The Young Turks are probably best known for their ‘smugness to meltdown’ video back in November. Well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it:
It epitomises the breathtaking lack of awareness of the mainstream media, and the wannabe mainstream media of 2016, in a distillation of smugness, choked back tears, and tantrums (and by the look of it, this trend looks set to continue unabated in 2017). The mainly YouTube-based Young Turks epitomise all of the worst tropes of regressive left media. Culturally irrelevant, dwelling in a fringe false reality, and completely out of touch with the sensibilities of 99.999% of the population.
The founder and figurehead of the Young Turks is Cenk Uygar. You can tell a lot about someone based on who they have irreconcilable differences with, and who thinks they have a few Roos loose in the top paddock. For Cenk Uygar, his most telling critics are Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. Cenk thinks that the religion of peace is no more violent than any other faith, and Dave took issue with his blind support of an ideology that would love to walk the gay host of the Rubin Report off a building. The religion of peace won out over gay rights over at the Young Turks, and Dave understandably chose the door at an organisation that by default had chosen the roof for his kind. Joe Rogan also takes issue with the guy. Keep in mind that these are two of the most level-headed, reasonable, and rational people on the planet. People who will at least entertain most points of view. And it’s not just them. The consensus on Cenk Uygar from rational people seems to be fairly consistent across the board.
The Young Turks under Cenk Uygar are an ego-driven organisation who are always extremely jealous of the success of more genuine media activists. Credit is only given begrudgingly to like-minded organisations by their God-Emperor Cenk Uygar (a man with an ego easily bigger than the President-elect), and any organisation that deviates from their rigid groupthink is given no quarter whatsoever. And this isn’t just conservative media: Cenk and co. clearly even have disdain for soft-left media that they don’t consider progressive or militant enough.
So I read and watched with interest when both The Young Turks and the similarly partisan Huffington Post got right into the spirit of Fake News by alleging that citizen journalist James O’Keefe is attempting to sow chaos at the Trump inauguration. For those who are familiar with O’Keefe, these allegations can’t be justified in any way, shape, or form. Even the mistake of making them cannot be justified in any way shape or form. This story is the textbook definition of fake news and speak volumes about the integrity (or lack-thereof) of both news outlets.
The assertion made by the group Americans Take Action and the media who picked up the story is that O’Keefe is trying to cause anarchy on Inauguration Day, as if somehow this would be advantageous to him or the right in any way. They either miss the point of what he’s doing entirely, or are so lacking in self-awareness that they don’t understand that giving militant progressives enough rope to hang themselves is what James O’Keefe does. To suggest that he is genuinely invested in causing mayhem at Trump’s inauguration is as crazy and disingenuous as suggesting that conservative prankster Mark Dice is serious when he does his ‘man on the street’ interviews.
As is so often the case, progressives rely on emotion while ignoring the facts. The Young Turks, Huffington Post, and ATA report upon the incident as if Project Veritas were doing something highly secretive and illegal, i.e., plotting acts of domestic terror.
Umm… no… not even close. O’Keefe was filming the whole thing as well, indicating that he planned a very public reveal. Hardly the actions of somebody planning wholesale anarchy and the closing of bridges. Cenk further broadens the incredulity of his report by scoffing at the notion that any progressive or anyone else under the progressive umbrella could ever possibly be violent or be coerced into closing a bridge. Heaven forbid. That’s just preposterous. Clearly the Young Turks missed this, this, this, and of course this among scores of other even more serious acts of violence by leftist protesters.
Obviously most news outlets have their own take on the facts, which is why you’ll see a left-leaning and a more conservative one interpreting exactly the same set of facts in wildly different ways. But when news is reported upon with all the key facts completely disregarded, as the Young Turks and Huffington Post have done in this case, it casts doubt upon everything else they’ve ever reported. The Huffington Post has a long track record of being fake news. These are the people that reported on the Trump campaign in their entertainment section. Likewise, the Young Turks called the election for Hillary before the ballots were in. Sites like Brietbart and XYZ provided more accurate election coverage than either of them. Infowars, the butt of all progressive jokes, more accurately reported the news than these organisations. Let that sink in. With their Project Veritas coverage, Huffington Post and the Young Turks have now become bona fide, card-carrying members of the Fake News Collective.