AHCA has failed! But what does this mean for Donald Trump? My suspicion is that this is what Trump and Bannon wanted all along. My roommate Ray disagrees with me strongly. We’ve decided to bet on the outcome. I think some kind of broader coverage Trumpcare plan will come out within the next six months. Ray disagrees. The loser will be forced to endure some form of social media shaming. What do you think that should be?
Indonesia is an extraordinary country, and it’s doing very, very well. But the only time we seem to hear about it in the United States is when somebody is whining about Sharia law. This video clears up the record on both counts. It documents the country’s incredible success, and points out how Aceh’s adoption of Sharia law isn’t anything to freak out about, and may even be a useful model.
Sharia law is a fascinating topic. If you watch Fox News you may have the sense that it is some lock-step box of evil that you can plug into a country to turn it into Afghanistan. In fact it means something different in every place it has been implemented. The Saudi Arabian version we are most familiar with is quite rare. Some countries treat it as an additional source of law. Some use aspects of it for family law issues. Some try to keep it in mind when drafting some aspects of their law. Having a special fear of “Sharia” makes about as much sense as having a special fear of the Code Napoleon. And No, it’s not coming to the United States any time soon. 99.9% of the public discussion of this issue is just idiotic. My hope is that this video is part of the .01%
One quick programming note. In the video, when I correct the Breitbart headline I’m actually wrong. A version of Sharia has been applied to all of Aceh province, which amounts to 2% of the population of Indonesia. In the video I corrected the headline to reflect that. But the article appears to actually talking about the North Aceh Regency, which has a population of 500,000 not 5 million. So
Steven Pinker talks about the “expanding circle of empathy”. Today’s video is an exercise in that. The concept, as I understand it, goes something like this. When we were all living in caves, we looked out for our family and that was about it. As societies develop, the circle of empathy expands. We look out for our tribe, our city, and over the past couple hundred years or so we’ve begun to see entire nation states as “our people”. Many of the challenges and victories of the past couple decades can be explained through this concept. Fights over everything from civil rights for other races and orientations, to environmentalism and animal rights are generated by differing ideas of the circle of empathy.
I’m generally a fan of expanding the circle. As I get older and crustier, I’m sure to object to stuff new generations come up with, but as of 2017, I’m pretty down with most expansion efforts. There’s one in particular that I try to get out ahead of. I spend a lot of time thinking about geopolitics. So much of what is written on the topic in the US fails to see things from the other side. It’s not that I’m not patriotic, it’s just that I think US interests are better served when we understand how other people are feeling. An expanding circle of empathy is a good in and of itself, but there’s also a utility there.
This video started off within one circle of empathy, and ends up in a broader one. Empathy is hard. The makers of Kong: Skull Island may have worried about the first circle, but as their actions and this video show, they put zero thought into the second.
Everybody loves Silicon Valley. I do too! They are building the future etc. etc. But when we set out to build a constituency for Globalism they present a real challenge. Disrupting things is nice, but if this past election taught us anything it’s that people are feeling just a bit too disrupted. A populace that is losing economic ground to a changing economy isn’t going to get excited about Amazon or Facebook’s commandeering of larger and larger slices of the economy.
We talk a lot about bubbles when it comes to politics. But they apply to economics too. If you’ve got a college education and a great job, it’s likely that you and your friends delight in the ease and convenience of every new service and app. Many outside of privileged circles do as well. But they’re just as likely to feel left out as their prospects steadily fade in the new economy.
People should be working to build the future. And not just to make money off of it. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took a crack at it recently. His manifesto has some interesting ideas, but it was disconcerting how closely it aligns what is good for the world with what is good for Facebook. We need to build a better, safer, more free world. Silicon valley is vital, but the Globalist effort can’t be left to Tech Utopians looking to make a buck. All we’ll find in that direction is dystopia and more electoral disaster…
I’m honestly not sure how serious I am about this one. But I am sure that our current party system is broken. The Republicans and Democrats simply don’t represent the true tensions of 21st century living. I’d like to use the discussion of Globalism to pick apart what parties that actually represented opposite sides of a discussion might look like.
“Globalist” as it stands now is mostly a term of abuse. It’s a catch all term used to describe the “transnational elites”, and depending on the flavor of conspiracy you prefer it can refer to the UN, the Elders of Zion, or telekinetic space lizards. The only people who take the term seriously are nuts. I think that’s a missed opportunity. In fact, “Globalist” is a neat way to describe one of the positions on the most important question posed by globalization: How do we strike the right balance between sovereignty and connection?
