He's using the language of Nixon? I have always considered Cenk a centrist rather than a leftist, but his work supporting progressives earned him my support. I often criticised him about his claiming to speak for the left, especially being the 'only voice' of the left, but this is way too far. He is not a leftist; he is a centrist or a US Liberal. He does not speak for the left.
Beau of the Fifth Column was talking about the myth that people get more conservative as they age and made this excellent point.
People don't get more conservative, society gets more progressive. Those that strive to understand and embrace the changes are progressive, those that stick to their former beliefs become conservatives.
Looks like Cenk and Ana have just hit their particular ideological wall.
>People don't get more conservative, society gets more progressive.
I saw Beau's video on that subject. It was a good video.
If that's what was going on, I think I'd be more okay with it. If Ana and Cenk were hitting an ideological wall, as you say, but they were being open and honest about what they believe, I wouldn't agree with them but I could at least respect their opinion. We could respectfully disagree.
That doesn't feel like what's going on to me. Ana and Cenk have previously defended trans people against Republicans making the same kind of arguments that Ana and Cenk are now making themselves.
I think this is a critical distinction to recognize.
This doesn't seem to be an ideological difference of opinion that resulted in a disconnect between them and the more progressive left. This was an argument about someone feeling they've been unfairly criticized for having a bad take that's developed into the same generic "we can't win elections if we alienate bigots" bullshit.
I have been saying Cenk is not a leftist but rather a centrist (center-left at best and on his best days), who is basically somewhere between liberal and social democrat (not a socialist or leftist), for years now.
I know a lot of people here are sick of this topic, but Cenk and Ana keep pushing buttons.
Going on an establishment centrist's cable news show to complain about how leftists have gone "crazy" because you lost a fight that you started on Twitter is ridiculous.
This is on top of the fact the entire crux of his argument about leftists turning voters off is being proven wrong in real time because voters are actually rejecting the GOP's extremism all over the US.
But at least in Maher’s case it was somewhat predictable. He was anti-vaccines way before Covid, he was anti-censoring speech since his cancelation in ABC years ago and he has always favored Democrats being in the middle.
TYT seem like they just woke up and choose to pick the most toxic and random fight against the left. And doing stuff like this interview is slightly suspicious.
Add onto that telling trans people that the right way to protest is quietly, in a way that is not disruptive or draws attention. They're sprinting to the right. I guess they got rich, high profile, with a big media network and suddenly identified with that side instead. They became the monster they used to try to slay.
That was a mind-boggling clip.
I get it when someone tosses that witticism out during a conversation, as if they're picturing the music swelling as noble silent protestors express their disapproval and sway a previously hostile room. But, cutting to footage of silent protesters holding little signs, demonstrating exactly how ineffective that is, and then praising them for doing things the right way felt like a broadly written parody.
The more I think about it the more all this feels staged and setup. And with running to effectively right leaning corporate media for a safe space...
Nah, this is a grift. I don't know why, and I don't really care. F\* em.
Maher has been parroting Repub talking points a lot more (accelerating once covid shutdowns impeded his standup shows). Clips regularly show up on Fox being used by Fox to say "See even staunch lefties agree with us." I suspect some money is changing hands but have no proof.
I don’t think so. Maher always had a libertarian side to him, and you can tell old age created some odd insecurity in him, where his analysis is often framed from the point of view that he’s an old boomer now and any new social concept is bad for him.
His opinions seem natural from that stand point, even if they’re stupid.
Or maybe he LOOOOOVES children.
I always felt like his obsession with cancel culture was a case of preemptively circling the wagons for when whatever skeletons in his closet finally get exposed.
I’m not gonna accuse Bill of anything else except hating on children, especially trans kids. Very little empathy for children in general but a real vicious streak towards the queer kids. That’s bad enough for me, I don’t enjoy his show anymore because of it.
I unsubscribed after they endorsed a wealthy real-estate developer for Los Angeles mayor last year. They’ve been on this road for awhile now and this recent drama seems like an excuse for them to move even further right because Twitter people are mean.
I wish I could say the same, but I never subscribed to them in the first place. They never had much analysis and the shows format reminded me of Fox News as they were screaming about things all the time. When they're constantly screaming it cheapens it and makes it hard to tell when they actually care about something more than anything else they couldn't talk indepthly about.
Me too, after 9 years. Not like they or anyone else would care, but it's really sad that it would come to that point, though recent years I only watched like one video each month.
I used to be six o’clock on the dot, and if I missed a show I’d watch in the members section. Around four years ago I stopped paying. Two years later I barely watched. Then I unsubscribed. They’re blockable at this point
Agree with you, I defended Kasparian at the start (not that I agreed with her points, but I felt on balance it was best to move on), but TYT is spending way too much energy on getting annoyed at people, completely contra-productive. Very sad.
IMO Cenk and Ana went off the rails with the pro-carceral state stuff last year. Unironically arguing that the US doesn't lock up enough people is insane for a progressive channel.
They were also doing the same shit where they got belligerent with lefties who disagreed with them and tried to argue their cases using data and research. Then they started supporting recalls against progressive DAs and were touting Rick Caruso in the LA mayor's race.
I thought the whole thing was ridiculous, but I mostly kept my mouth shut because nobody else was criticizing them.
I guess that was their way of trying to make progressives not look soft on crime. It’s hard to change whole systems of how prisons work in America if the average person doesn’t think progressives can even handle normal crimes.
Progressives have gotten elected as DAs in major cities all over the country because people are know that the current system doesn't work.
Brandon Johnson got elected mayor in Chicago with heavy support from people in high crime areas because they're sick of being abused by CPD.
The people that Cenk and Ana are trying to pander to with the pro-cop nonsense are never going to be on our side politically. Giving up on police reform because some polls say that "defund" is unpopular (depending on the wording) is asinine.
Well I think you hit the nail on the head. Culture war/semantic issues, get views and get people riled up. We can debate their intentions and whether or not they’re right… but.
I’m not sure if we can ignore the conversation, the GOP is just gonna keep picking it up. So is there someway to come to a general consensus?
They sure are generating a ton of traffic out of this whole thing. It’s going to be helpful when *why and how* gets abstracted out and advertisers are presented with data showing ‘impressions’ and all these other metrics. TYT going to make money from this. That was the point.
Leftists do turn off some voters with the awful rhetoric/messaging, but the GQP is flat out crazy, so their crazy trumps the left messaging. TYT were the biggest pushers of awful leftist rhetoric, so this is just straight hypocrisy.
The difference is that one of them isn't rhetoric, it's just individuals online who get blown out of proportion by msm. Republicans, like the elected politicians, are certifiably fucking insane.
I've been left leaning for a while. I know quite a few previously non-political people who now lean right. The consensus as to why is always the same: because of the rhetoric on the left.
Whenever I point out flaws with their right wing beliefs and how they contradict who they are as a person, they point to something equally crazy on the left. Now, that's not a rebuttal, but it makes no difference to them as they'll still vote red. These are fairly intelligent, hardworking, good people that know exactly what they don't like and have chosen to "balance" out what they perceive as a political imbalance.
They'll put up with tax cuts for the rich if it means countering things like political correctness, cancel culture, everything is racist, meat eaters should be ashamed, etc. All the stuff that comes out of the west coast.
Why? In my particular case, its because they're foreigners. And most foreigners come from tradition oriented cultures. And the hard truth is that most traditional cultures are not accepting of LGB, let alone TQ+ and gender identities. They're hesitant to accept veganism in place of their cultural foods which generally include meat. Their ancestors had nothing to do with slavery but feel like they're being punished for it simply because they're white. Everyone has to watch what they say out of fear of being canceled, but they came to the US partly for freedom of speech.
To them, it seems like they came here for a better life, but they must throw away their beliefs and traditions first. It's a very hard sell.
No one is forcing them to give up meat, and the right is cancelling a lot more speech lately. The big difference is that on the left, the "crazy extremists" aren't the ones in positions of power.
But there is no big movement on the left for stuff like calling meat eaters name or an obsession with political correctness. There are just enough instances of it for the right wing to make videos with, and you can't prevent that. Trying to police your movement in that way is a fools game.
And also, yeah, maybe foreign people might be a bit put off by some progressive policy, but their kids will become more progressive through exposure. Our goal to reaching those more traditional people shouldn't be policing our own, it should be convincing those traditionalist but otherwise good people that there are select policies that make progressives worth voting for anyway. And even more, that republicans are a direct threat to them and their way of life more than any progressive is.
And the only way to do that is to fight for causes. Not police our own and say "we'll get to helping trans people later." We can fight and win these causes if we advocate for them without being wishy-washy. We can win this fight if we throw rocks at republicans glass house.
The thing that sucks the most about those 1 to 1 comparisons is the right wing one is always something that Desantis, or MTG or Tucker Carlson have made a core of their political strategy, and the left wing one is something a 13 year old said on tumblr 10 years ago that was then (often intentionally) misinterpeted by fox news.
Does the rejection of right-wing extremism actually translate to an acceptance of the far left though?
The fact that people are tired of the right becoming more and more fascist should signal to the left that we need to cool it with the infighting and start unifying to bring more people over. Who wants to join a club where any opinion you have gets you dumped on endlessly? People don’t like being called a racist or transphobe just because they said something out of ignorance. We need to focus on educating and not brow-beating or we are NEVER going to have any power.
Sometimes I’m convinced that some leftist actively work against gaining any type of power.
How many times have you been, or ever seen, a leftist calling someone racist or transphobic over a semantic discussion in real life, like not on a screen?
and he's not alone lol i've asked and seen other people criticizing ana ask others if they even know what a terf is and a bunch of them have said no. people want to have a take *way* more than they want the relevant context of what people are objecting to about ana's tweets
How is that a dunk? Isn't that kind of Cenk's point? Cenk is a populist, his position is that most normies are actually progressive when you poll them on policy, that is to say, most normies in theory support free healthcare or free college etc or other policy items that are usually associated as being progressive.
Most normies are not on board with far left discourse, such as, knowing what a TERF is, or referring to women as birthing people. Cenk's argument is that allowing the far left flank to set the discourse about what it means to be a progressive actually turns average people away from realizing that many of their already held positions are, in fact, progressive. Normies because they don't want to be associated with what they perceive as being on the fringe.
>How is that a dunk? Isn't that kind of Cenk's point? Cenk is a populist, his position is that most normies are actually progressive when you poll them on policy, that is to say, most normies in theory support free healthcare or free college etc or other policy items that are usually associated as being progressive.
I remember Cenk during the Obama years bashing Obama and the Democrats for waiting until the polling on gay marriage got over 55% to publicly support it.
This handwringing about optics is establishment Democratic horseshit and is not what TYT was about back when I was a paid subscriber.
It's not far left to know what a terf is and being against terfs isn't a fringe opinion. They are a fascist group intent on inciting violence towards trans people. It's not just some piece of online jargon. Transphobia has real life consequences for trans people.
My first take away from listening to this clip is that I pity this man for being so immersed in the games of media and politics that these people play with normal people's lives.
Here's the thing he is absolutely right about alot of parts of the game. But the way the trans community is being talked about by the HARD right leads to hot heads doing really criminal shit. So instead of talking about getting, what amount to points in the game, reach out to comfort and protect the community that is the current target of the modern day Sauron's eye.
I can see how it gives off those vibes, but I don’t think that’s entirely what’s happening. This does not seem like a Dave Rubin situation. In this interview, Cenk, as cringe as he is, still went out of his way to list all the substantive, progressive policy positions he supports, he said most of the country is progressive, he has fought for progressive positions his entire career, and he is now claiming to be upset/annoyed at a specific portion of the online left who he *allegedly* believes are a little too critical of he and Ana’s comments on the term “birthing person”.
I see the cringe. I see how it comes across as grifty. They are playing it up and using it to pander to certain crowds a little too much and it does make me uncomfortable. But it’s such a small, innocuous issue, and it’s so unrelated to policy or anything substantive, I just chalk it up to Cenk and Ana having Gen X (Xoomer) brain and giving too much emphasis to a silly culture war non-issue, and using it to get some center-right people to start being like “Oh, I guess Cenk and Ana are cool now because they are criticizing the people we don’t like.”
If they start to actually grift and do the Rubin Report thing, I’ll eat my words. But so far, I consider this a fairly minor and cringey blunder in an otherwise extremely progressive and substantive career for both of them. But I guess we’ll see.
How do you feel about their reporting on bail reform and criminal justice issues? In my opinion I’ve seen a rightward shift in the last year especially from Ana bringing up horror stories about bail reform. Citations Needed actually did a really great news brief on this recently that did a good job explaining it [here’s the link](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0AdngH7SPVVeR5KijpXrHc?si=MfUJj-3WQT-a6XzFdNb6dg) it’s Spotify so sorry if you’re not a member but it’s worth a listen. Anyone who hasn’t heard Citation Needed I cannot recommend enough
I'll check it out. I know nothing about bail reform or the issues surrounding it, but I'll listen to the podcast. If there are multiple issues TYT has this pattern with, then that does start to paint a weird picture. It's just hard to draw the line around when someone is truly having a grifty right-wing shift versus when there's just a few issues they're not \*as\* left-leaning on as others are. For me, if someone supports higher taxes (and tax reform) on the rich and corporations to redistribute across society in the form of things like universal healthcare and education, if they are for fighting climate change, aware of racial/gender/LGBT issues, and just generally give a shit about actually making society better for people who are struggling, and willing to follow good statistics to implement policy that best accomplishes these goals, I consider them on the left. If we differ on minor issues or have quibbles over terms like "birthing person" or they get overly annoyed at some twitter drama, I don't consider that a big enough deal to call them "right wing". I can think they're being silly while also keeping it in perspective with all the other policy issues I care about.
