Andrew Yang YangGang art

The #YangGang: Andrew Yang’s 4chan-Powered Fanbase of Former Trump Supporters

Why would an obscure, socially progressive, Silicon Valley candidate like Andrew Yang capture the adoration of 4chan?

A candidate polling at 0-1% in Democratic primary polls, socially progressive, a person of color who’s the child of immigrants, and offering free money for everyone would seem to be the natural enemy of Trump fans. Apparently not so much.

Why is Andrew Yang gaining popularity among online former Trump fans? Also, why is his candidacy a troubling prototype of future political figures?

#YangGangBang

I’m going to be as clear and unambiguous as I can about this: any candidate that draws away 4chan memers from supporting an open white nationalist like Trump is a net positive. Andrew Yang is not a white nationalist, nor is he sympathetic to racist appeals. To the #YangGang, please continue to leap from the Trump Train. Tuck and roll.


To the #YangGang, please continue to leap from the Trump Train. Tuck and roll. This is with no irony, no sarcasm; that ride was a dead fucking end.

This is with no irony, no sarcasm; that ride was a dead fucking end. I’m actually very glad they’re making a pivot. I feel I have to walk this fine line of acknowledging that this is a good thing, but also not forgetting who I’m dealing with. So you plucky zoomers: keep making memes mocking the disgusting Nazi fash. Feel free to stan for the candidate who talks about foreskins. Fine with me, as long as the overall result is less fascist propaganda, less violence, less youth support for far-right elected officials.

A sizeable percentage of devoted 4chan and social media users have no set political policies, desiring mostly to cause outrage at the self-appointed sanctimonious leaders of culture. This type of meaningless antagonism will naturally gravitate towards reactionary politics, and it did. And then they found a savior, a messiah, in Donald Trump: a vile, repulsive goblin who represents nearly every negative aspect of American society, corrupt to a cartoonish degree. Trump represented the ultimate “fuck you”. He was the chaotic evil candidate, someone willing and able to wreck real havoc, which is the only thing many of the chuds wanted: destruction and revenge.

Trump likes porn and cheap food and wrestling. He swears and calls people failures and losers. He also doesn’t get a whole lot of shit done. He’s a lazy, undisciplined fancy lad who screams at people on Twitter and plays golf. 2 full years of complete control of Congress: no wall, no jobs, no future. He did not make America great again for them, or for anyone who doesn’t own a mansion.

Many of them have since pivoted and jumped to the #YangGang, the collective hashtag used to spread pro-Yang memes and content. #SecureTheBag is an endorsement of UBI, with the bag being the monthly $1,000 payment. And the memes began to flow, like mana from heaven:

(Note: #YangGang is not used exclusively by 4chan users, but it is overwhelmingly dominated by them considering many Yang-supporting threads on that site, particularly in the /b/ and /pol/ boards. There’s even a tinfoil conspiracy theory that a Pro-Yang Discord server might be seeding the trend. Online is an adventure.)


Yang represents a type of weird compromise position between the extremist far right that go on shooting rampages and more socially progressive ideas they could get on board with.

So why is Andrew Yang attractive to people who were literally promoting white nationalist propaganda for LOLs? The biggest draw is that since Trump was a complete failure for them, Yang represents a type of weird compromise position between the extremist far right that go on shooting rampages and more socially progressive ideas they could get on board with. It’s political synthesis; an easy out for people worried about the potential law enforcement consequences from being associated with white nationalist terrorism, or just from Trump meme fatigue. They’re giving themselves permission to endorse traditionally progressive ideas (like dealing with climate change and student loan debt) while keeping their precious, precious memes and some lingering racism.

Andrew Yang is himself easily meme-able. He comes with no pre-determined personality or brand characteristics, a hallmark of Silicon Valley dorks, so content is easy to plaster onto him. Just like blank meme templates, you can project any type of person onto that vacant expression. The YangGang 2020 hat template is a direct palette swap for MAGA hats, so they get to keep that optical silhouette. All their favorite characters get to come along. It’s surprising how easy their iconography grafts itself to a new center.

Yang’s campaign has acknowledged this unexpected support (I mean, when you’re polling at <1%, it’s hard not to), yet still maintaining arm’s length. A lot of #YangGang imagery is infused with vaporwave and mallsoft imagery, which is commonly used as an ironic anti-capitalist genre of music and design. This is a not a group with coherent politics.

Finally, it’s the material benefit of his candidacy. You can buy a lot of jackoff anime and video games with $1,000 a month. When all politics is filled with unreal, abstract characters and ideas, it makes sense to indulge in fantasy. Deeper down, it may fulfill their ultimate dream of completely checking out of a society that they feel so deeply alienated by. Devil’s advocate: for $1,000 a month, it might be worth it considering what happens to them when they go outside, but we don’t need another generation of American hikikomori rotting online. Make that another appealing trait: Yang hits a checkbox on their Asian fetish.


Deeper down, it may fulfill their ultimate dream of completely checking out of a society that they feel so deeply alienated by.

A major downside of this realignment is going to be identical to the evolution of Pepe memes, used to smuggle in white nationalist propaganda under the guise of “edgy memes”. Many of the same people who went #YangGang still post anti-refugee hate speech and Islamophobic content. This is despite claiming to endorse a Democrat, first of all, and one that calls for support for the DREAM Act, immigrant amnesty, abortion rights, and ending gender inequality in pay. Mind you, the 4chan crowd isn’t all glowing praise and hat memes, a hate mob also engaged in a harassment campaign against Yang’s deputy chief of staff.

