“Are you okay, Heidi?”
It was Andrew’s birthday, and he had just gotten off the stage at Drake University where he’d spoken to close to a thousand supporters. I had been on that stage earlier, introducing the person who would then introduce Andrew, and was sitting alone backstage, recovering from a panic attack that ensued.
“I’m fine, boss, just eating your birthday cake,” I joked, trying to hide how I was really feeling. “I haven’t eaten anything else today.” But he could see plainly my claim of being “fine” wasn’t true — his entourage of advisors had walked on and it was just Andrew and I. Were this nearly any other man, I’d feel the panic rising again. But not with Andrew — he had cemented himself through his words and his actions as a man I didn’t have to worry about crossing my rather strong boundaries. He saw me sitting alone, and he knew I needed someone to simply ask if I was okay.
“Can I do anything for you? How about some Belvitas to balance that out?” I laughed, remembering instantly why I was putting myself through daily panic attacks. I knew the country as a whole needed the empathy that Andrew showed me, someone no one had heard of, a small town woman who didn’t matter to anyone important, and that fact made no difference to Andrew.
If you’d read my piece from last year, My Time As a Woman in the Andrew Yang Campaign, you’d know that working for this campaign was one of the most healing experiences of my life, but I’d like to go one step further today.
I’ve watched from across the country as Andrew Yang, being the front runner in the New York City mayoral race, has been painted as a misogynist, a “tech-bro”, as a joke candidate who doesn’t take things seriously, and I urge you to listen to another perspective, of someone who knows him.
It was May of 2019 when I’d discovered Andrew Yang via a Facebook ad — and quickly fell down the rabbit hole of watching any interview I could get my hands on. Here was a man with brazenly compelling ideas for a better world, who would talk to literally anyone to get them out there — with no judgment. I watched him talk to liberal and conservative outlets alike, commanding respect across the political gamut for his bold yet pragmatic vision that excited most folks who’d heard it.
The next step of jumping into the online conversation around Yang, though, gave me my first, and only pause. Whereas listening to Andrew’s words alone didn’t engender this, there seemed to be an online narrative of Yang’s campaign having a “bro culture”. I was immediately concerned. As a woman veteran who suffers from PTSD due to military sexual trauma, “bro’s” are not my people. A couple of years ago, at a military exam for my PTSD, the examiner brought up a note from my therapists records: “Heidi seems to have zero tolerance for sexual harassment, innuendo, or other bad male behavior in the work place.” My therapist put rather plainly something I’d cried about endlessly. I just wanted to be seen as a human with value, here to do a job and help — and for men to keep their hands and their thoughts to themselves, which they often did not do.
I became wary and defensive. I was on the lookout for the bad male behavior I’d been warned about — and found a single instance in the Yang2020 facebook group. As part of my PTSD, I am on high alert and become narrowly focused — and I caused a stink, eventually taking it to twitter to tweet at Andrew himself. I came across another woman sounding the same alarm, and joined forces. I became active in the #WomenForYang group. But what I didn’t expect, based on the narrative I was told, was that the campaign cared or would do anything about it.
Except they did. Almost immediately, I was contacted by a member of Yang’s social media team. He listened to my concerns, and explained to me the actions they had already begun to take — I had found Yang’s campaign around when he had appeared on Joe Rogan, so there was an influx of new members into the official facebook group, and the group was trying to scale quickly and keep good order. From there, I was contacted by a female staffer who got on a phone call with me, and promised to escalate my concerns. Meanwhile, I worked with the social media moderator — he kept in touch with me, and when I checked back into the facebook group a few months later, I saw they’d done a good job of cracking down on conversations and people who were disruptive, rude, or threatening — in fact, I saw none of that ever again there.
But were you to follow only the totally online narrative, the Yang campaign was doing absolutely nothing to address these problems. I unfortunately made the mistake of tuning into this, to the point of mental anguish for myself. I had to try and decipher for myself if these things were real, or if I was in an echo chamber of outrage that simply sought to be outraged.
