# Cenk Uygur **Cenk Uygur** (born March 21, 1970, in Istanbul) is the founder, chief executive and lead host of [[The Young Turks]], one of the oldest and largest progressive news shows on [[YouTube]]. A lawyer by training and a naturalized U.S. citizen, he has also tried to build political machinery to match the show: he launched the campaign-finance group Wolf-PAC in 2011, co-founded Justice Democrats in 2017, ran for Congress in 2020 and ran for president in 2024. **Why he's on the map:** Uygur built the closest thing the American left has to an independent media network, and the wiki tracks it as a counterweight to the far better funded right-wing media system. He also matters for where he has taken it. Since the 2024 election he has argued that the populist left and the populist right share an enemy in "the establishment." He has appeared on stage with [[Charlie Kirk]] and on [[Tucker Carlson]]'s show, and has made opposition to U.S. support for [[Israel]] his central cause. That has made him a target from two directions at once: a senior Trump adviser's wife told him on air to check his citizenship papers, and the British government barred him from the country. ## Background - Born in [[Turkey]]; his family moved to the United States in 1978, when he was eight, and he grew up in East Brunswick, New Jersey. - Graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1992) and from Columbia Law School, then worked briefly as an attorney before moving into talk radio. - He has described his younger self as a liberal Republican. - He is the uncle of streamer [[Hasan Piker]], who got his start at The Young Turks. ## Building The Young Turks - **February 14, 2002:** Launched *The Young Turks* on Sirius Satellite Radio with Ben Mankiewicz and Dave Koller. The show began posting video to YouTube in 2005. - **2010–2011:** MSNBC hired him as a contributor and gave him its 6 p.m. hour in January 2011. He left that summer after turning down a weekend slot, and has said the network was uncomfortable with how progressive his commentary was. - **2011–2013:** Hosted a nightly version of the show on Current TV until the channel ended live programming. - **2017:** Raised $20 million in venture capital for the network from investors including Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo. - **2020:** Urged his production staff not to unionize, arguing the company could not afford it. They voted to join the stage and screen workers' union IATSE anyway, and the company recognized the result. The network's history and numbers are on [[The Young Turks]]. ## Political organizing - **Wolf-PAC (2011):** Launched in New York during the [[Occupy Movement]]. It lobbies state legislatures to call a constitutional convention for an amendment that would end corporate personhood and publicly finance elections. Overturning [[Citizens United v. FEC]] has been his signature cause. - **Justice Democrats (2017):** Co-founded on January 23, 2017, with commentator Kyle Kulinski and former [[Bernie Sanders]] campaign staffers Saikat Chakrabarti and Zack Exley, to recruit primary challengers against establishment Democrats. Its best-known recruit was [[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]]. Uygur did not last the year. The group forced him out on December 22, 2017, after a trade publication surfaced blog posts from the early 2000s in which he demeaned women. He apologized. Kulinski stepped down the next day in protest. - **Run for Congress (2020):** He entered the race for California's 25th District after Rep. Katie Hill resigned. Sanders endorsed him on December 12, 2019, and withdrew the endorsement a day later after the old posts and other remarks resurfaced; Rep. [[Ro Khanna]] withdrew his as well. Uygur finished fourth in a field of twelve on March 3, 2020. - **Run for president (2023–2024):** He announced a Democratic primary challenge to [[Joe Biden]] in October 2023, arguing that Biden could not beat [[Donald Trump]]. The Constitution limits the presidency to natural-born citizens, and Uygur argued that the rule is unlawful discrimination by national origin. Election officials in Nevada, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Arkansas kept him off the ballot. He ended the campaign on March 6, 2024. ## The populist turn, 2024–2026 After Trump's victory in November 2024, Uygur said he was optimistic, on the grounds that the establishment had lost and that "MAGA is not my mortal enemy." What followed was a deliberate effort to talk to the right. - **December 21, 2024:** He joined Charlie