Cenk Uygur Debates Destiny: Is It Still 2018?
Is anyone out there keeping up with the “internet bloodsports” drama with the Young Turks show (Cenk and Ana, aka TYT) and all the troubles they’re having with other leftists (If not, I don’t blame you one single solitary infinitesimal teeny-weeny bit)?
Yesterday I watched Cenk’s debate with Destiny on David Pakman’s show. None of that crap has been on my radar at all, not since 2018, when I was writing my first book about internet culture, so I guess I was expecting Destiny to be the one defending progressives/AOC et al, not Cenk. No, Destiny (the left’s version of Ben Shapiro, a mortally annoying chatterbox) was saying moronic stuff like “why don’t progressives/Green Party candidates etc ever win any elections? Neener!” On and on he jabbered, while Pakman tried, as usual, to promote the Democrats (I don’t know how anyone can even do that anymore and still kiss their family members. I’ve consistently tweeted/skeeted/tooted that I believe Drump’s win finished off the Democrats once and for all; that they just went the way of the Federalists — believe it or not, those idiots are actually thinking of running Harris again in 2028!). Alas, Cenk proved that he’s unarmed when it comes to this stuff. He didn’t bring up the fact that the Democrats own the mainstream media and whatnot and always attack progressives harder than they ever do Republicans. Like, he could easily have said something about what the Democrats did to Green Party candidate Matthew Hoh to keep him off the ballots. But he didn’t. Pretty dumb. But hear me out, at least Cenk tried to argue fact-ish stuff with those two guys, and I think you have to give him that.
So what’s the problem? Well, it’s that Ana’s war against the homeless (which some believe was justified) turned me off to her once and for all. She’d built up some real credibility by taking on the emcee role on the Jacobin show, but she always sort of annoyed me, like you could tell she’d rather be having a flatbread-and-mimosa brunch somewhere than interviewing people like Seymour Hersh or Finkelstein or whatnot.
So at this point, I’m tending to think that Cenk is mildly salvageable (strictly as a pragmatist, mind you, so don’t yell at me: It’s okay to have Marxist beliefs and be interested in political maneuverings, don’t let anyone tell you different) but Ana isn’t. Either way, that whole “debate” was quite the eye-opener, not that I take any of that stuff seriously. I knew Pakman was a hopeless neoliberal cyborg, but I’d always thought Destiny had a little leftist in him. Put it this way, in my new book I name Briahna Joy Gray as the best online-independent talk-box around, even though I thought she went too hard on Bernie Sanders when he dropped out of the 2020 race. She has her problematic triangulations, is what I mean, but she knows her stuff, unlike Destiny.
What a mess, eh? There’s obviously tons of nuance to all this, and I don’t want to go at it with another beginner-level tankie here or on social media, much less fight with anyone who actually believes Biden/Harris care about anything other than retiring and counting all the loot they’ve accumulated from lobbyists, but yeah, I’m saying I don’t completely hate Cenk anymore, even if he does seem a bit obtuse and class-unconscious most of the time. At least he’s now admitting that the Democrats are irretrievably hopeless.
Baby steps. He needs to lose Ana at this point, though, because if there’s anything the left hates, it’s aristocratic airs, regardless of how they came into play. Not that I’m suddenly interested in all this nonsense, don’t get me wrong and don’t worry about my repeating this performance, but unfortunately those “bloodsport” kabuki spaces do get mildly interesting from time to time.
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My second book, My Year In The Online Left, came out on June 10. Meantime, if you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my previous book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in there, but you’ll get it, I promise. My Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com (I’m spending a lot more time there now), my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social (ditto) and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9 (I do visit it daily).