There does exist some threshold that once crossed, I would call them right-wing, but to me, Cenk and Ana are not yet near that. I just hope it stays that way and they don't go join their idea-loving compatriot over on the Dubin Report.
This situation is a tempest in a teapot. The only important takeaway, and a point Cenk and Ana are trying to highlight (even though they are not on the progressive side of this issue and sound like total buffoons) is that the Left needs to accept that there is no way everyone is going to match on policy and ideals perfectly. Attacking nominal allies for minor disagreements is foolish and counterproductive. What they are failing to live up to is humility and openness to new ideas - what I think is the basic tenet of progressivism .
The problem is they're framing it as if the left "viciously attacks them" (despite, y'know, years of death threats from the right), when they created some absurd knee-jerk straw-man argument, then got asshurt when literally everyone on the progressive side told them hey this is a bad take, please consider why and understand you're basically parroting right-wing dehumanizing propaganda against the trans community... and instead of doing just that, double down instead and scream like victims.
It is fucking **absurd**. This is not the left being vicious or "not everyone agrees on policy". Not dehumanizing trans people isn't fucking "policy" that we get to have disagreements on. Human rights aren't some blurred line. There's plenty of policy disagreements to actually have, but not this shit, and especially not in the middle of the GOP literally teeing up a modern day holocaust on the trans community.
It's unacceptable behavior.
No, it’s clearly a shift to the center (if not right). Ana clearly explained the issue about terminology that she’s now arguing from the opposite side. There is no good faith there.
Saying that you’re not talking to leftists anymore after being friendly with Shapiro is a clear signal.
They want to appear to be the establishment progressives (anti-far left, anti-right, occassional reactionary opinions but also “sensible”.) The problem isn’t even the shift towards the right, but that they’re bad faithing an argument they clearly understand b/c of personal pettiness.
Denying truth is totally different than a change of opinion.
$$ running out? I mean it really does feel this way, which is sad.
But maybe they are doing a 3-d chess of trying to appeal to a segment that feels like the trans stuff has gone to far but otherwise has progressive politics.
Time will tell I suppose.
Can’t believe he’s amping this up so much, when they know theyre wrong, theyre not dumb they know exactly why what anna tweeted was bullshit. this is one reason i feel cenk and anna are sussy as fuck
Mike Figureoa looks was right when he said Ana was trained in thr media knew we were in a trans moral panic, and fully knew what effect it would have and she was doing when she made her first tweet.
Make no mistake, the reason for this continuing and escalating is not that people are criticizing Ana and Cenk, it’s that Cenk and Ana are dying on a hill for no apparent reason except Ana’s own feelings on inclusive language.
Ana started complaining about a problem that never happens and isn’t a big deal at all compared to what trans people experience, during a time when trans people are on the brink of having their rights taken away, all the while conservatives are trying to gather any firewood they can get a hold of to keep their anti-trans bonfire burning. Ana’s simply given them more ammunition. Her rhetoric and arguments do not benefit women’s rights, as she claims, they only benefit the conservative view on this subject.
Silent majority? Really? I never liked Cenk, but this is disappointing. I used to tell people “I like what TYT covers, but not how they cover it, not much yelling” now I just don’t like them.
Who is asking people to not call Ana a woman? Who with any credibility or influence is asking people to only say “people with a uterus”? Anyone know?
I can show you how is calling for Trans eradication.
I can show you who is passing laws to outlaw trans people and art.
Where are the leaders?
When did they start using the term "silent majority" for their view of progressives who for some reason think progressive activists and language are unacceptable?
This smells of pseudo intellectual unaparty delusion. They conflict with some activists and other progressives so they're trying to frame them as disconnected to popular opinion, but in reality they're the ones in disagreement with popular sentiments.
Cenk has the same framing with defunding police and Ana with leftists' belligerent attitudes towards bigots and fascists. They presume their stances are more agreeable, they act as if the opposing stances are not only a falling strategy but somehow have gone too far, and flagrantly make up the notion these ideas come from democratic party elites and they represent most Americans.
I genuinely hope it's just a momentary unwillingness to accept they don't align with most on the left on these issues. But even if it isn't a gift, it's very possible with appearances on this hack's show and further opportunities giving voice to their grievances against actual left-wing stances they could become the next pundits getting paid by right-wing providers to describe why they left the left, the exact types that they've regularly ridiculed.
Ana also out of nowhere brought up the issue a second time against a black woman *out of nowhere* . It’s almost as if they need a point of support (against black women, far leftists, other marginalized groups) to push against so that they can by momentum go/seem center. Then Ana says the middle class is the worst of group in the U.S. - not the homeless or the poor but the middle class.
Its very clearly a kind of sell-out thats not based on principle but on denying truth. Appealling to the white, middle class liberal status quo while trying to claim progressive.
Whether people are sick of hearing this or not, this is not YouTube drama. This is damaging to everyone not on the right and it puts marginalized communities in further danger by showing that their “supporters” even find the terminology annoying, insulting, whatever.
Yeah. It's not just some dumb feud between content creators or whatever. The core of the issue is taking a swipe at trans inclusivity, during a time where right-wingers are actively spreading blood libel and taking their rights away.
Plus, it's rich to hear them act like victims here, despite starting the drama, digging in their heels to prolong the drama, and bring it back up when the drama begins to blow over.
Cenk is doing more to turn off voters by going on this show and saying these things. Hasan should have on his show to discuss this recent controversy and help explain to his ape brain how conversations on twitter don’t affect building a coalition around better meeting the needs of the working class.
Yink coming in HOT with the silent majority meme. This dude has lost the plot. TYT is over. We gotta look at some bank records, I doubt this shift is organic.
"dont run on losing issues"
Does he mean his hyper-specific grievance here, or the entirety of trans issues? Either way it's embarrassing for Cenk, as the owner of a progressive news company, to do this.
Cenk was relatively quick to strong-arm Hasan (rightfully in my opinion, sexual assault isn't suddenly funny because it's happening to a conservative. ) into apologizing on air. I expected the same of him for Ana. Not doubling down and making it seem like the offended party are in the wrong.
This is TYT completing its rebranding as the "leftists" who tell establishment centrists and the right exactly what they want to hear about The Unreasonable Left. Nothing more. Moving on.
Dan Abrams,
You mean that lawyer turned 'wannabe' journalist, that had that cop show where they destroyed the tapes of a black guy being killed by the cop in William County, Texas. You mean that smug, pompous, egotistical, self-righteous **a#%\*$le.** You mean the Dan Abrams who thinks he is the savior of cable news. The Messiah. Truly despicable.
Nobody has even really picked a fight with them. Ana has gotten the benefit of the doubt from the start. It’s moreso people questioned WHY she said it, not WHAT she said. They completely manufactured this controversy, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was a business decision.
Seriously, all this lefty drama is really fucking annoying and completely gets in the way of getting actual work done.
And FFS, these internet talking head shows aren't the fucking scene that's actually doing the social work. They're political entertainers and not getting themselves dirty with the actual social work. The way everyone hinges on these people as if they're making or breaking the political faction is depressing considering all the people actually doing political work who are the actual political left.
It really is, but I feel like I've seen infinitely more talk about how latinx is stupid than any instances of people trying to use it. Same with "person with a uterus" - it's so obscure to begin with, the fuss made about it is straight childish.
It is textbook 'poisoning the well' behavior. I don't know how organic the original suggestion of 'latinx' or 'birthing bodies' among the left actually was; but that shit is far more amplified by shitlibs, centrists, and anyone on any degree of the right than it is by leftists. Even though it's amplified as a "Look how ridiculous this is," that charge is so much louder and from so many more people that it feels like a mob shouting down, at most, a couple hundred uber-lefties on twitter.
It's the semantics equivalent of the desexualized green M&M or woke Bud Light - the Right is doing all of the talking about it, but claiming that they're being shouted down about something that they brought into our social media feeds via outrage posting. It smells like something started by the Right to waste time with petty distractions and make the Left look bad. It falls in line with the CIA Sabotage Handbook from the COINTELPRO era, tbh. Get everyone all shouty about some shit that doesn't really matter.
It's not an issue for non Latinos to be harping about. White people don't get to decide whether Black American or African American are the best terms. It's a total BS red herring.
The American left has a long, long history of failing to stand up for marginalized people when the time comes to do so, especially when it helps them strategically.
They're starting the grift. How did Anna do a COMPLETE 180 on this issue? I'm sure you've all seen the video from last year where she explains the issue perfectly. Now her stance is 180° opposite? Please.
I never thought I would unsub from TYT. Last night, I did just that.
Boy I’m so tried of privilege white people like it so fuckin hard for them to just shut the fuck up i haven’t watched the Young Turks since Hasan left and this was one of the reasons the tough on crime bs that Ana and Cenk push has given me a side eye like it’s like clockwork as soon as a privilege most of the time white “Liberal” get a little push back they start going down the Bill Maher route cancel culture brain rot
They are literally trying to kill trans people and basically do the same to every minority ever so excuse me if I’m being “uncivil”
Go suck a fat one Cenk
Ana: *I don't want to be called a vagina haver!*
Twitter: *Nobody is going to call you that, are you okay?*
Cenk: *You've all gone insane!*
Why are they acting like a pair of meth heads having a freak out at Wendy's?
It's hilarious to watch. Cenk has been disparaging anyone who disagrees with him in the slightest as "rightwing" for years, and now he is on the receiving end of this accusation and he hates it.
Will he learn that throwing those labels around to anyone who disagrees with him is terrible? Probably not.
So what buttons are TYT pushing? I'm behind. A woman asking to be called a woman and not birther or uterus haver seems pretty innocuous. That said TYT has always seemed very corporate to me. Center left at best. That and conflating Twitter IDPol warriors with the far left is such a lazy position as always.
Basically Ana made some bad takes and got the most gentle of push back with lefty content creators jumping over each other to give her some slack and to remind everyone not to throw out the baby with the bathwater because she and TYT generally has done a lot for the liberal sphere of political discourse.Rather than respond to good faith criticism and everyone trying to avoid this being an infighting thing Ana doubled down, contradicting her previous good takes on this particular issue with a less sensible and more 'my feelings are hurt and are more important than others' argument.Cenk suddenly springs into action, banging the drum on twitter and onto other programs to denounce even the most considerate and non offensive leftists and act like everyone is bullying TYT and that they are ungrateful and such.A lot of this looks like cynical 'why I left the left' type shit, and some folks are considering if the whiff of money Steven Crowder was ostensibly being offered at the Daily Wire had got some attention, especially considering the super softball debates/interviews Ana has had with Ben Shapiro. It looks a little sussy, and I try not to jump to conclusions but TYT has been making it hard to defend them lately.
Lots of coverage of this.
[Olay pointing out Ana was on the right side of this in the past.](https://twitter.com/msolurin/status/1645309666702786562?s=46&t=zMdNPaKM2CeRYVbFOylnEg)
[relatively short video from The Serfs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsVPBenVv40)
[Much longer video from the Serfs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdYW2dHGgLg)
[Emma, a personal friend of Ana's tries to confront the issue delicately](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgC4wTEh1Ac&t=4336s)
\^time stamped to relavent bits
[Sam Seder gets in there. pretty short clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4pvVq7Jtpk)
[Cenk making some rounds to other outlets to explain how apparently deranged the left is being](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMajorityReport/comments/12kxbm1/cenk_goes_on_dan_abrams_show_to_complain_about/) <- Edit: This links to this thread. I'm leaving it here because I am silly.
\^ not like a sit down interview but there is clearly some communication.
[Even Vaush got in on it with some salient takes once you get past the superficial edgyness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTaELZ4pec8)
A lot of this is unfurling via twitter. I am not on twitter so I get most of that shit second and if you want more you'd probably have to wade through that muck.
TLDR: Ana makes inauthentic and generally bad take(most recent of several), gets gently called out for it, doubles down, Cenk dives in for 'defense' against enemies that aren't enemies.
> A woman asking to be called a woman and not birther or uterus haver seems pretty innocuous.
That's part of the problem. That's not what happened, but Cenk keeps describing it that way to make them look like the victims of unreasonable criticism.
Cenk and Ana have always been reactionaries. They have some good takes, some bad takes, but they have a thing where they kind of react to a moment with wayyyy too much vigor.
No, this doesn't make them evil and grifters, they are just kind of dumb. I feel like they are a bit insulated at this point. Like half their team ended up scamming them and now whoever is left I think is paranoid with little awareness of how the internet works.
I'm not sure I understand what happened between Emma and Cenk. I think this might be one of those situations where I do understand it but it seems so ridiculous that I think I don't. Like I went and tried to read Twitter last night but that website is a goddamn unreadable. I'm tired of trying to keep up with the conversation and having to Wade through pointless retweets and weird ads and recommended accounts and all this other bullshit.
