Captain America actor, vocal Trump critic and budding political insider Chris Evans has his full suit of armor on to fend off Twitter trolls who don’t agree with his political views before the election.
Evans also has the lights on at a relatively new website called A Starting Point, which aims to cut through the political chaos he thinks stems from the very top of government (the White House), which is preventing a needed new round of stimulus for Americans.
“No,” Evans told Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade when asked if he was surprised there is no stimulus plan. “To inject some of my personal opinions, we have someone in the White House who creates division. I’m not surprised that we can’t have commonality — and that’s what this site is hoping to rage against.”
The best way to describe A Starting Point is to imagine The Players’ Tribune (a first-person news site started by Derek Jeter) merged with Snapchat (short videos) and The Hill (all about politics). And subsequently, that one unified platform churned out short videos from politicians with no outside commentary.
The site features unvarnished videos — including short Democratic and Republican debate sessions — from politicians eager to get their messages across to the general public. It not only serves as a way to get information straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, but it gives viewers an inside feel to how the political process works.
Evans and co-founders Mark Kassen and Joe Kiani have worked hard since A Starting Point’s founding in 2017 to gain the trust of lawmakers...so they get the access down in D.C. It took a while to pull off, but early indications suggest the platform is gaining steam. The trio say they have notched 330 million in engagements directly from the content on the site.
Despite the site’s best intentions and countless interviews, the group does not expect the polarization in government to subside anytime soon.
“I don’t know if there is an indication [the polarization will subside], but they [politicians] tell us they want it to. They all have different opinions,” Kassen says.
Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and co-anchor of The First Trade at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.
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