By: Jack Holmes, Esquire

In an age of disruption and constant flux, it still pays to be the first. Just ask The Young Turks crew and host-C.E.O. Cenk Uygur, who mastered Internet TV while Netflix was still mailing people DVDs. Now, as cable subscriptions flatline and the median age of a Fox News viewer is 68, Uygur’s brainchild—which began in his Los Angeles apartment and broke through as a late-2000s YouTube phenomenon—is positioned for what he calls “world domination.” The TYT network garners 80 million unique views every month across its various channels, and is the number one online network for the 18-34 demographic. The flagship program is the largest online news show in the world. They’re closing fast on CNN in the overall standings, too—something Uygur won’t hesitate to tell you.

That’s what he did when we met at a midtown hotel bar earlier this month. We also had plenty of time for the 2016 election, which the Turkish-American host—who was also the subject of a 2014 documentary—sees as a battle between an establishmentarian advocate of the status quo and a “monster.” But some of his best insight comes in discussions of where media is and where it’s going. His Young Turks, for instance, are making the leap to cable, partnering with Fusion to bring a 12-week show live from college campuses starting this month. Tonight, they’ll hold one of their very first shows at John Jay College in downtown Manhattan. Ambitious as ever, Uygur will be counter-programming the first presidential debate.

Colin Kaepernick’s protest is making headlines at the moment. Where are you on that?

Look, I’m a huge optimist. I love America so much that I’m kind of jingoistic about it, so I wouldn’t have chosen that form of protest. But that’s okay, everyone has their own way, and maybe I wouldn’t have sat in the front of the bus and I would have been wrong. I think his is a perfectly good protest, and the more people rally against him, the more I support him. People miss the whole point: ‘People didn’t fight for that flag so you could sit.’ No, that’s exactly why they fought for—so he could sit.

Do you think people are conflating those things on purpose, like a defense mechanism, because they don’t want to talk about the issues he’s trying to raise?

I think it’s a combination of things. I think people have been taught to reflexively salute and not question anything. At the same time, race is the last issue people want to talk about, especially the right wing. There’s not a single form of protest they would agree to. If it were a violent protest, they would be livid. If it was the quietest, most serene protest in American history—which is what Kaepernick is doing—they still hate it. If they sit, they hate it. When they had their hands up, they hated it. They just hate it, because the last thing they want to see is the ugly truth.

It’s only a certain truth they’re unwilling to confront. After all, there’s another guy out there right now saying that America is not great.

That’s right—for different reasons that they’re totally on board with. The reality is, it’s not that convenient for either side. Yeah, there is racial injustice, there is systemic police abuse. And at the same time, there are low wages that people are genuinely angry about. There are a lot of things wrong with the country, and that doesn’t mean America sucks. It means we should improve it.

What do you think is the primary fuel behind the Trump movement? You hear about economic anxiety and wage stagnation, but clearly there is something else there.

I think the biggest percentage is people with misdirected anger. They are seeing their place in the world slip away from them. They are losing their jobs and haven’t had a wage increase in forever, and they’re pissed about that and that they can’t give their jobs to their kids the way they used to. That’s real, justifiable anger. At the same time, there have been demographic shifts in the country so that white males can’t just rule everything like they used to. To some people, that’s enormously frustrating.

I read a great article a couple years ago about how slave owners thought the North was trying to take their freedom away when they took their slaves away, because they viewed their freedom as the ability to dominate over others—to own others. They didn’t feel their property was being taken as much as their rights. They viewed is as their right to rule the world, and how dare you challenge that.

Right now you have a black president and Republicans can’t seem to win a national election. They are frustrated, and taking it out on all the wrong targets. They say Mexicans are the problem. Wait, let me get this straight: The people who rig the rules that you’re so mad about are the most powerless people in the country, that just crossed the border? No, it’s the powerful who rig the rules. But they misdirect people’s anger towards powerless people so they don’t cause real trouble.

If the anger at the economic aspect is justified but misdirected, is there an avenue for someone like Bernie Sanders to appeal to them?

Absolutely. That’s not my opinion, it’s a matter of fact. There’s polling on it. He polled way better than Hillary Clinton among independents, and had a much bigger lead—15 points—over Trump than she did. It was not an anomaly, it was not a mistake, because he was authentic and addressing the root cause of the problem. A guy at home pissed about his job thought, well at least he cares and he really means it. Clinton comes across as the biggest phony in the world.

Do you think Bernie got the same scrutiny as Hillary Clinton did in the primary? Do you think he was attacked by Republicans the same way she was?