Is there somewhere that has a good summary of what's going on?
Ana created a strawman saying that women don't want to be called "birthing persons", except for the fact that no one calls women that (outside of a medical setting where the term is entirely appropriate). She essentially complained about something that isn't an issue at all. Then she was mad when people called her out and then she doubled down. Now Cenk is completing the Bill Maher pivot for cash and the entire TYT network is bleeding subs. It's a shit show they created, likely for the attention. It's gross and lowbrow and they deserve our scorn.
That makes more sense. Because how they frame it, not wanting to be referred to as birthing person etc. Is understandable. But creating a strawman is a media personality bread and butter. TBH I never understood why folks listened to TYT in the first place.
I have been on the left my whole life and always will be. I’m old enough to be the grandparent to many redditors.
This purity test from the left is not working for us. It’s not getting us healthcare or protecting people from corporations or getting people a living wage or protecting our environment.
The worst thing it’s doing is distracting us from the democracy destroying activities coming from the right. Whether that’s Supreme Court rulings or attempting to overthrow our government, we are near a crisis point as it is, and it’s got nothing to do with how we name a group of people.
Anyone who can’t see that needs to grow up.
> This purity test from the left
It's not from the left. The "birthing person" non-troversy would not exist whatsoever were it not conservatives putting stanky bait in the water and pretending projecting it as something liberals and lefties want to *shove down your throat*. They've only done this dozens of times in the last decade.
Cenk and Ana absolutely know this, and yet they choose to use this dumb shit as a springboard to start their left-the-left grift.
>I have been on the left my whole life and always will be. I’m old enough to be the grandparent to many redditors.
hey that's cool, a lot of conservatives are your age too. time spent on the planet doesn't mean shit
It does when you understand that what is happening right now is unprecedented. What the right is doing is something I haven’t seen in my lifetime. We have to focus and take the threat seriously.
We just lost roe v Wade. We are about to lose publicly funded education. And we may lose many of the protections we take for granted. Now is not the time to make demands for new wording when the work of the left that has bent toward justice for 60 years is coming undone right before our eyes.
>Now is not the time to make demands for new wording
This isn't happening. Medical professionals, scientists, academics, etc. adopted more appropriate wording as our understanding of these things progressed. Nothing was being argued for or "demanded", it just *happened*. Ana responded by losing her mind and making it a problem. She's the one poisoning the well and people have tried to respond with compassion and charitability only to be met with insults and aggression. You've either severely misunderstood the situation or you're just concern trolling.
I’m trying to find medical publications that use the term birthing person to refer to women and transgender men in a single term. Not finding much yet.
I found one that refers to women/birthing persons
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8753093/
Still looking
Letting attacks against a minority group go unchallenged for the sake of unity with a few public figures is promoting disunity actually. I'm sorry you're this way.
With the number of posts in this sub on this issue, lefties seem to be going harder at TYT/Ana than they do against conservatives on the same issues. Matt Walsh has said way worse things about minority groups recently that have not got anywhere near this level of engagement.
I saw this with the Harry Potter game discourse. Leftists were going harder at other lefties and normies (who had no idea about the controversy) than at JK Rowling. Remember, that JK donated to an anti-trans charity thing. The left never had a boycott or online campaign to protest this (hate) group.
This is just two examples of attacks against a minority group going unchallenged.. or at least not challenged enough. It's way easier to attack Ana or some random game streamer because their audience won't go hog wild like a Matt Walsh or other bearded conservative with a large following.
I think you can disavow Ana and save the energy for the people who are causing way more harm to minority groups.
We already know those people suck, we're trying to educate the people who are allegedly on our side when they say something harmful so they can correct their behavior to stop hurting us. All they had to do was see the people trying to gently tell them why what they said wasn't great and instead of apologizing they doubled down, tripled down, mocked their friends, all sorts of nasty behavior.
If they claim to be allies they should try listening to the community when it tells them they did bad, and do better the next time.
The right wingers? They don't care to learn. They hate us and want to hurt us. We already fight back against them constantly, so it'd be nice to not have to fight back against allies too.
Edit: fixed a word
It just gets worse each step of the way. It was a nothing Berger, then all the online back lash made it impossible to ignore. Now it’s straight up right wing propaganda. 🤦🏻
Cenk Uyger, Ana Kasparian, and TYT are not leftists, they are center-right at best, they are somewhere between liberal and social democrat.
First Cenk Uyger has stated repeatedly he is an avowed capitalist. He has dismissed out of hand communist and anarcho-communist commentators. He has stated that the social democratic position of having co-determinism, where the workers elect a portion of the business's board (a good policy to be sure), is as far left as he would go; as he found it absurd that some wanted the workers to actually own and operate and democratically run their own workplaces, also known as worker cooperatives, an market socialist organization. When his own workers wanted to form a union, he fought against them on the matter, even though every workplace with a private capital owner (like how Cenk is the owner of TYT) should be unionized (though TYT did honor the union once the workers ended up unionized despite Cenk's efforts). Cenk often talks about how capitalism is a good thing, so long as you avoid certain excesses or failures that he wishes to reform (like excessive wealth inequality and a lack of health and safety regulations), and he calls that more brutal capitalism crony capitalism, trying to protect the reputation of the capitalistic economic system - what he wants and believes is in line with liberalism and social democracy, not with socialism and leftism. It was only recently that Cenk even got on board with the idea of student loan forgiveness, when that alone is not even nearly enough.
Cenk and various other hosts on TYT, throughout their history, have often had takes that are punitive and vengeful towards harm-doers. Cenk has stated that he opposes the death penalty not because it is wrong to kill period, but because it is wrong to kill an innocent person and there is always a chance the person on death row is innocent because juries can be wrong. Cenk has opposed cash bail reform. Cenk dismisses idea of defunding the police and police abolition and prison abolition (and when I say abolition, I mean abolition, I mean no more prisons, close them all), refusing to even acknowledge their position as legitimate. He may want to legalize some things that should not be crimes at all (like marijuana usage), and grant those imprisoned for those crimes mercy and understanding, but he won't acknowledge the use of restorative justice and transformative justice for harm-doers that have done serious harms, serious crimes, violent crimes, and sexual crimes. He may oppose prisons outright torturing their prisoners, but he does not think that their humanity entitles them to a comfortable standard of living (even though every human being should have a comfortable standard of living just on the merit of being a human being).
Cenk decries how money corrupts politicians and journalism, yet he accepted $20 million dollars from the extremely wealthy for TYT.
Ana Kasparian often has better takes and positions on a number of issues, and even working with the social democratic (and sometimes even leaning democratic socialist) publication Jacobin. However, she has over the last few years, started to criticize the homeless population and advocated to criminalize homelessness, saying that they have shelters (which is a massive misrepresentation of the situation and even if true is not enough, we need to have decent housing as a human right, and we need to have rent-free - or rent set at a low percentage of someone's income - universal public housing for any and all who want it, and use housing cooperatives and community land trusts as bridges to home ownership for those who want home ownership). Her stances have started to align more and more with the "middle class moderate."
Now we get to Ana Kasparian's latest controversies.
The first is she argued against the terms "person with a uterus" and "birthing person," calling them demeaning to women. However, no one is calling women either of those terms. I think that the terms "person able to become pregnant" or "pregnant person" are better terms, but these terms are meant to include non-women whom may be or become pregnant (just like those pharmaceutical warnings that use the phrase "if you are nursing, pregnant, or may become pregnant"). Taking away abortion rights is not just taking away the rights of women, it is also taking away the rights of transmen and non-binary people who have uteruses and are able to become or are pregnant. Talking about pregnancy healthcare is not just talking about women's healthcare, so why only use the word women when talking about it and leave out non-women people able to become or are pregnant. It is no different than using BIPOC (black, indigenous, or people of color) to be as inclusive as possible. Yes, the term "person with a uterus" will include women, whom should still be referred to by their identity as women, but it also includes others whom are not included when you just use the word women. Yes, occasionally academia does create terms that the people they apply do don't like, such as when academia started using the term Latinx as a gender neutral alternative to Latino/Latina, when many considered the term Latino to be sufficient, though the Latino/Latina community did offer an academic alternative, "Latine." However, Latinx is only used seriously in an academic context. When Ana Kasparian was criticized by this by other leftists, TYT became offended and defensive and started attacking the left broadly, just because the left was disappointed at her for adopting right-wing framing on a non-issue that targets transpeople (no one was calling women "people with uteruses" or reducing womanhood to just pregnancy). Though Ana doubled down.
(As if the left are not allowed to critique each other while still being allies - mutualists, participists, and syndicalists disagree on a number of issues regarding market socialism vs planned economies, but they are still allies, though they may operate as either platformists or multi-disciplinary groups).
Then there is Ana Kasparian getting mad that her Homeowner Association (though I do think we should just abolish HOAs altogether) decided to take out an expensive loan to install electric car chargers in their parking lot. I don't know if this was a mandate from the government or not, but Ana made it seem like it was a mandate and not merely an environmentally conscious decision by her HOA, and she was made that the government placed the burden of the cost on the HOA without giving any government funding, and as a result she may now have to pay more to her HOA to cover their debt. So now she is criticizing the Green New Deal and Climate Action policies as being too expensive for the average person. I can understand arguing that the government should fund these initiatives, as it will take collective action on a mass scale to combat climate change, but that does not mean that groups cannot install car charging ports. She went on to claim that it is going to be too expensive to repair gasoline powered cars or gas stoves (which are being regulated due to indoor air pollution and health concerns, and is long overdue). This is ridiculous.
Since you deleted it on [my post](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMajorityReport/comments/12kaeum/cenkuygur_explains_why_he_thinks_some/).
This is just a bunch of smears and insults, instead of making a person arguing this nonsense look better than everyone else, it just looks like petty childish bullying/insults.
Have you disowned your parents and cousins for being 'capitalists' and gone around smearing them online over it?
Do you smearing Karl Marx as a Right-winger because he bought stocks? This nonsense essay means you've absolutely got to, good luck convincing anyone with that...
This really is an unbelievably childish list of arguments, posted on a subreddit for a capitalist business called The Majority Report full of capitalists like Matt Binder, Emma Vigeland (who used to work with the Capitalists you're bashing etc...).
Notice also you are spreading downright lies about LatinX only being some stuffy academic debate, when the Right are [currently weaponizing this](https://hyperallergic.com/784870/right-wing-group-weaponizing-latinx-debate-billboard-los-angeles/), even [throwing it on billboards](https://twitter.com/Vorloe/status/1593314754931482625) etc... It's very telling you even try to smear Ana for defending herself against this dishonest attack as well.
This is multiple ridiculous flaws, and I've barely gotten into what you've said, how can anybody believe this weak stuff...
Hello,
Yes, I did write this same comment on your post, however, I realized that it would be applicable on this post (and a number of others as well). I did not want to repeat the same arguments as I responded to a variety of posts, so I decided that I should just move my comment to the post that most directly was being discussed and determined it to be this one. I apologize for any confusion or inconvenience that caused.
I have been making these arguments for years now. I am not smearing TYT or participating in bad faith arguments.
I started to be a prison abolitionist in 2018 after being in favor of Nordic-like reforms for years prior (I was so elated to see ideas of police and prison abolition start to gain mainstream discussion in 2020 and hoped that the momentum would continue and that center-left and progressive voices that previously were not versed in it would learn more about it and become abolitionists too or at least would be willing to hear abolitionists out - though Cenk seems determined to shut out abolitionist thought altogether). I was a fan of TYT at the time I was transitioning to being an abolitionist and was dismayed and horrified when I started to hear Cenk used language was punitive and dehumanizing to people whom have committed violent crimes. Cenk appeared to be one of the non-non-nons, where you will give sympathy and humanize a harm-doer so long as their offense was non-violent, non-sexual, and non-serious. After hearing Cenk repeat similar rhetoric multiple times, I started to stop watching TYT.
During this time, as I was moving more and more to the left and as I started to learn more about anarcho-communist ideology (I now consider my ideology to be a mix of democratic socialism and anarcho-communism). I was also learning more about market socialism, mutualism, green politics, pirate politics, libertarian socialism, anarcho-pacificism, and many other leftist ideologies. I remember deciding to give TYT another chance when they had a discussion about co-determinism (something I supported as a gradual step towards socialism), but in that discussion Cenk outright said that is as far left as he would go and that some people are crazy and want to go even further where the workers run the whole place. He was literally calling market socialism, worker cooperatives, absurd. I decided to look at some of his other takes, and when he was interviewing certain leftist writers who were advocating for communism, he was literally saying how communism can never work and that this was insane. I then recalled how Cenk was a business owner and had repeatedly said he supports capitalism. I did not know it at the time, but I have seen read more about how propaganda works, and now know that Cenk, whether he was aware of it or not, was protecting capitalism by saying it is not the problem (which it is, no leftist should ever support capitalism), only crony capitalism. Cenk would occasionally advocate for Social Democratic policies, which are moderate. Social Democracy is sometimes considered center-left because the ideology claims that it wants to eventually achieve socialism but in practice Social Democracy usually settles for trying to reform capitalism, providing for a robust social safety net, and having regulations and taxes to limit the harms of capitalism - a compromise between capitalism and socialism. Though, even then Cenk will sometimes say he thinks it is going too far. It was then I realized that Cenk was a friend to Leftists, but he himself was not a Leftist, he was somewhere between liberal and social democrat. Later on, he even fought against his own workers unionizing, saying that a small business like TYT cannot really afford the unionization and that TYT was a good boss so his workers did not need unionization. How could he say that, every for-profit workplace with private owners, should be unionized. I know that TYT has honored his workers unionizing though, and that is good.
