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 there from sunny New England!
Today we are all learning to live in a world without Chuck Norris. A karate master who made his way in popular action series and my grandma’s favorite show, “Walker: Texas Ranger.” Fun Fact: Duke Sandefur, friend of the show and father of my friend Griffin who passed recently, was a writer on that show. I was tangentially attached to Mr. Norris and Duke got to work with him for years on that show and met his current wife on that show. Speaking of deaths, news just came across the wire that Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who looked into Trump’s “collusion” with Russia and his finances (among other things) in his first term, died this morning due to complications from Parkinson’s. President Trump was not kind on X (formerly known as Twitter) and remarked that it was a good thing and that he couldn’t hurt innocent people anymore. That’s certainly…a perspective.
Nick Shirley has made waves this week for posting a new 40-minute video exposing fraud in California for daycare centers that have no children but receive state dollars. The comment section in the twitter version of the video is quite interesting. It isn’t quite the slam dunk that it was for Minnesota. I really want to find out who is funding him. This doesn’t just happen, and he seems to be able to go around doing this. He could be self-funding his journalism (I’m self/reader supported) but I smell an agenda.
This week, I’m happy because I got my city on Cities Skylines to work again, which means there might be streams coming up soon on The Living Joke! I had so many great interviews this week with Frank Spring where we talked about the current political environment and what democrats are getting wrong. I spoke with Frank Graham as well, and we had another live with Zolal Habibi about Iran (posted below!) I talked to Celina Mattocks about the future of AI too. Keep an eye out on The Cameron Journal Podcast for those episodes coming up!
Anyway, let’s get 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
The End of the PetroDollar?
As the Iran War drags into its fourth week, Japan announced today that they are buying oil in Yuan from Iran. Japan imports all their oil (they have none of their own) and so for them, it wasn’t really an option. Iran is only letting oil, whose trade is being settled in Yuan, through the straight. The next question will be how long before other Gulf states start selling oil and gas in yuan just to get something moving again. Given that they are already rationing gas for the public in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia, Iran just gave the world a way to get out oil and without dollars. How long before other nations take on the same offer.
This could mean the end of the petrodollar as we know it. Since the end of the 1973 oil embargo, the big oil producers have agreed to sell their oil denominated in dollars, and this has secured the dominance of the US dollar in the world market. Anyone who wants to buy oil must maintain massive reservers of dollars to do those transactions. For the US, this has meant it has been easy to sell US debt and we’ve been able to export much of our inflation to the rest of the world instead of dealing with the massive dollar printing in our own economy. Now, thanks to the Iran war, the whole system that has undergirded the US economy is up for question and debate.
There have been various sensational articles about the “end of the dollar” and the “end of the petrodollar” in various shady newsletters and the less reputable parts of the internet for years, but this is very real. Iran is letting ships pass through the Straight of Hormuz, as we speak, as long as the oil is being traded in Yuan. If this continues, up to 20% of the world’s oil will have to be traded in Yuan simply to move through a 22-mile wide patch of ocean.
It looks like the war will continue for several more weeks. Strikes at Diego-Garcia, the joint US/UK base have occurred today. Overnight, the US strikes around 8,000 targets. A friend of mine in Kuwait posted videos of the sirens in Kuwait last night from Iran strikes. Iranian strikes continue across the Middle East and in Israel, where things in Tel Aviv have gotten quite dire. The world was suspicious when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son stopped tweeting, and he seemingly disappeared for a few days only to pop up on Friday in newly released footage.
The Private Credit Market
There’s a bit of a crisis in the private credit market. I’ve been following the story and hearing rumors for some weeks. Blackrock, recently restricted withdrawals from its fund due to investors fleeing private credit.
Now, for those who don’t understand, private credit, as the name indicates is a market for lending money outside of banks. Companies like Blackrock, take money from investors, including from retail investors (non-accredited) and loan it to companies on terms, investors get better yields, but there are requirements on the liquidity of that money (when investors can withdraw money from the fund). Blue Owl has ended its quarterly liquidity payments to investors as loans in the sector start to go bad and not pay out on time. Stopping payments prevents the fund from going underwater (they owe more to investors than they have cash on hand). Banks can have more money loaned out than capital because they can borrow from other banks, borrow from themselves or borrow from the Fed Reserve to meet short-term liquidity needs. Indeed, most banks “sweep” depositor accounts every night and loan the money out overnight to make a little interest. The loan ends by the next morning, so when we all wake up and go to buy coffee or order breakfast, our money is available to spend.