To what extent should each country cooperate with other countries? Where should the lines be drawn? What is international law? Where does each country draw the line? These questions are fascinating. On many issues I think Sovereignty should be respected more. But I also know that a country has to make allowances to international consensus if it wants to compete in the 21st century.
I can’t claim to have the answers here. I’ve got some thoughts. But we don’t discuss this stuff enough. The decisions just seem to get made, while the two major parties run around arguing about guns, abortion, and the methods we should use to bomb other countries into the stone age. The important conversations on globalization and sovereignty get left to cranks like Alex Jones. That’s too bad. The current plight of the EU should be a cautionary tale. For too long the folks in charge assumed that they could just get on with European integration, without really making the case for it. Well there are new folks in charge in the UK now… We can’t afford to leave this discussion to the nationalists and the cranks. With this series I hope to elevate the discussion a bit.
Remember the too big to fail banks? They are still a problem. I don’t know when the next crisis is coming, but it’s inevitable. Too many of the problems at the root of the 2008 crisis have never been solved. This video lays out how Dodd Frank made everything worse. But it has created a situation that won’t be improved by repeal. It’s one of those catch-22 things basically.
I love it when the environment I’m in inspires a video. San Francisco is an interesting place. There’s a ton of money everywhere, and a ton of poverty too. I’m currently in the midst of a tour of the West Coast, staying anywhere there is a free couch, and San Francisco has probably been the most inspiring city. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Market Street, where the bulk of this video is set, has a ton of history (For California). The street has seen multiple cycles of boom and bust since the mid 19th century. The current vibe is definitely boom.
A few blocks away the Salesforce Tower is currently going up. It will be the tallest building in San Francisco and the second tallest west of the Mississippi. It’s hard not to think of the “edifice complex”. Nothing signals a coming downturn like a massive new skyscraper. NYC’s Empire State and Chrysler Buildings went up during the beginning of the great depression. The buildings that ended US dominance in the Skyscraper game, Malaysia’s Petronas Towers, were finished in 1996, one year before the Asian Financial Crisis. The Burj Khalifa, the biggest of them all (so far) signaled a financial crisis for Dubai.
The Salesforce Tower ends the video, but it definitely cast the mindset for the whole thing. That and Wells Fargo’s hilariously bloated presence in downtown SF put me in mind of financial crises past and future. I don’t know when the crisis will hit. Who knows, we could be at the beginning of a great boom rather than its end. But if our banks continue to be structured the way they are, we’re going to be in trouble eventually regardless. Hugs!
This video convinced me to put together a new playlist “MFF on the Markets“. The channel tends to be a little more focused on history and geopolitics, but I’ve been a stockbroker and a corporate lawyer in my day, so I’ve got some stuff to contribute on the topics of law and markets when I can stomach it. I was surprised that the playlist came to 34 videos. Check ’em out!
Certain white people like to bitch about identity politics. There are elements of this argument that I understand, and partially agree with. But if we’re going to discard identity politics white people should go first.
Last weekend I saw “I am Not Your Negro” a documentary film based on the words of James Baldwin. You should go see it. It helped me formulate some ideas I’ve been mulling over since listening to the soundtrack to the Hamilton musical. If you voted for Clinton, the chances are higher you know all about Hamilton. If you voted for Trump you may have no idea what I’m talking about it. The video does a fairly good job of explaining the phenomenon.
What follows is another white guy pontificating on race relations. Feel free to avoid it.
I believe that the United States could have a post-racial future. As James Baldwin says in the video above, we can forge a new identity on this continent. Many would argue that we already have. Most of my college professors held that the concept of “Whiteness” as currently practiced in this country is a wholly American invention. This was always served with heaping mouthfuls of Marxist interpretations of labor relations, so I’m not sure I’m completely on board. But I’ll eagerly concede that “White” and “Black” are slippery definitions. Italians weren’t necessarily seen as white 100 years ago, and the Irish weren’t 50 years before that.
Some would argue that the definition of “Whiteness” requires an “Other” to use as contrast. In this view the Italians and Irish assimilation to US whiteness relied upon the out group of African Americans to look down on. I’m not sure I buy that. But I’m happy to retire the concept of whiteness entirely. If the 20th century was the story of the color line, why not let the 21st century be the story of its disposal?