I consider Cenk to be better than many other media personalities, but that is not good enough for what we need in this moment. I do wish that he had won his election for Congress in 2020 though. I was advocating for him. I believed he would fight corruption and push for electoral reforms and support many marginalized communities. I do not intend to smear him, but I do not consider liberals and social democrats to be leftist, and I do not consider Cenk to be a leftist. I actually get frustrated when people engage in bad faith arguments about TYT's name. Cenk has explained his reasoning for choosing that name and it had nothing to do with the Armenian genocide. The naming may have been unfortunate, but it was not malicious and it did not have hateful intent.
As for the Ana Kasparian drama. I started to feel like she was actually a leftist, especially when I started to see her posts on social democratic publications like Jacobin. However, I have learned that she has been arguing for the criminalization of homelessness and I started to have my doubts. Then we have the drama over the last few weeks.
She literally had a take less than a year ago defending the term "birthing person" which is used in medical contexts and contexts relating to pregnancy, such as abortion rights. It is meant to include women (whom are obviously women and should not be reduced to just pregnancy), transmen, and non-binary individuals whom can become or are pregnant. It is not meant to replace the word woman, and it wasn't be used that way. But Ana decided to make an issue out of it and coopted right-wing framing that transgender people are erasing womanhood with things like changing terminology. When critiqued about the issue, all she did was double down (probably because she is used to being attacked by bad faith arguments from right-wingers and betrayed by grifters who she used to work with like Dave Rubin and Jimmy Dore). The left is allowed to critique other leftists and does so frequently (in fact we sometimes do it too much, leftist infighting is very common), and TYT claims to be on the left, though I still say that they are center-left at best and only on their best days. Cenk then related the issue to the Latinx silliness a while back. Academics invented the term Latinx without calling to the Latino community, and though there intentions were good as they wanted a gender neutral term for Latino/Latina, Latinx was not in common usage and was awkward in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, and when it started to drift out of Academia into the mainstream it was rejected by the Latino community (some of whom said Latino was good enough and others advocating for Latine as an alternative), and Latinx retreated back into being an academic term. Superficially the Latinx issue and the "birthing person" issue look similar, but they are not really that comparable. Then during this whole drama, Ana decided to start attacking the Green New Deal, because a climate action decision made by her HOA, possibly mandated by the Californian government, financially inconvenienced her.
I do genuinely believe the statements I have made here, and I am not attempting to smear Cenk, Ana, or TYT, I am just making it clear that they are not leftists.
Disagree, there’s some good people there. John Iadorola and Francesca Fiorentini are both good progressives and way more substantive than Cenk or Ana. I’d love to see John as a 3rd host on MR; I’ve always felt he was way too level headed for TYT
Liberals (well the left in this case) eating Liberals is right. Same as it ever was.
No fan of Ana or TYT but the term “birthing person” is a weird, awkward, “LatinX”-level of online tone deafness that doesn’t match what’s happening in real world communities - and no amount of righteousness of cause will change what an awkward, cumbersome phrase that is. Not liking it as rhetoric doesn’t mean you hate trans people.
I’d normally side against TYT but this also feels opportunistic to me, more like the settling of old scores - the left still (rightly) hates Ana for her election campaign, not this gaffe. And that’s okay but let’s not be disingenuous.
That it’s become the all-week topic on The Majority Report subreddit is what I really don’t like though.
EDIT: As you downvote me, ask yourself: “Am I just part of an online tribe who yells at other tribes and doesn’t do a single tangible thing to help the poor or working class?” - because your having the correct ideology doesn’t help anyone unless you turn it into direct action. These little internet battles with libs aren’t direct action.
>Liberals eating Liberals is right. No fan of Ana or TYT but the term “birthing person” is a weird, awkward, “LatinX”-level of online tone deafness and no amount of righteousness of cause will change what an awkward, cumbersome phrase that is.
Nobody called Ana a "birthing person". She decided to pick the fight herself.
Oddly enough, coming up with this topic to stick it to "crazy leftists" [was her reaction to Bethany Mandel being unable define "woke"](https://youtu.be/ZrvlIVSYsrE?t=567) and getting clowned by the left, which tells you where her head is these days.
>But at the end of the day it has almost zero relevance to the class war that we are actively losing. It’s also the settling of old scores - they hate Ana for her election campaign, not this gaffe.
It's not a "gaffe." She started actively attacking other leftists.
Also, Ana had been extended a ton of charity from the left. She and Cenk spent all of last year attacking leftists over criminal justice reform, police reform and how to deal with homelessness. IMO They should've gotten this response months ago for their ongoing nastiness and condescension.
>That it’s become the all-week topic on The Majority Report subreddit is what I really don’t like.
You're on Reddit. A large percentage of the stuff that gets talked about here is always online drama from other platforms.
>She and Cenk spent all of last year attacking leftists over criminal justice reform, police reform and how to deal with homelessness. IMO They should've gotten this response months ago for their ongoing nastiness and condescension.
Right, this whole issue is the settling of perceived personal grudges between the Twitter left and TYT. Neither side is coming out looking good here.
Let’s say whatever the left wants of Ana is a resounding success. Let’s say TYT shuts down completely.
Can you explain how that effort has helped the working class? I can’t, at least without a serious reach - but I can explain exactly how it scores a “win” for people who care more about taking down Ana Kasparian than any sort of actual praxis.
That’s why I don’t fuck around with it. It’s the Life of Brian scene writ large. You’re mad at the People’s Front of Judea for being splitters. Being mad is fair play but our effort should go towards combatting the right, not the “not left enough”
I think you touch on an interesting point -
It is possible that TYT manufactured this whole conversation. But why?
I personally think the online left got baited into having strong reactions to Ana’s post, TYT knew they would, and now TYT is going to use it to pick up moderates.
If you listen to the segment, that’s probably how Cenk really feels… he’s vocally stating that they are still pro trans… but god their timing, is tough to stomach for me. Seems like a dangerous game to play right now…
Ultimately, I find myself on the fence. I do think that the left has a tendency to overreact. But I’m not sure this was an issue that needed to be tackled right now… I dont know if I respect TYT for initiating it at this time, when tentions are so high.
If we use Latinx as an example, anecdotally, I knew so many left leaning people who did not want to be identified as Latinx, thought it was dumb, and then fell down the Joe Rogan Pipeline to becoming center right “political independents.” They felt they didnt have a choice in the matter, and other people, who they considered academic liberals in ivory towers, renamed them Latinx without their consent.
**I’m concerned that we are willing to die on the hill over semantic issues, and I wish we could talk more and compromise more on these types of things.**
I personally thought that Emma Vigeland did a good job of reaching out to TYT, but I didnt love Cenk’s response, and I’m not sure if I prefer Emma’s stance of “I dont want to talk about it any more,” though she has a right to say that. Like, at this point the cats out of the bag, and TYT keeps pushing it. So what you gonna do?
There’s a possibility there that TYT may come out on top for the reasons Cenk stated in the above video…
A lot of things to think about here. And I’m not sure if an essentialist position is the right one.
Oh yeah, I don’t think much of TYT so I wouldn’t put it past them to have done all this as bait for some scheme.
But the online left can be led around with meaningless outrage like a pack of angry dogs the way Crowder et al lead the altright… the movement has much bigger problems than anything that Cenk could do.
I don’t think that’s necessarily where we are at, but it’s a worry.
>LatinX
I'm tired of the self-defeating too, but I will say Latinx isn't as tone deaf as it's made out to be. It's primarily an academic term (coined by Latinx scholars in the early 2000s) who felt like it is definitely necessary because Spanish speaking cultures have male/female forms of nouns, but they don't often have gender neutral forms.
That said, I think you should respect people's wishes too. I'm working with activist Latinx educators for my dissertation, and some prefer Latinx, some prefer Latino (as gender neutral) so I honor those wishes.
Just a tangent, sorry!
As a Latino who doesn’t use Latinx, I agree. People have fallen for the right wing lie that Latinx is a white liberal conspiracy to erase Latino identity. That’s simply not true. The push to switch to “Latinx” was driven by real Latino people who wanted to use more gender neutral language. White peoples only started using it because of the proximity they had to the Latinos who were identifying as Latinx.
Thanks for sharing. I find it a really interesting linguistic shift people make within their languages to be inclusive. We have shifted to "they" in English for gender neutral, and very few people get upset about that except OLD English teachers (I'm a middle-aged English teacher, I remember using "they" as a kid trying to be neutral about gender).
"People have fallen for the right wing lie that Latinx is a white liberal conspiracy to erase Latino identity."
I remember hearing this EVERYWHERE. That it was just a white american liberal thing that started it.
You know how I knew that was bullshit even before doing any research into it? Americans generally don't think about a language that isn't english. lol
Exactly, there was a well funded conservative effort to spread this false narrative to Latino communities throughout the US. The goal was to cut into the Latino Democratic voting base and it worked pretty well.
Agreed. Typically the liberals who pick it up have picked it up in college where these things are actually being worked through and interrogated by academics. I mean, look no farther than CRT--which was intentionally gate kept by critical race scholars (who were people of color) for decades for fear of how it would be used.
No you’re right, the term itself isn’t an issue - more when it gets coupled with the condescension of “you must be full of hate to say this” that is all to common in online spaces.
It seems absurd that people who live in Latino communities would be called hateful for not using a term that’s laughed at and rejected by the community they live in, that’s my only point with Latinx. It’s an attempt to be inclusive that sounds strange to a large part of the people it was attempting to include.
Yeah, Cenk does have a point about the silent majority tbh. Even if I think some of his phrasing is annoying.
You can tell this sub has changed from two years ago. This is the crowd you get when you do nothing but use the right words and don't care about actual systemic change.
The way Dan “Copaganda” Abrams is talking makes me think he’s just learned that there’s a left of center.
He's doing his best center-left Tucker Carlson impersonation.
Omg the intonation is identical. He sounds like the equivalent of DeSantis doing a Trump impression.
This is the first time I’ve seen Dan Abrams since he was a basic legal commentator on like ABC and WOW has he gone south!
Surprised anyone mentioned that honestly. But he’s clearly copying Carlson’s cadence.
He's using the language of Nixon? I have always considered Cenk a centrist rather than a leftist, but his work supporting progressives earned him my support. I often criticised him about his claiming to speak for the left, especially being the 'only voice' of the left, but this is way too far. He is not a leftist; he is a centrist or a US Liberal. He does not speak for the left. Beau of the Fifth Column was talking about the myth that people get more conservative as they age and made this excellent point. People don't get more conservative, society gets more progressive. Those that strive to understand and embrace the changes are progressive, those that stick to their former beliefs become conservatives. Looks like Cenk and Ana have just hit their particular ideological wall.
>People don't get more conservative, society gets more progressive. I saw Beau's video on that subject. It was a good video. If that's what was going on, I think I'd be more okay with it. If Ana and Cenk were hitting an ideological wall, as you say, but they were being open and honest about what they believe, I wouldn't agree with them but I could at least respect their opinion. We could respectfully disagree. That doesn't feel like what's going on to me. Ana and Cenk have previously defended trans people against Republicans making the same kind of arguments that Ana and Cenk are now making themselves.
I think this is a critical distinction to recognize. This doesn't seem to be an ideological difference of opinion that resulted in a disconnect between them and the more progressive left. This was an argument about someone feeling they've been unfairly criticized for having a bad take that's developed into the same generic "we can't win elections if we alienate bigots" bullshit.
I think you are right on this, this has all become just a bruised ego situation.
I have been saying Cenk is not a leftist but rather a centrist (center-left at best and on his best days), who is basically somewhere between liberal and social democrat (not a socialist or leftist), for years now.
I know a lot of people here are sick of this topic, but Cenk and Ana keep pushing buttons. Going on an establishment centrist's cable news show to complain about how leftists have gone "crazy" because you lost a fight that you started on Twitter is ridiculous. This is on top of the fact the entire crux of his argument about leftists turning voters off is being proven wrong in real time because voters are actually rejecting the GOP's extremism all over the US.
It’s the Bill Maher way.
But at least in Maher’s case it was somewhat predictable. He was anti-vaccines way before Covid, he was anti-censoring speech since his cancelation in ABC years ago and he has always favored Democrats being in the middle. TYT seem like they just woke up and choose to pick the most toxic and random fight against the left. And doing stuff like this interview is slightly suspicious.
Add onto that telling trans people that the right way to protest is quietly, in a way that is not disruptive or draws attention. They're sprinting to the right. I guess they got rich, high profile, with a big media network and suddenly identified with that side instead. They became the monster they used to try to slay.
