Mother Jones: Here’s Why Andrew Yang’s Alt-Right Supporters Think He Is Their Candidate

I’m disappointed that I wasn’t mentioned in the article.

I would say that I have written far more about this issue than anyone else in the “Alt-Right” or “White Nationalist” discursive sphere. If there is someone else who has given the implications of UBI and Andrew Yang’s candidacy for our movement more thought than we have done on this blog, then I would be happy to stand corrected, but I seriously doubt it:

“Last Month, Andrew Yang’s 2020 Presidential bid careened from out of nearly nowhere onto the 2020 Democratic debate stage in a matter of days.

Until March 4, the hashtag #YangGang had mostly been quietly floating around Twitter, only occasionally garnering a peak of just hundreds of daily mentions. But on that day it spiked into the thousands, according to metrics shared with Mother Jones, and compiled by Zach Verdin, a partner at the pro-democracy independent research collective Guardians.ai. …

Yang has also attracted a diverse and sometimes chaotic group of internet adherents. Beyond the centrist Democrats and Silicon Valley liberals Yang has wooed through traditional campaigning, he’s garnered support among white nationalists, self-described white identitarians, and white supremacists. The groups either mildly disagree with the others or outright hate them.

“Messy is an understatement,” said Louis, pointing to one 4chan thread where white supremacists and white nationalists viciously debated whether Yang’s politics had the potential to start a “white revolution.” …

First things first:

I’m not on 4chan or Discord.

Andrew Yang never solicited my support.

He came to my attention through Twitter and his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show. Unfortunately, leftwing journos tend to be really dumb people who are high on their own supply of political correctness. Thus, they are unable to grasp that we pay very close attention to public affairs and are constantly mulling over and turning over ideas from thousands of different sources.

Tucker Carlson never asked me watch his television show. Michael Lind never asked me to read his books. I was never asked to read National Review and The American Conservative and The New York Times and Politico and Axios and dozens of other sources that I do on a daily basis, but I do it anyway because I am a highly intelligent and well educated human being who owns a vast library.

From time to time, I also read Mother Jones, Vox, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Slate, Salon and other leftwing sites as well depending on whether these outlets have anything interesting to say or just catch my attention with clickbait. While I don’t follow their discourse as closely as that of True Conservatism, which I enjoy watching on Twitter as well, I still pay attention.

Andrew Yang’s idea of Universal Basic Income and his message about the 4th Industrial Revolution is very interesting and landed with us at exactly the right moment. It has only recently caught my attention due to his media appearances. I’ve thought about it in the context of all the the other things that I have thought about and written about on this website for years like the economics of plantation slavery and various critiques of free-market capitalism from a wide variety of different sources.

As I told Nicole Einbinder of Business Insider, “I think he has a superior vision for the country, it’s vastly superior to Donald Trump’s vision,” Griffin told INSIDER. “I strongly support universal basic income and think it’s brilliant… I think Yang has solved the white nationalist problem.” I’ve recently been joking about how I should be hired as the new chief of the SPLC to solve America’s “hate” problem as well as the lingering problem of poverty and the Deep South. That’s because I think that I can solve both of those problems simply by bouncing around some ideas with Andrew Yang.