Accession to white privilege used to be the sign of successful assimilation. We can do better. Here’s a standard white privilege line: “What’s with all the hyphenations!? Why can’t we just be Americans!?” I’m actually kind of sympathetic to that, not that it’s my business how folks define themselves. Most people pushing that line, however, would probably take issue with the video above. In particular the fact that the only white guys in Star Wars movies seem to be the bad guys nowadays has been a real sticking point for a lot of white people. There seems to be a growing movement for “White Rights”.
Leaving aside about a million other objections to that idea, it strikes me as the wrong strategy. If you’ve got a problem with “identity politics”, jumping on the bandwagon is exactly the wrong way to go about opposing it. If you’re interested in a color-blind “American” identity, then you should be celebrating the de-whiting of our national mythology. An “American” identity should be built on our civic culture and history. To do that well, we need to make that culture and history as accessible as possible.
US history has never just been about folks from Europe. Paler folks were in the drivers seat for a lot of it. But people of color were making contributions every step of the way, and not just involuntarily. We need to do a better job of highlighting that fact. “Hidden Figures” my pick for the year’s best film, does an excellent job of just that. It surfaces the true story of African American women who contributed to the engineering of the space race. It’s also a lot of fun. These uses of history are to be applauded, and we need more of them.
I take history very seriously, I’m a big fan of Western Civilization and I’m also a committed Anglophile. The details of the ideas and culture that shaped the Founding Fathers are incredibly important. We should never lose sight of those things. But it’s also important to recognize that our sense of the American Founding isn’t completely accurate at the expert level either. 150-odd years of US friendship with the UK has probably over-emphasized the example of the British system in our study of law and government. Examples like Switzerland and an array of Southern European republics were more important to the Founders than is currently recognized. It doesn’t make sense to be sticklers for a particular expert vision of the Founding Fathers, because it’s not “perfect” either. History is always incomplete.
History nerds like me will always be playing in this toolbox, and that’s great. But US history isn’t just history. It’s also myth, renewed and changed with every generation. On the popular level, things like “European Heritage” and “Judeo-Christian Tradition” are over-emphasized. Lincoln saw these United States as the “last, best hope of Earth”, not the last best hope of white Christian dudes.
Look at that picture of “Black Thomas Jefferson” above. How cool would it be if 100 years from now, the main thing people saw as weird about the depiction was the fact that his clothes look odd? Perhaps that oddness would prompt a future student to look further into the details of the Founding Fathers. Depictions of the Founding Fathers that “look more like America” could lead to a broader class of US history nerds. And what could be better than that?
Oh, one last show note. If I remember my history (and my Hamilton) correctly, Thomas Jefferson was out of the country during the writing of Constitution. That could be construed as an error in the video. Sorry. If you caught and were annoyed by that, I love you, and am grateful you’re watching my stuff.
Everybody thinks that the Middle East is different somehow. It’s really not. The real reason it’s a mess isn’t “centuries old hatreds” or the “oil curse”. 30 years ago, much of the rest of the world was just as screwed up. The reason the Middle East is still a mess, is because it remains the subject of competition between regional and world powers. The US and Saudi Arabia against Iran, and Israel against everybody else (supposedly), has kept a “Cold War” dynamic going in the Middle East long after it has faded everywhere else.
China, the only power that may one day rival the United States, is a paid up member of the US system. “Competition” in the rest of the world is about “Trade Wars” not “War Wars”. The US has provided a good enough deal to get everyone on the same page. Donald Trump wants to end that. He has a straightforwardly mercantilist, or even mercenary way of looking at the world. As I put it in the video, he wants to replace a generous deal with “F#*K you, pay me!”. These rough edges might be in the process of being shaved off, but it’s worth looking at what would happen to the world if he got his way.
Trump’s world would be one of renewed competition between the US and regional powers on every continent. It wouldn’t be one of great power war, not during Trump’s term anyway, but it would mean more proxy wars. Likely locations are some you’ve heard of, like Ukraine and Libya, and some you might not have thought of, like Thailand and Azerbaijan. Political tussles that are worked out locally today would quickly attain an international dimension. The Cold War’s ability to turn every local issue into competition between the US and the USSR was extraordinary. In a world of renewed competition between regional powers, this dynamic would resurface. In the words of Thucydides…
“the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
Let’s try to avoid that shall we?
