Tag Archives: More Freedom Foundation

Bernie Sanders Is More Electable Than Joe Biden | Election 2020 3

I can’t believe people don’t spend more time talking about the 666 Fifth Avenue bribe (alleged). It’s one of the most perplexing things to me in US politics. The general impression seems to be that it’s kind of funny?! The President’s son-in-law got an absurd bail out on a losing real estate deal, to the tune of over a billion dollars, and the consequences appear to be nil. When he was trying to get the money from China it was rightly condemned, but now that he got the money from Qatar, through Canada, it’s somehow OK? It’s just a thing that happened? As I point out in today’s video, I think Joe Biden and the political culture that he exemplifies has a lot to do with this…

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Ronald Reagan Vs. The Joker | Election 2020 2

The times they are a’changing! Maybe it’s just turning 40, but I really do think US politics and society are undergoing a bit of a sea change. Nobody can argue that the past three years have been fun. On the other hand, I think that, so far, this period of transition is infinitely less bruising than the one the country went through in the 1970s and 1980s. In today’s video I try to knit the New Deal and Reagan eras into a single narrative of progress and change. It is punctuated with Joker level chaos of course.

I really do believe that 2020 presents an opportunity to help the country move on to its next cycle of growth and progress. I have no idea who would best represent and shape that change. But I do know that whoever gets elected in November, even if it’s Donald Trump, will have that opportunity. I’d really rather it wasn’t Donald Trump. Today’s video sets out my general attitude to US history and the 2020 election. It’s useful viewing if you want to know my biases before this year of election madness.

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Trump Derangement Syndrome is Powerful… And Justified | Election 2020 1

One of the most standard right-wing rhetorical poses of the past four years has been “This is how you got Trump.” Whether it’s progressive snowflakes on university campuses, some egregious example of left-leaning media bias, or some new frontier in trans rights, many conservative commentators have regretfully observed, “you see this is why people opted for Trump, even though he’s gross…” etc. etc. There may even be some truth to these observations. There’s certainly a diverse and well-financed range of media sources constantly telling right-leaning people that they are embattled and without a voice.

What there is little appreciation of, is that the reverse is almost certainly true as well. If the perceived liberal lean of politics and society had a serious backlash in the form of Trump, what might Trump’s dominance of our political and media spheres be doing? Right-wing brand commentators love pointing to “Trump Derangement Syndrome”(TDS), the supposedly irrational hatred the majority of the country feels for the President. What they are not thinking through is how powerful that sentiment is, and the potential it has to warp the country much, much further away from the “conservative” principles they profess to cherish. Today’s video attempts to think more seriously about the consequences of TDS, and also launches my 2020 US election coverage!

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The Trump Iran Policy’s Last Chance | Maximum Pressure | Iran Sanctions 5

I feel like the broader arc of Trump’s Iran policy has been ignored recently. The incredibly flashy and violent gyrations of escalation have gotten a lot of coverage, but there isn’t enough emphasis on why we’re here. Sure, I suppose it’s fun to get bogged down on the question of whether or not assassinating the general of a country we are not at war with is a good idea, but we’re kind of missing the forest for the trees. No matter what you think of the Soleimani killing, we should be more focused on how we got here. And that’s what I try to do today with this video. I attempt to evaluate Trump’s “Maximum Pressure” policy against Iran, and I find it wanting.

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Brexit Is The End Of The British Empire | Avoiding the British Empire 11 | Brexit IX

The later 20th century was not a big focus of my book, Avoiding the British Empire. I date the end of the British world system to 1914, and the beginning of World War I. The time after than is mostly one of decline. But it had peaks, and the period after 2016 will be seen as a new valley. One of the things that I did study intensely in writing the book was the distinction between “informal” and “formal” empire. The informal empire of financial power was as important, or perhaps more important than all the red bits on the map that were formally controlled by the British Empire.

If you look at it that way, then it’s clear that the European Union represented a new informal empire for Britain. Which makes throwing it away with Brexit quite nuts. I take a more in depth look at this in today’s video.

