RIP US Forest Service| The Cameron Journal Newsletter
This week on The Cameron Journal Newsletter we're talking about Trump's address, the destruction of the Forest Service and how desperation leads to fascism.
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
Happy Weekend everyone!
Such a long week and with such shifting weather! We’ve been more hot and cold this week than someone going through menopause, perhaps the planet is middle-aged? In any case, things have been busy. I’m working on a new initiative called Cameron Journal Salons, it’ll be free to Cameron Journal+ members and a small ticket fee for everyone else. I will be bringing together the best of the guests of The Cameron Journal together for some great panels and conversations. So that’s exciting, and I will be looking forward to presenting this to you all.
If you celebrate Easter, I hope you have a lovely Easter and a great week.
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The News Narratives of the Week
Don’t forget to join me on Monday for The Cameron Journal Newshour
Iran and Trump Trade Messages
President Trump addressed the nation this week regarding the war in Iran to little fanfare. It barely made the news anywhere for longer than a day. But that is because I don’t think the American people were the intended audience. Trump walked out of a meeting to fire Attorney General Pam Bondi this week and straight to the podium to report on the war in Iran with information everyone already knows. I think the message was really for Israel to give them a signal: it’s time to wrap it up because the mission has been accomplished, no really, the mission is over.
Interestingly, Iran also fired back, not to Trump but straight to the American people with a letter this week that explained some history of Iran, its people and its relationship to the United States. The message is clear: you’ve been the aggressor in our relationship, and we harbor no actual ill-will towards you. I think the point of the letter was also clear, “This is not your war.” And to that point, it was revealed this week that Israel was even funding Hamas to the tune of $35 million a year. This doesn’t surprise me at all, given that Hamas provides most of the social services for Palestinians and the leadership in Qatar is a crafty bunch.
But the message is clear: there really isn’t a reason for this war but for one player: Israel. And no one is talking about the drone incursion at Barkesdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
Trump Guts the Forest Service
More Than Just Parks is reporting that this week the Trump administration is making significant changes to the National Forest Service that will affect the 193 million acres of protected, national forests. The headquarters are being moved to Salt Lake City (the center of the anti-public lands movement) and the regional offices are being shut down in favor of “state directors” and the research arm of the service is being eliminated entirely. The language used is bland and bureaucratic in nature focused on efficiency and trimming the budget bloat. However, as someone who grew up out West, I know exactly what this is for: it’s to get ahold of public lands.
The reality is that public lands are rich with resources. The whole point of the National Forest system and the National Park system was to preserve certain portions of the country for future generations so that the entire country would not be merely used for the enrichment of a few. It was the crown jewel of the progressive movement of the early 20th century. It had an environmental purpose long before we had that word or worried about what we were putting in the air and water. The forest service in particular was there to manage the interaction between forests and human in the western part of the country and that included fighting fires and keeping forests healthy. There is much controversy around the way we manage forests, but the point was to save some of this vast country for its own sake, not just commerce.
After 121 years, that commitment is coming to an end. Logging companies would love to harvest national forests, same thing with mining companies. What we see as a national and shared public resource for them is dollar signs. The reality is that with a trimmed down Forest Service, they pressure to open up public lands for extraction will grow almost right away and soon little buts of national forest will be opened up, a project here, a pilot there and pretty soon the national forest system will be much less about preservation and more about making the remotest and least interfered parts of the country available for logging and mining.
If you want to dig into the details and how this is similar to what happened to the Bureau of Land Management (which is the enemy of every farmer and rancher west of the Mississippi) then I suggest you click on the link above. This is yet another way in which the system we are used to living in is coming apart at the seams.
The Secret Ingredient to the Rise of Fascism: Desperation
I saw this tweet this week between David Pavlou and another person who refers to themselves as Ben Shapiro’s Biceps. He had remarked that he liked another account but they had TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and Ben Shapiro’s Biceps remarked that David Pavlou used to be a liberal who had gone over to MAGA because he could grift and that he used to have principles. Why am I bringing this tiny bit of internet gossip to your attention? To make a greater point of course, I always wondered what caused the Germans to drift over to fascism (which they did not invent, that honor goes to Mussolini first) when it seemed like they were the least likely people in Europe to go in that direction. I read the books, I read and watched the movie about Hannah Arendt. I was a litany reader for Holocaust Memorial Day. I watched the documentaries and read the commentary, but was still unsatisfied. Until now. The answer is quite simple: desperation.
When people get desperate enough for change or something to break through or to improve their lives, they will slowly start to listen to anyone who offers a solution. And this takes time. Remember, Hitler was not successful in his first coup attempt in Munich. He ended up in prison for the back half of the 1920s instead, where he wrote Meine Kampf (which is on the official reading list). As it turns out, he just needed to wait for things to get bad enough that instead of attacking the government, they would just welcome him in, as they did in 1933.
In the 12 years he was in power he managed to kill millions and turn a society of openness and acceptance with the largest Jewish population in Europe into a hell for anyone who didn’t fit into his race ideology. Homosexuals, people with mental health issues, Roma, Jews, and communists were all eliminated under his regime and people didn’t merely accept it, they cheered for it. The reason is not complicated: they were so desperate for a functional society that they accepted it, slowly at first and more quickly after. Don’t forget, Hitler put Germany back to work in factories to build his war machine. He improved people’s lives with massive building projects that created new jobs and people had grown so desperate that they did not care that the those jobs came at the expense of marginalized (or about to be marginalized) groups in their society or that it would lead to a war that would leave their entire country devastated. Stop me when any of this starts to sound familiar.
I had long wondered what it was like to live in the 1930s Germany. What was the mood, what was the atmosphere? Why did no one really push back against this until it was too late? Where did that attitude of quiet resistance that hid vulnerable people come from? I don’t wonder anymore because we are all living in it. I don’t know that we’ll end up in the same place, but we certainly nailed the desperation of the American people.
The United States has slowly, but surely, been hollowed out enough that people have grown desperate enough for opportunity that they were willing to elect a reality TV show host to the highest office in the land. It was the desperation that was the story all along. That’s why the media could never figure out Trump voters. They weren’t looking for the quiet story underneath, and it was this: the quiet desperation of a country that didn’t know how they were going to get ahead. We can trace these trends back to neoliberalism and the rise of shareholder capitalism (read America’s Lost Generation for more on that).
What can we learn about this? People have to be looked after in society, they have to have buy-in, and they have to believe that they can get ahead. They have to believe that society is working for their benefit and that they will be ok and when that is broken, and it has been broken in the US for 45 years, people start to get desperate. They will try various candidates and ideas and if none of them work then eventually, someone will come along and offer a dangerous solution, and they will take it because “at least he does something.”
Articles of Interest
I just updated the official movie list here
How to make the city apartment work for you
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A new housing trend: Live, Work Play
Keep up with The Cameron Journal Podcast and The Living Joke
The Interview:
The Cameron Journal Newshour:
There was no newshour this week due to personal reasons.
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.