“In the context of my book, I was saying, how will this tribalism and violence manifest itself. Poor whites who felt like they had no future and then that violence would emerge in large part because that group would become increasingly angry and distressed,” Yang said. “That’s the context of the book.”
Yang, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, quipped that he “d[oesn’t] look much like a white nationalist” and added, “I don’t want the support of anyone who has any kind of agenda that’s different than the agenda of this campaign. And our slogan is humanity first.”
Yang assured one questioner, a survivor of the August 2017 Charlottesville car attack by a white supremacist that killed counterprotester Heather Heyer, that he was “most concerned” about white nationalist violence, although he did not directly answer her question about whether he would sign a bill defining white nationalist violence as terrorism if he is elected.
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