Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang made the case for an ombudsman to monitor malicious speech in the US. "We have to be able to sort out people who are maliciously informing the American people and that to me is a much greater danger than we face now," he said. He brought up the UK and how it monitors certain speech. Yang said they had something equivalent to an ombudsman, where complaints are filed and taken under review. "So if they can do that, why can't we?" Yang asked. Yang said foreign actors are investing money to maliciously doctor information to corrupt US democracy and "then frankly having a good laugh about it." "Right now we're on the verge of a difficult time. So Americans can't trust what we see," he said.<doc-sep>With astonishing speed, a near-total unknown has climbed to the top ranks of the Democratic presidential primary: Andrew Yang. Yang, a startup veteran and founder of the nonprofit Venture for America who has never run for elected office before, has made a $12,000-per-year basic income for all American adults the centerpiece of his campaign. He averages 1 to 2 percent in public opinion polls, but as of this writing, he’s surged on prediction markets, with bettors giving him better odds than Beto O’Rourke or Amy Klobuchar. Some of that momentum can be traced to his appearance on comedian Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast (the above YouTube clip of his appearance has more than 2 million views). After his appearance on the show, small donations started to stream in. As of early March, Yang had exceeded 65,000 donors, thus clearing a threshold the Democratic National Committee has set for eligibility in the first two debates. Was considering celebrating hitting 65,000 donations by flossing but found out it wasn’t cool anymore. Thank you all for getting us this far! pic.twitter.com/7j7aAm6tvS — Andrew Yang (@AndrewYangVFA) March 11, 2019 His campaign manager, Zach Graumann, told the Daily Beast that the campaign had already obtained at least 200 donors per state in at least 20 states, clearing another DNC threshold. “Everything is up and to the right since the Joe Rogan podcast. That was the key. That was the moment,” Graumann told the Daily Beast’s Sam Stein and Will Sommer. Achieving mass popularity through interview podcasts — Yang has also appeared on Sam Harris’s show, Freakonomics, and Vox’s Ezra Klein Show — is not a traditional path to a successful campaign. Nor are appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program the norm in a Democratic primary. But as was seen in the 2016 election, a lot can happen when an unexpected person does well in a debate. Exceeding expectations — whether on a debate stage or a podcast — can build name recognition and can help candidates who are strikingly different from the rest of their field (like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders) stand out. And successful or not, Yang is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. He blends a traditionally left-wing platform (a mass expansion of the safety net and a big new value-added tax, or VAT, to pay for it) with massive appeal to the young, predominantly male, and, in their unique way, socially conservative audiences of people like Joe Rogan and Sam Harris. This meme, showing an angry, MAGA hat-wearing Trump supporter transforming into a blissful, basic income-enjoying Yang backer, is a good illustration of how certain Reddit/4chan denizens think Yang’s message will penetrate on the right: Found this on the Yang subreddit. Could someone explain to me why Trump fans would turn into Yang fans? pic.twitter.com/zqZVNPReiz — JD-800 (@thejd800) March 7, 2019 Indeed, Yang is already winning the 2020 meme wars by a wide margin, and on the strangest accounts: Did Trump just lose the 2020 meme war? Memers flock to @andrewYangVFA's campaign centered around AI mass job loss requiring universal basic income (UBI) after mentions on @JoeRogan and @WikiLeaks. See #Yanggang and #yanggang2020 for thousands of examples. pic.twitter.com/n7vxeMN4l2 — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 8, 2019 4chan is a particularly prominent hotbed for the Yang Gang, which could cause his campaign some problems given the site’s popularity among some white nationalists; one backer posted an innocuous tweet from Yang about the opioid crisis with the caption “Andrew Yang cares about white people.” Yang, of course, totally rejects support from white nationalists. But the mainstream Yangsters who make memes? He’s a fan. “If you excise any racist white nationalist, bigotry leanings, I find the whole thing hysterical,” Yang told me in a phone call, audibly laughing. “You know what I mean? Imagine seeing your face on dragons and whatnot. The whole thing is funny.” He continued, “I wish I could just jump up and down about how funny it is, but obviously there’s an element of it that’s intertwined with some terrible beliefs. Anyone who spends, like, five seconds looking into me or my background or my beliefs or my platform would be like, ‘This guy is the least white nationalist dude ever.’” Message received! So what does Yang stand for — and what does his online success mean for the 2020 race going forward? Who is Andrew Yang? Yang, 44 and the son of Taiwanese immigrants, worked as a corporate lawyer (“for five unhappy months,” he told Klein) after Brown and Columbia Law, before going into startups. His first one was called Stargiving and aimed to “raise money for celebrity-affiliated nonprofits,” Yang writes in his book Smart People Should Build Things, a kind of unofficial manifesto for his nonprofit Venture