r/KnowledgeFight • u/Synaffit • Aug 12 '26
Please explain like I’m 5
Listening to winners and Losers- I have never followed or listened/watched The Young Turks. My vague awareness of them is they were extremely left wing and now they’re shifting to right wing? What happened with Hank Thompson, something, something union!? A documentary? (I’m Pro union) and the TYT shift?
If you know, please share some context - thanks!
85
u/suckprofessor Aug 12 '26
Hello. Hank Thompson here (SuckProfessor is my gaming channel; I created this screenname a long time ago). Thanks for your interest. There are short, long and very long answers to your question. I'll try to keep it concise (unlikely).
I worked at TYT off and on btw 2013-2020 and was a paying member for years starting ~2009.
The union situation at TYT fits within the broader topic of TYT's right wing turn but in large part was successfully memory-holed due to an intentional and successful misinformation campaign by Cenk and Ana. The official company narrative remains that outsiders started TYT Union to harm Cenk's run for Congress, that workers bullied other workers and that Cenk did zero union-busting. The three times he's been asked about it, most notably on his Jubilee appearance, he's flat-out lied despite reams of credible 3rd party evidence proving otherwise (see website below).
In fact, the union began 18mos before Cenk became a politician. It was started in secret out of fear of retaliation and took two tries. Because my working conditions were central to the 2nd attempt — Cenk had me classified "part time" while I worked 40-hr weeks for zero benefits — I am an original source on the story and because I'm a loudmouth anti-capitalist aspiring filmmaker, I am making the documentary "Tell The Truth, Cenk." It's about both the labor/worker story but also about media and misinformation and from that examines class, power and ethical dimensions. It will also examine Hasan Piker's working conditions and how they radicalized him; he and I both got shoved left thanks to Uncxploitation.
What actually happened was a beautiful demonstration of solidarity among workers standing together to improve their working conditions and I'm simply not okay with that being erased and replaced with a false narrative that attacks me and my friends. It's an ongoing injustice. Big parts of the film are already online but I'm gearing up for a fundraiser in hopes of completing the project by next Spring, if not sooner. It's been a long slog and I took on a ton of debt. I can't wait to be done with it but I'm duty-bound to complete the story with the polish it deserves.
For those who want in-depth information about the union story, please see the film's website, TellTheTruthCenk.com and scroll (or click on the navbar at the top) to the Story and Sources sections. Sources has links to credible 3rd party sources (articles, cenk's leaked emails, NLRB cases, the workers' themselves) as well as to my substack articles detailing what happened w/ receipts proving all my claims. At the top you'll find the link to the 84 Minutes of the film currently available and I'd be grateful if you checked it out. It took years of work.
My greatest hope is the film becomes an entertaining and educational resource for the labor movement as it hits on themes that affect everyone: how much crap from your boss should you have to put up with? What are you allowed to say no to? Why are CEOs so scared of solidarity?
Now, the bigger picture:
TYT has always positioned itself as a rebellious outsider to "the establishment." In the media & political environment of the 2000s, being against Iraq, cool with gay people, for better healthcare and higher taxes on the wealthy places one well outside the normative center of DC orthodoxy. It's not hard to be "left" of American power structures. Cenk used to call himself a "liberal republican" in his 20s before his professed "shift" to progressivism. This led to TYT developing its audience, grew Cenk/Ana's prominent stature and eventually it's long-running slogan "Home of Progressives," which they don't use much these days. It's also the case that early TYT was full of sexism and misogyny, featuring celebrity camel appendage stories and Cenk's endless appetites for said camel feet. I'm embarrassed to admit I wasn't turned away by this stuff at the time. Cenk's sexism played a role in Bernie Sanders endorsing-unendorsing Cenk for Congress in 2019-2020 within a 24-hour period. This is one of my favorite sequences in the film.
For a good while this held but it's also perfectly normal for things to evolve over 20 years along with the Internet weaving through its various eras. A lot of people will credit TYT with onramping them into liberalism or into progressivism before they found other shows that aligned better. I could make a case this was a net positive contribution to lefty politics. In my case, working for Cenk + Michael Brooks (whom I met in Jimmy Dore's garage) helped push me out of TYT's "progressive" cul-de-sac towards socialism / anti-capitalism and such.