Kirk on stage at AmericaFest, the annual conference of [[Turning Point USA]], received a standing ovation, and told the crowd it was more welcoming than Democrats. Critics on the left accused him of pandering. - **September 2025:** Days after the [[Assassination of Charlie Kirk]], he was a guest on *The Tucker Carlson Show* and said the people he met at Kirk's conference had treated him with respect. - **January 30, 2026:** He returned to Carlson's show for an episode on [[Jeffrey Epstein]], the Kennedy assassination, the September 11 attacks and Israel. - **February 13, 2026:** He posted on X, "I no longer believe official 9/11 story." Commentators on the left and the right criticized him for promoting a conspiracy theory. This was a reversal. In an interview from the years when Carlson was still at [[Fox News]], Uygur dismissed progressives who appeared on Carlson's program as not "the real left" and called the bookings a trick. On Israel, Uygur accuses the country of genocide in the [[Gaza War]] and argues that American politicians are beholden to the Israel lobby. Critics, including the advocacy group Combat Antisemitism Movement, say some of his claims, such as that Israel controls Congress, repeat tropes of [[Antisemitism]]. He says he is being punished for criticizing a foreign government. ## Targeted from two directions - **October 29, 2025:** During a debate on Piers Morgan's online show about New York mayoral candidate [[Zohran Mamdani]] and Israel, Uygur called Katie Miller and her husband, White House deputy chief of staff [[Stephen Miller]], liars. Katie Miller, a former Trump administration aide, told him to "check your citizenship application." Press coverage read it as a threat to have a critic's citizenship revoked. - **June 1, 2026:** The British Home Office cancelled the travel authorizations of Uygur and Piker days before both were due to speak at the SXSW London festival and the Oxford Union, saying their presence was "not conducive to the public good." Uygur said he had been banned for criticizing Israel. The ban became a [[Free Speech]] dispute in the [[United Kingdom]]. - **2025–2026:** Chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations made him a regular headliner. He gave the keynote at its Chicago chapter's banquet on October 5, 2025, and the Combat Antisemitism Movement, criticizing the bookings, reported that he keynoted the Los Angeles chapter's gala on September 4, 2026. - **November 3, 2026:** C-SPAN 2 carried The Young Turks' election-night broadcast for the [[2026 Midterm Elections]] live, with Uygur anchoring. C-SPAN 3 carried the broadcast of conservative podcaster Patrick Bet-David, which put the two shows side by side as the left and right of online political media. ## The Armenian Genocide record In November 1991, as a college student, Uygur wrote a column in *The Daily Pennsylvanian* denying the [[Armenian Genocide]]. In 2016 he retracted the column, saying he did not know enough to comment. In 2019 he acknowledged the genocide on air. The episode still shadows the show because of its name: the Young Turks were the Ottoman movement whose leaders carried the genocide out. Uygur says the phrase is used in its everyday English sense of young rebels, and the show has declined to rename itself. ## Timeline | Date | Event | |------|-------| | 2002 | Launches *The Young Turks* on Sirius Satellite Radio | | 2011 | Hosts MSNBC's 6 p.m. hour for about six months; founds Wolf-PAC | | Jan. 2017 | Co-founds Justice Democrats | | Dec. 2017 | Forced out of Justice Democrats over old blog posts | | March 2020 | Finishes fourth in California's 25th District | | Oct. 2023–March 2024 | Runs for president despite being ineligible | | Dec. 2024 | Appears with Charlie Kirk at AmericaFest | | Oct. 2025 | Katie Miller tells him to check his citizenship application | | Jan.–Feb. 2026 | Second Tucker Carlson appearance; 9/11 post | | June 2026 | Barred from entering the United Kingdom | | Nov. 2026 | Election night simulcast on C-SPAN 2 | ## Connections - [[The Young Turks]] — the network he founded and runs - [[Ana Kasparian]] — co-host, whose own break with the left ran alongside his - [[Hasan Piker]] — nephew and former Young Turks host, barred from Britain with him - [[Dave Rubin]] — former host at the network who moved to the pro-Trump right - [[Tucker Carlson]] and [[Charlie Kirk]] — the right-wing figures he chose to engage - [[Populism]] and [[Realignment]] — the ideas behind his left-right strategy - [[Horseshoe Theory]] — the framework critics use to describe it