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.
Update from Cameron
Hello everyone! Welcome to the end of March. March is always a long month (doesn’t it seem to go on forever?) I’m going to keep my update short this week because I write about how I’m feeling about things at length below (keep scrolling for more!). I’m less than a month a way from turn 38, and so I’m heading into my birthday month, which is fun. Maybe I will do something fun on the show. It was a tough week this week with many new and exciting changes coming up.
I had some great conversations this week for The Cameron Journal Podcast, including speaking with Kanwal Rekhi about the rise of Indian immigrants in tech and with Candace Lynn Talmadge about the healing power of story (see what I did there?) and her Stoneslayer series of dark fantasy books. Look for those episodes coming up in April. If you haven’t subscribed to The Cameron Journal Podcast, you should.
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The News Narratives of the Week
Don’t forget to join me on Monday for The Cameron Journal Newshour
All Things Legal and Good
There is big legal and legal adjacent news this week: The Supreme Court is about to rule on the birth right citizenship Executive Order that President Trump signed last year. If SCOTUS decides to let his order stay in place, it will undermine the promise of the 14th amendment, and it will bring into question nearly everyone’s citizenship and allow the government to further define who is a citizen or not. Denying citizenship is a human rights violation which was created through international law after WWII due to the massive displacement of people in Europe and elsewhere who did not hold passports from the country where they were born due to laws that restricted citizenship. You can set rules on who is a citizen but it is against human rights to take citizenship away, especially just to repress certain people or populations.
Meanwhile, some lower level members of the Trump administration are afraid that they are going to get indicted after Trump’s second term in office. Some of us couldn’t notice that their reason for this fear is because of what happened to many members of the first Trump term. It didn’t keep them from voting for him or working for him. Interesting that.
I would also encourage you to read this fascinating Substack post from legal-maven Joyce Vance from MSNow (MSNBC) fame. She goes through the real results of the Mueller report and why Trump was certainly responsible for enabling Russian interference in the 2016 election and how much the campaign welcomed it (which we know from interviews with 2016 campaign staff and the Cambridge Analytica lawsuit). Those actions alone are damnable, and that doesn’t even get into the Jack Smith report and the fake electors scandal that was overshadowed by the January 6 riot at the capital. I’d like to say everything is coming apart on Trump, but we know there is much worse that can be done. I do think it is fascinating that the distraction from Epstein has taken the scales off some people’s eyes about him.
Some of us knew all along.
The Global Response to a Rogue US
It’s like when your parent finally loses it and goes crazy. The rest of the world is watching the US go rogue and destroy the international order it has been responsible for since 1945 and really in charge of since 1991. For many average voters, the juice was not worth the squeeze, and I understand that. With 800 military bases around the world and an economy hollowed by globalization (that has made a-lot of people but almost no one reading this newsletter rich), it makes sense that the average voter finally threw up their hands and said, “enough is enough.” But now we have to deal with the fallout of that decision.
But the rest of the world now has to contend with a country who still has a lot of power and find a way to respond to that country in light of that power. The US will likely end up weaker after a disastrous trade policy and the Iran war, but that will take time and the world has to take action now. There are much that nations can do, but the options are not terribly appealing. Some will “bandwagon” and get on board the crazy train for the side benefits of it (and the risks too, just as the Gulf states during the Iran war) and others will try to find friends on the outside to learn to live without the US and stand in opposition. More countries are going to have to do what Denmark did and simply say “no” to the various demands that the White House issues at all hours of the day and night. When threatened with invasion, Denmark sent troops to defend Greenland. The rest of the world can look forward to more moments like that. Much of the new trade policy is so simply route around the US whenever and however possible. China’s new payments system is already a demonstration of this routing. The EU has reached new trade deals with China and other countries in Asia-Pacific. That will continue to happen and is an important way to dealing with the rogue nature of the US. But ultimately, it will take time and patience for the world to really take on the changes that have happened over the past year and a half. For those that think this will be solved by voting out the Republicans in 2026 and 2028, the level of institutional destruction by DOGE and other administrative changes by the Trump administration will take decades to fix.
The present is the new world that we are living in; everyone had better get used to it.
The Existential Horror of Now
In the middle of writing this, I stepped out for more caffeine and I got to talk with my co-host on The Living Joke (watch Wednesdays at 4 or see last week’s episode below!) about how screwed up everything is. He has been applying for jobs recently (until we get to be famous podcast stars) and has finally gotten some break through past the ATS systems and rewriting his resume every time using AI to tailor it to the job posting and using the right keywords. We both commiserated about how dumb the entire system of finding a job is now.
With 80% of companies posting “ghost jobs” and nearly 20% of jobs being those ghost jobs, applying through job boards, once a reliable way to find a new job, has turned into a competition to be seen in search….like a webpage on Google. If your resume SEO isn’t good enough, then you’re just out in the cold. It has nothing to do with who you are or your story or what you have done. It’s all down to whether you can package up the right set of words in a computer so that the computer will pick you to display to a human who might talk to you about a job. And you must do all of this for a job that you need to continue to live. That’s rather absurd, isn’t it?