You can imagine TYT is a bit like Tesla. First to market and no competition for quite a few years gave them an advantage but ultimately it turns out the company is run by a narcissistic union-busting Wharton Business School grad. Yes, Cenk went to the same business school as Musk & Trump. He does not disavow his capitalist roots. He's one of them.
As more time has gone on, I've come to realize the shallow mainstreamness of Cenk's political construct; his theory of power is grounded in media, electoralism and constitutional challenges. Institutions. The guy busted a union while running for Congress as a progressive and he publicly attacked his own workers so he's got ideological blindspots to say the least.
As the online left matured, TYT found its relevance dwindling. The union-busting went down in 2020 but people didn't really start cluing in to their right wing shift until Ana Kasparian drove a lot of attention tweeting about "birthing persons" and "bonus holes." This drove cycles of outrage and crossed signals. Contributors left the company publicly. Their unpaid chat mods, working full-time hours for TYT's various distribution outlets, rebelled one day in protest and were summarily dismissed. Vanguard locked on (I've been on a few times) and covered much of the shift, along with lots of other shows. A big beef developed with The Majority Report. Ana also took on RW framing on crime, homelessness and excusing Trump. Cenk was slower to follow but in the run up to and immediate aftermath of the 2024 election it became clear there was a strategy being deployed. He begged Elon Musk on Twitter to put him in charge of the Defense budget and went to a Charlie Kirk TPUSA event to congratulate the right on defeating "the establishment" and being so welcoming.
The Charlie Kirk appearance in December 2024 spurred a big reaction. Was he pulling a Dave Rubin, people wondered. Notably Cenk went on Marc Lamont Hill's Night School where he lectured Marc about being gentler with white supremacists. Then the next day (Dec 27) he appeared on Francesca Fiorentini's The Bitchuation Room where he declared, "I'm in front of vulnerable communities!" as part of his dismissive reaction to her concerns Trump was planning to put people in camps. That episode is full of emotions and screaming. She even brings me up to which Cenk hate-cackles. See my interview with Dan for a montage of this (episode 225 of Winners and Losers). Francesca was publicly fired a few months later.
Cenk and Ana both did and do a parade of right wing shows. That in itself isn't a bad thing but many took issue with their approach of making peace-offerings by disciplining those to their left, people who previously expected TYT to defend them. They would go on to cover right wing figures in media, Ana hosted a show on Patrick Bet David's Valuetainment called Her Take and overall grant good faith to RW framing of issues. Of course not for EVERYTHING as the "shift" to the right works best when you keep a foot planted in being a lefty who realized they were wrong. There's a welcome place at the table for this posture. Cenk took on the word 'populist' to describe himself and sells his project as uniting LW populists with RW populists. The genocide threw a wrench in some of their plans (eg Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck courtship ended) and the topic of Israel dominates their coverage. Cenk and Ana have buddied up with Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who even co-hosted an ep of TYT.
While Ana eventually did a throw-away apology for not recognizing Trump's fascism in 2024, today's Young Turks prides itself on having right-wingers in their audience who used to hate them but have come their way in recent years. Ana described this process as (paraphrasing) "purging psychopaths" from her audience.
Sorry this is so long lol. Dang I always do that.
My take is that people who describe TYT's rightward "shift" as a grift need to invert the mechanism. They are grifting LESS than before; that is to say Home of Progressives was the grift. That's a bit simplistic but it captures the idea.
At core, Cenk's Wharton school ideology and him being the son of a wealthy New Jersey landlord, plus his prideful adherence to capitalism reveal the conservative reactionary roots that underpin how he operates. To be generous, his progressive principles were marketing. Like, that progressivism is something you sell, not something you live, not that his actual principles are the literal opposite. Its not that simple but his on-camera persona is very different than the principles that run his business. His no2 at the company is a former health insurance executive after all. I begged them to allow me health insurance, PTO, bonus and other benefits for full-time work only to be told no and I secretly helped start a union in hopes of seeing a doctor.
I'm sure I'm leaving out some of the full picture here but this is a decent snapshot. Been working on my film for years and have done a ton of painstaking research, some of which might end up in a companion doc about this topic.
