Yes, and he’s lying. Bill Maher still considers himself a liberal but nobody with ears in the last decade would take his claim seriously.
Most people who call themselves Progressives that I know personally are indeed fans of TYT, Kyle Kulinski, and the others of that ilk.
I would agree with you that there is little that is “progressive” about pro-Russian “America Bad” talking points like they peddle, but they appear to have successfully claimed the term afaict.
That sort of becomes a circular definition of people who are fans of Cenk will accept his self-characterization as progressive.
If you go by the standard of who do the loose coalition of influential progressives treat as serious peers whose ideas are worth taking seriously vs people who have gone off the deep end and are slowly self-radicalizing themselves into reactionaries, Cenk moved into the second category some time ago.
There were actual fairly mainline progressive voices who acquitted themselves terribly during the Graham Platner debacle, Ken Klippenstein and Ryan Grim are two of the most prominent that I’d highlight. The reaction from other progressives to their actions has generally been one of disappointment and an urge to reconsider. Their reaction of Cenk, on the other hand, has been more of an eyeroll and a “there goes Cenk again”. The bulk of the conversation around Cenk in the last week has been on how he put out a tweet claiming the Chinese don’t use Soy Sauce and refusing to delete it despite everyone taking a cheap shot to clown on him. That’s the level of unserious he’s being taken.
My larger point was to point out that The Bulwark is always going to come at things with their particular point of view and labelling Cenk and Matt Stoller as progressives is part and parcel of their worldview. I’m not even disputing the core point so much as disputing how competently they’re able to make it.
As a point of evidence, I decided to look at what tweets from people I follow mentioned Cenk and I dug this one up. NYTPitchbot is considered a fairly normie Bluesky leftist and in 2024, he had a poll of who his readers think might “Go Full MAGA” over the next 4 years.
Cenk Uygar came in 2nd, narrowly edging our Bari Weiss with 56% voting Yes for him going full MAGA. NYTPitchbot himself editorialized in the thread
Personally I think TWC is the most likely to oppose it (though I’d bet on ignore/bothsides) while Bari and Cenk are the most likely to go full MAGA.
Notably, the vote counts for the first 2 entries were 600+ with monotonically declining vote counts as you go down the thread as you would expect from Twitter but then it jumps from 376 → 653 votes for Cenk. You can decide how persuasive all this is but to me, this is evidence that even 2 years ago, he was legible as a person who most progressives didn’t consider progressive anymore.
I hope the good folks at Lee Kum Kee never hear about this. I’d hate to lose my favorite brand when they wise up.
The Chinese, in fact invented the stuff, the Japanese picked it up later, and brew it with wheat in addition to the soybeans.
“Soy sauce? That is so 2,000 years ago.”
Yeah. I’ve gotten this second hand (from Bluesky) but apparently CU and AK have been trying to sell the idea that MSM “left out” all kinds of exculpatory-for-Platner evidence. This evidence being, apparently, that the woman “asked for it.” And of course the Usual Suspects are covering it all up.
As you and others have said, actual progressives would not be getting behind the ‘rape isn’t rape if she knew his name beforehand’ and the like. The whole “she asked for it” mindset is not acceptable to most people (let alone to actual progressives).
They WERE doing so with respect to Uygur, but not with respect to Matt Stoller. The posts reproduced in that JV Last column were showing Uygur replying to Stoller (to oppose Stoller’s take that ‘Platner’s relationships’ were central to his being asked to close his campaign).
Anyway, despite the possible poor choice of “progressives” to cite by Last, I do think his point about some on the Democratic side (ostensibly) prioritizing taking down Dems over taking down the GOP, is fair. Another of his examples: David Sirota, who was a speechwriter for Bernie Sanders during his 2020 campaign.
(screenshot of that post is in the article linked in my previous post.)
As Last remarked in opposition: “This wasn’t a Neera Tanden–engineered coup. Graham Platner did it.”
OK, but the Sirota claim is qualitatively different from Ugyur/Stoller. He’s not alleging anything about Platner himself but about the process of replacing him. This is a place where many good faithed people can disagree but still fall in the realm of respectable discourse vs the Ugyur/Stoller end of the conversation that is ugly conspiritorialism.
This is what I mean by The Bulwark being such a bad source, it’s in its best interests to smear all these things together and do guilt by association and hope you don’t think too closely about what the actual claim is. The Bulwark can be valuable when it’s assessing phenomena to the right of itself and provides a different lens than the standard left analysis but when it’s analyzing the far left, it’s just a pretty standard Republican analysis, except calibrated to feed the egos of the center left.
It’s spelled Uygur. Admittedly, the combination of sounds /uj/ is unfamiliar to English speakers, unless you take “Oo-wee!” and mash it down to one syllable. The Uyghur people of Xinjiang pronounce it that way too (despite what you’ve been told).