WhatIfAltHist, or Rudyard, was an alternate history YouTuber and current right-wing^A) political commentator/self-proclaimed prophet.
His videos were relatively okay until he completely lost his mind…then he tripped balls and likely unlocked his latent Schizophrenia. Though I stopped watching him long before that point.

WhatIfAltHist can broadly be placed into three eras. Of those, one was good, one was okay and the current one I don’t know much about.

The first era was his Alternate History era, where he simply took certain scenarios and then speculated about them.
What differentiated him from, for example, AlternateHistoryHub was that: he’d be more detailed; he’d consider more aspects than AHHub; his interpretations were darker/more cynical (though this is only obvious when it’s pointed out).
The height of this era and a last gasp of sorts was his video on a medieval America, where he speculated about transplanting modern-day American culture and geography into a medieval setting. This video I do recommend watching.

The second era was the one where he expanded outside of Alternate History…politics, (actual) history, anthropology and whatnot.
This era was okay. The main problem is that he would speak confidently about topics he didn’t actually understand that well…but the upside is that whenever he touched on a subject he did understand, it would be pretty alright. Though which ones these are is a big question mark. He would often predict the future and these predictions should not be taken super seriously.
This era was extra special in that he finally started citing the books he read in bibliographies: located either within the community tab, video descriptions or within the videos themselves. These book recommendations are probably the main thing WhatIfAltHist is useful for…because he’s read a frankly insane amount of books. Though, having read just a (tiny) fraction of them…another flaw of his pops up where…he doesn’t seem to be good at evaluating those books critically. One book he recommended was Debt: the First 5000 Years…and, as far as I can remember, he took much of the information there somewhat uncritically. After I actually checked other responses to the book and thought about the content, I realized that a lot of the information was inaccurate. Like, to the point that it’s hard to say what is or isn’t true if you aren’t familiar with any of the topics.
This isn’t really that big of a deal though as it just means you have to take everything he says with a grain of salt, plus you have to be wary of what you read in those book recommendations.
Though what makes the specific example of Debt odd is that the book is written by someone WhatIf would consider left-wing, so it’s extra strange that he seemed to take it uncritically.
Of course, looking back now it’s very difficult to know how much of what WhatIf said is actually accurate or not due to that tendency to be uncritical of books and his tendency to be overly confident about what he learned.

The third era started around the time he started losing his mind for reasons unknown. I think it pre-dates the incident where he took drugs and had a trip so bad he became Schizophrenic. That’s not a joke or anything, his family (per his own claims) has a history of Schizophrenia, so he really should have seen this coming. Whether he’s fine now or not I don’t know, because I stopped watching him way before that point.
If I had to speculate about what it was, I think WhatIf just got overly self-centered and egotistical. He conflated success on YouTube with his level of ‘correctness’ and who knows what-else.

There were a few reasons I stopped watching WhatIf. The main one was practical: his videos ballooned in length to such a point that I just didn’t have the patience to spend time watching them (or even listening to them in the background). The other reason is that I just kinda decided to look for info myself. The final reason was that I kinda got annoyed by his views…and the things he was talking about. Though I won’t get into specifics too much.

What’s sorta important for me to note specifically is that there was an era where I respected him and mostly agreed with him, but never a point where I agreed with him 100% and, at this point, I’ve learned enough to know that he and I are not exactly the most compatible.
What I did like, back when I watched him, is that I could discuss the topics of his videos with a few other people around me who also saw those videos, or just wanted to weigh in. That isn’t really a thing anymore, but in hindsight I’d say that’s what was most valuable to me specifically.

Do I recommend watching him? Not really, no. His book recommendations are good, though, so read those. His earlier Alternate History videos are fun too, to a certain degree.

• YouTube Channel
• I may add a link to the Medieval America video at some point.
• Another thing of note is that his maps are not very good at all. He makes them himself and it shows, but how they look that bad is anyone’s guess.