Tag Archives: MoFreedomfoundation

The Cold War Ended In 1956

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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!

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Matt Yglesias Is Wrong About Defense Spending & GDP

I don’t usually mind Twitter personality and defenestrated Vox Media founder Matt Yglesias that much. But a couple weeks back he engaged in an argument I’ve been dying to make a video about for years. So with this video I took the opportunity to complain about the irritating data point that Defense Spending has fallen as a percent of GDP, and how meaningless it is in the context of the US federal budget. I feel like I got outside my wheel house a bit, maybe diving a little too deeply into accounting I don’t fully understand, but I think it makes for a fun video.

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Peter Zeihan Doesn’t Understand America…

Geopolitics Entrepreneur Peter Zeihan has been one of the most requested topics on this channel for the past couple years. I’ve put together a couple less formal videos dealing with his ideas, but this is the first produced effort. I decided I had to do it after Zeihan’s Joe Rogan appearance at the beginning of this year. A very amateurish, years old, clip critiquing Zeihan quickly became one of my channel’s most viewed videos. Here’s hoping this much more carefully crafted video does well!

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WTF Is the US Doing In Africa? | Africom

It’s absurd how little we know about what the United States is up to in Africa. Because people care about it more, there is a fair amount of scrutiny of US actions in the Middle East. But in Africa the Pentagon has been doing essentially whatever it wants, with very little scrutiny… for over 20 years now! With today’s video I attempt to use some recent reporting to pull the veil back a bit.

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US Middle East Withdrawal Isn’t Happening…

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at US involvement in the Middle East in depth. I’ve been doing a deep dive into the history of Yemen for months now, but that was mostly pre-1983, when the US decided to make the Middle East our daily problem with the founding of Centcom. Over the past month or so I’ve dived deep, not just into the “Greater War For the Middle East” (as Andrew Bacevich calls it) but also into the unified combatant command structure that is solidifying US empire all over the world. My view on all of this is… somewhat grim. I hope the video isn’t too much of a downer.

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How the US Won By Breaking Everything…

I think about history a lot. And when historians look back to the beginning of this century, I’m beginning to get the sense that the only story they will be able to tell is one of US imperial consolidation. This could easily be just one part of a three-parter, but I don’t think I’m going to bother to tell the other parts of the story, because they are adequately covered elsewhere. Most know that US oil and gas is now dominant in the world, and that the US dollar is stronger than it has ever been. But few understand how much our own foreign policy disasters cleared the way for that dollar and petro-supremacy. With today’s video I lay that out…

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How Yemen Beat The Cold War | Yemen vs. Empire 3

This one was a bit of an ordeal, honestly. A full 30 minutes of produced video, which is only part three of four, got a bit daunting. Every step of the way was a bit of a struggle. I hope it’s worth watching. Heading back to do more YouTube Drama before I attempt “Yemen vs. Empire” Part 4.

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Whatifalthist Explained

A number of months back I ran a poll asking which of a selection of geopolitics YouTubers I should do a review of. I was surprised to see Whatifalthist win the poll dramatically. The few videos of his I had watched had struck me as inoffensive and vaguely amusing. Having now done a deeper dive, it’s clear I was missing a lot. This kid, and I do mean kid, I think he’s like 22, does delightfully nerdy deep dives on European history, but his takes on countries and events outside of “Western Civilization” are sometimes… problematic. As I looked into it further, I was surprised to find that he has a lot of the same educational gaps and right wing ideological hang-ups that I did when I was 22. It’s an odd artifact of our age that he is working out his ideas with an audience in the hundreds of thousands. I don’t think he should be pilloried for it. This was an interesting video to write. If I were criticizing someone with serious institutional backing, or over the age of 25, I think I would have been a lot harsher. But this kid literally seems to have grown up on-line, starting a YouTube channel half his lifetime ago to answer fun nerd questions. I’m not sure I got the balance right. Let me know what you think.

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Is China’s Growth Miracle Over?

This video is another attempt to shake up the style a little bit. It’s been a while since I’ve done an all visual video, and this one almost qualifies. I’ve noticed that a lot of the successful geopolitics videos on YouTube tend to be lighter on the speaking in person, and heavier on the storyblocks and animated maps. Storyblocks is a stock video website I’ve been subscribed to for about six months now. It’s a cheap service, and you get what you pay for, but it’s a fun way to build a video. The selection is limited enough that after going through the library, I am beginning to see the same clips over and over in the work of my competitors. I think I have a few more rudimentary animation skills than a lot of the other geopolitics YouTubers, and I think I mixed animated graphs well with the storyblocks clips. Let me know what you think!

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Saudi Arabia Makes Biden’s Democracy Summit A Joke…

I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a while. Heck, and one point, I thought I might make a multi-video series covering all the ways the Gulf Monarchies worked to destroy the Arab Spring. It’s a vital point that gets over-looked. Yes, as my “Everybody’s Lying About Islam” series documented at length, Saudi Arabia’s century of power and wealth has been terrible for world Islam. The Saudi Wahhabi project has been a sort of cultural genocide against what was a much more diverse body of Islamic practices half a century ago. That matters. But beyond the religious aspects there is the fact that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are proselytizing monarchists as well. They have extraordinary wealth and influence in Washington, DC, and for the past 10 years they have used it to crush democracy across their region. This is the real tragedy of declining democracy this century. The Arab Spring could have made 2011 a new 1776, or 1989. Instead Arab Democracy was strangled in the cradle by a set of absolute monarchies that simply would not exist without the United States.

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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