President Andrew Yang

[Elio di Supo]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Frankenstein

Ik denk dat wij nu een voorproefje zien van White rural America. Op Vpro recent een docu gezien over blank stadje ca 16000 inwoners op het platteland cq bossen. Tis absurd wat daar gebeurd; drugsepidemie, zelfdodingen.

Dit kan ik beamen. Vanuit mijn ervaring althans. Kleine dorpjes en gemeenschappen in landelijk Oklahoma zijn in verval. Verschillende achtereenvolgende jaren van droogte hebben veestapels gedecimeerd en tal van landbouwbedrijfjes zijn over kop gegaan.

Rurale gemeenschappen zijn sociale kerkhoven geworden met nauwelijks werkgelegenheid, inwoners die tot over hun oren in de schuld zitten en alcoholism en/of drugsverslaving. In de 9 jaren dat ik in Tulsa woon merk ik dat de bevolkingsaangroei merkelijk is toegenomen. De plattelandsbevolking is naar de steden aan het keren.

[vanderzapig]

En na de gecoördineerde karaktermoord op Tulsi van enkele maanden geleden, is nu ook Andrew Yang aan de beurt:

Here’s Why Andrew Yang’s Alt-Right Supporters Think He’s the 2020 Candidate for White Nationalists

After chatting with Tucker Carlson and tweeting about demographic change, the Democratic long shot garners racist backing.

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.
4chan has become a theater for sloppy internet infighting over the dark horse candidate.

Verdin hypothesized that 4chan’s /pol/, a discussion board notorious as a watering hole of racist and sexist internet trolls, was responsible for the so-called Yang Gang’s Twitter explosion. In the immediate lead up to the hashtag catching fire, people boosting Yang flooded the imageboard with absurdist, neon pink vaporwave memes backing his campaign and its centerpiece proposal to provide every American a $1,000 monthly universal basic income.

While Yang and his campaign have disavowed racist backing, unsavory elements of his online support network have seized on tweets he’s sent that raise questions about white demography, and have reframed his central campaign plank as a tool to punish undocumented immigrants living in the United States and deter others from coming. Yang’s campaign has argued the explosion in support on 4chan took place without their prodding, but it came in the days and weeks after he appeared on actor Joe Rogan’s widely heard podcast and Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, both of which are popular on the message board and in other right-leaning online spaces.

Hilarisch hoe men Tucker Carlson en Joe Rogan in een extreem-rechtse hoek probeert te zetten. Je zou denken dat "links" haar lesje wel geleerd zou hebben na Hillary haar "basket of deplorables". Maar nee dus.

Andrew Yang's campaign and supporters struggle to push away extremists, leaked chats show

In one chat room, moderators have had to post rules like “no slurs, no racism." Other users discussed whether to allow anti-Semitic comments.

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse whose research focuses on internet trolling campaigns and the alt-right, said the campaign by 4chan trolls to hijack Yang’s support base reminds her of Trump’s alt-right support in 2016, except “a little more dangerous.”