I’m a little farther advanced in my career, and I’ve spent most of my life as a full-time working artist, and that has left my resume with holes you could fly a jetliner through. Now that I’ve had executive roles, applying for jobs is basically pointless, it’s all about networking. I recently sat in a meeting with some other executives and people of similar experience and many of them had come from Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 companies, and we were sitting there with Kurt Phelps of Phello, and he was telling everyone that no one would hire us for executive roles without knowing us first and that our way to get consulting, fractional roles, or new jobs was to network with all the people that we know. I appreciate his advice to hustle, and I’ve been a hustler all my life, so I’m used to it in a way that most other people are not. I was torn apart watching the faces of these men, diligent workers who had put in years and decades at companies, finding themselves in this new world and looking like deer in the headlights. I walked away from the meeting unable to work, write or think. It was a horror too awful.
And that’s the point of this final column, this is less of a news column and more of a plaintive observation, we live in a time of existential horror so great it cannot be considered for very long without some unfortunate thoughts. We live in a time that is so broken that regular people cannot find jobs and are forced to bend themselves backwards to please machines and system that companies setup to filter all the resumes that they get simply because it is too easy to post a job and too easy to get applications from around the country and the world. Everyone is competing with everyone, everywhere, all at once. I talked about this a little bit in America’s Lost Generation when it comes to dating (another horror of our times) and economically. I’m not going to get into that now (you can read about it in the book!) but that is the reality of our times.
We all see how the system is breaking down. Enshittification is everywhere, from the products you buy to the job you need to buy those products. Everything is awful everywhere. Cars are expensive and expensive to fix. Housing is expensive now. Wages are flat, entertainment is terrible (for a variety of reasons) and that doesn’t even touch politics. Prices since the pandemic have stayed high, more things are locked up behind glass due to theft, and it seems like no one has an answer to any of this. Why do we have to bend ourselves into pretzels to get a job? Why are we basically making AI write a resume so that AI can read it? It’s like Zizek saying that the perfect sex is two people having their sex toys interact so that they can have sex having fulfilled the safety part. That metaphor is being used for everything. Healthcare is too expensive and delivers too little. Everything has become a race to the bottom in an attempt to survive. We keep taking hits over and over again. The system abuses the people working within it. That is the true horror of our time.
And the fact that there is no resistance and no one is standing up to say, “NO” is the most disturbing part. Everyone just keeps taking the hits, over and over again. When will everyone stand up to these systems and say, “We aren’t doing this anymore!” Unfortunately, I also know a good reason why: in a competitive system like we live in, there is always someone willing to take a deal or do something because “at least it’s a job” or “at least I’ll be ok.” And that’s the genius of modern life in this country.
My Mom always said that unions died when Reagan broke the back of the Air Traffic Controllers union, who went on strike in 1983 and banned from federal jobs for life. The message of the moment was clear: you strike and complain, you will be ruined. And while that hasn’t stopped significant labor action, it told people a story that if they wanted to survive, they can’t be too loud, complain too much or cause too much trouble for fear of ruination.
Any sense of solidarity has been so bleached out of everyone that resistance only hurts the people resisting. Even if half the country decided to stop applying to jobs using ATS, the other half should shrug their shoulders, apply anyway and be happy that there are fewer applications. I would venture to guess most people are frustrated with day to day life in this country, but most people, whether consciously or unconsciously, understand that if they stand up and resist, the opportunity will simply go to someone else, and they will be left out in the cold. Just like those air traffic controllers.
And that should scare the living hell out of you. We can’t demand decent healthcare, schools, and infrastructure because resistance truly is futile. No matter your political affiliation, the system so controls our lives and our very survival within it that we are powerless to stop social media companies from poisoning our minds, food companies from poisoning our food and AI from poisoning our souls (and our job searches). Nobody voted for AI, it simply occurred. No one voted for social media, and yet, it occurred. No one votes on many things that affect our daily lives, we simply accept them as reality and try to find our place within the new paradigm, hoping that we will continue to survive. What is the point of living in an advanced civilization if we cannot tailor it to our needs? If it doesn’t serve the people living in it, then who does it serve? What is the point of doing it anymore? What is the point of anything anymore? If we cannot thrive, and we cannot fulfill the promise of the human spirit, then everything we do is for nothing.
That sinking feeling you have in your chest late at night, in the quiet hours, that everything is wrong and that the system is breaking you is real. No one wants to say this, but I’m notorious for saying things no one else will say (it’s my thing).
That feeling is real. Our world is a horror.
Articles of Interest
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The Living Joke:
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. If you’d like to explore what The Cameron Journal can do for you beyond the news, just reply to this newsletter and we’ll connect you to the team.
Remember, The World is Hard, This is Not.
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