So, NYC's mayoral race had a debate recently, and the progressive left is skewering Yang for comments made on homelessness. Ignore his competition making jabs at home for this being a nonanswer at the end. I'm more focusing on how the progressive base is just ripping him for this.
Honestly, I like the progressive left on a lot of things. But their smearing of Yang is...distasteful. They're spinning it making it look like he hates homeless people, the mentally ill, blah blah blah. Uh, anyone who has spent any time in cities should know exactly who Yang is referring to. He's referring to the crazies who hang around bus terminals screaming about Hitler and telling wild stories about how the Clintons killed their family (yeah, I may or may not have a true story going along with that specific description). And he's talking about these crazy homeless people running around the streets attacking people. He's not talking about all homeless, or all mentally ill people, mostly that specific class of relatively dangerous mentally ill people who do attack people. These people need help, and Yang is trying to get them help, and get them off of their streets so they're no longer harassing people or even physically attacking them on occasion.
Yang isn't someone who hates homeless people, or the mentally ill. Yang has robust, progressive plans to reduce homelessness, including a very progressive Bernie-esque housing program. And in response to backlash he has pointed out Yang has been to counseling before when he was young. It seems blatantly clear to me that Yang was clearly talking about people who have no support structures who harass and attack people. I mean, are people going to deny homeless people sometimes do that, especially if they require certain mental help they're not getting due to being homeless?
I mean, really, while we can debate Yang's policy specifics (I don't feel qualified to do that at this time), I mean, his sentiment is reasonable and not wrong. This comes off as progressives just taking crap he said out of context to pull their little virtue signalling games.
Honestly, and I say this as someone who can be a purity testing jerk myself a lot of the time, I feel like a lot of progressives as of late are as bad as the SJWs with the virtue signalling nonsense. Yang isn't a bad guy here. I'm sorry, he's not. We should be looking at policies to help people with severe mental illness, as they require resources they cannot get while being homeless, and simply giving that subgroup a UBI isn't going to help because, by definition, they're not in a proper state of mind to take care of themselves. Yang's not wrong on this.
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