Tag Archives: MoFreedomfoundation

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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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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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!

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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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