The Problem With The Young Turks

Since 2002, The Young Turks (Abbreviated TYT) has grown into a formidable news resource, turning their anchors into up bona fide celebrities of the progressive movement. Transitioning early on from Sirius Radio to a full blown production on YouTube with over 5 million subscribers, the once liberal team put together by founder Cenk Uygur, who in 2013, crowd funded over 250,000 USD to build the developing news network their very own studio, commanded tremendous respect in response to the increasing far-right rhetoric in mainstream media like Fox News.

Joined by Ana Kasparian and, and in its infancy, far right conspiracy theorist Jimmy Dore was a member of the production team before leaving to start his own program on YouTube. Until 2020, it had been pretty soft sailing for the budding network and its stars, but things change fast these days.

Over the last few months, like so many independent journalists responsible for their own brand and income, both anchor desk mainstays, Kasparian and Uygur, began to parrot some pretty obvious right-wing talking points where it concerns trans women specifically and the over 500 pieces of legislation moving through every GOP led state in the United States. At first, Kasparian tested the waters to see how far she could take her liberal audience to the dark side by making ridiculous, opinion-based rants that gave right wing extremists a brand new hero… and bragging rights over the left losing what had once been a dependable source of information rather than another network carrying the water for Republicans… but like Dore, Joe Rogan and others who came before, the TYT crew found it easier to part dollars from Republican pockets if they said what they wanted to hear instead of reacting to and condemning the horrors emerging around vulnerable communities.

After years of aggressive pushback on the right, The Young Turks have clearly changed their trajectory to embrace the budding- and lucrative- culture war that transgender people across both the US and UK have been unwittingly thrust into as both the Republican US Senate members and Conservative UK Parliamentarians have weaponized laws to eliminate trans people from every sect of society including prohibiting access to health care, removing transgender people from discrimination laws and policing how they are allowed to present in…