Our favorite touched son, Baked Alaska, has disavowed the alt-right on The Scoop and his own YouTube channel, and even penned a #YangGang anthem (listen at your own peril, it sucks shit). He’s claims he’s no longer part of the alt-right, that he was brainwashed by memes, and he’s very very sorry, etc. Note Baked Alaska’s apology and turn only came after his ban from Twitter and other social media, a devaluing of his brand, indicating he is more likely a cynical huckster who enjoyed the fame and attention until it turned sour. (The comment section of his video is outright blistering hatred for his about-face. These are your people now, Baked. Have fun.) More mainstream fascists such as Richard Spencer have also praised Yang, probably for the reason that white people would be the biggest recipients of UBI, and all other social groups would have assistance flattened or erased. (Spencer denouncing statist communism but applauding Yang wanting to nationalize social media makes me whiplash.)

This is a tug-of-war between the emboldened far right and internet incels that has been called a “civil war” between #YangGang and #MAGA online, a sentence so depressing it’s difficult to write out. Honestly, let them fight, as long as no one is inspired to murder someone.

UBI: Unending Bullshit Incoming

Let’s take a look at one of Yang’s central campaign planks, a $1,000/month “Freedom Dividend” for every American citizen. Sound pretty lefty, correct? That’s something a socialist should support? Freedom from grindy jobs, bills, etc? Possible only in the vaguest sense of a universal access program that could potentially address income inequality. There’s some more fundamental problems associated with Universal Basic Income (UBI) that Yang sidesteps and the meme kids completely ignore.

Automation may, for young Trump fans, very quickly replace undocumented immigrants as a central existential fear. People have seen driverless cars on the roads, self-checkout lines, algorithms in social media in real life. Many of them have never seen what they imagine in their racist fantasies as an “immigrant invasion” outside of some deep fried memes and Fox News snippets.

Yet income inequality is a symptom, not the problem. The issue is also not automation taking jobs, but the current jobs simply not paying enough. It’s the inverse power relationship between who owns and who works. Unemployment is relatively low, but income inequality and dissatisfaction with current economic system are as high as it’s ever been. Social infrastructure being gutted and personal debt skyrocketing means people’s situations are fragile and precarious, leaving them as vulnerable as ever to exploitative jobs they simply can’t leave. The market at work, folks.


UBI does not allow for any sort of labor solidarity, one of the most powerful weapons a group can wield against organized capital.

UBI does not allow for any sort of labor solidarity, one of the most powerful weapons a group can wield against organized capital. UBI makes the population truly dependent on capital’s whims, doesn’t allow for cost of living, and perpetuates the destruction forces that impoverish us all. The combination of UBI and the current inefficient market system is also financially unsustainable without a near complete withdrawal from the capitalist system. The lack of worker empowerment to make democratic decisions about who sets UBI, how it would be distributed, and the top-down nature of a rollout are questions without answers. Instead of supercharging the market and destroying all other social infrastructure, the goal should be to decommodify the necessities for life and reorient who owns what.

Technocrat or Democrat or Both?

Andrew Yang is a longshot candidate, with slim chances to placing top 3 in any major primary this time around. This time around, mind you. Not just because of his obscurity, name recognition is half the game, but that Yang is part of a troubling wave of Silicon Valley technocrats who think everything just needs an app slapped on top of it. Or that we can innovate our way out of climate catastrophe. Other than Yang’s rather stock socially progressive policies, his main 3 platforms are Universal Basic Income, Medicare for All, and some bizarre word salad called “Human-Centered Capitalism”.


Yang is part of a troubling wave of Silicon Valley technocrats who think everything just needs an app slapped on top of it. Or that we can innovate our way out of climate catastrophe.

Human-center capitalism, in Yang’s definition, is a neoliberal wet dream, the same type of failed, broken thinking that seeks to apply market principles to every aspect of life. A dead end. The fantasy is that only if they were correctly applied for the right reasons, it would work. Folks, this current state of deep unhappiness, anger, and alienation is the inevitable result of a system working exactly as designed. Marx, in fact, had respect for capitalism’s accomplishments over feudalism, but warned that the separation of labor from ownership was and still is the cause of great suffering. Marx also warned about the dangers of automation as well, so Yang isn’t breaking new ground. In fact, he’s just repackaging dusty futurist ideas with a Silicon Valley sheen.

Also, capitalism did not “win out” over socialism when so many leftist governments were undermined, infiltrated, or practically destroyed by US imperialism afraid of losing its hegemony after WWII. That’s like shooting someone in the kneecap and then congratulating yourself that you beat them in a footrace.

Andrew Yang represents an upcoming taste of dangerous Third Way politics: the technocrat.


Technocrats are the new brand of undemocratic power. They come with the glossy allure of futurist progress, flashy technology, and clean brand images that aesthetically do not share the baggage of rightwing ideology.

Technocrats are the new brand of undemocratic power. They come with the glossy allure of futurist progress, flashy technology, and clean brand images that aesthetically do not share the baggage of rightwing ideology. They have cast a spell that their ideas are somehow non-ideological, based on an impartial algorithm, and that technology has no partisanship. Tech geniuses are championed by both traditional parties, exemplifying the ridiculous idea that billionaires are self-made and they are the smartest people in the room.

If climate change is not stopped, if automation truly becomes a runaway force of nature, it won’t be the little people that get rescued. Futurists always imagine a world far away, but never the effort it takes to get there, or the people it leaves behind. Yang is the prototype, the software alpha, of a new release of American politician. Andrew Yang’s market-based worldview combined with technocratic fantasy is completely compatible with far more dangerous ideologies such as eco-fascism or totalitarian technocracy. His courting of a group of people who openly supported a fascist for President and post hate speech is troubling.

Tech turbonerds like Yang must acknowledge the failures of and still champion capitalism as some permanent institution that just needs reform, because to fully critique is to open up the possibility of new ideas, for better or worse.