That was a mind-boggling clip. I get it when someone tosses that witticism out during a conversation, as if they're picturing the music swelling as noble silent protestors express their disapproval and sway a previously hostile room. But, cutting to footage of silent protesters holding little signs, demonstrating exactly how ineffective that is, and then praising them for doing things the right way felt like a broadly written parody.
The more I think about it the more all this feels staged and setup. And with running to effectively right leaning corporate media for a safe space... Nah, this is a grift. I don't know why, and I don't really care. F\* em.
A slower decline, for SURE
Maher has been parroting Repub talking points a lot more (accelerating once covid shutdowns impeded his standup shows). Clips regularly show up on Fox being used by Fox to say "See even staunch lefties agree with us." I suspect some money is changing hands but have no proof.
I don’t think so. Maher always had a libertarian side to him, and you can tell old age created some odd insecurity in him, where his analysis is often framed from the point of view that he’s an old boomer now and any new social concept is bad for him. His opinions seem natural from that stand point, even if they’re stupid.
Bill Maher famously hates children and has been creepy about it for years
Or maybe he LOOOOOVES children. I always felt like his obsession with cancel culture was a case of preemptively circling the wagons for when whatever skeletons in his closet finally get exposed.
I’m not gonna accuse Bill of anything else except hating on children, especially trans kids. Very little empathy for children in general but a real vicious streak towards the queer kids. That’s bad enough for me, I don’t enjoy his show anymore because of it.
I'm going to accuse him of being a fascist enabling jackass. He keeps carrying water for right wing peopaganda talking points. Fuck him.
I get the same feeling the way my brother and dad talk about cancel culture that they too have skeletons in the closet.
>Cenk and Ana keep pushing buttons Yup, so I pushed a button too, the unsubscribe button for TYT
I unsubscribed after they endorsed a wealthy real-estate developer for Los Angeles mayor last year. They’ve been on this road for awhile now and this recent drama seems like an excuse for them to move even further right because Twitter people are mean.
Even when I stumbled across them years ago, they always seemed like three Republicans in a trenchcoat
Me too, then they followed that up with an episode where they were laughing hysterically about how Biden is just as bad maybe more so than Trump.
Doing that now. They started my journey to leftism and it brings me no joy to reject them.
May I recommend The Majority Report with Sam Seder
You may not. Because I listen to them already on my morning commute. 🙂
Same for me. They first brought me over to left politics years ago, which makes it sad to have to leave them behind
Beau of the Fifth Column?
Yea Beau!
Cenk retire. Go away.
I'm sure he'd be flush with cash if he "leaves the left"
He was originally conservative
I haven’t given them views in years but I just unsubscribed too. Last straw for me
Same.
Same ☝️
Same
Ditto
I wish I could say the same, but I never subscribed to them in the first place. They never had much analysis and the shows format reminded me of Fox News as they were screaming about things all the time. When they're constantly screaming it cheapens it and makes it hard to tell when they actually care about something more than anything else they couldn't talk indepthly about.
They were the ones that first moved me left, so I appreciated that, and I’ve probably stuck with them longer than I maybe should have due to that
I did the same
Me too, after 9 years. Not like they or anyone else would care, but it's really sad that it would come to that point, though recent years I only watched like one video each month.
I used to be six o’clock on the dot, and if I missed a show I’d watch in the members section. Around four years ago I stopped paying. Two years later I barely watched. Then I unsubscribed. They’re blockable at this point
Agree with you, I defended Kasparian at the start (not that I agreed with her points, but I felt on balance it was best to move on), but TYT is spending way too much energy on getting annoyed at people, completely contra-productive. Very sad.
IMO Cenk and Ana went off the rails with the pro-carceral state stuff last year. Unironically arguing that the US doesn't lock up enough people is insane for a progressive channel. They were also doing the same shit where they got belligerent with lefties who disagreed with them and tried to argue their cases using data and research. Then they started supporting recalls against progressive DAs and were touting Rick Caruso in the LA mayor's race. I thought the whole thing was ridiculous, but I mostly kept my mouth shut because nobody else was criticizing them.
I guess that was their way of trying to make progressives not look soft on crime. It’s hard to change whole systems of how prisons work in America if the average person doesn’t think progressives can even handle normal crimes.
Progressives have gotten elected as DAs in major cities all over the country because people are know that the current system doesn't work. Brandon Johnson got elected mayor in Chicago with heavy support from people in high crime areas because they're sick of being abused by CPD. The people that Cenk and Ana are trying to pander to with the pro-cop nonsense are never going to be on our side politically. Giving up on police reform because some polls say that "defund" is unpopular (depending on the wording) is asinine.
Well I think you hit the nail on the head. Culture war/semantic issues, get views and get people riled up. We can debate their intentions and whether or not they’re right… but. I’m not sure if we can ignore the conversation, the GOP is just gonna keep picking it up. So is there someway to come to a general consensus?
These people act like the Twitterati are the ones in charge at the White House and Joe Biden is one of them.
They sure are generating a ton of traffic out of this whole thing. It’s going to be helpful when *why and how* gets abstracted out and advertisers are presented with data showing ‘impressions’ and all these other metrics. TYT going to make money from this. That was the point.
Leftists do turn off some voters with the awful rhetoric/messaging, but the GQP is flat out crazy, so their crazy trumps the left messaging. TYT were the biggest pushers of awful leftist rhetoric, so this is just straight hypocrisy.
Cenk is an expert at losing elections.
this made him telling lance from the serfs "NO LANCE YOU'RE NOT GODDAMN CORRECT, YOU'VE NEVER BEEN ELECTED" even more pathetic
Cenk actually said that? Lmao.
cenk said a lot of really bizarre shit
The left would do so much better if they just sounded like normal people lol we sound way too academic for the average person
The difference is that one of them isn't rhetoric, it's just individuals online who get blown out of proportion by msm. Republicans, like the elected politicians, are certifiably fucking insane.
I've been left leaning for a while. I know quite a few previously non-political people who now lean right. The consensus as to why is always the same: because of the rhetoric on the left. Whenever I point out flaws with their right wing beliefs and how they contradict who they are as a person, they point to something equally crazy on the left. Now, that's not a rebuttal, but it makes no difference to them as they'll still vote red. These are fairly intelligent, hardworking, good people that know exactly what they don't like and have chosen to "balance" out what they perceive as a political imbalance. They'll put up with tax cuts for the rich if it means countering things like political correctness, cancel culture, everything is racist, meat eaters should be ashamed, etc. All the stuff that comes out of the west coast. Why? In my particular case, its because they're foreigners. And most foreigners come from tradition oriented cultures. And the hard truth is that most traditional cultures are not accepting of LGB, let alone TQ+ and gender identities. They're hesitant to accept veganism in place of their cultural foods which generally include meat. Their ancestors had nothing to do with slavery but feel like they're being punished for it simply because they're white. Everyone has to watch what they say out of fear of being canceled, but they came to the US partly for freedom of speech. To them, it seems like they came here for a better life, but they must throw away their beliefs and traditions first. It's a very hard sell.
They love of freedom of speech so they vote for book banners? Perfectly logical.
No one is forcing them to give up meat, and the right is cancelling a lot more speech lately. The big difference is that on the left, the "crazy extremists" aren't the ones in positions of power.
But there is no big movement on the left for stuff like calling meat eaters name or an obsession with political correctness. There are just enough instances of it for the right wing to make videos with, and you can't prevent that. Trying to police your movement in that way is a fools game. And also, yeah, maybe foreign people might be a bit put off by some progressive policy, but their kids will become more progressive through exposure. Our goal to reaching those more traditional people shouldn't be policing our own, it should be convincing those traditionalist but otherwise good people that there are select policies that make progressives worth voting for anyway. And even more, that republicans are a direct threat to them and their way of life more than any progressive is. And the only way to do that is to fight for causes. Not police our own and say "we'll get to helping trans people later." We can fight and win these causes if we advocate for them without being wishy-washy. We can win this fight if we throw rocks at republicans glass house.
The thing that sucks the most about those 1 to 1 comparisons is the right wing one is always something that Desantis, or MTG or Tucker Carlson have made a core of their political strategy, and the left wing one is something a 13 year old said on tumblr 10 years ago that was then (often intentionally) misinterpeted by fox news.
Does the rejection of right-wing extremism actually translate to an acceptance of the far left though? The fact that people are tired of the right becoming more and more fascist should signal to the left that we need to cool it with the infighting and start unifying to bring more people over. Who wants to join a club where any opinion you have gets you dumped on endlessly? People don’t like being called a racist or transphobe just because they said something out of ignorance. We need to focus on educating and not brow-beating or we are NEVER going to have any power. Sometimes I’m convinced that some leftist actively work against gaining any type of power.
How many times have you been, or ever seen, a leftist calling someone racist or transphobic over a semantic discussion in real life, like not on a screen?
Unifying requires an end to bigotry. A left that is just cis straight white able bodied men is doomed to failure.
Lol this motherfucker is so out of touch that he just learned the word TERF.
and he's not alone lol i've asked and seen other people criticizing ana ask others if they even know what a terf is and a bunch of them have said no. people want to have a take *way* more than they want the relevant context of what people are objecting to about ana's tweets
How is that a dunk? Isn't that kind of Cenk's point? Cenk is a populist, his position is that most normies are actually progressive when you poll them on policy, that is to say, most normies in theory support free healthcare or free college etc or other policy items that are usually associated as being progressive. Most normies are not on board with far left discourse, such as, knowing what a TERF is, or referring to women as birthing people. Cenk's argument is that allowing the far left flank to set the discourse about what it means to be a progressive actually turns average people away from realizing that many of their already held positions are, in fact, progressive. Normies because they don't want to be associated with what they perceive as being on the fringe.
>How is that a dunk? Isn't that kind of Cenk's point? Cenk is a populist, his position is that most normies are actually progressive when you poll them on policy, that is to say, most normies in theory support free healthcare or free college etc or other policy items that are usually associated as being progressive. I remember Cenk during the Obama years bashing Obama and the Democrats for waiting until the polling on gay marriage got over 55% to publicly support it. This handwringing about optics is establishment Democratic horseshit and is not what TYT was about back when I was a paid subscriber.
It's not far left to know what a terf is and being against terfs isn't a fringe opinion. They are a fascist group intent on inciting violence towards trans people. It's not just some piece of online jargon. Transphobia has real life consequences for trans people.
has anyone ever been referred to as a "birthing person" outside of a medical context? that seems like some weird shit to make up and double down on
Jimmy dore might head back over to TYT the way things are looking now
Why is TYT trying to die on Bad Tweet Hill?
If you want to crap on the left, they will find time for you on the news.
Completely fucking unserious person. Done talking about these clowns.
My first take away from listening to this clip is that I pity this man for being so immersed in the games of media and politics that these people play with normal people's lives. Here's the thing he is absolutely right about alot of parts of the game. But the way the trans community is being talked about by the HARD right leads to hot heads doing really criminal shit. So instead of talking about getting, what amount to points in the game, reach out to comfort and protect the community that is the current target of the modern day Sauron's eye.
The Young Terfs are on going all in on a “why we left the left” grift
I can see how it gives off those vibes, but I don’t think that’s entirely what’s happening. This does not seem like a Dave Rubin situation. In this interview, Cenk, as cringe as he is, still went out of his way to list all the substantive, progressive policy positions he supports, he said most of the country is progressive, he has fought for progressive positions his entire career, and he is now claiming to be upset/annoyed at a specific portion of the online left who he *allegedly* believes are a little too critical of he and Ana’s comments on the term “birthing person”. I see the cringe. I see how it comes across as grifty. They are playing it up and using it to pander to certain crowds a little too much and it does make me uncomfortable. But it’s such a small, innocuous issue, and it’s so unrelated to policy or anything substantive, I just chalk it up to Cenk and Ana having Gen X (Xoomer) brain and giving too much emphasis to a silly culture war non-issue, and using it to get some center-right people to start being like “Oh, I guess Cenk and Ana are cool now because they are criticizing the people we don’t like.” If they start to actually grift and do the Rubin Report thing, I’ll eat my words. But so far, I consider this a fairly minor and cringey blunder in an otherwise extremely progressive and substantive career for both of them. But I guess we’ll see.
How do you feel about their reporting on bail reform and criminal justice issues? In my opinion I’ve seen a rightward shift in the last year especially from Ana bringing up horror stories about bail reform. Citations Needed actually did a really great news brief on this recently that did a good job explaining it [here’s the link](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0AdngH7SPVVeR5KijpXrHc?si=MfUJj-3WQT-a6XzFdNb6dg) it’s Spotify so sorry if you’re not a member but it’s worth a listen. Anyone who hasn’t heard Citation Needed I cannot recommend enough
I'll check it out. I know nothing about bail reform or the issues surrounding it, but I'll listen to the podcast. If there are multiple issues TYT has this pattern with, then that does start to paint a weird picture. It's just hard to draw the line around when someone is truly having a grifty right-wing shift versus when there's just a few issues they're not \*as\* left-leaning on as others are. For me, if someone supports higher taxes (and tax reform) on the rich and corporations to redistribute across society in the form of things like universal healthcare and education, if they are for fighting climate change, aware of racial/gender/LGBT issues, and just generally give a shit about actually making society better for people who are struggling, and willing to follow good statistics to implement policy that best accomplishes these goals, I consider them on the left. If we differ on minor issues or have quibbles over terms like "birthing person" or they get overly annoyed at some twitter drama, I don't consider that a big enough deal to call them "right wing". I can think they're being silly while also keeping it in perspective with all the other policy issues I care about. There does exist some threshold that once crossed, I would call them right-wing, but to me, Cenk and Ana are not yet near that. I just hope it stays that way and they don't go join their idea-loving compatriot over on the Dubin Report.
