A two-hour podcast interview in February with Joe Rogan, a stand-up comedian, television host and mixed martial arts commentator, put Yang on the map. Rogan boasts an audience of millions — particularly young men — and has a devoted following on Twitter and Reddit, where some fans have half-jokingly referred to his show as “Oprah for Dudes.”
After the Rogan podcast, Yang’s Twitter followers jumped eightfold — going from roughly 34,000 to 287,000 in a little over a month. Online fans started creating thousands of memes and videos on Facebook, Instagram and other social media, spreading his campaign further.
.. In substance and in style, Yang presents himself as a candidate relentlessly of the future. He warns that the United States is on the brink of a major job apocalypse, spurred by an increasing use of robots and artificial intelligence in the workplace that ultimately will eliminate the need for human employees.
“What we did to the manufacturing workers we are now going to do to the retail workers, the call center workers, the fast-food workers, the truck drivers, and on and on through the economy,” Yang declared at a rally in Chicago in March. “This is a crisis.”
.. Yang has particularly fixated on the plight of truckers. Speaking at a recent rural issues forum in Stuart, a tiny town in western Iowa, a state where the trucking industry employs an estimated 98,000 drivers, Yang pointed to an incident in February in which scores of truck drivers snarled traffic on Indianapolis-area highways in protest of mandated electronic monitoring devices that track their hours.
“What are the truck drivers going to do when the robot trucks come and start driving themselves?” Yang asked.
A murmur went through the audience of about 200 people. An older man in jeans and a trucker cap shook his head at the thought. “Chaos,” the man said.
This is where Yang’s “Freedom Dividend” comes in. The $12,000 given annually to every U.S. adult up to age 64 would be funded in part by a 10 percent “value added tax” on technology companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, which he estimates would generate roughly $800 billion a year. (Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)
.. “You could call this the tech check,” Yang said. He has dismissed critics who say the money, paid out regardless of an individual’s income or employment status, would encourage people not to work. He argues that the added financial security will spur people to create businesses or go back to school, or take risks they might not otherwise take. “This isn’t about people being lazy,” he said.
He has also pitched the concept, for which he has not stipulated an overall cost, as a pro-business, pro-economic development idea that could potentially revive dying small towns.
“Some of [that money] would float up to Amazon. You’d buy an extra toaster or something, but most of it would stay right here because you would be investing in car repairs you had put off, and then tutoring for your kids, the occasional night out, trips to the hardware store,” Yang said in Iowa.
To prove his point, Yang decided to use his own money to give $1,000 a month to two people for a year — someone in New Hampshire, the other in Iowa, the first voting states. In late December, Yang began sending a monthly check to the Fassi family in Goffstown, N.H.
In 2017, just as his daughter Janelle was beginning her freshman year at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., Charles Fassi was laid off from his job as a manager at a small chemical services company. Fassi, 49, said he felt suicidal, wondering how he could support his family.
While Fassi is now back at work, the family still struggled financially. Janelle met Yang at a Young Democrats of New Hampshire event and submitted an application for her family to be a test case for the monthly payments. After interviewing the family, Yang presented the first $1,000 check on New Year’s Eve. Fassi said the money has been mainly used to help pay for Janelle’s tuition, but Fassi said he and his wife are thinking of starting their own business.
“One thing I like about Andrew is that throughout all of this, he’s never asked us to vote for him. He’s never asked us to do anything for his campaign. He’s never tried to tell us what we can tell the media or anybody about this,” Fassi said. “When he came to our house, he said he was just trying to start a conversation. It wasn’t about him becoming president.”
That was enough to land Yang in the “top tier” of 2020 candidates that Fassi is considering voting for, though he is wary of the idea that people might think Yang is trying to buy his support. “I want to see how far he can go,” Fassi said, adding that he wasn’t comfortable backing a “fringe candidate.” He added that he likes Sen. Elizabeth Warren of neighboring Massachusetts, and soon he and his family will house a staffer working for another Democratic candidate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California. “I was like, ‘Why not? I like Kamala Harris,’ ” he said.
Yang has yet to pick the Iowa recipient — his campaign is taking applications — but after the Des Moines Register questioned the legality of his spending, Yang’s campaign told the paper he would amend his Federal Election Commission report to list the $4,000 in checks he had written so far as gifts.
A native of Schenectady, N.Y., Yang is the son of Taiwanese immigrants who came to America in the 1960s. Yang recalled that he and his older brother were two of the only Asian American students at the local public school and were picked on. Later, as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, the prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, he was a self-described nerd and goth kid.
He studied political science and economics at Brown University before graduating from Columbia Law School. After briefly working at a big law firm, Yang joined a test-prep start-up, which was later sold and earned him “some number in the millions” that gave him enough to quit his job and launch his White House bid.