I’d see a blue check on twitter calling out the Yang campaign for having a high male supporter population, and then at an event, I’d take it upon myself to arrange the women there in the front for pictures — never fully considering the fact in front of my eyes that there *were* a sizeable amount of women at events who probably didn’t feel the need to stand in the front to counter the tech bro narrative. They, not being entirely online, weren’t even aware they were seen as non-existent. To the average supporter not connected to the daily outrage machine, they were there because of Andrew’s message of hope, that an economy based on valuing people rather than capital could lift everyone up, and that all were welcome.
Four years prior, I’d been a Bernie Sanders supporter. That enclave, too, was rife with accusations of “Bernie Bros.” The Yang campaign was sensitive to this, however, having watched it play out for Bernie. They knew that populist movements like Yang and Bernie’s did tend to attract disaffected younger people, and that it tended to skew more male along with the statistics of YouTube’s viewership — where platforms like these found a voice when tuned out by the mainstream media.
From the get go, Yang and his campaign stressed Humanity First values, that called for higher standards of behavior. Whereas Bernie’s movement tended to be an (understandably) angrier bunch, the #YangGang took a different tact, in encouraging mindsets of abundance rather than scarcity. We talked about mental health, and how poverty and a gradual decline in institutional trust made us all worse off. We pledged to be good to others and give them the benefit of the doubt. To show kindness in the face of unkindness, and to lift up rather than put down. Later, when I went to work for the campaign, I’d learned there was a zero tolerance policy for sexual harassment, and I saw it put in action multiple times.
Was the Yang campaign perfect at all this? No, they weren’t. Plenty of things went wrong. Some dishonest people will use your ignorance of political campaigns to paint this as nefarious when not — Yang’s campaign didn’t have the best and most polished politicos vying to join their employment ranks, as people who do this professionally had already signed up with other, more established and promising campaigns. When he finally gained traction, rather quickly, it nearly overwhelmed the campaign comprised of people who were more true believers in Yang’s vision than seasoned professionals. The Yang campaign did their absolute best, though. In some ways, it was to their own detriment. Time and again, personal grievances that were HR issues erupted that the campaign handled with kids gloves to give the benefit of the doubt to someone, and time and again that someone would use that not to fix the problem, but stir up an online mob against people they’d had transgressions with. Most experienced campaigns saw these things coming and would nip them in the bud quickly. The Yang campaign though, wanted to ensure people were heard, even if this allowed them to take away resources and time that otherwise could be used to further help the campaign. The down side to this was by not callously shutting things down, it gave life to some dishonest claims rooted in personal grievances and made it easy to paint the entire campaign as something it was not. By the time the campaign had ended, I had, however, separated myself entirely from this faction that demanded I see what wasn’t there in good people drawn to Yang’s message.
The facts are, #Yang2020 was a mixture of people from all walks of life — men and women young and old. And to be sure, if you ask a supporter to name a prominent voice in the movement, they’re probably more likely to name a woman like Paget Kagy, Aarika Rhodes, or Carly Reilly, before they’d come up with a man’s name. Women led and supported this movement at every level, with the full support of Andrew himself. Painting the campaign and Andrew as a “bro” candidate erases thousands of intelligent and passionate women who worked their butts off to give this campaign life.
That a literal “unknown man” was able to make it into the top 6 finishers in the Democratic Presidential Primary is testament to Yang’s leadership and his ability to connect with, inspire, and help people regardless of who they were.
Andrew Yang is probably the most human “politician” I’ve ever come across, which is rare in a world where the entire game is one of destroying other people in pursuit of your own power. He cares. He laughs nervously when put on the spot by a comedian. He has re-homed a pet. He’s forgiving. He’s relatable. He’s kind. He’s human. He loves New York City, and America.
Andrew never wanted power, he wanted to help. And to that end, he doesn’t play those games, and why politicos and blue checks in the media on twitter dislike him, but normal people love him.
