideal location for the bombing to take place.
Have We No Shame?
This article popped up for me. It’s from Public Notice, a substack that tracks the courts, and in this case, the judge ruled that the Trump administration had been discriminatory against racial minorities and LGBTQIA+ people in their cancellation of grants with the National Institutes of Health. The quote that stood out to me is the title of this section: “Have we no shame? No, your honor, the Trump administration has no shame whatsoever, especially when it comes from undoing ‘woke’ and ‘DEI.”
One of the big thrusts of the MAGA movement in 2024 was anti-woke and anti-DEI, and the Trump administration put up some early “wins” on the board by throwing trans people out of the military and in other areas of government. He issued an executive order defining gender as the biological sex defined at birth, just to put a neat cap on the new direction in policy. It is an interesting time that we have to make that sort of thing government policy.
On this subject, the administration does not have any shame, and the reality is that being trans or even LGBTQIA+ (to some lesser degree) is like being a communist. Part of the country wants these people removed from public life so we can go back to the way things were: having LGBTQIA+ people quietly existing but not being visible, certainly not on a day-to-day basis. In government, this means a certain amount of purging. LGB might be able to fly under the radar, but TQIA+ is going to face increasing pressure. But good on this judge for calling it out.
Interesting Video of the Week
Of the great conflicts I studied back in 2009-2011 for my degree in international relations, two of them are currently underway: a Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war against Iran. That leaves the third one that I always feared, China vs. US over Taiwan. In this week’s interesting video, we get an insider look at the possibilities of that conflict from Sarah Paine at the Naval War College. Her perspective is fascinating, and I encourage you to watch her other videos on these topics.
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