Private credit companies don’t have access to the Fed window and banks will hesitate to lend money to a fund that’s having a liquidity crisis, so these private credit funds have to be far more careful about their reserves of cash than a regular bank. That’s part of their appeal. By the way, banks also have these facilities. J.P. Morgan has a private credit division, and they have recently reduced the value of some loans to private credit due to market changes, especially in the tech sector. This means that they think the risk has gone up, and the loans might not pay back. Most banks will not lend into a liquidity crisis unless they are planning on buying the fund and gutting, leaving investors out in the cold or with getting pitiful returns on capital.
Why am I telling you about this? The private credit market is massive. There is 2 trillion in loans and capital floating around in private credit markets. If enough of these loans go bad and people start losing money, then we could be facing a 2008-style crisis here soon and the government will be loathed to do anything about it. Indeed, the Fed will have very little power to do anything about it. We are already printing money and because these funds aren’t banks, the Fed doesn’t really have any authority. These losses could spread throughout the economy, and companies may be forced to pay back these loans early if these funds start to collapse. It also could be tied up in court for years as investors sue the funds for money and the loans hang in the balance.
This week the Federal Reserve kept rates steady because of the softening job market, we printed strong jobs in Q1, but the revised 2025 numbers were way down. Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, mentioned it in his presser after the Fed meeting in Washington. If you feel like the job market sucks, even the Fed is admitting that while unemployment remains low, they are seeing a soft job market and felt that keeping rates steady was the move for now. Powell did not give much in forward guidance on interest rates. His term as Fed chair ends in May.
I’ve been watching this story because a failure in private credit could lead to a systemic event where if these funds start crashing because companies can’t pay, despite the flexible terms and high rates, all banks will be exposed. The potential crisis could be bigger than housing in 2008. And we’ll go through all the same things: millions laid off, houses foreclosed, which will trigger other products to not pay either and it becomes a domino effect. So far, it’s isolated, but we’ve all been here long enough to know that it will easily spread. Analysts are already raising alarms and given the volatility in markets and how the global economy is shifting under our feet due to the war in Iran and other factors, a front in our ongoing polycrisis is not far off. I will monitor and report back with news as things develop.
Erika Kirk, the Air Force Academy and the Duggars
This week, President Trump announced that he was appointing Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, to the board of the Air Force Academy. She has already said that she wants to bring “bold, christian faith” to the Air Force Academy and to the troops. This is another chapter in the ongoing Christian Nationalist takeover of the armed forces that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been fighting against for years. On top of that Jonathan Larsen covered the poster of Jesus firing a mortar that was found hanging in a battalion headquarters this week.
Another one of the Duggar children (Joseph) has been accused of abusing children. He is 31 now but has confessed to abusing a 9-year-old when he was 25. His brother is serving 12 years for molesting his sisters. Someone posted a passage from the Institute of Basic Life Principles this week that condones abuse. As someone who went to an introduction event for IBLP and knows this stuff well, it was an unwelcome blast from the past.
What does this all mean? I will use plain language. Nobody wants to live under a Christian Fundamentalist theocracy. Flat out. Women’s rights will be non-existent. LGBTQ rights will be gone too. And civil rights for racial minorities won’t be far behind, we’ve already seen this with challenges to interracial marriage winding their way through the court system.
This is a religion that blames children for their abuse. If you grew up in an abusive household, they would gaslight into telling you that it is your fault. If you’re a married woman who is in an abusive situation, they would tell you to stay and submit to your husband’s leadership under his “umbrella of protection” (and yes, that’s exactly how they put it). It is a world where a man is the head of the household, and he only has to answer to church and god for his actions. And these people want our entire society and government to be remolded into this view of the world.
I would rather not live in a society based on the very real world that I grew up in. I’m grateful that my parents don’t believe this way anymore and have left the church, but there are millions more who are signing up for this and these people have outsized power in the GOP and once Trump is gone, they will take over the GOP, and they will actively work to implement these policies. If you don’t believe me, I will remind that 50% of Project 2025 is already completed.
Vote accordingly both in 2026 and 2028. But take it one step further, we’re going to need to mobilize on this too. Join local organizations, protests, and other groups to stop this from happening. You can donate to MRFF to help to continue the fight in the military. If this isn’t on your radar, it should be. It is already creeping in society and if we don’t do something, the Handmaid’s Tale will not be a cool show in TV, it’ll be our daily reality.
Articles of Interest
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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
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