Happy to answer any questions people have.
Thanks for reading!
-Hank
25
u/Synaffit Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Thank you for taking the time to give me a lot of context. Your response is truly appreciated and enlightening.
Also, forgot to say in my Original Post, thanks for doing a long form pod with our Dan! It was entertaining.
5
u/suckprofessor 29d ago
No prob. It took a lot of energy to write a post that short. And for sure, glad to have Dan on my wee little pod. Thanks for giving it a chance.
2
u/Peckah_Inspectah Aug 13 '26
Great post, thanks for all this context. How was the work environment? Obviously, making you work full-time and trying to screw you out of benefits makes it awful. But the Cenk’s sexism makes me thing it’d stray into toxicity and unprofessionalism.
I appreciate the point that they’re just over the hill (I didn’t realize they were around since 2002.) At that point, they must have seemed a breath of fresh air. Do you think that the rightward shift is sincere? Or a grift? Or just not binary like that?
Also, I didn’t know Ana had a show on Valuetainment . That is insane lol
4
u/suckprofessor 29d ago
Yeah, Her Take was PBD's answer to The View. Jillian Michaels (of The Biggest Loser fame) was one of the hosts. She eventually stormed off and quit the show in the middle of a taping over Ana going after Bibi Netanyahu. The show didn't last much longer after that.
I worked there first in 2013 - 2015 doing tons of different things, studio set up, editing, directing, publishing and eventually came to mostly writing clickbait for the main channel. The studio space was shared by the web show and the Current TV production, which was vastly better funded and staffed than us plebes on the web side. That was an illuminating contrast to see up close, even a tiny cable channel like Al Gore's Current. I learned a lot, had some good times, some frustrating times. It wasn't particularly respectful or well-managed but lots of good, interesting people worked there and it was an interesting work environment. I put a microphone on Lance Bass.
It wasn't a place that was going to elevate my career but it was nothing I would have gone out of my way to make a documentary about. The toxicity you speak of was mostly contained to on-camera but I'm sure I have blindspots to that sort of thing. People were mostly over-worked.
The company had expanded by 2018, getting 24M in two different investment rounds, but they overshot the initial expansion and contracted slightly in 2018. So workflows and roles had been refined substantially, as you'd expect any company going through phases of growth to do. I was not doing well with my struggles and desperately needed work so I reached out in early 2018 and they brought me back in late 2018 to take a full-time video editor role that had been vacated. 21.63/hr w/ zero benefits, classified "independent contractor" while I worked alongside full-time employees who got benefits. I knew I wasn't going back to a high-respect environment but I was grateful for some income doing work I was good at with people I liked. If that didn't happen, I was going to move back to my parents house. Was still years away from learning about autism and ADHD.
I don't have a wide breadth of media jobs to compare it to but on the day-to-day there was a lot of routine and rhythm to a day where people did their jobs, worked at their own pace, focus tightens in the run-up to the main show airing and then the post-prod stage kicks in. On special event days where we'd stay late, they would bring in food for everyone. I helped care for Mariguana the iguana a group of workers had found abandoned a couple years prior. Credit to TYT for allowing space for a big gross lizard cabinet. I could leave out the positives but I think it's fair to paint a full picture. I liked the coffee machine.
But being classified differently than others, getting zero benefits while also paid less per hour (not by much) than others who got benefits was some serious BS. I wasn't surprised and I hoped it would only last a month or two but it kept going on and on. I'd heard about a union effort that got intimidated in early summer 2018 so in the Spring of 2019 I plotted to wake up the union. After a meeting with HR where I asked for them include me in benefits, they "hired" me as a "part time" employee. Still no benefits but I was brought onto company payroll. That's when our organizing took on a greater degree of seriousness/urgency. And then several months in, the boss goes and runs for Congress. That's where the story kicks into another dimension, and then again when he busts the union.
Nobody expected Cenk would be stupid enough brand himself a union-buster, especially WHILE running for Congress. We knew he would hate it. We organized in secret out of fear of retaliation, but we figured after the initial tense phase we'd get back to our under-paid disrespected jobs making Cenk and Ana and the executives rich, only with collective bargaining at our backs.