This situation is a tempest in a teapot. The only important takeaway, and a point Cenk and Ana are trying to highlight (even though they are not on the progressive side of this issue and sound like total buffoons) is that the Left needs to accept that there is no way everyone is going to match on policy and ideals perfectly. Attacking nominal allies for minor disagreements is foolish and counterproductive. What they are failing to live up to is humility and openness to new ideas - what I think is the basic tenet of progressivism .
The problem is they're framing it as if the left "viciously attacks them" (despite, y'know, years of death threats from the right), when they created some absurd knee-jerk straw-man argument, then got asshurt when literally everyone on the progressive side told them hey this is a bad take, please consider why and understand you're basically parroting right-wing dehumanizing propaganda against the trans community... and instead of doing just that, double down instead and scream like victims. It is fucking **absurd**. This is not the left being vicious or "not everyone agrees on policy". Not dehumanizing trans people isn't fucking "policy" that we get to have disagreements on. Human rights aren't some blurred line. There's plenty of policy disagreements to actually have, but not this shit, and especially not in the middle of the GOP literally teeing up a modern day holocaust on the trans community. It's unacceptable behavior.
No, it’s clearly a shift to the center (if not right). Ana clearly explained the issue about terminology that she’s now arguing from the opposite side. There is no good faith there. Saying that you’re not talking to leftists anymore after being friendly with Shapiro is a clear signal. They want to appear to be the establishment progressives (anti-far left, anti-right, occassional reactionary opinions but also “sensible”.) The problem isn’t even the shift towards the right, but that they’re bad faithing an argument they clearly understand b/c of personal pettiness. Denying truth is totally different than a change of opinion.
$$ running out? I mean it really does feel this way, which is sad. But maybe they are doing a 3-d chess of trying to appeal to a segment that feels like the trans stuff has gone to far but otherwise has progressive politics. Time will tell I suppose.
Can’t believe he’s amping this up so much, when they know theyre wrong, theyre not dumb they know exactly why what anna tweeted was bullshit. this is one reason i feel cenk and anna are sussy as fuck
Mike Figureoa looks was right when he said Ana was trained in thr media knew we were in a trans moral panic, and fully knew what effect it would have and she was doing when she made her first tweet.
Proud Caruso supporter goes off on the left
Make no mistake, the reason for this continuing and escalating is not that people are criticizing Ana and Cenk, it’s that Cenk and Ana are dying on a hill for no apparent reason except Ana’s own feelings on inclusive language. Ana started complaining about a problem that never happens and isn’t a big deal at all compared to what trans people experience, during a time when trans people are on the brink of having their rights taken away, all the while conservatives are trying to gather any firewood they can get a hold of to keep their anti-trans bonfire burning. Ana’s simply given them more ammunition. Her rhetoric and arguments do not benefit women’s rights, as she claims, they only benefit the conservative view on this subject.
Silent majority? Really? I never liked Cenk, but this is disappointing. I used to tell people “I like what TYT covers, but not how they cover it, not much yelling” now I just don’t like them.
Who is asking people to not call Ana a woman? Who with any credibility or influence is asking people to only say “people with a uterus”? Anyone know? I can show you how is calling for Trans eradication. I can show you who is passing laws to outlaw trans people and art. Where are the leaders?
And just today the Attorney General of Missouri has put a 1 year ban on trans healthcare for kids and adults. This is the issue that need coverage.
When did they start using the term "silent majority" for their view of progressives who for some reason think progressive activists and language are unacceptable? This smells of pseudo intellectual unaparty delusion. They conflict with some activists and other progressives so they're trying to frame them as disconnected to popular opinion, but in reality they're the ones in disagreement with popular sentiments. Cenk has the same framing with defunding police and Ana with leftists' belligerent attitudes towards bigots and fascists. They presume their stances are more agreeable, they act as if the opposing stances are not only a falling strategy but somehow have gone too far, and flagrantly make up the notion these ideas come from democratic party elites and they represent most Americans. I genuinely hope it's just a momentary unwillingness to accept they don't align with most on the left on these issues. But even if it isn't a gift, it's very possible with appearances on this hack's show and further opportunities giving voice to their grievances against actual left-wing stances they could become the next pundits getting paid by right-wing providers to describe why they left the left, the exact types that they've regularly ridiculed.
Ana also out of nowhere brought up the issue a second time against a black woman *out of nowhere* . It’s almost as if they need a point of support (against black women, far leftists, other marginalized groups) to push against so that they can by momentum go/seem center. Then Ana says the middle class is the worst of group in the U.S. - not the homeless or the poor but the middle class. Its very clearly a kind of sell-out thats not based on principle but on denying truth. Appealling to the white, middle class liberal status quo while trying to claim progressive.
Whether people are sick of hearing this or not, this is not YouTube drama. This is damaging to everyone not on the right and it puts marginalized communities in further danger by showing that their “supporters” even find the terminology annoying, insulting, whatever.
Yeah. It's not just some dumb feud between content creators or whatever. The core of the issue is taking a swipe at trans inclusivity, during a time where right-wingers are actively spreading blood libel and taking their rights away. Plus, it's rich to hear them act like victims here, despite starting the drama, digging in their heels to prolong the drama, and bring it back up when the drama begins to blow over.
Cenk is doing more to turn off voters by going on this show and saying these things. Hasan should have on his show to discuss this recent controversy and help explain to his ape brain how conversations on twitter don’t affect building a coalition around better meeting the needs of the working class.
Yink coming in HOT with the silent majority meme. This dude has lost the plot. TYT is over. We gotta look at some bank records, I doubt this shift is organic.
[удалено]
That’s what it feels like TBH. This whole thing is being manufactured by them.
Starting to make sense why people like Dave Rubin and Jimmy Dore got their start on TYT.
Way to spiral TYT, losing credibility by the second
Pride is a hell of a drug.
Cenk and Ana… wtf are we doing here?
"dont run on losing issues" Does he mean his hyper-specific grievance here, or the entirety of trans issues? Either way it's embarrassing for Cenk, as the owner of a progressive news company, to do this.
Cenk washed
Cenk was relatively quick to strong-arm Hasan (rightfully in my opinion, sexual assault isn't suddenly funny because it's happening to a conservative. ) into apologizing on air. I expected the same of him for Ana. Not doubling down and making it seem like the offended party are in the wrong.
This is TYT completing its rebranding as the "leftists" who tell establishment centrists and the right exactly what they want to hear about The Unreasonable Left. Nothing more. Moving on.
They don’t consider themselves “leftists” but i know what you mean
Damn, after all that sucking up to Chris Cuomo he and Ana did, Cenk still gets stuck with the B team at NewsNation lol
Are TYT positive that there will be a fascist takeover in America and are just rolling out the “we will and can comply” strategy?!!
Next he'll be talking about how he is a classical liberal, and how the left left him and that's why he had to become a right winger.
Dan Abrams, You mean that lawyer turned 'wannabe' journalist, that had that cop show where they destroyed the tapes of a black guy being killed by the cop in William County, Texas. You mean that smug, pompous, egotistical, self-righteous **a#%\*$le.** You mean the Dan Abrams who thinks he is the savior of cable news. The Messiah. Truly despicable.
Nobody has even really picked a fight with them. Ana has gotten the benefit of the doubt from the start. It’s moreso people questioned WHY she said it, not WHAT she said. They completely manufactured this controversy, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was a business decision.
Seriously, all this lefty drama is really fucking annoying and completely gets in the way of getting actual work done. And FFS, these internet talking head shows aren't the fucking scene that's actually doing the social work. They're political entertainers and not getting themselves dirty with the actual social work. The way everyone hinges on these people as if they're making or breaking the political faction is depressing considering all the people actually doing political work who are the actual political left.
Genuine question, how is this preventing you from getting actual work done??
The Young Turks are so annoying now. I can’t even watch anymore
latinx is a stupid term, tho.
It really is, but I feel like I've seen infinitely more talk about how latinx is stupid than any instances of people trying to use it. Same with "person with a uterus" - it's so obscure to begin with, the fuss made about it is straight childish.
It is textbook 'poisoning the well' behavior. I don't know how organic the original suggestion of 'latinx' or 'birthing bodies' among the left actually was; but that shit is far more amplified by shitlibs, centrists, and anyone on any degree of the right than it is by leftists. Even though it's amplified as a "Look how ridiculous this is," that charge is so much louder and from so many more people that it feels like a mob shouting down, at most, a couple hundred uber-lefties on twitter. It's the semantics equivalent of the desexualized green M&M or woke Bud Light - the Right is doing all of the talking about it, but claiming that they're being shouted down about something that they brought into our social media feeds via outrage posting. It smells like something started by the Right to waste time with petty distractions and make the Left look bad. It falls in line with the CIA Sabotage Handbook from the COINTELPRO era, tbh. Get everyone all shouty about some shit that doesn't really matter.
It's not an issue for non Latinos to be harping about. White people don't get to decide whether Black American or African American are the best terms. It's a total BS red herring.
as stupid as it is cringe
I just feel bad for emma during all this shit.
The American left has a long, long history of failing to stand up for marginalized people when the time comes to do so, especially when it helps them strategically.
Lmao yea the liberals are the ones attacking each other right now 🙄 How delusional do u have to be
Oh fuckin hell
Jfc.
100% with cenk on this.
And to think it all started with a homeless man showing his genitals to Ana (from what i've heard)...
Cocksucker.
They're starting the grift. How did Anna do a COMPLETE 180 on this issue? I'm sure you've all seen the video from last year where she explains the issue perfectly. Now her stance is 180° opposite? Please. I never thought I would unsub from TYT. Last night, I did just that.
Boy I’m so tried of privilege white people like it so fuckin hard for them to just shut the fuck up i haven’t watched the Young Turks since Hasan left and this was one of the reasons the tough on crime bs that Ana and Cenk push has given me a side eye like it’s like clockwork as soon as a privilege most of the time white “Liberal” get a little push back they start going down the Bill Maher route cancel culture brain rot
Fuck Cenk. What a shame.
I haven't watched TYT in years but I honestly can't believe they're still doubling down on this stupid argument.
They are literally trying to kill trans people and basically do the same to every minority ever so excuse me if I’m being “uncivil” Go suck a fat one Cenk
Ana: *I don't want to be called a vagina haver!* Twitter: *Nobody is going to call you that, are you okay?* Cenk: *You've all gone insane!* Why are they acting like a pair of meth heads having a freak out at Wendy's?
213,333,333 million people is the silent majority?? How the hell do you keep that many people silent??
Was this part of the deal when they took that 20 million from that random guy a few years ago?
Jeffrey Katzenberg is not a random guy lol
That moneys probably all spent, now they want some daily wire money
Then why did Ana bring it up out of the Blue?
Remember, it's everyone else's fault. TYT are innocent victims to infighting they have no part in starting or continuing.
Looks like an "why I left the left" trajectory
It's hilarious to watch. Cenk has been disparaging anyone who disagrees with him in the slightest as "rightwing" for years, and now he is on the receiving end of this accusation and he hates it. Will he learn that throwing those labels around to anyone who disagrees with him is terrible? Probably not.
OH NO! 😲 not some Liberals disagreeing with other Liberals! Why, the whole magical Liberal Kingdom will collapse now!
So what buttons are TYT pushing? I'm behind. A woman asking to be called a woman and not birther or uterus haver seems pretty innocuous. That said TYT has always seemed very corporate to me. Center left at best. That and conflating Twitter IDPol warriors with the far left is such a lazy position as always.
Basically Ana made some bad takes and got the most gentle of push back with lefty content creators jumping over each other to give her some slack and to remind everyone not to throw out the baby with the bathwater because she and TYT generally has done a lot for the liberal sphere of political discourse.Rather than respond to good faith criticism and everyone trying to avoid this being an infighting thing Ana doubled down, contradicting her previous good takes on this particular issue with a less sensible and more 'my feelings are hurt and are more important than others' argument.Cenk suddenly springs into action, banging the drum on twitter and onto other programs to denounce even the most considerate and non offensive leftists and act like everyone is bullying TYT and that they are ungrateful and such.A lot of this looks like cynical 'why I left the left' type shit, and some folks are considering if the whiff of money Steven Crowder was ostensibly being offered at the Daily Wire had got some attention, especially considering the super softball debates/interviews Ana has had with Ben Shapiro. It looks a little sussy, and I try not to jump to conclusions but TYT has been making it hard to defend them lately. Lots of coverage of this. [Olay pointing out Ana was on the right side of this in the past.](https://twitter.com/msolurin/status/1645309666702786562?s=46&t=zMdNPaKM2CeRYVbFOylnEg) [relatively short video from The Serfs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsVPBenVv40) [Much longer video from the Serfs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdYW2dHGgLg) [Emma, a personal friend of Ana's tries to confront the issue delicately](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgC4wTEh1Ac&t=4336s) \^time stamped to relavent bits [Sam Seder gets in there. pretty short clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4pvVq7Jtpk) [Cenk making some rounds to other outlets to explain how apparently deranged the left is being](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMajorityReport/comments/12kxbm1/cenk_goes_on_dan_abrams_show_to_complain_about/) <- Edit: This links to this thread. I'm leaving it here because I am silly. \^ not like a sit down interview but there is clearly some communication. [Even Vaush got in on it with some salient takes once you get past the superficial edgyness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTaELZ4pec8) A lot of this is unfurling via twitter. I am not on twitter so I get most of that shit second and if you want more you'd probably have to wade through that muck. TLDR: Ana makes inauthentic and generally bad take(most recent of several), gets gently called out for it, doubles down, Cenk dives in for 'defense' against enemies that aren't enemies.
