All posts by robbo28

How Yemen Beat Ali Abdullah Saleh | Yemen Vs. Empire 5

I’m delighted to present the fifth episode in my “Yemen vs. Empire” trilogy(?)! And we’re not done quite yet. In attempting to document the war in Yemen we’ve all been looking at for the past decade, I realized there was no way I could fit it all into one video. So with today’s video we’re covering the final fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh, from 2011-2017. The next, and final, for sure this time, Yemen vs. Empire video will cover the conflict from the Saudi-Emirati invasion in 2015, down to the war’s end in 2022.

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China Is Getting Smarter

This one was fairly straightforward. It’s easy to get caught up in the roiling clusterbomb that is US foreign and domestic policy failure in 2024. But we should be paying more attention to what China is up too. On a lot of levels China is weaker looking than they have been in decades. The upward economic trajectory is slowing, and their demographics are apocalyptic. But they are still the second greatest power in the world, and they are just beginning to figure out what that can mean. And they are getting smarter. Very quickly.

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How Yemen Beat The United States | Yemen Vs. Empire 4

The war on terror contains horrors. Today’s video was almost two years in the making, but I think it’s worth the wait. To truly tease out the strands that have led to the mess that is today’s Yemen, I had to dive deep into the US war on terror in Yemen. It didn’t create today’s mess entirely, but it exacerbated it mightily. And as this video shows, it’s impossible to see what we did there as anything other than a ludicrous failure. Research for this video also led me to a review of the War on Terror in Somalia, which is, incredibly, even worse. I hope to get around to making a video about that one of these decades.

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What Peter Zeihan Gets Wrong About China

I will confess that I found this one to be a bit of a chore. I used to find Peter Zeihan’s over-the-top jingoism amusing as I poked holes in it, but after October 7th, it’s gotten a lot harder for me to watch his smug pro-American shtick. But you have to give the people what they want! And whoo boy do the people want Peter Zeihan analysis from me. This video’s predecessor, uploaded in March of 2023, is now my second most watched video ever, and my most watched video in five years. Here’s hoping that today’s video performs well. Very happy to move to other things after struggling with this video script for almost six months. Zeihan’s flaws afforded me the opportunity for some big picture rumination on the world order and the industrial revolution. I hope you enjoy the video!

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Whatifalthist Is Getting Desperate

These “YouTube Drama” videos are fun to produce. It sometimes seems a bit silly to be taking a 22-year old to task for his views, but the fact is that Whatifalthist is a 22-year old with a viewership of 100s of thousands. And these videos are very important for my channel. There was a recent survey on my discord server, asking how people first found my content. Most of them, the most committed members of my audience, found me through one of my critiques of other YouTubers. Here’s hoping this one does well! I don’t think I’ll be revisiting this particular creator any time soon.

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Argentina & Venezuela’s Big Lesson For US Empire

The recent trajectory of Argentina and Venezuela provides a very clear lesson to US empire. It’s as close as you can get to a natural experiment with countries. 20 years ago they were both stridently left wing members of the “Pink Wave”. Now things are very different. The lessons are clear. But is Washington, DC aware enough to see them? And does it want to? These are the questions we’re diving into with this produced video. Along the way we attempt to get beyond the cliches and explain all of the history of these two very different countries.

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The Cold War Ended In 1956

The channel has been doing rather well over the past couple weeks! Better than it has been doing for the past five years in fact, thanks to the success of a Peter Zeihan take-down video I did seven months ago. In an attempt to capitalize on this success, and keep it from slipping away. I’ve rushed out a produced video, with a completely new workflow. Rather than laboriously script out the video, I’ve simply taken a decent snippet from a recent conversation, and spent a couple work days whipping it into something produced looking. Let me know what you think!

If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click here to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.

US Empire’s Monstrous Fraud | MIC 33

I am pretty angry. All of the Middle East’s recent deaths, the 1,400 Israelis, and the 11,000 Palestinians, were preventable. It probably won’t surprise anybody much that I think it all ties back to the US Military Industrial Complex. There’s plenty of horror to go around this month, but one aspect that I think people are missing, is the way that Israel and Palestine’s catastrophe has allowed the MIC to conquer another US president. Todays’ video covers Joe Biden’s fall, as well as most of the rest of the history of the 21st century. Let me know what you think…

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Turkey Must Rein In Azerbaijan | Nagorno-Karabakh 4

This was a weird one. I had most of an unproduced video on Azeri threats to Nagorno-Karabakh put together already. Then this week Azerbaijan just reached out and conquered the Armenian enclave, much more quickly than anybody expected. The message had to be changed somewhat, but I think it just got a lot more important. It may seem absurd to look to Turkey to defend these put-upon Armenians. But sadly that’s all that’s left.

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Western Civilization is Just Big Government

Man, I’m really not a Libertarian anymore. I think this video makes it pretty clear. This video represents a lot of mental housecleaning on my part. I’m not entirely sure it is valuable, or even will make much sense to anybody else. I sure hope it does! Let me know. You may also notice a real stepping up in the amount of AI generated art I’m using. Not sure about the ethics of all that, but I do enjoy the creative possibilities…

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