I do not have any personal experience, but sadly it does not sound too surprising from what's been out publicly. The moment he dropped out and immediately got the CNN job really changed my perception of him. Then after some events from his mayoral campaign, such as his Israel comments or the Staten Island ferry cowboy incident, it's pretty clear he is a politician like many others.
I donated to his campaign after seeing him on JRE, and I’ve been getting spam emails from political candidates ever since. I’ve blocked at least 7-8 different “PLEASE DONATE” mailers, but they keep coming. I think Yang sold my info.
I donated to a few candidates and the same thing happened. Not sure if it’s from the campaigns individually, or via the Act Blue platform that they all used.
My issue was not with stopping the assault, but more with the fact that the story as told seemed quite embellished, ran on a number of outlets, and it seemed specifically tailored to garner votes.
To be specific, on one side the "bad guy" was a staten island guy wearing a cowboy hat in the midst of a hate crime epidemic soon after the capitol riots. On the other side, with pictures, a mentally ill person of color. The assaulted photographer was there shooting Yang, with many other campaign people and other photographers. All the accounts and pictures were released by the campaign, nobody pressed charges, and as far as I know nobody helped the guy get some help.
I hope that's a bit clearer. I wasn't there and don't really know what happened for a fact, but after looking at multiple sources my best guess was between cheesy embellishment and distasteful stunt.
Now I don't know what to think anymore... I thought it was widely discussed at the time, but I'm having a hard time finding the original coverage of the event on youtube, and the written articles I find seem more balanced than what I remember hearing. So maybe fake news got me on this one.
That said, the Israel comments and the CNN job had a lot more weight in changing my opinion (which to reiterate, is not "Yang is the worst", just "Yang is like his peers").