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Qassem Soleimani and World War III | Iran, Russia and China

My guess is that today’s video will get lots of comments along the lines of “You’re only realizing this now?” and “Obviously!”. For many observers of the Middle East over the past two decades it is transparently obvious that the United States has been the problem. Nobody else has been overthrowing governments and sowing chaos with the abandon that the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have. At least a million lives have been lost, and an entire region of the world has lost out on two decades of economic development because the US wanted to cover up for the fact that their client state, Saudi Arabia, had done 9-11. So yeah, we’re the bad guys. Obviously. But that doesn’t mean it can’t get worse.

Our bad guy status is not so obvious to the US public at large. And it’s certainly not so obvious to the US media. That’s why I think it’s worthwhile to mark the trajectory here. The US isn’t just a damaging actor, it’s been getting progressively worse. Many argue that Obama was better than Bush, and his attempt at an Iran Nuclear Deal really was a serious attempt at peace, but everything else he did was a continuation of the horrors of the Bush presidency. More than that, it was an intensification of them. Obama destroyed Libya and Syria without even pretending to rebuild them. His drone program led to fewer US casualties, but its scope and brutality put us into even more morally fraught territory that its initially smaller bodycount hid from us. And Trump, with his gleeful embrace of war crimes is obviously another big step down the path to heck. Things really are getting worse. That’s worth marking, which is one of the things I attempt to do with today’s video

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Is Tunisia Too Different To Be A Model? | Tunisia 5

I may have gone a bit overboard with today’s video. It packs what I’ve learned from the three books on Tunisia I have read over the past month into one video, and it may be a bit overstuffed. Even given that, I can already see the angry comments talking about everything I’ve missed. Tunisia has an incredibly complex and lengthy history that led to the successful country it is today. I hope I’ve done it a bit of justice with this video!

Happy New Year!

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Tunisia’s Thrillingly Boring Elections | Tunisia 4

Merry Christmas Everybody! I’m heading out of town in a couple hours, but I’m super psyched to be able to fill one of the year’s biggest gaps by putting out a Christmas eve video on Tunisia! I intend to do a better job of keeping on top of Tunisian and North African politics in the new year. In September and October they held a series of elections that I am very late in covering. Tunisia is probably the most important country in the Middle East/North Africa region. There’s a distinct chance that what they’re doing now will be remembered long after the decades of nastiness further East have been forgotten. One can hope anyway…

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Were The British “Better” Colonizers Than the French? | Avoiding The British Empire 10

Believe it or not, today’s video deals with a surprisingly persistent piece of conventional wisdom. I honestly couldn’t tell you where I picked it up, maybe Niall Ferguson, but it’s something I unthinkingly believed for decades. The idea is that countries that were colonized by the British were better off than those colonized by the French, because of superior British institutions, or better management or whatever. I hardly thought about this old assumption in my two years researching the British Empire. Serious books of history don’t try to make this claim. But once the vids started coming out, it started cropping up in the comments.

This is one of the most fun things about studying history. If you build up a base of knowledge, you can occasionally get these sudden “Ah-Hah!” moments when you realize that something you’ve always believed is unmitigated balderdash. Today’s video wrote itself with very little prompting. If you have a cursory knowledge of the history of the countries in each of the Empires before and after colonization, it becomes clear how silly this old story is. And with this video, I get to make it clear to everybody else too… I love my job.

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Was Winston Churchill a Loser? | Avoiding the British Empire 9

Winston Churchill is a complicated figure. He’s also a cherished one for the British, and for white dads across the English speaking world. He’s seen completely differently by the Indians, millions of whom starved to death on his watch, and there are very few others in the broader British empire that would have had much good to say about him. These historical arguments are important, and I don’t really have all that much interest in them one way or the other. But Winston Churchill is not just a historical figure. He’s a symbol. That glorious year and a half, between Churchill’s coming to power, and successfully convincing the US to save Britain, are worth emulating and celebrating. But for US politicians, the vital belligerence that made Churchill so valuable for that destroyed world, is something that should constantly be applied to our infinitely safer, happier world. That’s nuts. Which is why I made today’s video.

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