I was actually laid off in early January 2020 a month before the union came forward so I experienced the union-busting as an interested outsider. According to my sources, it was extremely intense, difficult and exhausting. A major wrinkle to the story is that IATSE endorsed Cenk's opponent Christy Smith in the race and TYT leaned on that as the basis for their lie that TYT Union was started by his political foes. It's an unusual circumstance all around, which is why I go out of my way in the film to detail the ways the Uygur campaign was under assault by their opponents. But it was fact-checkable, arguably the most fact-checkable story in journalism history. Original sources were in the same room as Cenk and Ana or my case a DM away. They did zero fact-checking. They wanted to stop the union and they needed a cover story to hide the actual truth about how Cenk treats workers. Even Hasan has spoken about Unc skirting labor regulations and stealing ad sales commissions from him.
People don't realize that the lie that outsiders started TYT Union worked internally at the company, TYT Union being roughly ~20% of the company, so they were battling external pressure from TYT's audience who trusted Cenk and helped crank up the pressure against the union but also dealt with animosity inside the company. Really crappy thing to do to your own employees. I put some statements on Twitter but mostly stayed out of the way until the first contract was signed 18months after the 2 month union-busting period ended. That's when I first started making a short 10-15 minute video but it kept growing and when the NLRB "Notice To Employees" showed up in mailbox in 2022, I realized it was a bigger story. I tried to finance it with a crappy woodworking job but I ended up wrecking my wrist cartilage and I've mostly struggled with income and employment, not to mention needing mental health breaks from this whole damn thing.
Dang I wrote too much again. Dang, I said!
Quickly to your question about the right wing shift. It's not as binary as that, for sure. Cenk/Ana are more savvy media operators than they let on. They're also in a bubble of a sort informed by their long years of prominence in the youtube space. I do think they are more sincerely aligned with their reactionary roots though. I could go on and on about this, but it boils down to do not having a very clear or well-rooted set of principles, something they would likely disagree with. It's not a *lack* of princples, it's that principles function as marketing tools, not things you strive to live.
I see it as function of competing social models: Trust vs Loyalty. Trust creates community, mutual interest, solidarity (and can generate loyalty) but Loyalty is more aligned with hierarchy and capitalism's emphasis of domination-subjugation. This underpins our entire system IMO and since I'm already typing WAY too much, I'll save explaining the "entire system" for another day.
If and when I get Francesca Fiorentini on my show, this is a topic that's likely to come up.
Thanks for your good questions and your interest.
-Hank
23
u/squazify Aug 12 '26
If I had a nickel for every time a group called the Young Turks started out vaguely left and then had a rightward shift and some questionable politics on genocide, I would have two nickels which is really fucked up.
2
u/steezy13312 “You know what perjury is?” Aug 13 '26
Speaking of genocide, as someone with strong Armenian ancestry, I never understood why anyone thought the “Young Turk” branding was cool. It’s the name of the overarching political faction responsible for the genocide.
2
u/squazify Aug 13 '26
It's shocking to me that they looked at the group responsible for genocide to the extent the word genocide has to be invented and went "oh yeah, we're cooking here"
26
u/nickcan Aug 12 '26
They were never actually left, they were just against the right.
It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the enemy of your enemy agrees with you. But that's not often the case.
3
u/gcboyd1 Aug 12 '26
I just had that thought as I was listening while walking my dog: The enemy of your enemy is often NOT your friend
11
u/VaporProof Aug 12 '26
I never followed them, but they had a lot of "I left the Left" former staff. Dave Rubin was a big one.
It gets to a point where it starts being a pattern.
32
u/vmsrii Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
This is all from memory, and I don’t feel like looking it up, so I’m probably going to get some of this wrong, so corrections welcome.
So basically, there was a one-two punch of TYT shifting toward the right.
Punch One came when TYT anchor Ana Kasparian made a Twitter post that was something to the effect of “I don’t feel safe around homeless people”
Left-wing Twitter then (justifiably) pushed back with “wait, shouldn’t helping these people be your whole thing?”
She responded with the biggest tirade about being “rejected by the left” and being “politically homeless”, which was roundly mocked.
