The Russia Hoax? The Newsletter

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 Tulsi Gabbard and her latest case against the Obama administration and how we got here. Why are we going back to 2016? That’s the topic this week.

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 Saturday everyone! This week was quite eventful. On Tuesday, I went to the beach for the day, and I really shouldn’t have been naughty and snuck out of my office. The sun, wind, and waves were delightful, but we did discover a man creepily photographing women at the beach with a large camera hidden under a hat! You hear about such things, but it is quite a different matter when you see it actually happen. My friend confronted him directly. I’m more of a “mind my business” guy, but I’m always there for my friends. He did not need my backup, but he had it if needed. I had fun in the sun, and it was great to get in the water, but boy did I get behind with everything else that happened.

I live in an old house and this week, our sink became electric! One visit from the electrician later, and we’re going to need to take out some of the wall in order to find which exposed wire is touching a pipe that it shouldn’t. My buddy went to the hospital to make sure his heart was still working properly. Talk about the body, electric!

So, that gets us to today. For those of you who tried to watch The Cameron Journal Newshour, there was an error with the audio so we made a great video with no sound. I think I figured out what happened, but that was a disappointment. We’ll be back on Monday.

Sign up for CameronJournal+

If you love these newsletters and want to support my work at The Cameron Journal, please consider signing up for CameronJournal+. You will get exclusive content for CJ+ subscribers, access to our Discord, and special hangouts with me. It’s the coolest club in town!

The Cameron Journal Academy is your home to write your book!

You can write a book in 2025, and I can help! My new writing courses are out now, and you can sign up for Fiction, Non-Fiction, or both! To learn more, please visit The Cameron Journal Academy and explore my course: The Power of Story.

P.S. If you aren’t ready to do a full course and want to work one-on-one, please take a look at my latest article about my writing coaching!

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.

The Latest

Don’t forget to join me on Monday for The Cameron Journal Newshour to catch on everything happening in the world!

Tulsi Gabbard and the 2016 Election

This week, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, came out with some rather interesting accusations of former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in a 45-page letter about the intelligence reporting in the aftermath of the 2016 election. A reader sent in this article explaining why Putin was supposed to want Hillary Clinton to win in 2016 rather than Trump. Part of that could be they thought Clinton would act in the same way Obama did (more on that in a minute). In her letter, Gabbard maintains that the Obama administration was using the intelligence community, who had concluded that Russia had not hacked election systems during the 2016 election, to undermine the incoming Trump administration. She maintains that Obama weaponized the intelligence community against the Trump administration.

In the 45-page letter, she lets all the skeletons out of the closet, including information about Hillary Clinton’s health and the fact she was on “heavy tranquilizers” and had a “thirst for power.” I thought that was fascinating enough. I think the reason the Obama administration continued their intelligence investigation right up to when they left office was due to the fact we did not have the full story. We did not know about the FSB or Cambridge Analytica and the influence campaign leveled against the American voter in 2016. We still don’t even fully know what the Chinese were up to, either. Not only that, but we also didn’t know all the interesting foreign ties that Trump campaign staffers had, and then there was the new posture about Russia from Trump that was strange indeed.

We lived through the years of the Mueller Report (which Bill Barr dutifully buried, just like how he protected Reagan from the fall out of Iran-contra in 1991) and we lived through the first impeachment. I will go along with the idea that Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler got out over their skis when it came to the Russia narrative, but the fact remains that the “Russia hoax” was a deflection on the part of Trump to cover up his inconvenient ties and actions toward Russia (remember Trump Tower Moscow? Or the Stockholm presser?).

The transition Trump took the Republican party through about Russia was a stark one. The GOP sported Reagan, who was the country’s biggest cold warrior. In 2012, people made fun of Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was the biggest national security threat. Romney wanted to increase military spending because we did not have enough ships and some other equipment, and Obama joked that we didn’t have much use for bayonets or horses these days. I’m not defending Obama. I voted for Romney in 2012. I think he was spot on.

However, it wasn’t just Republicans who were carrying water for Russia. Let’s not forget, Obama let Putin annex Crimea without a shot fired. The Obama White House was incompetent in the worst way. Valerie Jarette is the most incompetent political operative to enter the White House in American history, and David Axelrod is no better. Did Liberals get too smug for their own good? Probably. And nothing turns off the average voter faster than being condescended to.

The DOJ is already subpoenaing the Clintons over this new intelligence and over Epstein matters. Let me say this now, I will never defend the Clintons simply because of what happened in Mena, Arkansas (the drug running and human trafficking). There is an interviewing with DeLani Bartlette coming up on the show shortly called The Dumond Affair. She wrote a book about how Whitewater, the Lewinsky affair and the Clinton impeachment led to a serial killer getting released from prison by Mike Huckabee (father of Sarah, current governor) as a kickback for moving into the governor’s mansion in Little Rock. Anyway, the Clintons are more crooked than a $3 and everyone knows it. I still don’t know why she ran after 2008, there was always going to be too much baggage for America to accept her as President, and then there’s the whole Sanders affair within the DNC.

However, for all their faults (back to Axelrod and Jarette), Neither of those incompetent buffoons were working for Russia and Turkey under the table as agents of a foreign government without registering (among other problems). Meanwhile, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort are both guilty of that. Roger Stone was the only person to come out of the Watergate scandal (that’s how he got his start in politics, in the Nixon administration) and bragged about being involved to get jobs. He also started the Brooks Brothers riot that stopped the vote recount in Broward county during the 2000 election and was, at least in part, responsible for Al Gore concession and Bush winning the White House. He is a political provocateur (his words). Paul Manafort was chairman of the campaign, and he was a gun for hire for anyone with a check and had an already checkered history of whom he had worked for, even as a K Street lobbyist. Hardly the best and brightest, even as republican operatives go.

