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
Like most of America, the big snow storm that is sweeping across much of the midwest, southeast and up in New England is barreling down on us. If you’re reading this from Texas to Florida and up to Maine (and most points in between), you’re already under an assault of ice and snow. Some parts of the plains may reach -50F. We are supposed to have 6-12 inches of snow here. It is another reason to move!
In any case, if you were watching The Cameron Journal Newshour, you already know that my father, Wardell, McGee Jr. passed away on Monday last at the age of 78. He was being well-cared for and was surrounded by family. His funeral will be on the 30th of January in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It has taken me a few days to process what has happened. I didn’t meet my Father until I was 23 years old. My Mother rarely spoke of him. He was a mirage in my life until I found him in my early 20s. Our relationship, was therefore, rather short. His relationship with my Mother was only a year but you’re reading my words right now because of it.
Our relationship was somewhat distant. Fathers and Sons are rarely as close as mothers and daughters. I was glad that we had the talks that we did and spent some time together. He enjoyed The Cameron Journal and I will dearly miss him liking my social media posts or commenting on my videos. I haven’t deleted his number from my phone yet. It definitely threw me for a loop this week and what was supposed to be a productive week began with a call from his Lady telling me that he had gone home to rest with the saints. I’ve taken some time this week and friends have reached out so I’ve been on the phone often. Tonight, as I write this, I am reflective on a life lived and the complications of family.
However, the world has been oh-so-busy this week so let’s dive into the headlines.
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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!
2026 Midterms?
In this recent Substack post from Chris Hedges, Chris talks about how Trump isn’t going to be interested in having elections and if we have elections they will be rigged affairs to keep the “right kind of people” in power. Given that Trump has questioned the legitimacy of elections since 2020, it is no surprise that he likes to “joke” about canceling elections.
I can’t predict whether Trump will cancel elections but given the push to gerrymander certain red states to produce more congressional seats, I think they are planning to do what the GOP has been doing for the last 20 years: attacking who gets to vote, where people vote, by what method they vote, and how those people are represented.
Chris Hedges mentions this too that our elections will become farcical shows where votes don’t actually matter and the results can’t be trusted. For some, they feel like this is already the case. After 2020, many Republicans began to question the honesty of our elections. However, it is good to point that extensive investigations (including by Trump’s own campaign) did not find irregularities beyond normal and that elections are quite honest. Trump’s cases were defeated in court over and over again and some weren’t even heard due to standing. However, I’ve seen a similar energy from the Left about 2024 with conspiracies about Elon Musk’s Starlink and voting being used to question the 2024 election.
I’ll say it straight out: if we can’t trust elections then we have no democracy. And sadly that’s the kind of suspicion that Trump wants to cultivate. He has done so since November of 2020 and it is because it serves a purpose: anywhere a democrat wins can simply be said to be “fake” or “rigged.” Elections have no legitimacy and the basic foundation of democracy falls apart. Just like in 2020 and 2021, it won’t be every race, just a few, just enough to keep the Trump and the GOP in power and everyone else marginalized.
The mid-terms are a long way away. Who knows what will matter in November? Who knows if the election results will be believed if they are held. It is in moments like these that it is hard to think that we aren’t losing the country at some point. It is hard to not despair in these tough days. The big question is this: what do we do next?
Pete Hegseth’s Invitation to Prayer
I’ve been a media partner and outlet for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation for a few years now and every time a new article featuring them comes out I always check it out immediately. They fight everyday for the religious rights of our fighting men and women. So when I saw a piece about Pete Hegseth and an invite to prayer I was intrigued. I’ve written about the Christian Nationalist takeover of the armed forces before and I’ve talked about it on the show, however, I like to keep up on the latest efforts and this latest move is a big one.
In this article from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, they cover a situation where Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth sent out an invitation to the entirely of DoD (including contractors) that invited everyone to a half hour of prayer and Christian worship on 21 January at 1200-1230 hours in the Pentagon (that’s noon to half past for we civilians!). It was live-streamed on their internal TV channel as well and everyone was invited who had access to the building. Seems innocuous enough right? It would be but not in a government setting where religion is something that is supposed to be kept private.
From the article, “Hegseth’s critics aren’t all atheists or secular humanists. Many are Christians themselves, alarmed at what they see as the imposition of one narrow theological perspective on an institution that includes roughly 70 percent Christians among its active-duty personnel alongside substantial numbers of atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, and followers of Eastern religions.
“Hegseth is overstepping his boundaries, trying to become the denominational policeman for members of the military,” Reverend Justin Cohen, a Baptist chaplain, told The Daily Mail. One chaplain endorser, speaking anonymously, characterized the current environment as “the weirdest era we’ve ever seen when it comes to the chaplain system.”
Mikey Weinstein, the former Air Force JAG officer who founded MRFF in 2006, didn’t mince words. He called Hegseth’s moves “multi-generational damage to the US military” and “a tidal wave of unconstitutional destruction fueled by his fundamentalist Christian nationalistic arrogance and hubris.” MRFF represents over 100,000 military personnel, with 95 percent identifying as Christians.”
And the reality is that Hegseth has been on this path for quite some time. The article goes on to say that, “Hegseth recently shared a CNN video featuring those arguments on his social media, adding the CREC slogan: “All of Christ for All of Life.”
When CNN asked Wilson whether establishing CREC’s new Washington, D.C., church was part of a mission to turn America into a Christian nation, his answer was unequivocal: “Yes.” Wilson added: “This is the first time we’ve had connections with as many people in national government as we do now.”