I should probably explain what I’m up to with this World War 3 Series I’ve been developing over the past couple months. On one level it’s a shameless bid for views. YouTube loves World War 3. There’s a lot of stuff out there insisting that world war is imminent. One of the most annoying bits of fake news during the 2016 election was the assumption that Hillary Clinton would bring it about if she were elected. My annoyance has now transitioned to the folks who insist that Trump is going to turn the world into a cinder. The chances of that are definitely higher than they would have been under Clinton, but I think they are still pretty trivial. If we’re looking for a partner for World War III, we’ve got the same problem we’ve had since 1989. Nobody’s really interested. In the first episode in this series “Will Trump Start a War With China?” I address China’s inability to challenge us today, and Trump’s possible role in encouraging a conflict down the line. In Part two, “Is Russia Winning?” I laid out why they are pretty clearly not.
So in one sense, the point of this series is to get people to relax. But it’s not that I don’t think World War 3 is possible. In fact I think it’s inevitable. The only question in my mind is when it happens. Will it happen 50 years from now, or 500 years from now? It’s our responsibility to push that day off for as long as possible. That’s the point of this series beyond the clicks. The internet shouldn’t be talking about World War III the way it does, but it’s a good thing to think about nonetheless. We humans are violent folks. Past performance is no indicator of future results, of course, but the every year that goes by without a conflagration is a win for us. We need to think more seriously about how to keep that streak going. Which is exactly what today’s video tries to do.
US media is filled with disinformation about Syria, as I think I’ve documented fairly well. The question of Christian Refugees from Syria is no exception. The idea that this population of refugees is being discriminated against by the US government has largely gone unchallenged. This excellent politifact explainer does a good job of debunking the issue, but dances around the true reason why there are so few Syrian Christian Refugees in the United States. They devote about a sentence to the fact that Syrian Christians support Assad, and never mention the economic status of those Christians who leave, which are the two central points of my video.
The US government can’t fully commit to fighting the idea that they are discriminating against Christian refugees from Syria, because the truth does too much to undermine its narrative of the Syrian war. In Washington, DC’s story, the Syrian opposition is filled with moderate rebels trying to bring about a modern Syria. Acknowledging that Christians feel safer with Assad than they do with the Sunni opposition undermines that image. In Washington DC’s story, the Iranian influence on Syria is just as nasty and destructive as the Sunni rebels ever-closer affiliation with violent Wahabi Jihadism. According to the US government the Iranian influence is worse. In this story Assad, a member of a small, disapproved of, Shia sect, is somehow the leader of a Shia fundamentalist force. The continued comfort of Christians with Assad undermines this story. So does the fact that Christians have always been a privileged pillar of the Assad regime. In truth, Iran and Russia are the status quo powers here, trying to preserve the structures of the Syrian government as they have existed since the 1970s. They are of course maintaining the status quo with brutality and violence but it’s the US and our Gulf allies that are working to bringing anarchy.
I really like this video, I think it’s the closest thing to actual reporting that I have done in this Syria series. It was developed through long conversations with Syrian refugees I knew in my five years in Istanbul, Turkey. I don’t consider myself a journalist. My business is narratives, unpacking them, correcting them, and re-forming them. To do this I rely on the work of real journalists in Syria and around the world. At best I’m an opinion journalist. With this one I rise above that a bit, and I’m happy for the opportunity.
You may notice that the sound on this one is fantastic. My on-going battle with sound is hampered by amateur equipment, and my growing but meager sound editing capabilities. This week in Los Angeles I was lucky enough to get some professionals involved. Through the good offices of MFF Patron Abigale James I was able to procure the pro bono services of Sam May, a professional sound guy. Folks can argue about the content of this video, but nobody can dispute that it sounds fantastic. I remain super grateful for the support I get from friends and strangers. MFF may seem like it’s a solo effort, but it’s really not.
March was a monster month for the MFF. We produced 8 videos on a range of topics from Obama in Cuba, to Batman v. Superman, to the limits of Google Trends. To the extent there is a theme here it’s on the limits of narratives. As I best pointed out in my criminally under-watched first video in the Syria series, we govern ourselves, and view the world through stories. Until the robots take over, we don’t have a choice. Human minds, even the minds of supposed experts in a given subject area, are captured by stories that synthesize and simplify what’s actually going on. A large part of what we’re up to here at the More Freedom Foundation is challenging these narratives and trying to develop new ones. We will always be governed by stories. To improve things, we need to challenge the ones that aren’t serving us well, and find better ways to reckon with this infinitely complex, messy world we live in.