There are two parts to that. Did he get the same scrutiny? Of course he did. He got more. He was asked if he was a communist during the debates. The fact he’s a so-called socialist was framed by the mainstream media as, ‘Aren’t you unrealistic? Aren’t you naive? How can you possibly afford that?’ That’s not how they framed the questions to Hillary Clinton. They framed hers as pragmatic, practical, realistic. They didn’t lay a glove on her during the primaries.

But the Republicans and the rightwing media have attacked Clinton for twenty straight years and have done great damage to her brand, her name, her reputation. That’s a fact, and why it was a terrible idea to nominate her. They would have had to do to Bernie in three months that it took twenty years to do to Clinton. If you tell people Clinton is inauthentic, it’s easier to get it to stick. People are primed for it. So the Democrats have made a monumental mistake, and if they win, they’re going to win by a razor-thin margin. Or they might leave us with this monster.

You supported Bernie in the primaries. Are you supporting Hillary now? Will you vote for her?

There’s a difference between voting for her and supporting her. I will most certainly vote for Hillary Clinton. No, I do not remotely support her. I will be looking to fight her on day one.

What’s your biggest issue with her?

She is the establishment. She doesn’t want to change anything. I would be shocked beyond belief if she actually changed anything of substance. The establishment has created a system where the rich get bigger tax cuts, the corporations shift their tax burden on the average man, salaries stagnate. They’ve created enormous income inequality, and where it’s legal to bribe politicians in the form of campaign donations and independent expenditures. Clinton is the status quo, and I’m fighting the status quo.

How much is money in politics at the root of all these issues?

There’s no question. There’s only one issue: money in politics. You can’t solve any of the other issues until you get the money out of politics. God bless people who are fighting on other issues, but it’s a waste of time. You can’t win a congressional seat unless you have money. Even if you do, it’s tick-tock, tick-tock until someone with more money beats you. Ninety-five percent of the time, the person with more money wins. Princeton tracked two decades of policymaking, and public opinion had zero effect on public policy. We lost our democracy. It’s gone. Ninety-three percent of Americans want [to expand] federal background checks, but we didn’t get it. Because we don’t live in a democracy.

What is the path to fixing the problem?

Amendment, amendment, amendment.

Here’s a hypothetical. Let’s say they told you before your show one day that the only people watching would be your average viewers from a night of Sean Hannity’s show. How would you approach that as a left-of-center commentator trying to reach those people?

Super easy: I would tell them who really screwed them. Would I get all of them to agree with me? Of course not. Would I get the majority? No. But I could probably convince 25 or 35 percent to take a second look. You first have to acknowledge their pain, which is real. Then you talk about what actually caused it, and who set the rules of the game.

Yes, crony capitalism is terrible. Yes, the establishment is screwing them. Big government is a problem because they’re being bribed—so who’s bribing them? The Mexican guy across the border? The Muslim refugee from Syria? No. I talk to conservatives all the time, and you’d be shocked at how much agreement we have. We’re not going to agree on everything, but I’d say we probably have eighty percent agreement on money in politics. So I’d say to the right wing, I can end crony capitalism for you. Let’s do it together.

Is Donald Trump an accident, or is he the natural outgrowth of the conservative movement?

He’s definitely an outgrowth of that movement. In fact, he A/B tested his whole campaign. He’d go and do speeches and see what the crowd reacted to. He contradicts himself on a daily basis. Why’s that? He’s A/B testing. He is just a mirror of the Republican voters. Oh, you want me to hate Mexicans? I’ll hate Mexicans. Did he before? I don’t know, probably not. Who knows what’s in his mind. Did he hate Muslims before? Nah, probably not. He probably had business dealings with a bunch of rich Saudis.

And Qaddafi.

Qaddafi, right. He just gave them what they wanted. Anger, rage—this is the last gasp of the angry white man. They are going to go out in a fit of rage, and they’re not going to whisper anymore. They’re going to yell. Trump was bound to happen, and we’re in a populist mood in this country. The left was always going to be a guy like Bernie Sanders, who has been saying the same thing for 40 years. And on the right, you were bound to get someone super angry, totally inauthentic, who misdirects your rage.

Is he channeling the message coming out of this Fox News, talk radio vortex? And how do you reach the people who live there?

Part of the reason they’re so angry is that they lost. Demographically, they are done for. Trump is going to get every last angry vote, and he’ll probably barely lose. I think it will be close, but in 2020, it doesn’t get better for them. They’ll never recover from this. Not all of them are this way, but the old, angry, white, racist 72-year-old who listens to Bill O’Reilly, and lived in the time outside of our experiences where they had different ‘colored’ fountains and people “knew their role” and his was at the top of the hierarchy? His days are numbered, and he’s super pissed.