for America, which places recent grads of elite schools in startups in cities like Detroit and Baltimore. “It was extraordinarily difficult. My company failed spectacularly, but I recovered,” he writes. “I went to work for a mobile software company, Crisp Wireless, and then a health care software company, MMF Systems, over the next five years, eventually becoming the CEO of a test-prep company, Manhattan GMAT, in 2006,” he continues. Manhattan GMAT is now known as Manhattan Prep, and has expanded from offering prep for the GMAT (the standard business school admissions test) to offering GRE and LSAT prep as well. A few years after Yang took over, the test prep giant Kaplan (owned by the then-named Washington Post Company) bought Manhattan Prep. In 2011, Yang started Venture for America (VFA), an effort to try to prevent elite colleges and universities from funneling graduates toward safe options (like jobs in finance, management consulting, or big law) by enlisting teams of fellows to move to cities across America and work for local startups. As detailed in a 2013 New York Times profile, the group offers recent graduates a five-week boot camp on entrepreneurship, and then sets them up with startup jobs at companies that “must be less than 10 years old and employ less than 100 people. Starting salaries are $33,000 to $38,000.” The target fellows are people from selective schools who could easily be making six figures at other jobs straight out of college. The profile, by Hannah Seligson, paints VFA as a darling of wealthy startup founders like Tony Hsieh of Zappos (based in Las Vegas, a VFA city) and Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans (based in Detroit, another VFA city). And if you read Smart People Should Build Things, that cultural milieu shines through. It’s not the work of a radical socialist firebrand. It speaks the language of startup founders and TED talk speakers, and directly targets an audience of fellow elite college grads in service of trying to spread economic growth more evenly across the US. “We’re using educational attainment as an imperfect proxy for ‘smart’ and talking about people who get tracked, sorted, and aggregated throughout their adolescence into various universities and courses of studies,” Yang writes in the introduction. And, unsurprisingly given his organization’s name, “Venture for America,” the book largely equates creating value in overlooked parts of the US with starting businesses there. Examples Yang touts include Kickboard, a VFA partner company “that provides a software application to help teachers track student performance,” and ShapeUp, which “helps individuals promote health and wellness through social networking and goal measurement.” “People and companies around the country are solving real problems right now,” Yang concludes, and those kinds of firms are what he means. The Freedom Dividend: Yang’s universal basic income plan The centerpiece of Yang’s campaign is his call for a universal basic income (UBI) that he calls the Freedom Dividend (he told Klein, in a bit of characteristic bluntness, that he calls it that because it “tests better” as a term than “universal basic income”). The Freedom Dividend, outlined in Yang’s second book The War on Normal People, is a $1,000-per-month (or $12,000-per-year) check mailed to every adult American age 18 to 64, no strings attached. It’s a pure universal basic income, with no phaseouts for top earners or work requirements.<doc-sep>CEO of ADL: Seeing a 'blitzkrieg of anti-Jewish' acts across US 'Stay out': Fulton County official reacts to potential GOP visit during audit Dana Bash: This is so telling about where the Republican party is NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 24: Trump Tower stands on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on August 24, 2018 in New York City. Following new allegations over hush money that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen paid to an adult-film actress, the Manhattan district attorneyÕs office in New York City may seek criminal charges against the Trump Organization in the coming days. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Why GOP is standing in the way of Capitol riot investigation WASHINGTON - NOVEMBER 08: US Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-VA) remarks on the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the US Capitol November 8, 2006 in Washington, DC. Warner said he supports President George W. Bush's nomination of former CIA Director Robert Gates for Secretary of Defense. Warner said he anticipates Gates' confirmation before the end of the year. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), joined by Senate Assistant Minority Leader John Thune (R-SD) (L) and Senate Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO), speaks following a Senate Republican Policy luncheon at the Russell Senate Office Building on May 18, 2021 in Washington, DC. Hear what Matt Gaetz said about Paul Ryan before his speech Former GOP senator: If McConnell said this, 'it's shameful' 'Some people have no shame': Biden calls out GOP lawmakers with list 2020 hopeful wants holograms to campaign in multiple cities (CNN) — Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang is taking campaigning to new heights, recently unveiling his plan to use a 3D hologram to campaign remotely in two or three places at once. Yang revealed his campaign strategy on “TMZ Live” Wednesday, appearing in a video alongside a hologram of rapper Tupac Shakur. Me trying out being a hologram with hologram Tupac 👍 pic.twitter.com/IclQvAa27z — Andrew