Cenk Uygur

Cenk Kadir Uygur (born March 21, 1970) is a Turkish-born American politician, political commentator, media host and a former presidential candidate.

He is the co-creator of The Young Turks, a left-wing, progressive, sociopolitical news and commentary program.

There, he wrote a school paper column in 1991 in which he criticized affirmative action for blacks and other minorities.

He also criticized campus feminists for “making Anita Hill their patron saint,” and made disparaging comments about women.

He also said that all of the discussion about rape on campus was making men afraid.

Representing the Turkish Students Association on the university's Student Activities Council, Uygur argued against a $228 allocation to the Armenian Club in the council budget; council members overwhelmingly voted against him, and uncharacteristically applauded after his defeat was announced.

In November 1991, he wrote an article in The Daily Pennsylvanian titled "Historical Fact or Falsehood?", in which he denied the Armenian genocide and asserted: "The claims of an Armenian genocide are not based on historical facts. If the history of the period is examined it becomes evident that in fact no such genocide took place."

He has since denounced these statements and reversed his position (though the credibility of his denouncement has been questioned by Stephan Pechdimaldji in TheWrap).

He received a Juris Doctor degree from Columbia Law School.

Although a “D” in high school calculus almost kept Uygur out, he transferred into the undergraduate Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in management and graduated in 1992.

In 1996, Uygur worked briefly as an associate attorney.

Uygur worked briefly in 1996 as an associate attorney.

He practiced first at the law firm Drinker Biddle & Reath in Washington, D.C., and then at Hayes & Liebman in New York City.

He then worked in 1996 as a weekend/fill-in radio talk show host on WRKO in Boston, Massachusetts, and also that year in a similar position on WWRC in Washington, D.C. He bought time on a local access channel in Washington, D.C., where he made political commentary on his show called The Young Turk.

In 1999, he wrote for, produced, and appeared on a WAMI-TV news show, The Times in Miami, Florida.

He then started The Young Turks (TYT) on Sirius Satellite Radio.

That year, Uygur wrote on a blog post on the TYT website: "It seems like there is a sea of tits here, and I am drinking in tiny droplets. Obviously, the genes of women are flawed. They are poorly designed creatures who do not want to have sex nearly as often as needed for the human race to get along peaceably and fruitfully."

He also wrote, in a letter to the editor in Salon, that talk of an Armenian genocide was simply propaganda.

In a July 21, 2001, post about Native American tribes filing a lawsuit against tobacco companies for deliberately targeting Indian teens, Uygur wrote: “these Redskins show up everywhere there’s a buck to be made these days." In the 2000s, Uygur maintained a weekly blog on The Huffington Post and wrote entries that were critical of the 2003 Iraq war.

Uygur created the left-wing, progressive talk show The Young Turks with the goal of starting a liberal-leaning political and entertainment show.

He launched and began hosting The Young Turks in 2002.

It launched on the Sirius Satellite Radio network on February 14, 2002, and was also on the Air America radio network between 2006 and 2008.

Uygur and his co-host Ana Kasparian applied a populist-left branding and programming strategy that made TYT a global online organization.

The show's name has been criticized by Armenian-Americans, because the original Young Turks political movement in the Ottoman Empire was responsible for committing the Armenian genocide.

Aram Hamparian, Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of America said about Uygur and the show's name: "Denying a genocide, belittling its survivors, and then naming your political show after its perpetrators should be troubling not only to Armenian Americans, but anyone concerned about human rights. Cenk Uygur... did just this ...."The Young Turks began a daily news video show on YouTube in 2005, and claims to have been the first on the streaming service.

In 2011, in addition he appeared briefly on MSNBC as a political commentator (he was replaced by Al Sharpton), and then from 2011 to 2013 he appeared on a weeknight commentary show on Current TV.

Uygur regularly states that The Young Turks is the largest online news show in the world, and has claimed so since at least 2011.

It has amassed over 5 billion views on YouTube, and over 5 million subscribers, for a U.S. rank of #5,566.

He expected the requirement to be overturned by the courts in the event of his victory due to the Equal Protection clause, emulating an unsuccessful argument previously made by ineligible candidate Abdul Hassan, in 2012.

Uygur withdrew from the race on March 6, 2024.

Uygur was born in Istanbul, Turkey, to a Turkish Muslim family.

He emigrated with his family to the United States when he was eight years old.

He spent the remainder of his upbringing in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and graduated from East Brunswick High School.

Uygur was raised in a secular Muslim household, but became more religious during college.

He says that he then became agnostic and still identifies as a cultural Muslim.

In 2017, Uygur co-founded the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats.

In 2020, Uygur was a candidate in both the special election as well as the regularly scheduled election for California's 25th congressional district.

Uygur's candidacy was considered by some to be controversial due to his past comments about women, minority groups including the LGBTQ+ community, Asians, religious Jews and Muslims, and others, which were considered offensive but that he described as taken out of context.

He ultimately lost both elections, being placed fourth overall and second amongst Democrats after receiving six and seven percent of the vote, respectively.

Uygur announced his candidacy in the 2024 Democratic presidential primaries in October 2023, despite not being a natural-born U.S. citizen as required.