Those guys will never win another national election. They are gone. The question is whether a certain percentage of Republicans can be convinced to direct their anger towards the right place. They can’t be convinced they shouldn’t be angry, which is what Clinton will come in and try to do. And the anger will grow every single day until it’s a crescendo in 2020, and she’ll likely be taken down by the left, not by the right.

You think she’ll be primaried in 2020?

Absolutely. I’d be shocked if she wasn’t primaried, and I think there is a decent chance that she’ll pull an LBJ and not even run.

What’s the origin story of the Young Turks?

We started this show fourteen years ago in my living room in LA, in a one bedroom apartment off of Sunset. We just bought a bunch of mics and radio equipment and I kind of willed my way onto Sirius/XM radio. In the beginning, they weren’t even paying us. I’m not even sure they knew that we were on air.

No one has really opened a door for us. We’ve pretty much broken down every single door that we’ve gone through, and most of those doors were broken down by our audience. We moved to TV in 2005, and now we have the longest running daily show on the Internet. We were the very first partner for YouTube, and then we took off online. I got on MSNBC in 2010, but we kept doing the show. We started adding channels, and now we have 12 that we own and operate.

What’s the goal now, and has it changed from when you set out?

No, the goal hasn’t changed, but that’s because I’m mental and originally set a totally insane goal that’s now kind of sane. We were a rinky-dink radio show on Sirius before Howard Stern, and a paper asked me what my goal was for Young Turks. I said world domination. That’s still our goal, and we’re close. We now win every category for viewers under 24 online. We’re number two in the older demos—CNN is still number one. We’ll pass CNN online fairly soon, and then we’ll beat them on every platform.

Our goal is to be the largest news show in the world, and the largest news network in the world. Right now, we are the news network for the online generation. Others do news in different ways—we don’t do articles, only video—but in terms of video views, were number one in the age groups I mentioned, and soon to be number one overall.

From an editorial standpoint, do you characterize yourself as left-of-center? When I came across you guys on YouTube in 2006 or 2007, you seemed like you were looking to be a counterweight to the Fox News’s of the world.

That’s a totally fair impression, and within the American spectrum, we are clearly left of center. There’s no hesitation on that. But 50 percent of our audience is international. For our international audience, we’re centrists. Jeremy Corbin is a little too liberal for me. Another fact that’s really important: the positions and political ideology of millennials matches ours almost to a T. I can’t find one position we disagree on. Older generations say, ‘Oh, you are progressives,’ or ‘You’re left of center,’ and use that to say we’re biased. No, for the online generation, we’re as centrist as it gets.

Do you think there’s such a thing as news without opinion, and if there is—if that was Walter Cronkite and network news—is there a future for that going forward?

People have twisted the past to what it wasn’t. What are the two things Walter Cronkite is most known for? When he cried when JFK was killed, showing emotion and passion, and when he said we were losing in Vietnam. The past is not what they say it is, and there’s a reason for that. The right wing wants the news to be neutral, not objective. If you’re objective, you say the planet is getting warmer. That’s a fact, not an opinion. Every month this year has been the warmest on record. They want you to be neutral, and say, ‘Democrats say it’s the warmest it’s ever been, and the Republicans say it’s not.’ That’s a lie. It’s a trick. Journalism should get back to objectivity, I’m all for that. But it has to get away from neutrality, which is killing us.

Do you think Trump hiring Ailes and Steve Bannon indicates he’s looking to build his own media empire? What does that say about the symbiosis between media and politics?

They’re tapping into an outsider vein, but in reality, they’re all enormously rich. Do they want to overturn the system? No. They just want to profit off the guys who are angry with it. Ailes gives Trump a chance to win—he’s genuinely brilliant and a force to be reckoned with. The minute he joined Trump’s campaign, officially or unofficially, I said we’ve got a race. And ever since then, Trump has been closing, closing, closing. Ailes’ bread-and-butter move is misdirected anger. His greatest trick was to convince people that he’s against the system, when his whole job is to keep the system going exactly as it has been.

What do you make of the situation with Peter Thiel and Gawker, and do you fear that kind of money being wielded against an organizaton like yours?

I’m tempted to be a tough guy and say, ‘Come and get it.’ First, Gawker was wrong. So it’s not a great example. But money can be used in the wrong ways. If they attack us, we’re not wilting flowers, and we’ll attack back. We don’t have money, but we have people—80 million unique viewers a month now. That’s a different kind of power. I think we’ve proven you don’t need that much money to win. And if they do kill us, then the next Young Turks will pop up, and the next one after that. They’ll lose, because we’re right and they’re wrong.

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