I think all of this new investigation comes down to a narrative that reinforces the “Democrats are evil and broke the country with the Russia hoax” which is a general feeling that can be grafted onto the Russia “hoax”, DEI, Woke, white male oppression and (insert any other thing Liberal people have advocated for here). I think much of this has to do with the fact that too many fringe groups were complaining a little too loudly for most people’s taste. The browns were complaining about racial inequality, suddenly Trans people are around and gender is no longer a given. There too many gays on TV, too many trans people in video games, too many women screeching about too much. Then there’s social justice warriors and woke and DEI and….and….and…

It all comes down to one thing: too many minorities complaining too loudly and (thanks to social media and doting tech companies) got too much public power, both in culture and in reality. And some folks couldn’t put up with that for very long. If there is one thing about this country that will never change is that a certain core group of Americans (among them wealthy political donors and people who support them) will not, under any circumstances, give up power. And that’s where Obama becomes quite an inconvenience (again, not his fan). Many Liberals thought we were going to have a “permanent revolution” after the election of Obama, but they weren’t counting on the pushback from people. That is how Trump got his political juice to run and win.

Let’s not forget how Trump got into politics in 2014-2015. He was pushing the birther conspiracy that President Obama was not a natural-born citizen and couldn’t/shouldn’t be president. No one before had to put up their birth certificate. As long as someone, somewhere knew they had been born somewhere in the US that was enough. Quite frankly, it was a bit of an insult that just because he was born in Hawaii that wasn’t “American enough” even thought Hawaii had joined the union just a few years before and has the distinction of being one of the few places in this country attacked by a foreign power. Hell, Ted Cruz was born of American parents in Canada and got his citizenship without naturalization on that basis and ran for president. Not a peep from anyone about that. That was how Trump decided to get into politics seriously (this time around anyway, he had toyed with the idea before).

But Obama had to be brown, and for some people that was simply a bridge too far. I will still maintain that Obama being elected broke America in ways we don’t understand. Trump’s political instincts are unmatched and he (along with Roger Stone who had been trying to get him to run for years before) decided that between Birtherism and anti-vaccine propaganda, that there was a market opportunity to do something. No one thought Trump would be taken seriously. And most folks didn’t think he would win (although I did start to figure it out in the summer of 2016, and I made a video about the zen of Donald Trump).

My point is this: as is so typical in American politics. No one’s hands are totally clean in all of this. There are multiple games being played at multiple levels. Things are getting serious, and the prosecutions of Trump and his associates did successfully radicalize a solid 40% of the country. Neither of our political parties are worth a damn, but I saw where the GOP was going in 2012 and jumped ship 4 years beforehand. I was a bit shocked that Trump rose to prominence, but I understood that one day there would be blowback, and I had written about it in 2014. In 2016, I knew that it was one of those times in history where you had to pick sides. I couldn’t sit on the fence forever. I had to choose. So, I chose in my best interest.

The GOP has rarely touched my concerns as a citizen, and I saw the conversations happening over among the Democrats that, I thought, was productive. I don’t often like defending these idiots, and often I spent more time criticizing them than praising them (which is true of many folks like me), but what’s the alternative? According to more than one account on X (formerly known as Twitter), I’m not a real American because I’m not a “heritage” American (which is really just code for white). I’ve watched public discourse devolve to various issues that I thought we had long left behind. And yet….here we are…unprecedented levels of social discontent.

People made fun of me for crashing out after the election but I still carry my passport with me in my handbag in the hopes that I have enough time and opportunity to attempt to use it to protect me even though I know it may not matter. I know that I may come under attention for criticizing the President. I don’t know if I can even travel internationally currently because I don’t know I could get back into the country given what is happening at the border. My German web developer/AI guru friend has told me I should try to come there, but I’m trying to hold out for our thing to come to fruition.

Back to Ms. Gabbard and her ruse. Trying to say Obama was undermining Trump’s first term and was causing a coup, that’s a distraction. Given the DOJ is off to speak with Ghislaine Maxwell and Bondi told Trump he was in the Epstein files, this all adds up to a giant distraction. It is all very convenient. And besides, as it was an official Presidential act, according to the Supreme Court, he’s immune (thanks Trump!).

Interesting Video of the Week

Most people don’t know this, but I’m into cars. I used to work for a car dealership, and I’ve driven/delivered exotic cars. I probably know too much about cars. I really like to study cars sold in other countries (even by American manufacturers) and in this video we get to explore the cars available to people during the Soviet period. Obviously, most Russians did not own a car and buying a car was expensive and took several years to deliver. When you see some of these cars, they will look….familiar. In typical Soviet style, they looked at what the West was doing and simply made a cheaper version. Some cars, like the Trabant (East Germany) were so cheap, the body wasn’t made of metal. It was made of essentially linen and epoxy to form a sort of plastic. However, they also made some interesting cars, mostly for the state and party members but interesting cars all the same. So in this video, we get to learn a little more about Soviet motoring!

Articles of Interest:

Millennials: Student Debt Shaped Every Life Decision

Keep up with The Cameron Journal Podcast

The Interview:

The Cameron Journal Newshour:

Unfortunately, there was an audio error on the Newshour this week and while there was a video, there was no audio. I’ll be back on Monday!

The Living Joke: