This week on the Andrew Yang podcast.
They've just written off these red states because it's hard to compete here. And it is very different than the coast. The people are very different. Their lived experience is very different. You have to compete differently. You can't just treat it like it's California or Texas or something like that. You have to have a different approach, which is what I'm trying to model this time.
It is my pleasure to welcome to the podcast a very tall gentleman. He goes by 6'6" or so, Air Force veteran, current park ranger, former university instructor, and a bunch of other things too. He's had quite a career, but right now he is the independent candidate for US Senate out of South Dakota, Brian Bengs. Welcome, Brian.
Thank you, Andrew, for having me, and I'm actually 6'8", so even a little bit taller than you thought.
That see, I under promise, over deliver. 6'8", so much authority. Maybe that's how you wound up not just like an Air Force instructor, but you've done a whole lot of things. You've been a real leader throughout your career. Where to start? Well, first, you grew up in Iowa, which is a place I've spent a fair amount of time. And you have a lot of warmth and love for your home state.
Oh, absolutely, yeah. Iowa made me who I am, certainly. And then the Air Force made me who I am now. But the small town values, I grew up in a town of 500 people in the last graduating class of the high school before it ceased to exist anymore. Class of '17. That small townness is what I carried with me forward, and it made me want to move back to a small town, which is what I've done now.
So, you were the lord of the class of '17. You said like as your leader and the tallest among you.
I don't know if I would say that. I was not a particularly motivated student in high school. So, I went to the Navy immediately afterward because I didn't know what I wanted to do and my family couldn't afford college. So, yeah, go to the Navy, find out what that's like, and then you get some discipline and go, you know what? I think I will go to college and found out that I could do quite well there.
Yeah, I'll say. So, you came back and went to school and law school in Iowa after serving on an aircraft carrier in the Navy?
I was, yes. So, I was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, but my join the Navy see the world adventure was not what you would imagine because it was unfortunately in dry dock for my entire enlistment. So, I joined the Navy and I saw South Philadelphia.
A great part of the country.
[laughter] Lovely, but it wasn't what I signed up for necessarily.
All right. So, you come back and then you go to college and law school in Iowa and then you wind up in the Air Force, I want to say.
Yeah. So, you know, I went to college, studied history and international affairs, and then went to law school not thinking that I wanted to practice law, but thinking I want to get involved in the Foreign Service. And I thought, oh, I'll get a degree and focus on international law, and that'll, you know, pave the way for me to get into the Foreign Service. But I was doing a work study with the office of the state archaeologist, and one of the people there, one of my bosses, said, "Oh, my cousin is getting ready to retire from the Foreign Service. I can get..." And this was the day just when email was getting started. "I can give you his mailing address, and you can get in touch with him, and he can give you some tips." And he basically talked me out of it. So, then I pivoted of like, okay, I'm halfway through law school. I'm not just going to walk away. I'll finish law school with the goal of getting into practice and the Air Force offered a better opportunity to do something productive and get paid better than what the county prosecutors in Iowa were offering as a starting salary.
So at that point then, you did have the see the world adventure, right?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I signed up thinking I'll do 4 years and probably get out and do private practice or something, but then 9/11 happened in the first 4 years and you can't leave at that point because that's why you sign up. So the Air Force just kept sending me cool places to do things I never imagined I'd have the opportunity to do and it turned into a couple decades there before I finally retired.
Wow, so 19 years you were in Japan, Germany, Kuwait, Qatar. You became a lieutenant colonel. And then an instructor at the US Air Force Academy and somewhere in there you I think you met your wife and now have two adultish kids. Like where did you two meet? Was it in the Air Force?
No, actually it was, I met at the, let's see, the summer before my senior year of college at Iowa State. So we started dating when I was at Iowa State and then she graduated early and went and got a job in Kansas City and we kind of had the long distance thing for a while and then we got married before the start of my second year of law school. And we've been married, it'll be 31 years in about a month or so. And we had our first daughter was actually born in Japan. So she lived the Air Force lifestyle and the youngest was born in Louisiana. And we actually came to South Dakota to retire in Aberdeen, South Dakota because I wanted them to have a home town like I had, a Midwestern experience, that sort of thing. And it worked out great for that.
So you met your wife in college and then you did 19 years in the Air Force. And so, I might actually don't know quite how this works. You were a JAG and an officer. And so, your spouse then goes with you and lives on the base everywhere, and then your kids get born on bases?
For the most part, yeah. There are certain bases where she can't go, but everywhere that I went except for the deployments to Qatar and Kuwait, she was there with me. And the kids came along, too. So, yeah, the kids had the experience of going to school. They were old enough to go to school in Germany, and they had the option of going to, hey, you could take a bus for a half hour when we lived in Germany to the army base down the road, or you could walk three blocks off the road and go to the German school. And we said, "Eh, go learn some German."
So, you come back to the states post Air Force about 10 years ago, and become a professor in South Dakota. And then you found yourself in a situation where you thought, "You know what? This country could use better leadership." Which it definitely could. We spent a little bit of time together. So, I find you to be a very sensible, pragmatic, level-headed sort. And it seems like you've been a political independent all these years.
Yeah, with the exception of a short period that I'll tell you about. I registered as an independent first when I turned 18. So, I had the foresight back in 1988 to go, "You know what? I don't want to be married to either team red or team blue. I like to think for myself." And so, it made it a lot easier when you're in the military because in the military, you have to be apolitical. So, most military folks, I think, tend to be independents. But, in 2021, the fall of 2021, I was watching or I had watched what had happened with January 6th and thought, "You know what? The current majority leader of the Senate, John Thune, needs to have a challenger." And the Chuck Schumer Democratic National Party was set to let him kind of coast to re-election. So, I called up the South Dakota Democratic Party and said, "You know what? I would prefer to run as an independent, but if necessary, I can run as a Democrat." And so, that's what ended up happening. And I registered as a Democrat for 13 months and then unregistered after the election.
It happens, man. There are millions of Americans who are registered with a party for convenience, to be able to vote, to be able to participate in our process. What it sounds like, you've been an independent for, gosh, not to put a date on you, but you know, like 30 some odd years or something like that versus a year or so as a Dem for practicality's sake. I think you're right that military veterans tend to be independent and pragmatic. There's a notion that folks who serve are all conservative, which I don't think is quite right. You know, that there's been, I actually, you know, much better than I because you've taught and interacted with at this point thousands of people. Like what was your experience?
Well, there's definitely some hardcore conservatives. You can't deny that. But by and large, you're expected to when you're on active duty to not display any partisan behavior. So, it is kind of hard to read people because we're all working towards the same thing. It's only when you're talking offline in, you know, at a bar or something like that that you might get a hint of that. But most people, myself included, just kept our views to ourselves and, you know, you salute and do what you're told. So, I don't think it is accurate to say that the military is overwhelmingly conservative or Republican. But it is certainly the most vocal aspect of it. Most people are just kind of keep down and keep swimming and probably a mixed bag like I was of I like that, but I don't like this, so tend to more independent thinking.
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You're now running as independent candidate in a state that I believe needs an independent candidate in the worst way because it's a red state at least if you look at the national map and the vote for Trump. And one thing that I'm passionate about is that the Democrats do not meaningfully try [laughter] in the vast majority of the rural areas, the vast majority of the red or reddish areas around the country. They're like, "Eh." And one of early forward adopters and Yang Gangers, Blair Walsingham, who like a lot of people who've been listening to me for a long time know about. She ran for Congress in Tennessee and became the Democratic nominee in a very reddish district in Tennessee as most of the state is. And so she becomes the Democratic nominee and then has a call with the state Democratic Party and is like, "Hey, I'm your nominee to be, you know, a member of Congress in this district. Like do you guys send me money? Like do I get stuff?" And then the state party was like, "No, no, no. You send us money." And then she's like, "I send you money? Like I don't have any money." [laughter] You know, and Blair was a military veteran herself and a mom and she's like, "Wait a minute. Like what?" And so the Democratic Party was not exactly running to help Blair, and is not rushing to help other candidates who step up in rural South Dakota, I'm imagining.
Yeah, well, I would say I can speak from experience having been the 2022 Democratic nominee against John Thune. And I was, in hindsight, I was woefully naive when I started that. I was thinking the traditional method of like you get out and you talk to people. That seems to be what you do. And I thought, well, as a military retiree, I have time to get out and, you know, hang out in the cafes and go to the small towns and talk to people. I did not realize the importance of money in this issue. And I can speak to the question of will the national party give you any support? And the best I can say is they did not give money to John Thune. That is the extent of my support, having been the nominee for the Senate in South Dakota. They've just written off these red states because it's hard to compete here. And it is very different than the coast. The people are very different, their lived experience is very different. You have to compete differently. You can't just treat it like it's California or Texas or something like that. You have to have a different approach, which is what I'm trying to model this time.
Yeah, so, I've not been to South Dakota as will become evident on national TV pretty quickly. I think you'll see what I'm talking about in a minute. But then there's, Mount Rushmore is in South Dakota, right?
Yeah, yeah. So, see that's something I did not know.
It's about an hour north of where I am right now.
