Cenk Kadir Uygur (/ˈdʒɛŋk kəˈdɪər ˈjuːɡər/; Turkish: [ˈdʒeɲc kaˈdiɾ ˈujɡuɾ]; born March 21, 1970) is an American political commentator, media host, and attorney.

In 2011, he worked briefly for 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.

Some considered his candidacy controversial due to his past comments about women and minority groups, including the LGBTQ+ community, religious Jews, and Muslims, which some found offensive but which he said were taken out of context by the media.

The family emigrated to the United States when Cenk was eight years old, and there Dogan worked as a commercial real estate developer.

[22][24] 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.

[18] In the 2000s, Uygur maintained a weekly blog on The Huffington Post and wrote entries that were critical of the 2003 Iraq war.

[29][31][32] Uygur and his co-host Ana Kasparian applied a populist-left branding and programming strategy that made TYT a global online organization.

Armenian-Americans have criticized the show's name because the original Young Turks political movement in the Ottoman Empire was responsible for the Armenian genocide.

Cenk Uygur... did just this ....[18]The Young Turks began a daily news video show on YouTube in 2005, and claims to have been the first on the streaming service.

[citation needed] In 2015, Uygur hosted ex-Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacist neo-Nazi David Duke on the show in an antisemitic segment about “how Jews control everything.

[60][61][62] Management saw the style of several hosts, including Uygur, as off-base from MSNBC's branding objectives, resulting in their demotion.

[63] According to Uygur, MSNBC President Phil Griffin disliked his "aggressive style" and told him the network's audience "require different manners of speaking".

[63] MSNBC denied that the network desired censorship of his anti-corporate stances, and both sides agreed that their main differences of opinion were about the style of communication.

[58] Uygur has supported the removal of corporate donations from the political system, and he said that "campaign finance reform" is the "only one issue" in the United States.

[67][68] Several Supreme Court rulings (1976, 1978, 2010) on campaign finance motivated Uygur[69][70] during the Occupy Wall Street movement to launch a long-term project, a political action committee named Wolf-PAC, on October 19, 2011, in New York City.

In an interview with TheWrap, Uygur said he had deleted the "ugly" posts a decade ago, and added: "The stuff I wrote back then was really insensitive and ignorant.

[87][88] In 2020, he co-founded Rebellion PAC, a political action committee with a focus on running advertisements in support of progressive electoral candidates, alongside Brianna Wu.

[89] In mid-November 2019, Uygur filed to run for Congress in California's 25th district, a seat recently vacated by the resignation of Katie Hill.

[94] Uygur positioned himself as left-wing, supporting single-payer healthcare, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and overturning Citizens United v. FEC.

"[52] At least a dozen women's, LGBTQ, and Democratic organizations denounced comments he had made as sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Islam, and anti-Semitic.

[52] Mark Gonzalez, the chairman of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, said of him: "This man has spent decades, including up until recently, attacking women, the LGBTQ community, Jews, Muslims, Asian-Americans and African Americans.

As of early December 2023, he has failed in his efforts to be listed on a number of state primary ballots, because he does not meet the U.S. constitutional requirement to be a natural-born citizen in order to serve as president.

[110][111] In September 2023, Uygur said that he was preparing to launch a potential challenge to President Joe Biden in the 2024 Democratic Party presidential primaries.

"[125][126][127] Similarly, Uygur filed, but was not certified, for the South Carolina Democratic Party presidential primary ballot, given that he does not meet constitutional requirements to hold the office of president of the United States.

[132] On December 18, 2023, Uygur's campaign issued a press release[133] indicating that he was on primary ballots for the following states: Minnesota,[134] Oklahoma,[135] Texas,[136] and Vermont.

I kissed over 23 different women, saw and felt countless breasts, and was in a wonderful drunken stupor thanks to my friend John Daniels."

[157][159] In 2016, Uygur defended the Harvard University men's soccer team for ranking the sexual appeal of female students on a scale of 1-to-10 on a widely shared “scouting report,” including explicit descriptions of potential sex acts with the women.

[162][37] Alex Galitsky, who works for the Armenian National Committee of America, stated "If a group decided to call themselves ‘the Young Nazis’, and pitched themselves as a disruptor or anti-establishment news outlet, people would be rightly outraged".

[162] In 1991, Cenk Uygur wrote an article in The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania, in which he promoted Armenian genocide denial.

"[164][165] In response to the criticism he has explained that the name of the show was chosen because it is a popular colloquialism traditionally meaning a young radical who fights the status quo.