Yang🧢🗽🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) April 11, 2019 “I was doing a demo of what a hologram would consist of in order to send the hologram me to campaign in Iowa and other battleground states,” Yang explained. Yang, who has centered his campaign around a universal basic income plan, said his team is working with a hologram company and may debut his 3D image as early as June, according to the Carroll Times Herald. “We are exploring rolling a truck out that would enable someone to see a hologram of me that is three-dimensional give my stump speech,” Yang told the newspaper. “And, also, if I were in a studio, which we could set up very easily, I could beam in and take questions live.” Yang told the Carroll Times Herald the 3D hologram is a “fun way” to be in multiple places at once but also ties to his presidential message that times are changing. “We can’t just keep doing the same things over and over again and expect it to achieve the results we need,” Yang said. Despite his new campaign approach, Yang told the newspaper he plans to continue scheduling in-person campaign stops. CNN has reached out to Yang’s presidential campaign for comment.<doc-sep>
NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 24: Trump Tower stands on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on August 24, 2018 in New York City. Following new allegations over hush money that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen paid to an adult-film actress, the Manhattan district attorneyÕs office in New York City may seek criminal charges against the Trump Organization in the coming days. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) WASHINGTON - NOVEMBER 08: US Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-VA) remarks on the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the US Capitol November 8, 2006 in Washington, DC. Warner said he supports President George W. Bush's nomination of former CIA Director Robert Gates for Secretary of Defense. Warner said he anticipates Gates' confirmation before the end of the year. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), joined by Senate Assistant Minority Leader John Thune (R-SD) (L) and Senate Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO), speaks following a Senate Republican Policy luncheon at the Russell Senate Office Building on May 18, 2021 in Washington, DC. Editor’s Note: On Sunday, April 14, at 7 p.m. ET, CNN will host a town hall with Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, former ambassador for global entrepreneurship under the Obama administration and 2020 presidential candidate. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN. (CNN) — I never thought I’d run for president. My parents were immigrants to this country – and leader of the free world was not on the list of careers presented to me as a skinny Asian kid growing up in upstate New York. Instead, I became a lawyer for five unhappy months and then an entrepreneur. In 2011, I started a nonprofit organization, Venture for America, to help bring talented young entrepreneurs to create thousands of jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, Baltimore and other cities around the country. I chose those cities because there I experienced the aftermath of automation and witnessed the devastating effect it had on people’s lives. And then Donald Trump became President. Clara Lu Andrew Yang For Americans who are still trying to figure out why Trump is President, the answer is simple – we automated away millions of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, and Trump spoke directly to the fear and anger of those voters. He promised them that he would restore those jobs – a promise on which he has notably failed to deliver. Here’s the reality, though: The financial crisis of 2008 brought our 14 million manufacturing jobs (itself a low plateau from the 17 million in 2000) down to 11.4 million, and 10 years of expansion has only brought us back up to 12.8 million. But what happened to manufacturing workers will soon happen to retail workers, call center workers, fast food workers, truck drivers and others, as the next Industrial Revolution takes hold of our economy. Bain, a leading consulting firm, projects automation will disrupt jobs at about three times the rate of the Second Industrial Revolution, which sparked thousands of strikes and mass riots at the turn of the 20th century. If you doubt that this is already happening, consider that America’s labor participation rate (the ratio of people who are working compared to the total population aged 16 and over) today has fallen to 63%, about the same level as Ecuador and Costa Rica. In the US, almost one out of five prime, working age men have not worked in the past year, and our life expectancy has declined for the past three years, in part due to surges in drug overdoses and suicides. This is before a projected 33% of American malls and retail stores may be forced to shutter their doors, and it might not be long before truck drivers are replaced with self-driving trucks. The challenge for the Democratic Party is to solve the problems that got Trump elected. However, when I went to Washington in 2017 to meet with lawmakers on this issue, no one wanted to touch automation and the changing state of our economy. But here’s the reality: We are undergoing the greatest economic transformation in our history, and we are dealing with it by pretending nothing is happening. I have two young children, and I have no intention of leaving the country in shambles for them. We need to wake up to the fact that it is not immigrants who are causing economic dislocations.