Cenk Kadir Uygur, presidential candidate and founder of the “progressive” (loosely defined) online news show The Young Turks, recently wrote a book. He had promised to write it for years and even started pre-selling copies of it last year – prompting many of his own fans to speculate about whether it was coming at all.
Cenk delivered the book, ultimately, last month, but sales have not been going splendidly.
After promising it would hit the best sellers list, his book is currently ranked #120,008 in the Amazon Kindle store, behind about 120,000 books that are better performing. It’s actually #7 in the “Radical Thought” category — a paltry turnout for a YouTube host who purportedly has north of 5 million subscribers. (I believe that figure is inflated by YouTube — a story for another day.)
So he apparently decided to up the ante with a sham presidential run, despite the fact that he immigrated to the United States in 1978 and is therefore explicitly disqualified from the office of the presidency by the Constitution. It’s right there in black and white; the only remedy would be a Constitutional amendment, and, for some reason, I find it hard to imagine Republican members of Congress going along with an accommodation for a Democrat online news host who has repeatedly expressed hatred for America, and white people in particular, on air.
Related: Foreign-Born Social Justice™ Bigot Cenk Uygur Announces Democrat Presidential Bid
Via Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution:
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
Anyway, the presidential run is going about as poorly as the book sales.
Via The Nevada Independent (emphasis added):
Progressive political commentator Cenk Uygur, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Turkey, attempted to file for Nevada’s Democratic presidential primary using an altered form that crossed out the words “natural born” before “citizen” — a change that caused state officials to reject his application…
As of the close of candidate filing on Monday, Biden will face off against self-help author Marianne Williamson and 12 other largely unknown candidates in the state’s February presidential primary.
Uygur, who immigrated from Turkey to the U.S. in 1978, has said he believes the Constitution’s requirements to qualify for the presidency — that a person be a “natural born Citizen” — would not disqualify him from running. He said he believed the case would end up being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
That differs from typical legal interpretations of the clause, which have described it as meaning someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth without needing to go through a naturalization process.
Uygur filed to run on Oct. 11, but on his declaration of candidacy, crossed out references to the Constitution’s qualifications for the presidency clause and replaced “natural born” citizen with a handwritten “naturalized” citizen.”
To summarize, Cenk, a lawyer who graduated from an esteemed Ivy League law school, figured that simply crossing our “natural born” on a government form and replacing it with “naturalized” would be sufficient to supersede the law as enshrined in the Constitution.
