MSNBC-of-the-internet The Young Turks has had a rough go of it lately.
Recently, the starlet of the show, Ana Kasparian, expressed the allegedly transphobic preference that she be referred to as a woman rather than a “birthing person” and that her vagina be called a vagina instead of a “bonus hole” — as a UK charity terms it so as not to offend trans men with vaginas who don’t want to acknowledge that they have vaginas lest it wreck their fragile psychology by forcing them to reckon with objective reality.
This is only the latest variety of scandal to engulf TYT. The network has also been questioning the “criminal justice reform” championed by the Social Justice™ left since the 2020 loss of George Floyd and the ensuing “mostly peaceful” “Summer of Love” protests, which likewise does not go over well with their ultra-progressive audience.
Cenk Uygur, the anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American immigrant proprietor of the network that he named after the Turkish government that committed the Armenian genocide, took to the airwaves to try to clear the air by espousing something he calls the “core principles of TYT.”
In it, he tries to convince his gullible audience — which no one with any analytical skills would believe having watched his horrendous Social Justice™ extremism in action for all of these years — that he actually favors open dialogue, nuance, and freedom of expression.
This plea is not going to assuage any of the transgender or BLM extremists who take any criticism of letting murderers out on bail with no cash or calling vaginas “bonus holes” as “genocidal rhetoric” or whatever.
TYT’s newfangled alleged commitment to free speech on their part is, of course, nonsense. TYT is notorious for accusing all of its opponents — even ones on the left — such as Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan, Gleen Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Aaron Mate, etc. of being “Russian assets,” “right-wingers,” “grifters,” etc. for disagreeing with them on transing children or starting WWIII with Russia.
They — Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian — fostered the environment they are now decrying. Smearing everyone not totally aligned with their views until this very week is their entire project.
Frankenstein is eating its creator. The TYT audience is not amenable to free speech because crushing and smearing political opponents has been the TYT ethos for literal decades at this point.
When you foster delusional Maoism as your guiding doctrine — with your mostly Zoomer and Millennial audience playing the role of Red Guard — in the arena of public debate, this is what you get when you try to backtrack an inch by injecting a smidgen of moderation into your rhetoric. Made your bed, lie in it, etc.
This is a phenomenon called “audience capture,” the dangers of which are explored in the Substack article, “The Perils of Audience Capture: How Influencers Become Brainwashed by Their Audiences“:
Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it’s not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it’s actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person’s identity with one custom-made for the audience.
Pandering to the interests of the audience by espousing a particular narrative and only that narrative creates an insular cult-like echo chamber in which any fact contradicting the official mythology is taboo. Any member who broaches unapproved arguments against the enforced consensus is ostracized and demonized. It is a pernicious trap that takes conscious diligence to avoid falling into.