Yeah, look at that. But I'm raising this because when you talk about, hey, it's a different kind of place, like I imagine that it's predominantly rural, predominantly agricultural, and a lot of hardship. You know, when I talked to Tadd Killeen who's running in Idaho, he was like, "Look, most people here make below the living wage and health care is a massive problem and there are like massive problems." So, I'm imagining that South Dakota feels similar.
Oh, absolutely. We were just, we're kind of in the midst of hitting all the less traveled parts of the state, at least in the west before we go do that in the east. And I was just talking to my staffer that was with me the other day, you go into these small towns and you can drive down Main Street and you see the old buildings and they're kind of in disrepair and you just feel bad that the town was once thriving and it is now a poster of, you know, bad policies that have left out and left behind the working class, the agricultural, the rural communities in favor of, you know, as long as Wall Street's doing well, everybody's fine. That's not the case. The main streets in these small towns, and I grew up in a small town and I feel the same way. It feels bad going home because it's not what I remember back then and it wasn't even, you know, a bright shiny economic star then. The decline was starting. So, these places, they feel forgotten. And they're hardcore Republicans in the sense they're like, "Oh, yeah." You go up to them, if you go up to them and say, "Hey, I'm running as a Democrat," they will not be well received. But you can go up to them and say, "I'm running as an independent and I notice that you've got these problems." And they will agree with you and engage with you. So, it is very different experience than what I had in 2022.
Yeah, Jon Tester, former Democratic senator from Montana, which I feel is culturally, you know, not that dissimilar, said that the Democratic Party brand is poisoned. [laughter] Absolutely. And then urged Seth Bodnar to run as an independent. You have direct experience running as a Democrat and South Dakotans would just shut down. By the way, I had that experience in Iowa where I was in a diner and I said, "Hey, I'm Andrew Yang, I'm running for president." And then the server, waitress, said, "Really, which party?" And I was like, "Democrat." She's like, "Oh." And then she reacted like I just sprouted horns. And so I was like, "Oh, no." But theoretically, I was like, "Aren't the Democratic party principles supposed to be helping that server, that waitress?" But you know, that's not the way she saw it. And I do also want to talk about my time in Iowa, which I visited 25 times, something like that.
Did you make it up to the north central part of the state because that's where I grew up?
Totally. I mean, I did a 17-stop bus tour all over the state, including to very, very small towns where 12 people would turn out, but then that was like, you know, 5% of the town, so it was like pretty good turnout kind of deal.
You get 12 in the town I grew up in, you're doing pretty well.
Yeah, yeah, that was what I did, you know, and we meaningfully contested it. I ended up getting maybe like 4 to 5% of the Democratic primary vote in 2020, which because of the arcane caucus rules kind of got compressed to near zero, but you know, like getting that level of support. I got 9,000 Iowans to say, "Hey, Andrew Yang number one." And that, you know, that was a lot of work on our part. You know, really, really proud. There were occasional glimmers I would get of this sort of creeping decline that was starting to make people flip to the negative. Like every once in a while I would get a glimpse of that. And I know that got a lot stronger during COVID, a lot of small businesses shut down, and then like a lot of towns. I mean, how old are you, Brian?
All right, you're a little bit older than I am. I'm 51. And so when I think about small towns, I think about John Cougar Mellencamp or now John Mellencamp or whatever. Like, and you know, in his songs and like when I grew up, there was a sense that if you, you know, I was born in a small town, you know, and I'll live in a small town kind of thing, like where life in small town America was good. [laughter] What was the sense that you had and then fast forward and it's become less good because of a whole number of problems. But like, you know, it's just been harder for Americans in that environment to afford a decent life and then some of them have become very beleaguered, frustrated, you know, like struggling with the addiction problems. Like there have been various social ills that have arisen.
Yeah, that's basically, you described the Midwest. The small towns in the Midwest. These communities were formed basically around the farms. So the town I grew up in for example in North Iowa was a farming community and it was a retirement community.
It was called Burt, B-U-R-T. Very small town and the neighbors on either side of us were retired farmers. Across the street, retired farmers. Down the street, retired farmers. So you'd move in, you know, when you got a certain age and said, "Well, I don't want to be farming anymore. I'll just give it to the kids and then move into the nearest town where you'd come in for the cafe and the bank and the co-op and everything." And now with the consolidation of agriculture, that you get bigger, you get swallowed up. You know, these rural farms, they're not the heart of the community anymore as they were before. So you've got big ag is displacing the family farm to a great extent and making it more difficult to survive off what you could before. So I think I saw the number recently in South Dakota, the average farm size is about 1,500 acres. And in the past it did not need to be that big. And so you had more people farming on a smaller plot of land and making a decent living. And they just can't do that anymore.