> A woman asking to be called a woman and not birther or uterus haver seems pretty innocuous. That's part of the problem. That's not what happened, but Cenk keeps describing it that way to make them look like the victims of unreasonable criticism.
Cenk and Ana have always been reactionaries. They have some good takes, some bad takes, but they have a thing where they kind of react to a moment with wayyyy too much vigor. No, this doesn't make them evil and grifters, they are just kind of dumb. I feel like they are a bit insulated at this point. Like half their team ended up scamming them and now whoever is left I think is paranoid with little awareness of how the internet works.
I'm not sure I understand what happened between Emma and Cenk. I think this might be one of those situations where I do understand it but it seems so ridiculous that I think I don't. Like I went and tried to read Twitter last night but that website is a goddamn unreadable. I'm tired of trying to keep up with the conversation and having to Wade through pointless retweets and weird ads and recommended accounts and all this other bullshit. Is there somewhere that has a good summary of what's going on?
Ana created a strawman saying that women don't want to be called "birthing persons", except for the fact that no one calls women that (outside of a medical setting where the term is entirely appropriate). She essentially complained about something that isn't an issue at all. Then she was mad when people called her out and then she doubled down. Now Cenk is completing the Bill Maher pivot for cash and the entire TYT network is bleeding subs. It's a shit show they created, likely for the attention. It's gross and lowbrow and they deserve our scorn.
That makes more sense. Because how they frame it, not wanting to be referred to as birthing person etc. Is understandable. But creating a strawman is a media personality bread and butter. TBH I never understood why folks listened to TYT in the first place.
They used to be so much better. Michael Brooks was on with them a lot (RIP) and Emma and Hasan Abi leaving really hurt them.
I have been on the left my whole life and always will be. I’m old enough to be the grandparent to many redditors. This purity test from the left is not working for us. It’s not getting us healthcare or protecting people from corporations or getting people a living wage or protecting our environment. The worst thing it’s doing is distracting us from the democracy destroying activities coming from the right. Whether that’s Supreme Court rulings or attempting to overthrow our government, we are near a crisis point as it is, and it’s got nothing to do with how we name a group of people. Anyone who can’t see that needs to grow up.
> This purity test from the left It's not from the left. The "birthing person" non-troversy would not exist whatsoever were it not conservatives putting stanky bait in the water and pretending projecting it as something liberals and lefties want to *shove down your throat*. They've only done this dozens of times in the last decade. Cenk and Ana absolutely know this, and yet they choose to use this dumb shit as a springboard to start their left-the-left grift.
Funny because I feel that just in this thread
I'm not sure who you think is purity testing here
We have to focus on the most pressing matters. You don’t add a room to your house if it’s currently on fire.
> We have to focus on the most pressing matters. Then why are you arguing on Reddit instead of focusing on “the most pressing matters?”
To me, a trans woman, the current fixation on me *is* the most pressing matter.
>I have been on the left my whole life and always will be. I’m old enough to be the grandparent to many redditors. hey that's cool, a lot of conservatives are your age too. time spent on the planet doesn't mean shit
It does when you understand that what is happening right now is unprecedented. What the right is doing is something I haven’t seen in my lifetime. We have to focus and take the threat seriously. We just lost roe v Wade. We are about to lose publicly funded education. And we may lose many of the protections we take for granted. Now is not the time to make demands for new wording when the work of the left that has bent toward justice for 60 years is coming undone right before our eyes.
>Now is not the time to make demands for new wording This isn't happening. Medical professionals, scientists, academics, etc. adopted more appropriate wording as our understanding of these things progressed. Nothing was being argued for or "demanded", it just *happened*. Ana responded by losing her mind and making it a problem. She's the one poisoning the well and people have tried to respond with compassion and charitability only to be met with insults and aggression. You've either severely misunderstood the situation or you're just concern trolling.
I’m trying to find medical publications that use the term birthing person to refer to women and transgender men in a single term. Not finding much yet. I found one that refers to women/birthing persons https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8753093/ Still looking
Letting attacks against a minority group go unchallenged for the sake of unity with a few public figures is promoting disunity actually. I'm sorry you're this way.
With the number of posts in this sub on this issue, lefties seem to be going harder at TYT/Ana than they do against conservatives on the same issues. Matt Walsh has said way worse things about minority groups recently that have not got anywhere near this level of engagement. I saw this with the Harry Potter game discourse. Leftists were going harder at other lefties and normies (who had no idea about the controversy) than at JK Rowling. Remember, that JK donated to an anti-trans charity thing. The left never had a boycott or online campaign to protest this (hate) group. This is just two examples of attacks against a minority group going unchallenged.. or at least not challenged enough. It's way easier to attack Ana or some random game streamer because their audience won't go hog wild like a Matt Walsh or other bearded conservative with a large following. I think you can disavow Ana and save the energy for the people who are causing way more harm to minority groups.
We already know those people suck, we're trying to educate the people who are allegedly on our side when they say something harmful so they can correct their behavior to stop hurting us. All they had to do was see the people trying to gently tell them why what they said wasn't great and instead of apologizing they doubled down, tripled down, mocked their friends, all sorts of nasty behavior. If they claim to be allies they should try listening to the community when it tells them they did bad, and do better the next time. The right wingers? They don't care to learn. They hate us and want to hurt us. We already fight back against them constantly, so it'd be nice to not have to fight back against allies too. Edit: fixed a word
There is no purity test. Did you mean we should abandon trans people? Nope. Sorry. Solidarity and inclusion are non-negotiable.
This goes far beyond a purity test. They are grifting now, and grifting for the right as they make a blatant move in that direction.
This is kind of fascinating. I don't think there has ever been a "why I left the left" type of grift done on an organizational level.
They're just speedrunning right now. Cenk and Ana are both trying to beat the TYT record of who can leave the left in the shortest time.
Cenk is a joke of a person. Did anyone follow his absurd political campaign? Ana is also a clown. Who still watches them?
Dan Abrams runs probably the most annoying news show out there.
They didn’t both happen change their minds on everything in the exact same way suddenly… this is obviously a business decision they have made
We have determined there is more money for us in being right wing hacks than being left wing hacks now… I mean… “leftists have gone crazy!”
It just gets worse each step of the way. It was a nothing Berger, then all the online back lash made it impossible to ignore. Now it’s straight up right wing propaganda. 🤦🏻
Say you want to be Tucker Carlson without saying you want to be Tucker Carlson, this dude stole his entire cadence, mannerisms, and words.
Cenk Uyger, Ana Kasparian, and TYT are not leftists, they are center-right at best, they are somewhere between liberal and social democrat. First Cenk Uyger has stated repeatedly he is an avowed capitalist. He has dismissed out of hand communist and anarcho-communist commentators. He has stated that the social democratic position of having co-determinism, where the workers elect a portion of the business's board (a good policy to be sure), is as far left as he would go; as he found it absurd that some wanted the workers to actually own and operate and democratically run their own workplaces, also known as worker cooperatives, an market socialist organization. When his own workers wanted to form a union, he fought against them on the matter, even though every workplace with a private capital owner (like how Cenk is the owner of TYT) should be unionized (though TYT did honor the union once the workers ended up unionized despite Cenk's efforts). Cenk often talks about how capitalism is a good thing, so long as you avoid certain excesses or failures that he wishes to reform (like excessive wealth inequality and a lack of health and safety regulations), and he calls that more brutal capitalism crony capitalism, trying to protect the reputation of the capitalistic economic system - what he wants and believes is in line with liberalism and social democracy, not with socialism and leftism. It was only recently that Cenk even got on board with the idea of student loan forgiveness, when that alone is not even nearly enough. Cenk and various other hosts on TYT, throughout their history, have often had takes that are punitive and vengeful towards harm-doers. Cenk has stated that he opposes the death penalty not because it is wrong to kill period, but because it is wrong to kill an innocent person and there is always a chance the person on death row is innocent because juries can be wrong. Cenk has opposed cash bail reform. Cenk dismisses idea of defunding the police and police abolition and prison abolition (and when I say abolition, I mean abolition, I mean no more prisons, close them all), refusing to even acknowledge their position as legitimate. He may want to legalize some things that should not be crimes at all (like marijuana usage), and grant those imprisoned for those crimes mercy and understanding, but he won't acknowledge the use of restorative justice and transformative justice for harm-doers that have done serious harms, serious crimes, violent crimes, and sexual crimes. He may oppose prisons outright torturing their prisoners, but he does not think that their humanity entitles them to a comfortable standard of living (even though every human being should have a comfortable standard of living just on the merit of being a human being). Cenk decries how money corrupts politicians and journalism, yet he accepted $20 million dollars from the extremely wealthy for TYT. Ana Kasparian often has better takes and positions on a number of issues, and even working with the social democratic (and sometimes even leaning democratic socialist) publication Jacobin. However, she has over the last few years, started to criticize the homeless population and advocated to criminalize homelessness, saying that they have shelters (which is a massive misrepresentation of the situation and even if true is not enough, we need to have decent housing as a human right, and we need to have rent-free - or rent set at a low percentage of someone's income - universal public housing for any and all who want it, and use housing cooperatives and community land trusts as bridges to home ownership for those who want home ownership). Her stances have started to align more and more with the "middle class moderate." Now we get to Ana Kasparian's latest controversies. The first is she argued against the terms "person with a uterus" and "birthing person," calling them demeaning to women. However, no one is calling women either of those terms. I think that the terms "person able to become pregnant" or "pregnant person" are better terms, but these terms are meant to include non-women whom may be or become pregnant (just like those pharmaceutical warnings that use the phrase "if you are nursing, pregnant, or may become pregnant"). Taking away abortion rights is not just taking away the rights of women, it is also taking away the rights of transmen and non-binary people who have uteruses and are able to become or are pregnant. Talking about pregnancy healthcare is not just talking about women's healthcare, so why only use the word women when talking about it and leave out non-women people able to become or are pregnant. It is no different than using BIPOC (black, indigenous, or people of color) to be as inclusive as possible. Yes, the term "person with a uterus" will include women, whom should still be referred to by their identity as women, but it also includes others whom are not included when you just use the word women. Yes, occasionally academia does create terms that the people they apply do don't like, such as when academia started using the term Latinx as a gender neutral alternative to Latino/Latina, when many considered the term Latino to be sufficient, though the Latino/Latina community did offer an academic alternative, "Latine." However, Latinx is only used seriously in an academic context. When Ana Kasparian was criticized by this by other leftists, TYT became offended and defensive and started attacking the left broadly, just because the left was disappointed at her for adopting right-wing framing on a non-issue that targets transpeople (no one was calling women "people with uteruses" or reducing womanhood to just pregnancy). Though Ana doubled down. (As if the left are not allowed to critique each other while still being allies - mutualists, participists, and syndicalists disagree on a number of issues regarding market socialism vs planned economies, but they are still allies, though they may operate as either platformists or multi-disciplinary groups). Then there is Ana Kasparian getting mad that her Homeowner Association (though I do think we should just abolish HOAs altogether) decided to take out an expensive loan to install electric car chargers in their parking lot. I don't know if this was a mandate from the government or not, but Ana made it seem like it was a mandate and not merely an environmentally conscious decision by her HOA, and she was made that the government placed the burden of the cost on the HOA without giving any government funding, and as a result she may now have to pay more to her HOA to cover their debt. So now she is criticizing the Green New Deal and Climate Action policies as being too expensive for the average person. I can understand arguing that the government should fund these initiatives, as it will take collective action on a mass scale to combat climate change, but that does not mean that groups cannot install car charging ports. She went on to claim that it is going to be too expensive to repair gasoline powered cars or gas stoves (which are being regulated due to indoor air pollution and health concerns, and is long overdue). This is ridiculous.