“Super Tuesday Explained and Ridiculed” is my favorite of my text-based videos. Released on Super Tuesday itself, it makes the very important point that Super Tuesday is a choice we made. The steady expansion of the Presidential race, to the point where it almost swallows up a full two years, is the result of stories we tell ourselves. The Presidency is of course important in our system, but it’s been getting more and more important, largely because we choose to make it so. This is the result of choices made by media, and the way that parties have organized the nominating system in individual states, but these choices are reinforced by, and reinforce the choice that the public has made to over-emphasize the President. There is a whole lot more to the US system than the Presidency, and important days like Super Tuesday. I’d argue that your governor, or your mayor, depending on your local system, are a lot more important to your daily life than the President. But we lose sight of that because of stories we tell ourselves about things like Super Tuesday and whole Presidential race.
“How Powerful Is the United States of America?” is probably my favorite video from 2016, if not of all time. It tackles the biggest broken narrative in US politics today. This is the idea that places like Iran, or Russia, or today’s China present any kind of real threat to the United States. Trump obviously presents an extreme version of this story, but he’s not the only one. Republicans and Democrats push this story as well, though in a milder form. In fact, the United States, with its US World Order runs the world. Everybody else is just living in it. The United Nations is probably the best example of the silliness of the story of US weakness. The UN does nothing without our approval. We wrote most of its founding documents and charters. The UN’s General Assembly, a powerless but more democratic entity than the all-powerful security council, occasionally releases PR against Israel. These actions get endless publicity. But nobody ever talks about the sixteen world hot spots that the UN polices so the US military doesn’t have to. It’s details like this that help to show how faulty our narrative of “American weakness” is.
“Is the USA Turning Socialist?” is a fascinating artifact of a video. It’s largely about one of my personal narratives falling apart. It’s interesting that I describe myself as a Libertarian in this one, because I don’t do that anymore. As the video above indicates I’m transitioning towards a weird “proud Globalist” stance that I haven’t really fully defined yet. The Libertarian story always appealed to me because of its extreme paranoia about centralized power and Washington, DC in particular. I still have that paranoia about power and the US federal government, but I simply can’t describe myself as a Libertarian anymore. The yawning abyss of Trump’s vision of the world has highlighted the value of things like Foreign aid, international law, trade, political correctness and the American world order. These things rely on a lot of money, international cooperation, and yes, even the US military industrial complex. Libertarians don’t support those sorts of things, so I guess I’m not a Libertarian. Weird. If the United Nations ever moves an inch towards the “World Government” fantasies of Alex Jones & Co. I’ll get super paranoid about its power as well. We’re nowhere near that though. This video itself is kind of fun, half improv, revised in post, and featuring a hobo fire. Basic Income is something we’ll hear a lot more about in the coming years. Interestingly, Milton Friedman, one of the many godfathers of modern Libertarian thought, supported the concept.
“Why the US world System Is Good For Everyone” is a brief video, but it makes a useful point, and expands on the message of “How Powerful is the United States of America“. We’re all into narratives of nationalism to one degree or another. My assumption has always been that the rest of the world should want to throw off US hegemony out of self-respect. The “How Powerful…” video makes the case for the US world system from the US perspective. This video makes the case for the US world system for everybody else. The “soft nationalist” urges of the rest of the world are better channeled into working to make the democratic and universal promises of the US world system real rather than destroying it. It’s a simple self-preservation argument. I don’t think any of us would survive the demise of the current approach…
The four videos above, as well as last month’s “3 myths about President Trump” were all produced in a five day period. I’ve only managed this particular feat of masochism twice, but I think it’s helped immensely both times. The videos in question aren’t always my most successful, aesthetically or in terms of views, but they sometimes are. And the effort puts me into a nice zone of flow. My second most viewed video ever “How Powerful Is John Oliver” was written on day 6 of a five video week in early 2015. In 2016’s “sprint week” Wednesday’s “How Powerful Is the United States of America” may be my favorite video ever, and Monday’s “3 myths about President Trump” holds up very well. The “Is the USA Turning Socialist” video is a complete mess, but I kind of love it. I think the frantic pace of a “sprint week” breaks bad habits and frees things up creatively. I’ve been devoting all my spare time to a particular project recently, but I’m looking forward to doing another sprint week at some point in March or April of 2017.
