Tag Archives: Independent Media

What is The More Freedom Foundation in 2019? -New Trailer For the Channel!

The New Trailer is Up! I had been thinking about this for about a year and it’s great to finally have it out there. Probably the most over-thought out and hashed over three minutes in this channel’s history. It’s always difficult for me to figure out what this channel is about. With this trailer I think I’ve gotten it down to something I’m happy with, is well produced, and might appeal to a broader group of people. I’m pretty pleased. Let me know what you think.

This is my third attempt at a channel trailer, and I think it’s useful to compare it to the other two. The first is probably the funniest, and definitely the best produced of the trailers, but it’s neither representative of what this channel is, nor does it have much of a point other than the fact that pie is funny. With the second trailer, in the direct aftermath of the Trump election, I’m clearly failing to come up with an ideological response to what had just happened. It’s also really shittily produced. It’s embarrassing that that has been the face of my channel for the unsubscribed for almost three years now. With this new trailer I think I’m much better situated to retain subscribers and grow the channel.

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Amazon’s The Boys Isn’t Just About Superheroes | MIC 20

I feel like I should do some more media criticism. In this video I sing the praises of “The Boys” a new Amazon streaming show that satirizes the Military Industrial Complex pretty heavily. It’s a good show, and I’m sure it will be disappointing when the 2nd season backs off on all the political content. But I’m not sure that this video does a good job laying out why I found the Boys so noteworthy.

In the video I point out that most of the rest of Amazon’s prestige products are implicitly or explicitly pro-war, and even pro war on terror, which is pretty insane in 2019. But I don’t underline the degree to which almost everything we watch, consume and walk through in the United States today carries some sort of pro-militarism bias. From the national anthem at sports games, to the absurdly one-sided reporting on foreign policy to everything in between, everything works to force us towards war. Maybe that’s why Amazon feels comfortable putting out one niche genre show that lightly satirizes the MIC. Amazon knows this show is just a drop in the bucket, that helps it seem a little more independent from the Pentagon it is currently trying to win a 10 billion dollar contract from.

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How One US Oil Company Is Wrecking Venezuela

Today’s video was super tough to put together. Back in the early days of this channel I had a gloriously scatter-shot approach. I would just put up a video on whatever bugged me that week. I would jump around from exciting poverty solutions in Colorado, to how much I disliked Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, to in depth theories about the fascist underpinnings of Batman V. Superman. I’m honestly a bit surprised by how well all of these hold up. I think it’s because so much of how issues (and films!) are covered is so surface and superficial, that bringing any context at all to them makes for pretty good videos. That said, I’ve got a video or two, on Iraq specifically, that I don’t think holds up all that well.

In recent years the focus of the channel has changed. I dive in deep on what’s going on in certain countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria or Yemen. This new, in depth approach has been great for the channel, and I think it also makes for much better videos. When something comes up with one of those countries, I usually have a pretty good idea of what I want to say, and I usually have some good, under-covered context to add to the conversation. Writing those scripts rarely takes more than 5 or 6 hours. My research on those countries is constantly on-going, and I don’t have to think too hard to put together something I’m proud of.

This one was different. I don’t claim to be an expert in anything, I only promise to do a better job than any cable news channel. This is super easy with the countries I’ve been covering for years. Venezuela is new for me. For years I’ve wanted to do more Latin America coverage, but I haven’t had the time to do the in depth reading that is necessary. It’s impossible to avoid having an opinion on Venezuela of course, but they are not really “MY” opinions. It’s what I’ve been force fed by other news sources. That made writing this one super tough. I had to try to cut through the layers of bullshit and say something original. The story of what’s really behind Venezuela’s drop in oil production was one I’ve wanted to tell since May, but the framing was super difficult. I just don’t have the necessary context, which I hope I made clear… Today’s video went through multiple drafts over multiple weeks. I hope you think it was worth the wait!

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The Truth About the Fall of Muslim Spain | Everybody’s Lying About Islam 31

Spanish history really is amazing. As someone from the United States, who has spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East, I tend to focus on British and ancient history. Last year my family took a trip to Spain and Morocco and I really got a sense of what I’m missing. Spain has its roots in a fascinating conflict and mixture between Roman, Medieval Christian, and Islamic cultures. The Crusades focusing on Jerusalem, a much more transitory affair, get a lot more press. Which seems nuts. You’ve got to go back to 1961 and the surprisingly woke, and gloriously bloated, Charlton Heston film El Cid to find a treatment of the Spanish Reconquista in popular culture.

