Andrew Yang

In the closing months of the 2022 midterms North Carolina residents began receiving text messages and phone calls from unfamiliar numbers, a ritual all too familiar to a swing-state voter. The benevolent voice on the line had seen the recipient’s name on a petition to allow the Green Party on the ballot and wanted to ensure the signature was on the up and up. With validity confirmed the anonymous caller would reveal himself to be a Green Party representative. “If the Green Party is on the ballot, it’ll take votes away from Democrats, giving Republicans a huge advantage. It will help them win North Carolina in 2022 and 2024. There’s far too much at stake to let this happen. Are you interested in asking to have your name removed from this petition or leave it as is?

The Republican primary has kicked into a higher gear in recent days. Donald Trump terrified one half of the country (and delighted the other) in his dominant, unrepentant CNN town hall appearance last Wednesday. Ron DeSantis is spending a lot of time in Iowa and — in the surest sign yet that he really wants to be president — appearing jacket-less among normal people. (10/10 fake laugh, Governor.)  The coming few weeks will see more candidates make it official. With Florida’s legislative session done and dusted, a DeSantis announcement is just around the corner. In a lengthy profile of Mike Pence, the New York Times yesterday reported the arrival of a new pro-Pence super PAC, Committed to America, a sign that he will soon come clean about his plans.

In 1958, the federal government surveyed the vast plains of the United States for the site that would launch the future of humanity and settled on... Greenbelt, Maryland, which had the advantage of a quick commute from the capital. On weekdays 7,000 people travel to NASA’s Goddard Space Center to work on those telescopes that go viral every few months with their high-definition photos of space. They were off for Labor Day weekend, so only a couple of hundred people were on hand to see the dawn of a political revolution.

In a surprise twist that even Cockburn never saw coming, Andrew Yang and Andrew Cuomo, Democrats both, have denounced the recent raid on former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. The Thousand-Dollar-Yang tweeted out a long piece that declared that, while Yang didn’t want Trump as president, he did have serious concerns about what happened at Mar-a-Lago: A fundamental part of his [Trump’s] appeal has been that it’s him against a corrupt government establishment. This raid strengthens that case for millions of Americans who will see this as unjust persecution. It seems like this was authorized by a local judge and a particular FBI office without buy-in or notification of higher levels of government. But literally no one will believe that or make a distinction.

For decades, the American Idol and Eurovision TV talent shows have calculated millions of votes during commercial breaks with barely a hitch. But it only took a few hours this week for New York City, the largest city in the US, to demonstrate just how incompetent local election bureaucrats can be. New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor was thrown into utter chaos on Tuesday after election officials withdrew their initial tabulation of the contest’s ranked-choice voting results, just hours after releasing a tally showing the clear frontrunner ex-cop Eric Adams was in a dramatically tighter race against Kathryn Garcia, the candidate endorsed by the New York Times. Ranked-choice voting allows voters to list up to five candidates on their ballot in order of preference.

We don't deserve dogs. The internet has spoken — and the consensus is unanimous. Of course, we have them anyway. At last count the United States was home to 90 million dogs, sometimes multiple dogs per household. We love them like family. Dogs are our best friends and national obsession. Dogs are not just dogs, but dogues, doggos, puppers. Somewhere between the advent of the @Dog_Rates Twitter account (where every dog scores at least 11 points out of a possible 10), the rise of subscription boxes full of gourmet freeze-dried beef spleen and a 1,000 percent increase in the term ‘pet parents’, dogs came to represent the living embodiment of all that is good and pure.

Tone-deaf. White people-pleasing. Bumbling pineapple bun. These are just some of the choice epithets that have been hurled at Andrew Yang after he shared his thoughts about the Asian American experience in the age of coronavirus. Calling the growing reports of racist and xenophobic attacks against Asian Americans across the country a ‘heartbreaking phenomenon', Yang opened his op-ed with a soliloquy about a recent experience at a grocery store where, for the first time since growing up as one of the few children of East-Asian descent in a New York suburb, he felt the searing tinge of race-consciousness and anxiety about his place in America.