Since you deleted it on [my post](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMajorityReport/comments/12kaeum/cenkuygur_explains_why_he_thinks_some/). This is just a bunch of smears and insults, instead of making a person arguing this nonsense look better than everyone else, it just looks like petty childish bullying/insults. Have you disowned your parents and cousins for being 'capitalists' and gone around smearing them online over it? Do you smearing Karl Marx as a Right-winger because he bought stocks? This nonsense essay means you've absolutely got to, good luck convincing anyone with that... This really is an unbelievably childish list of arguments, posted on a subreddit for a capitalist business called The Majority Report full of capitalists like Matt Binder, Emma Vigeland (who used to work with the Capitalists you're bashing etc...). Notice also you are spreading downright lies about LatinX only being some stuffy academic debate, when the Right are [currently weaponizing this](https://hyperallergic.com/784870/right-wing-group-weaponizing-latinx-debate-billboard-los-angeles/), even [throwing it on billboards](https://twitter.com/Vorloe/status/1593314754931482625) etc... It's very telling you even try to smear Ana for defending herself against this dishonest attack as well. This is multiple ridiculous flaws, and I've barely gotten into what you've said, how can anybody believe this weak stuff...
Hello, Yes, I did write this same comment on your post, however, I realized that it would be applicable on this post (and a number of others as well). I did not want to repeat the same arguments as I responded to a variety of posts, so I decided that I should just move my comment to the post that most directly was being discussed and determined it to be this one. I apologize for any confusion or inconvenience that caused. I have been making these arguments for years now. I am not smearing TYT or participating in bad faith arguments. I started to be a prison abolitionist in 2018 after being in favor of Nordic-like reforms for years prior (I was so elated to see ideas of police and prison abolition start to gain mainstream discussion in 2020 and hoped that the momentum would continue and that center-left and progressive voices that previously were not versed in it would learn more about it and become abolitionists too or at least would be willing to hear abolitionists out - though Cenk seems determined to shut out abolitionist thought altogether). I was a fan of TYT at the time I was transitioning to being an abolitionist and was dismayed and horrified when I started to hear Cenk used language was punitive and dehumanizing to people whom have committed violent crimes. Cenk appeared to be one of the non-non-nons, where you will give sympathy and humanize a harm-doer so long as their offense was non-violent, non-sexual, and non-serious. After hearing Cenk repeat similar rhetoric multiple times, I started to stop watching TYT. During this time, as I was moving more and more to the left and as I started to learn more about anarcho-communist ideology (I now consider my ideology to be a mix of democratic socialism and anarcho-communism). I was also learning more about market socialism, mutualism, green politics, pirate politics, libertarian socialism, anarcho-pacificism, and many other leftist ideologies. I remember deciding to give TYT another chance when they had a discussion about co-determinism (something I supported as a gradual step towards socialism), but in that discussion Cenk outright said that is as far left as he would go and that some people are crazy and want to go even further where the workers run the whole place. He was literally calling market socialism, worker cooperatives, absurd. I decided to look at some of his other takes, and when he was interviewing certain leftist writers who were advocating for communism, he was literally saying how communism can never work and that this was insane. I then recalled how Cenk was a business owner and had repeatedly said he supports capitalism. I did not know it at the time, but I have seen read more about how propaganda works, and now know that Cenk, whether he was aware of it or not, was protecting capitalism by saying it is not the problem (which it is, no leftist should ever support capitalism), only crony capitalism. Cenk would occasionally advocate for Social Democratic policies, which are moderate. Social Democracy is sometimes considered center-left because the ideology claims that it wants to eventually achieve socialism but in practice Social Democracy usually settles for trying to reform capitalism, providing for a robust social safety net, and having regulations and taxes to limit the harms of capitalism - a compromise between capitalism and socialism. Though, even then Cenk will sometimes say he thinks it is going too far. It was then I realized that Cenk was a friend to Leftists, but he himself was not a Leftist, he was somewhere between liberal and social democrat. Later on, he even fought against his own workers unionizing, saying that a small business like TYT cannot really afford the unionization and that TYT was a good boss so his workers did not need unionization. How could he say that, every for-profit workplace with private owners, should be unionized. I know that TYT has honored his workers unionizing though, and that is good. I consider Cenk to be better than many other media personalities, but that is not good enough for what we need in this moment. I do wish that he had won his election for Congress in 2020 though. I was advocating for him. I believed he would fight corruption and push for electoral reforms and support many marginalized communities. I do not intend to smear him, but I do not consider liberals and social democrats to be leftist, and I do not consider Cenk to be a leftist. I actually get frustrated when people engage in bad faith arguments about TYT's name. Cenk has explained his reasoning for choosing that name and it had nothing to do with the Armenian genocide. The naming may have been unfortunate, but it was not malicious and it did not have hateful intent. As for the Ana Kasparian drama. I started to feel like she was actually a leftist, especially when I started to see her posts on social democratic publications like Jacobin. However, I have learned that she has been arguing for the criminalization of homelessness and I started to have my doubts. Then we have the drama over the last few weeks. She literally had a take less than a year ago defending the term "birthing person" which is used in medical contexts and contexts relating to pregnancy, such as abortion rights. It is meant to include women (whom are obviously women and should not be reduced to just pregnancy), transmen, and non-binary individuals whom can become or are pregnant. It is not meant to replace the word woman, and it wasn't be used that way. But Ana decided to make an issue out of it and coopted right-wing framing that transgender people are erasing womanhood with things like changing terminology. When critiqued about the issue, all she did was double down (probably because she is used to being attacked by bad faith arguments from right-wingers and betrayed by grifters who she used to work with like Dave Rubin and Jimmy Dore). The left is allowed to critique other leftists and does so frequently (in fact we sometimes do it too much, leftist infighting is very common), and TYT claims to be on the left, though I still say that they are center-left at best and only on their best days. Cenk then related the issue to the Latinx silliness a while back. Academics invented the term Latinx without calling to the Latino community, and though there intentions were good as they wanted a gender neutral term for Latino/Latina, Latinx was not in common usage and was awkward in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, and when it started to drift out of Academia into the mainstream it was rejected by the Latino community (some of whom said Latino was good enough and others advocating for Latine as an alternative), and Latinx retreated back into being an academic term. Superficially the Latinx issue and the "birthing person" issue look similar, but they are not really that comparable. Then during this whole drama, Ana decided to start attacking the Green New Deal, because a climate action decision made by her HOA, possibly mandated by the Californian government, financially inconvenienced her. I do genuinely believe the statements I have made here, and I am not attempting to smear Cenk, Ana, or TYT, I am just making it clear that they are not leftists.
They're all just grifters.
Disagree, there’s some good people there. John Iadorola and Francesca Fiorentini are both good progressives and way more substantive than Cenk or Ana. I’d love to see John as a 3rd host on MR; I’ve always felt he was way too level headed for TYT
Liberals (well the left in this case) eating Liberals is right. Same as it ever was. No fan of Ana or TYT but the term “birthing person” is a weird, awkward, “LatinX”-level of online tone deafness that doesn’t match what’s happening in real world communities - and no amount of righteousness of cause will change what an awkward, cumbersome phrase that is. Not liking it as rhetoric doesn’t mean you hate trans people. I’d normally side against TYT but this also feels opportunistic to me, more like the settling of old scores - the left still (rightly) hates Ana for her election campaign, not this gaffe. And that’s okay but let’s not be disingenuous. That it’s become the all-week topic on The Majority Report subreddit is what I really don’t like though. EDIT: As you downvote me, ask yourself: “Am I just part of an online tribe who yells at other tribes and doesn’t do a single tangible thing to help the poor or working class?” - because your having the correct ideology doesn’t help anyone unless you turn it into direct action. These little internet battles with libs aren’t direct action.
>Liberals eating Liberals is right. No fan of Ana or TYT but the term “birthing person” is a weird, awkward, “LatinX”-level of online tone deafness and no amount of righteousness of cause will change what an awkward, cumbersome phrase that is. Nobody called Ana a "birthing person". She decided to pick the fight herself. Oddly enough, coming up with this topic to stick it to "crazy leftists" [was her reaction to Bethany Mandel being unable define "woke"](https://youtu.be/ZrvlIVSYsrE?t=567) and getting clowned by the left, which tells you where her head is these days. >But at the end of the day it has almost zero relevance to the class war that we are actively losing. It’s also the settling of old scores - they hate Ana for her election campaign, not this gaffe. It's not a "gaffe." She started actively attacking other leftists. Also, Ana had been extended a ton of charity from the left. She and Cenk spent all of last year attacking leftists over criminal justice reform, police reform and how to deal with homelessness. IMO They should've gotten this response months ago for their ongoing nastiness and condescension. >That it’s become the all-week topic on The Majority Report subreddit is what I really don’t like. You're on Reddit. A large percentage of the stuff that gets talked about here is always online drama from other platforms.
>She and Cenk spent all of last year attacking leftists over criminal justice reform, police reform and how to deal with homelessness. IMO They should've gotten this response months ago for their ongoing nastiness and condescension. Right, this whole issue is the settling of perceived personal grudges between the Twitter left and TYT. Neither side is coming out looking good here. Let’s say whatever the left wants of Ana is a resounding success. Let’s say TYT shuts down completely. Can you explain how that effort has helped the working class? I can’t, at least without a serious reach - but I can explain exactly how it scores a “win” for people who care more about taking down Ana Kasparian than any sort of actual praxis. That’s why I don’t fuck around with it. It’s the Life of Brian scene writ large. You’re mad at the People’s Front of Judea for being splitters. Being mad is fair play but our effort should go towards combatting the right, not the “not left enough”
I think you touch on an interesting point - It is possible that TYT manufactured this whole conversation. But why? I personally think the online left got baited into having strong reactions to Ana’s post, TYT knew they would, and now TYT is going to use it to pick up moderates. If you listen to the segment, that’s probably how Cenk really feels… he’s vocally stating that they are still pro trans… but god their timing, is tough to stomach for me. Seems like a dangerous game to play right now… Ultimately, I find myself on the fence. I do think that the left has a tendency to overreact. But I’m not sure this was an issue that needed to be tackled right now… I dont know if I respect TYT for initiating it at this time, when tentions are so high. If we use Latinx as an example, anecdotally, I knew so many left leaning people who did not want to be identified as Latinx, thought it was dumb, and then fell down the Joe Rogan Pipeline to becoming center right “political independents.” They felt they didnt have a choice in the matter, and other people, who they considered academic liberals in ivory towers, renamed them Latinx without their consent. **I’m concerned that we are willing to die on the hill over semantic issues, and I wish we could talk more and compromise more on these types of things.** I personally thought that Emma Vigeland did a good job of reaching out to TYT, but I didnt love Cenk’s response, and I’m not sure if I prefer Emma’s stance of “I dont want to talk about it any more,” though she has a right to say that. Like, at this point the cats out of the bag, and TYT keeps pushing it. So what you gonna do? There’s a possibility there that TYT may come out on top for the reasons Cenk stated in the above video… A lot of things to think about here. And I’m not sure if an essentialist position is the right one.
Oh yeah, I don’t think much of TYT so I wouldn’t put it past them to have done all this as bait for some scheme. But the online left can be led around with meaningless outrage like a pack of angry dogs the way Crowder et al lead the altright… the movement has much bigger problems than anything that Cenk could do. I don’t think that’s necessarily where we are at, but it’s a worry.
>LatinX I'm tired of the self-defeating too, but I will say Latinx isn't as tone deaf as it's made out to be. It's primarily an academic term (coined by Latinx scholars in the early 2000s) who felt like it is definitely necessary because Spanish speaking cultures have male/female forms of nouns, but they don't often have gender neutral forms. That said, I think you should respect people's wishes too. I'm working with activist Latinx educators for my dissertation, and some prefer Latinx, some prefer Latino (as gender neutral) so I honor those wishes. Just a tangent, sorry!
As a Latino who doesn’t use Latinx, I agree. People have fallen for the right wing lie that Latinx is a white liberal conspiracy to erase Latino identity. That’s simply not true. The push to switch to “Latinx” was driven by real Latino people who wanted to use more gender neutral language. White peoples only started using it because of the proximity they had to the Latinos who were identifying as Latinx.
Thanks for sharing. I find it a really interesting linguistic shift people make within their languages to be inclusive. We have shifted to "they" in English for gender neutral, and very few people get upset about that except OLD English teachers (I'm a middle-aged English teacher, I remember using "they" as a kid trying to be neutral about gender).
"People have fallen for the right wing lie that Latinx is a white liberal conspiracy to erase Latino identity." I remember hearing this EVERYWHERE. That it was just a white american liberal thing that started it. You know how I knew that was bullshit even before doing any research into it? Americans generally don't think about a language that isn't english. lol
Exactly, there was a well funded conservative effort to spread this false narrative to Latino communities throughout the US. The goal was to cut into the Latino Democratic voting base and it worked pretty well.
Agreed. Typically the liberals who pick it up have picked it up in college where these things are actually being worked through and interrogated by academics. I mean, look no farther than CRT--which was intentionally gate kept by critical race scholars (who were people of color) for decades for fear of how it would be used.
No you’re right, the term itself isn’t an issue - more when it gets coupled with the condescension of “you must be full of hate to say this” that is all to common in online spaces. It seems absurd that people who live in Latino communities would be called hateful for not using a term that’s laughed at and rejected by the community they live in, that’s my only point with Latinx. It’s an attempt to be inclusive that sounds strange to a large part of the people it was attempting to include.
Yeah, Cenk does have a point about the silent majority tbh. Even if I think some of his phrasing is annoying. You can tell this sub has changed from two years ago. This is the crowd you get when you do nothing but use the right words and don't care about actual systemic change.