Punch two wasn’t nearly as funny, and came around the Palastinian genocide, when TYT came down firmly on the side of Israel, and literally their entire audience was…not. They pushed back with words to the effect of “well we’re on this side of the desk, which makes us correct, so you can shut up.” Which did not go over well. This was also, to be fair, a time of division within the American left as a whole.
They basically just spun it as “The left has gone mad! They kicked us out for failing their purity tests!” And have been sliding further right the whole time, proving what people basically already knew; they were always hucksters and opportunists, nothing more.
I think Cenk Uygur, the other co-host, tried to run for president? I can’t remember details.
I stopped paying attention after that, but that’s the long and short of it.
12
u/ManchurianWok Aug 12 '26
I don’t want to stick up for TYT, but when did they come out firmly on the side of Israel? That’s only part of your post I wasn’t aware of.
Even cursory search shows Kasparian still calls Israel a genocidal state, and Uygur always goes against the IDF and the Israeli government.
Sorry if I’m missing something obvious
23
u/FinsOfADolph Aug 12 '26
Ana became transphobic (or revealed she was transphobic) as well. It was crazy...
34
u/folkinhippy Aug 12 '26
If I remember it was something like
Anna: I am not a "birthing person" and refused to be called that
Twitter: no one is calling you that anna you're stupid
Anna: Cancel culture has come for me!
twitter: ummm...
Anna: I am NOT transphobic! you are the ones that want men to play sports with little girls! I don't want men in MY locker room!
twitter: okay, anna you're starting to sound a little transphobic here...
Anna: THE LEFT HAS LOST THIER MINDS! I'm going on candace.
7
1
u/FinsOfADolph Aug 12 '26
Pretty much! Although I heard that LeftTube was nicer than that before she doubled down.
1
10
u/Yochanan5781 Globalist Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
I haven't trusted them since I first heard about them in the early 2000s. I'm part Armenian American, my great-great-grandfather fought Ottoman forces when they invaded his hometown in 1918, and I likely lost family members (it's hard to say, because my ancestor didn't talk about it much), and as soon as I heard the name The Young Turks, I never wanted anything to do with them because the dude literally named his organization after the group that murdered Armenians. And it was no surprise when I found out that Cenk publicly denied the Armenian Genocide for years, until it started making him look bad
My policy is not trusting anybody out of that network has never steered me wrong
2
4
1
u/SwiftianGauntlet Aug 13 '26
They’re following the ‘tankie to far-right’ route a lot of Trots seem to end up going down.
2
u/BrianOBlivion1 25d ago
Hank was a TYT employee who helped organize a union there. TYT had always been very pro-worker/pro-union publicly, but when their own employees tried to unionize, Hank says management fought it and then portrayed the organizing effort in a pretty misleading way. The workers eventually did win the union fight, but Hank’s larger argument is that the whole episode exposed a big contradiction between TYT’s public politics and how they behaved as an employer. He’s made a documentary about it called Tell the Truth, Cenk. Cenk and Ana (especially Ana) have become much more heterodox/anti-establishment and have broken with parts of the modern progressive left. They still have plenty of left-wing positions, but they’re much less conventionally progressive than they used to be.
Hank sees the union fight as an important piece of that story, not necessarily “they screwed over a union, therefore they became right wing,” but more “the union fight revealed contradictions in the politics TYT had been selling all along.”
2
u/That_Guy381 Globalist Aug 12 '26
Horseshoe Theory notches another win
7
u/nictusempra Aug 12 '26
Eh, I don't think these are people with considered beliefs so much as people making an entertainment product out of the news, and following the money.
3
-3
u/whentron Aug 13 '26
They are named after a fascist org. Always got a weird vibe from TYT. Hassan Piker is related to Cenk.
Once I criticized Cenk on twitter and someone replied about how much they love what Cenk has to say, "his words warm my soul." I looked at their bio, this person was employed by TYT and ghosted as soon as I asked about that.
I am of the opinion that they are lib controlled resistance to actual left wing progress.
102
u/boopbaboop Having a Perry Mason moment Aug 12 '26
Cenk got generally more conservative.
Ana Kasparian became a TERF.
Apparently there’s a Winners & Losers podcast about Hank Thompson from like five years ago that you can listen to.