Hegseth is devoted to the ideology of the late Dominionist founder R.J. Rushdoony, an extremist educator opposed to equal rights and human rights who was determined to eradicate secular public schools. On a Christian Nationalist podcast, Hegseth called for classical Christian schools to serve as “boot camps for winning back America” and an “educational insurgency” to “build” an “army” of young people who will rise up and obliterate liberalism, secularism, and intellectualism.”
When I first started writing about this seriously after meeting Mikey Weinstein at MRFF, I didn’t understand and the true nature of the problem. I had to learn and the reality is quite stark. I’ve watched stuff that was suggested for fringe people become the norm. Hegseth is being overt here and no one should take this lightly. Most people do not want to live in some kind of Christian theocracy where evangelicalism is the state religion. Our Constitution is supposed to expressly forbid that. By allowing this, Secretary Hegseth is prioritizing his own religion and trying to foist it on members of the Department of Defense.
I thought this bit at the end of the article was quite stark: “Weinstein framed the stakes starkly. ‘America first means one thing,’ he told GPAHE. ‘It means white first, male first, straight first, and not just Christian first, but Christian nationalist first.’ Christian nationalism is the jet fuel of MAGA,’ he added.”
If we value the separation of Church and State and the freedom of religion we have enjoyed for 250 years, this must be stopped. Regardless of how you feel about the present administration, these policies are not good for a free society.
The End of American Power
This week I was absorbed into this article from The Atlantic on the collapsing American-led Liberal World Order. It was a fascinating tour of a world without the US firmly at the helm and keeping things stable. The article goes over the history and the consequences of the Trump Doctrine. It is a good (but long) read that I recommend.
Last Monday on the Newshour, I aired a clip of a speech by Vice President J.D. Vance (congratulations to his wife, Usha for her new pregnancy!) talking about how globalization and a globalized economy has not been to the advantage of regular working people. TVs and consumer goods were cheaper but the price of everything else has risen and wages have been stagnant. He also points out that China and other nations have gotten rich off American off-shoring and have now developed industries and the US has much less industry than it used to have. This is on top of the expense of being the global police force and the expectation that the US will step in to solve the world’s problems in order for our global economy to function. For the everyday person, the math ain’t mathing.
I don’t like who is saying it but he’s not wrong. And now the Trump administration appears to be quite content to over see the dismantling of the rules-based, American-led, international order in favor of the chaos of multipolar power sharing with China and Russia where everyone has their own sphere and they negotiate everything among themselves.
It sounds neat, but as the article points out, Europe tried this between 1814 and 1914 and there were still 4 major wars over territory. So where does that leave us in 2026? Peter Zeihan has been saying that the US is not interested in protecting sealanes and that the global trading system that we’ve enjoyed will come to an end for that reason. That’s one side of the story. The other side of the story is that the US is tired of paying for all of this and providing the human bodies to keep it all running. Much like how the European powers, exhausted by World War II, decided that empire was too expensive to maintain, the US has reached its own stage of global exhaustion.
I don’t think anyone is prepared for the chaos of a world without a hegemon. One of the things that the article points out is how violent and how much conflict occurs in a multipolar world. Not every country is going to blithely going along with whatever Moscow or Beijing tells them to do. They are going to have their own ideas and compete with each other. This becomes a source of near constant conflict that disrupts trade flows, incomes, and destroys capital.
Prices of raw inputs (oil, sand, metals) will fluctuate wildly. There will be calls to start mining within the US. Environmental regulations may end up being torn apart. The legacy of 20th century industrial production is still being felt by Americans in cancer rates and disease. A return of dirty industries will create even more of those health outcomes. We’ll need universal healthcare to look after everyone.
But these conflicts also affect everyone on the planet. It causes massive upheavals of people and the resulting migration that can lead to genocide or worse. This roiling mass of violence and chaos will not leave the US untouched.
Decoupling from the planet is not an easy thing. We still live in a global village and now thanks to transportation links, the distance that used to protect the US from much of the world’s problems is shorter than it used to be. Defense spending will rise and the economic opportunity will shrink. Much of the US economy is predicated on being the world’s banker, its trading partner, and its clearing house. Stepping back from the world diplomatically will have consequences throughout society. For the average person, they will not care. I reminded someone that everything will be more expensive and they replied (with much sarcasm), “Oh no, people won’t be able to get a new phone every year, oh no!”
I will be interested to see if their attitude is so cavalier when that actually comes to pass. It’s not just phones and TVs that will become expensive. It’s everything, even food. There will be surpluses, shortages, and the standard of living will basically collapse. Everyone thinks that we’ll “just get back to basics” and “live within our means.” The reality will be much, much worse.
Fortunately, thanks to the present administration and how they are handling these trade imbalances that prioritize the wealthy over the working class, we will soon find out what it is like to live without a global economy and the benefits that it has brought us. I’m not a fan of globalization but even I’m not stupid enough to pretend that it hasn’t brought some advantages. The Biden plan to bring back manufacturing was much better and it was even starting to work. Biden moved too slowly and put union requirements on federal funds for new factories and development but the CHIPS act was a far better way of remaking the economy. Trumps’ ham-fisted tariff approach has done little more than to anger our allies and pass on a tax to the American people.
Surrendering American power (which everyone says is in decline) is going to have costs and consequences. The world will not snapback to the 1950s. It will be its own 21st century version that will look much different and be far darker than anything that has come before. I think the US will grow to regret this and when a major conflict does come, I hope that we will be able to survive it.
Articles of Interest
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