This is a shame, because it’s an incredibly epic story. You’ve got Medieval culture clash that literally ends the SAME YEAR, 1492, as a new and even more momentous clash between continental civilizations. The Crusades don’t have the conquest of a continent as their aftermath. The lack of coverage may have something to do with the fact that Spanish history, and Latin American history hasn’t always been the happiest. Here’s hoping that that changes in future years. I’m definitely excited to do some more work on the topic, and I am super excited to be covering it in this week’s video…

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Jeff Sessions Is the Worst

The most important news is often the stuff we never hear about. This is especially true in the era of Donald Trump’s twitter feed. With this video, I attempt to uncover one of the more important aspects of Trump’s presidency, the career of Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice. As Attorney General, Sessions is attempting to roll back a solid decade of progress in the arena of criminal justice, from civil forfeiture to marijuana legalization.

It’s frustrating to watch Sessions efforts be ignored. When Trump goes after him he even comes close to “resistance hero” status, or at least garners some sympathy. Jeff Sessions does not deserve our sympathy.

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Why The Iran Protests Are Confusing | MIC 14

The past week’s developments in Iran are tremendously exciting. Diverse and unexpected elements of the Iranian public have started taking to the streets to protest the regime that has failed them for most of the past 40 years. After a few days of very little press coverage in the United States, we now have a torrent of commentary. But it all strikes me as missing something. US coverage of Iran is limited by the way that US media sees Iran. With this video I delve into the problem…

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Islam’s “History of Evil” | Everybody’s Lying About Islam 29

History can be used as a weapon. There are a lot of people in my YouTube comments, and in the US at large, who have some weird ideas about Islam. The things they know aren’t necessarily wrong, but the conclusions they draw are. This is a problem that comes up again and again in contemporary political discussion. The more context you have, the more you realize that individual facts don’t tell you as much as you think they do. This video, and the next couple I will be producing, aim to provide the context necessary to better understand the darker aspects of world history, and Islamic history in particular.

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We Beat OPEC!!! | NFTGA Chapter 15

Back when I started doing this channel full time, I put out a series called “Notes From The Golden Age“. Today’s video, on the defeat of OPEC, is a long delayed addition to the series. In the six minutes of the video itself, I just laid out the facts as I understand them: The fact that OPEC did its level best to raise the price of oil, and they failed. If you want to hear more about why that is, and hear some discussion of the revolution in petroleum affairs we’ve experienced over the past five years, you could do worse than this video here.

Put briefly, oil doesn’t cost what it used to. The origin of this development is probably OPEC itself. That cartel drastically reduced the oil on the market on a couple occasions in the 1970s, driving the price through the roof. Much has, quite rightly, been made of the Shale revolution in the United States. A range of technological advances has made oil extraction easier, cheaper, and viable in places that it wasn’t before. This revolution has made US production competitive with Saudi Arabia again, and caused the plummet in prices that started in mid 2014. But the Shale revolution is only the most dramatic cause.

The plummet in oil prices is the result of a range of reactions to OPEC’s obscene market power. An under-heralded one is energy efficiency. We have finally reached a point where economic growth is decoupling from growth in petrochemical use. Some of this is renewables, but more of it is the very, very unsexy business of making cars and air conditioning units run more efficiently. Another reaction to OPEC was the broadening of the search for petroleum. Coupled with Technological advances, a staggering range of countries now produce significant amounts of oil and gas. OPEC has been beaten. They largely did it to themselves.

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Lebanon Is A Heroic Country | Everybody’s Lying About Islam 27

War Sucks. This is something we’ve lost touch with in the United States. It’s a central truth that’s become further and further from us since the middle of the 20th century. Not that our World War II experience was all that bruising either, compared to almost anybody else in Europe and Asia. Since Vietnam our military has been all-volunteer, and in the 21st century our death-dealing has become more remote, thanks to drones and smarter weapons. Our insulation from all of the consequences of war has made us more willing to use it as a tool of policy or economic stimulus.

Not for Lebanon. They don’t have that luxury. For fifteen years, it was their tiny country that was torn apart by the political fantasies of foreign countries. This video lays out how that horror has allowed them to save us from a broader war, both over the past six years and in the past month in particular.

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Yemen Is Dying. We Can Save It | Yemen 6


Yesterday the US House of Representatives finally had a debate on The US War on Yemen. It’s about three years too late. But it is a good thing that it happened. It’s easy to look at this delay, and the toothless resolution that was voted on, and conclude that Congress is useless on this topic. As today’s video explains that would be a mistake.

This reaction video fortuitously leads into the upcoming vids. They deal with the US Congress, and they would have looked super non-related if it weren’t for all the Congressional Debate stuff in this video. There’s been a notion in the back of my head for quite some time. The US government is nowhere as screwed as we like to imagine. All the tools are there. We just choose not to use them. It may be worthwhile to do more in this vein. What do 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.