Editor’s Note: although I’m still up to my eyeballs in work trying to catch up on lost time, I have recently been working on an interesting new feature over at my Patreon Blog called “The Skinny” – it’s sort of a multi-article collection of opinion-based analysis gathered from every social media site I write at each weekday; if you’re interested, you can check out the first two articles here and here.

In the meantime, today’s link comes from a short Facebook essay about Andrew Yang that I posted back in August after a reader request on Twitter. Why did I post it on Facebook? I have absolutely no idea except to note that the style I chose to answer in is extremely informal; as I recall it was the window that was open when I decided to address the question. In light of Facebook’s often uncooperative formatting, I’ve included the full text of the op-ed here on ninaillingworth.com as well as our now standard two link format to leave the choice of medium up to the reader.

The first question most people seem to have about Andy Yang is why he has such a weird spread of supporters online, both in what some perceive as the far “left” and in the extremist right corners of the web. Frankly, the answers to these types of questions are frightfully simple:

Extremely online “Young PeopleTM” like Andy because a thousand bucks a month worth of Universal Basic Income for doing precisely nothing sounds absolutely fantastic when you’re living at home, have no outstanding debt, don’t understand health insurance and have never bothered to find out exactly how much it costs to rent a one bedroom apartment in most urban areas in the United States. That’s it, that’s the whole puzzle for this group.

Fascists and reactionaries (again, primarily those who spend a lot of time online, even in this group) like Yang because he has repeatedly flirted with outright saying “It’s Okay To Be White” and has attempted to attract votes by portraying young white males as victims of a societal backlash and political correctness; he’s even gone so far as to at least imply that he might believe white genocide/The Great Replacement Theory is real (the theory that’s setting off nazi mass shooters as we speak) – which is music to the ears of most online shitlords. Factually, most of them also happen to have a hard on for libertarian economic theories like those Yang promotes because they’ve never read a book about economics and they’re pretty damn sure Atlas Shrugged is real.

Truthfully however, Andy Yang is neither trying to help broke young people, nor particularly committed to the fascist cause. Yang is part of a growing number of Venture Capital Tech Bro movers and shakers who have realized that our current societal situation is unsustainable on multiple fronts – I’m not just talking about economics and healthcare here, if we don’t change how our entire energy sector works pretty soon, we’re looking at billions and billions of people dying over, geologically speaking, a very short period of time. If you’re a rich capitalist, that’s pretty much going to ruin the entire point of being “an elite” in our society. Furthermore, Yang isn’t dumb enough to believe his own team’s bullshit, he knows that somewhere out there, we’re already dreaming of guillotines and if you don’t buy the angry peasants off pretty soon, things are going to get tricky for the wealthy and right fast.

So, unlike Elon Musk (who plans to run to Mars) or the numerous anonymous tech billionaires who told The Guardian and the New York Times they were planning on fighting it out with high tech weaponry and bunkers, Yang is getting proactive about all of this.

He knows rich people are going to have to appear to give up SOMETHING or the whole house of cards is coming down – which is where Andy’s UBI plan comes in, a thousands bucks a month for every American, a nice even number. The fine print however is that Yang wants to literally eliminate every other form of social benefits for the poor; which in reality means that a MAJORITY of poor families in the United States will see their already inadequate assistance slashed to starvation levels. If that’s hard for you to understand, just rewind to the part where I mentioned “if you knew how much a single bedroom apartment actually costs per month, you’d get this.” In other words, Andy Yang is trying to buy you off on the wealth sharing inequity front, both on the cheap and by taking the money from the brokest families in most desperate need of assistance in all of America.

Furthermore, despite the shiny, quasi-left wing veneer Yang has slathered over his primary run, he is at heart a market fundamentalist who sees the solution to every problem as a public-private partnership operating in a deregulated free market – pretty much all of Andy’s “left wing” ideas will be accomplished through lucrative partnerships with the private sector which is code for “this is going to suck and rich people are going to bill the government for forcing you to settle for it.” This is of course oddly convenient and potentially very profitable for all Andy’s Silicon Valley friends too…funny that.

This can all be clearly demonstrated by Yang’s complete abandonment of Medicare for All rhetoric in favor of a public option – which is essentially still private health insurance but forces the government to run a competing health insurance plan in that market; indeed, in his book he actually argues that it is impossible to provide healthcare without having a private market to compete with because otherwise the government will not know how much to pay/charge for medicines and services. Naturally, this is a load of horse shit but that’s pretty much Andy in a nutshell – the guy’s campaign is a stealth end-around run by rich Tech Bro libertarians to buy you off cheap and early so the uber-wealthy can go on like nothing ever happened.

Whether or not you want to vote for that, is up to you.

Que Se Vayan Todos.

– nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

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