The effect of these “sprint weeks” on views is interesting. The videos produced during the week don’t necessarily do all that well, but the effect on algorithm voodoo is hard to deny. March 2016 was my most successful month ever, and remains so months later. The videos that drove this growth were all from the back-catalog. But would they have done as well if YouTube didn’t know I was producing so much content this month? Hard to say. I tend to think not.
This project has taken me to some interesting places. Sometimes they are irritating as I laid out in my “sprint week” hangover video “Google Trends Is Depressing“. Google Trends is a free service I occasionally use to generate video ideas. It lists the stories people are talking about the most. It is mostly the sea of sports and celebrity stories that I complain about in this video. It turns out that this video is completely wrong about Google Trends actually. One of my many technically savvy viewers pointed out my screw-up. It’s not that people necessarily care more about these stories, it’s just that they are better suited to showing up under the Google Trends algorithm. If a sports game goes well or poorly, or Natalie Portman signs up for a new movie it creates a discrete news event, and a spike in awareness for the related topics. On-going issues are less likely to spike to the top of Google trends. So as fun as this video is, it’s just plain wrong. Whoops!
“Is Ted Cruz Worse Than Donald Trump” fights against a narrative that we’re still dealing with today. Folks in media, including myself at times, have invested tremendous effort into turning Establishment Republicans into scary monsters. In the context of typical party politics ca. 2014 this probably wasn’t wise, but it wasn’t all that dangerous. It has tripped us up in the era of Trump. When I made this video, asserting that a President Trump was much scarier than a President Cruz, I got a lot of push-back. “What about those Supreme Court Justices, etc. etc.”. After two weeks of President Trump, I don’t think anybody would disagree with this video anymore. Traditional Republicans present challenges that are threatening to a number of Coastal American priorities. Trump threatens everyone, and threatens to tear down the context within which both progressive and conservative priorities are implemented. This is getting clearer by the day. Incredibly the old narrative persists. When I uploaded my “When Can We Impeach Donald Trump?” video, the first two comments were along the lines of “Pence would be even worse!!!” I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. Another conservative judge or two might be a bad thing, depending on your worldview, but we’re getting that anyway. You may see Pence as malign, but at least he’s an adult, who would govern with something like decency and sanity. Old narratives can be dangerous.
“What Obama In Cuba Means for America” is an attempt to build a new narrative. I’ve played with the idea of a “New American Century” or a “True American Century” before. The old “American Century” concept refers to the 20th century as one of US dominance, leaving out all those other countries in North and South America. A 21st century dominated by the United States is hard to envision. But a 21st and maybe even a 22nd century dominated by the Western Hemisphere isn’t. The rise of the Pacific can be just as good for the Americas as it is for Asia. This may become a focus of this channel towards the end of this year, provided that this channel survives to the end of this year (You can help that happen).
Before I was a politics and history nerd I was a comic book nerd. I bring this absurd level of knowledge to bear in “Batman v. Superman REVIEW: The Worst Thing About It“. A lengthy discussion of comic book history and film is a great way to close out a month focused on narrative. Though I enjoyed it, I’m happy to concede that Batman v. Superman was a terrible movie. But there is no denying that it was tremendously culturally significant. Millions of people saw it, and this is the version of these characters that a generation of kids will grow up with. That’s a shame. This video points out that at the movie has an incredibly dark vision of the United States at its heart. Frank Miller is the grim genius that shaped this movie more than any other, and his vision of the world isn’t much different from that of Donald Trump. Narrative is important, and we have to be aware of the influences that shape the things we consume. Even things as trivial as super hero movies.
Views ballooned in March 2016, hitting 25,812 up from 17,709 in February. 10 months later it’s still my best month ever. None of the top five, and two of the top ten videos in February were produced in February. Interestingly, for such a good month, only two of the eight videos crossed 100 views on their first day. Ten months later, eight of eight have topped 200 views, and of those five have also topped 300, and one has topped 5,000 (I paid to promote “How Powerful Is the US“, because I like it). At the end of March 2016 we had 156 videos, all but four of which were viewed in March, 81 of which were viewed 10 or more times, 23 of which were viewed more than 100 times, and four of which were viewed more than 1,000 times (FATCA, John Oliver, Hillary Clinton, Putin-Estonia). The John Oliver video was viewed more than 10,000 times which has only happened three times before, two months for FATCA in 2014 and one month for John Oliver in 2015.
