Yang just said "Yeah, the mentally ill have rights, but you know who else has rights? The people and families of our city."
The mentally ill ARE people of our city, and they have families, too. #Mayoraldebate
The mentally ill ARE people of our city, and they have families, too. #Mayoraldebate
This rephrasing/spin/whatever-it-is just compounds the problem with the original statement. Again casts mentally ill people as a "them" who "we" need to get off of "our" streets.
https://twitter.com/AndrewYang/status/1405362813372178434
Yang is so eager to avoid referring to mentally ill people as people that he ties himself into rhetorical knots—the "them" here refers back grammatically not to "people," or even "the mentally ill," but "mental illness" itself.
We know that mentally ill people are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators, and that the vast majority of the mentally ill are neither violent nor living on the streets. But Yang can't help himself—he returns to this framing over and over and over.
BTW, the original quote from the debate was worse than my transcription. Looking back at the tape, what he actually said was "Yes, the mentally ill have rights, but you know who else has rights? WE DO. The people and families of our city." (My emphasis.)
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