The fact that Yang is unabashedly noting his Asian ancestry makes it all the more strange that his candidacy has found fans in the alt-right, many of whom have reframed his pitch on universal basic income as a quest to save white America. White nationalist Richard Spencer has tweeted approvingly of Yang, describing him as “the most grounded presidential candidate of my lifetime.”
Yang has repeatedly disavowed the support, even as his campaign has found it difficult to eradicate the racist memes spread by some of his fringe backers in chat rooms where Yang’s campaign has tried to mobilize supporters. “I honestly don’t get it,” Yang said. “I don’t look like a white nationalist, so I am sort of surprised that anyone who’s in that camp would be like, ‘Ooh, that’s my candidate.’ ”
Indeed, Yang’s crowds are notable for their diversity. Darrin Lowery, a 51-year-old social worker from Chicago, turned out after hearing Yang make his pitch to black voters on “The Breakfast Club” radio show. His warning about the dangers of automation had hit home with Lowery.
“The Kmart is closed, the Sears is closed. All these different businesses are closing, and I wonder what these people who don’t have advanced degrees are going to do?” said Lowery, who is black. “I do think he’s a long shot, but the more people hear him, I wonder.”
Angie Shindelar, a 53-year-old math teacher from Greenfield, Iowa, came to hear Yang speak in Stuart at the behest of her children. “Everything feels like it’s about bashing Trump or reacting to Trump instead offering some vision looking forward,” Shindelar said. “He’s the first person I’ve really heard that is looking forward and has vision in a way that can maybe overcome some of that division.”
Andy Stern, a former president of the Service Employees International Union who is friendly with Yang, cautioned that Yang needs “a breakout moment.”
“I don’t think people are looking at Andrew yet and say he’s someone who can win,” said Stern, who, like Yang, is an evangelist for a universal basic income.
Yang believes his moment could be the debates, and he’s already thinking of how much time he’ll have to make an impression.
“I’ve done the math, and I’ll have approximately 12 minutes of airtime . . . 10 to 12 minutes to introduce myself to the American people,” Yang said, probably exaggerating the time any candidate onstage is likely to have. “They are going to say, ‘Who’s that person standing next to Joe Biden?’ And hundreds of thousands of people are going to go Google ‘Andrew Yang’ or ‘Asian presidential candidate’ or whatever. . . . And then they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s Andrew Yang.’ ”
Debacle in Quebec
there has never been a disaster like the G7 meeting that just took place. It could herald the beginning of a trade war, maybe even the collapse of the Western alliance. At the very least it will damage America’s reputation as a reliable ally for decades to come; even if Trump eventually departs the scene in disgrace, the fact that someone like him could come to power in the first place will always be in the back of everyone’s mind.
.. I’m already seeing headlines to the effect that Trump took a belligerent “America first” position, demanding big concessions from our allies, which would have been bad. But the reality was much worse.
.. He didn’t put America first; Russia first would be a better description. And he didn’t demand drastic policy changes from our allies; he demanded that they stop doing bad things they aren’t doing. This wasn’t a tough stance on behalf of American interests, it was a declaration of ignorance and policy insanity.
.. Trump started with a call for readmitting Russia to the group, which makes no sense at all. The truth is that Russia, whose GDP is about the same size as Spain’s and quite a bit smaller than Brazil’s, was always a ringer in what was meant to be a group of major economies. It was brought in for strategic reasons, and kicked out when it invaded Ukraine.
.. There is no possible justification for bringing it back, other than whatever hold Putin has on Trump personally.
.. Then Trump demanded that the other G7 members remove their “ridiculous and unacceptable” tariffs on U.S. goods – which would be hard for them to do, because their actual tariff rates are very low. The European Union, for example, levies an average tariff of only three percent on US goods.
.. Yes, Canada imposes high tariffs on certain dairy products. But it’s hard to make the case that these special cases are any worse than, say, the 25 percent tariff the U.S. still imposes on light trucks.
.. His trade advisers have repeatedly claimed that value-added taxes, which play an important role in many countries, are a form of unfair trade protection. But this is sheer ignorance
.. they’re just a way of implementing a sales tax — which is why they’re legal under the WTO.
.. He may just have been ranting. After all, he goes on and on about other vast evils that don’t exist, like a huge wave of violent crime committed by illegal immigrants (who then voted in the millions for Hillary Clinton.)
Was there any strategy behind Trump’s behavior? Well, it was pretty much exactly what he would have done if he really is Putin’s puppet: yelling at friendly nations about sins they aren’t committing won’t bring back American jobs, but it’s exactly what someone who does want to break up the Western alliance would like to see.
.. Alternatively, maybe he was just acting out because he couldn’t stand having to spend hours with powerful people who will neither flatter him nor bribe him by throwing money at his family businesses – people who, in fact, didn’t try very hard to hide the contempt
.. this was an utter, humiliating debacle. And we all know how Trump responds to humiliation.