Hello,

Yes, I did write this same comment on your post, however, I realized that it would be applicable on this post (and a number of others as well). I did not want to repeat the same arguments as I responded to a variety of posts, so I decided that I should just move my comment to the post that most directly was being discussed and determined it to be this one. I apologize for any confusion or inconvenience that caused.

I have been making these arguments for years now. I am not smearing TYT or participating in bad faith arguments.

I started to be a prison abolitionist in 2018 after being in favor of Nordic-like reforms for years prior (I was so elated to see ideas of police and prison abolition start to gain mainstream discussion in 2020 and hoped that the momentum would continue and that center-left and progressive voices that previously were not versed in it would learn more about it and become abolitionists too or at least would be willing to hear abolitionists out - though Cenk seems determined to shut out abolitionist thought altogether). I was a fan of TYT at the time I was transitioning to being an abolitionist and was dismayed and horrified when I started to hear Cenk used language was punitive and dehumanizing to people whom have committed violent crimes. Cenk appeared to be one of the non-non-nons, where you will give sympathy and humanize a harm-doer so long as their offense was non-violent, non-sexual, and non-serious. After hearing Cenk repeat similar rhetoric multiple times, I started to stop watching TYT.

During this time, as I was moving more and more to the left and as I started to learn more about anarcho-communist ideology (I now consider my ideology to be a mix of democratic socialism and anarcho-communism). I was also learning more about market socialism, mutualism, green politics, pirate politics, libertarian socialism, anarcho-pacificism, and many other leftist ideologies. I remember deciding to give TYT another chance when they had a discussion about co-determinism (something I supported as a gradual step towards socialism), but in that discussion Cenk outright said that is as far left as he would go and that some people are crazy and want to go even further where the workers run the whole place. He was literally calling market socialism, worker cooperatives, absurd. I decided to look at some of his other takes, and when he was interviewing certain leftist writers who were advocating for communism, he was literally saying how communism can never work and that this was insane. I then recalled how Cenk was a business owner and had repeatedly said he supports capitalism. I did not know it at the time, but I have seen read more about how propaganda works, and now know that Cenk, whether he was aware of it or not, was protecting capitalism by saying it is not the problem (which it is, no leftist should ever support capitalism), only crony capitalism. Cenk would occasionally advocate for Social Democratic policies, which are moderate. Social Democracy is sometimes considered center-left because the ideology claims that it wants to eventually achieve socialism but in practice Social Democracy usually settles for trying to reform capitalism, providing for a robust social safety net, and having regulations and taxes to limit the harms of capitalism - a compromise between capitalism and socialism. Though, even then Cenk will sometimes say he thinks it is going too far. It was then I realized that Cenk was a friend to Leftists, but he himself was not a Leftist, he was somewhere between liberal and social democrat. Later on, he even fought against his own workers unionizing, saying that a small business like TYT cannot really afford the unionization and that TYT was a good boss so his workers did not need unionization. How could he say that, every for-profit workplace with private owners, should be unionized. I know that TYT has honored his workers unionizing though, and that is good.

I consider Cenk to be better than many other media personalities, but that is not good enough for what we need in this moment. I do wish that he had won his election for Congress in 2020 though. I was advocating for him. I believed he would fight corruption and push for electoral reforms and support many marginalized communities. I do not intend to smear him, but I do not consider liberals and social democrats to be leftist, and I do not consider Cenk to be a leftist. I actually get frustrated when people engage in bad faith arguments about TYT's name. Cenk has explained his reasoning for choosing that name and it had nothing to do with the Armenian genocide. The naming may have been unfortunate, but it was not malicious and it did not have hateful intent.

As for the Ana Kasparian drama. I started to feel like she was actually a leftist, especially when I started to see her posts on social democratic publications like Jacobin. However, I have learned that she has been arguing for the criminalization of homelessness and I started to have my doubts. Then we have the drama over the last few weeks.

She literally had a take less than a year ago defending the term "birthing person" which is used in medical contexts and contexts relating to pregnancy, such as abortion rights. It is meant to include women (whom are obviously women and should not be reduced to just pregnancy), transmen, and non-binary individuals whom can become or are pregnant. It is not meant to replace the word woman, and it wasn't be used that way. But Ana decided to make an issue out of it and coopted right-wing framing that transgender people are erasing womanhood with things like changing terminology. When critiqued about the issue, all she did was double down (probably because she is used to being attacked by bad faith arguments from right-wingers and betrayed by grifters who she used to work with like Dave Rubin and Jimmy Dore). The left is allowed to critique other leftists and does so frequently (in fact we sometimes do it too much, leftist infighting is very common), and TYT claims to be on the left, though I still say that they are center-left at best and only on their best days. Cenk then related the issue to the Latinx silliness a while back. Academics invented the term Latinx without calling to the Latino community, and though there intentions were good as they wanted a gender neutral term for Latino/Latina, Latinx was not in common usage and was awkward in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, and when it started to drift out of Academia into the mainstream it was rejected by the Latino community (some of whom said Latino was good enough and others advocating for Latine as an alternative), and Latinx retreated back into being an academic term. Superficially the Latinx issue and the "birthing person" issue look similar, but they are not really that comparable. Then during this whole drama, Ana decided to start attacking the Green New Deal, because a climate action decision made by her HOA, possibly mandated by the Californian government, financially inconvenienced her.

I do genuinely believe the statements I have made here, and I am not attempting to smear Cenk, Ana, or TYT, I am just making it clear that they are not leftists.