How Chris Evans (Yes THAT Chris Evans) is Trying to Save the Country
Cap America is trying to educate people on policy in an unbiased fashion, but how many want to listen?
For those of you who for some silly reason don’t follow Chris Evans on social media, you may be unaware that way back in 2018 or so he and his friend Mark Kassen embarked on a journey to try to bring rational political discourse to the country, (oh, Cap, you always have been an optimist.) And their chosen medium was to do interviews and lay out the positions of Dems and GOP on all the political issues that were out there. Originally the idea was to do counterpoint 60-second clips provided by the politicians explaining their views on topics. They did do that for a while but it seems that they have moved on from that and are doing more like interview style.
However, they slowly built a website called A Starting Point and the idea for the name and the site was to provide a starting point in conversations between liberals and conservatives.
Now, I will be honest in that I haven’t spent a ton of time on the site after it first came out. I tend to like reading longer-form articles etc and am rather familiar with a lot of the topics they discuss. However, for non-politics junkies, this would be a great resource.
They put out content frequently and Evans and Kassen themselves conduct QA sessions with politicians in zoom calls etc that are designed to be educational and informative. All these videos are designed to be quick hits, understandable and informative.
So one would think with Chris Evans’ star power and the fact that he appears in many of the vids and retweets all the things the site posts that A Starting Point’s Twitter feed would have millions of followers.
It has 89,000. That’s it. Evans himself has 16 million followers. A Starting Point joined Twitter in 2020. That’s barely 40k followers a year, which by Twitter famous people standards is pathetic.
Now, yes, many of Evans’ followers are probably from countries outside of the US but still. Here is an unbiased factual site, run by a highly successful Hollywood figure that is beloved around the world and who is turning out content designed for the way that so many people want to access information, and yet, it languishes.
I often see people not wanting to admit that the electorate chooses to remain ignorant. It is easier to say that politics is never explained well, it is too complicated, too boring, that there is too much division, and can’t someone just make it easier! Can’t we have rational conversations? Stick with facts! Get an unbiased view!
Well, Chris Evans created a site to fulfill all those wishes.
And it seems very few people are interested.
So, once again I ask: Is the problem the lack of messaging or lack of interest?
I was and still am thrilled that Evans is staying committed to this and I know it must frustrate him to see low engagement but here’s the thing. The only reason he can continue to do this is he has money and time and fame. I remember watching the vids he put out when he first started talking to politicians about this (oh fun fact, one of his brothers is involved in state politics so that’s cool), anyway, many of them were just stoked that “Cap America” wanted to meet them.
Some of them had no clue who he was (do they live under a rock?) but his fame made it easier for him to meet with politicians who would most likely have never met with or submitted content to a site put together by some nobody political junkie.
I assume Evans is having people edit all the vids, plus he had to pay for the site and upkeep, etc and all of that takes time. Since he’s made so much money off his acting he never needs to ask for money or subscribers. If he had, the site probably would have died years ago.
All of this comes back to one sad truth. Politics is not popular, people hate learning about it, and they don’t want to take the time to learn about it, even Chris Evans’ famous and lovely face can’t seem to change that fact. Instead, people flock to sound bite-sized ideas and slogans, and whichever politician does that best wins.
So, if you want to share the site with people, feel free to, watch some of the vids, maybe use them to open dialogues, etc.
Maybe someone will get interested that hadn’t been before.
Who knows?
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