In the words of the late great Joe Strummer, ‘everybody’s looking for the last gang in town’. In Democratic politics today, they’re looking for the Yang Gang. After New York entrepreneur Andrew Yang ended his improbable run for the presidency on the night of the New Hampshire primary, attention immediately turned to the allegiances of his notoriously enthusiastic supporters. Would they defect to Bernie Sanders, whose candidacy many had supported in 2016? What about Michael Bloomberg, a fellow New Yorker with a healthy following in the tech industry?Take it from me, a card-carrying member of the Yang Gang: I have absolutely no idea.

Now that ‘entrepreneur’ Andrew Yang has ended his presidential campaign, can we all admit what a sad commentary on the millennial generation it was? Yang was a policy quack who instantly won a cult following among young people who had never before taken the slightest interest in politics — in the other words, low-information voters. Yang seemed pleasant enough on the debate stage, and when he’d take a break from his pop-socioeconomic jargon — ‘fourth industrial revolution’ — he occasionally voiced some simple truth, like the importance of valuing the contributions of stay-at-home mothers, even though they aren’t included in measures of GDP. But such common sense was not the core of his campaign, the snake oil was.

Every so often, a political candidate rises to the fore fueled by the grievances of people who are seriously annoyed. Donald Trump, for example, stoked the fires of an America in perceived decline. Ron Paul in 2008 capitalized on the backlash to the costly military interventions of the Bush era. In 2016, Bernie Sanders drew together a coalition of the young, the far-left, and the people who didn’t want to cast a vote for a Clinton ever again.

Joe Biden ran two presidential campaigns alongside Barack Obama and served as vice president for eight years, yet his decades-old position on federal busing never seemed to come up during that extensive time period. If it did, it was confined to niche left-wing media. Certainly the denizens of MSNBC or the blue-check Twitter spinmeisters seldom, if ever, evinced concern for that aspect of Biden's record which they now claim to find so morally abominable. So the onslaught of attacks on Biden, like the one launched at last night's debate by Kamala Harris, come across as having a tinge of bad faith.

On Tuesday evening, I left my office suited up in a raincoat and a t-shirt that featured a picture of the nightmarish and internet-famous Philadelphia Flyers mascot, ‘Gritty.’ I was going to Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s rally in Washington Square Park, where thousands were expected to turn out despite the rainy weather (or, as my friend Cody commented, Blade Runner weather) to see the tech entrepreneur give his pitch for the presidency. I wasn’t quite sure what people would wear to a rally for Yang, a candidate who rose to prominence through memes and podcast appearances and whose supporters have been known to wave around signs that say ‘MATH’ and chant out ‘PowerPoint! PowerPoint!

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘charisma’ as ‘compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others’ – how fortunate then that the Democrats have been blessed with two exceptionally charismatic 2020 candidates in Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Yang. The candidacies of Beto and Yang are especially intriguing as they represent a pitch to the American people delivered from two opposing ends of the charisma spectrum. Beto is the hyper-sanitized, telegenic, photogenic, focus-group optimized old-money Texan who, as he says himself, was born to be in it. He’s also physically attractive, which counts in politics. This was true for John F.

Long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang isn’t afraid to take a position on, well, anything. Browse through his campaign website, and you’ll see not just that he believes in universal basic income – the policy proposal for which he’s best known – but also that he wants to mandate the payment of NCAA athletes, to crack down on spam phone calls, and to secure $6 billion to revitalize dying shopping malls. Many of his policy positions are tied to causes with little prominence in the mainstream but a devoted following on the internet, like his recent stance against childhood circumcision, the domain of an online community that refer to themselves as ‘intactivists.

Single issue campaigns are often built around whimsy. The Polish Beer Lovers’ Party springs deliciously to mind, as do Jimmy McMillan’s tireless efforts to remind New Yorkers that the rent was too damn high. Andrew Yang’s attempt to become the Democratic Party candidate for the 2020 elections is based on an idea that might seem whimsical and yet he is a deeply serious man. His campaign is to address the problem of automation: how, in other words, to make the best of a future where machines have rendered millions of jobs redundant. The first thing to be said is that Yang has about as much of a chance of becoming the Democrat nominee as this author has of becoming the UFC heavyweight champion.