The Original Young Turk

In 1981, Rod Stewart released a song about a couple named Billy and Patti, two young lovers desperate for change and running away from home with but a dollar between them, trying and make a better life together. Stewart called it “Young Turks,” and when I first heard it on MTV at the age of 10, I was captivated by its rebellious energy.

Interestingly, the song does not tell us how things work out for Billy and Patti. It ends with them finding paradise closed, with Billy writing back to Patti’s parents to try and explain why they ran away together, and then with Patti giving birth to a 10-pound baby boy. We’re left to guess how things worked out for ourselves.

In England, “Young Turk” is a popular phrase for a young person who pushes impatiently for change, and though most British people probably don’t know it, the phrase comes from an actual political movement in Turkey, during the First World War.

In the early twentieth century, the Young Turks promised to modernize the Ottoman Empire. The movement’s Committee of Union and Progress sidelined the sultan as supreme ruler and took dictatorial power in 1913. The movement was technically secularist, but retained and made good use of most Islamic prejudices against non-Muslims while mixing them with the idea of pan-Turkish nationalism. As the war dragged on, and an attempt to conquer Russian-controlled Armenia failed spectacularly, both the government and its exhausted, frozen, humiliated soldiers looked for a scapegoat. In revenge, the Young Turk-dominated government organized the deportation and destruction of the empire’s Armenian Christians. Families were driven from their homes and marched toward the deserts of Syria. Some were massacred; others died of hunger, thirst, disease, and exposure. Many of those who survived the death marches, women and young girls in particular, were raped and enslaved.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that at least 664,000 and perhaps as many as 1.2 million Armenians died in what became known as the Armenian Genocide.

The actual Young Turks were not the Billy and Patti of whom Rod Stewart sang. The actual Young Turks were genocidal monsters.

I don’t blame Rod Stewart for naming a song “Young Turks.” I’m sure he had no clue what that phrase might mean to an Armenian, but what do you say when Cenk Uygur, who is from Turkey, names his media network The Young Turks? 

Of all the names Uygur could have chosen, why did he pick that one? Perhaps it will help if we better understand just who Cenk Uygur is.

Cenk’s father, Doğan Uygur, grew up near Kilis, in southeastern Turkey, close to the Syrian border. Doğan’s father died when Doğan was an infant. His family had debts and farmed olives and grapes by hand. Sometimes a neighbor’s mule would help Doğan and his family, but often they had to carry the heavy containers of olives by hand as well. 

Doğan grew up with no electricity, and his workday began, according to Cenk, at four in the morning. This would have been a hard, grueling life, and I can imagine Doğan looking out across the barren fields, beyond the olive trees in which he toiled, toward the Syrian desert where so many Armenians were killed just 20-odd years before he was born.

Cenk recounts an uncle asking Doğan whether or not he liked working the farm. Doğan did not, but he was a remarkably hard worker, so his uncle thought he had real potential to do something more meaningful with his life. That uncle encouraged Doğan to leave the farm and head to İstanbul. 

Doğan took his uncle’s advice, moved to İstanbul, earned a scholarship, and studied mechanical engineering. Upon graduation, Doğan founded Enternasyonal Makina Sanayi, a successful machine manufacturing company. Somewhere along the way, Doğan married Nuket Yavaşça, and then, in 1970, Cenk was born as the second of two children.

As a child walking with his parents through İstanbul, Cenk claims to have seen a small mosque bearing his mother’s maiden name. His father went inside and was told that a Yavaşça ancestor had been the Ottoman admiral at the conquest of Constantinople behind the famous maneuver of moving ships overland past the city’s defenses in 1453.

These two origin stories, as told by Cenk Uygur, tell us a great deal about how Cenk sees his background, and through it, how he sees himself. One branch of his family may hail back to a famous Ottoman admiral, and the other grew up doing manual labor on a farm without electricity. 

In 1978, when Cenk was eight, his family moved to the United States. About two weeks after the move, Cenk recalls waking up in the middle of the night sobbing. His father found Cenk at the top of the stairs and put an arm around him. Cenk wanted to see his friends and family from İstanbul again, but Doğan told him they were in New Jersey to stay. Doğan then built a commercial real estate business called Doğan Uygur & Associates, which, by Cenk’s account, grew so big it eventually employed “a ton of people.”

Cenk graduated from high school in East Brunswick, studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and earned a law degree from Columbia. He practiced law before turning to talk radio and television, financed primarily by his father. 

In 1991, while Cenk was still in college, Cenk’s sister, Sedef, gave birth to Hasan Piker and moved back to Turkey to raise Hasan in İstanbul and Ankara. Piker calls his upbringing “fairly affluent.” His parents sent him to public school, in part to ensure that he knew children who were not rich, and he spent summers with his grandparents in the United States, eventually staying to attend college.

In 1991, the same year Hasan was born, Cenk Uygur published an article in Penn’s Daily Pennsylvanian disputing that the Ottoman destruction of the Armenian population was genocide (an article which has since been removed from the outlet’s main website.). In 1999, he argued the point again in a letter to Salon. 

Cenk Uygur was proud of his Turkish heritage and refused to believe that the real Young Turks—not Billy and Patti from the Rod Stewart song, but Mehmed Talât Paşa, İsmail Enver Paşa, and Ahmed Djemal (Cemâl) Paşa—had done anything wrong. These three men—the “Three Pashas,” as they were called—planned, organized, and carried out the murder of as many as 1.2 million Armenian civilians. Estimates for the percentage of Turkish Armenians killed go as high as 80%.

In 2002, Uygur commemorated the Young Turks by naming his new satellite radio show after them, and over time his show became one of the largest independent networks on the American left, making Cenk one of the more recognizable faces of progressive political commentary.

Cenk claims he named his group “Young Turks” based on the English idiom for a rebellious reformer, with no reference to the Armenian Genocide, but that would be like a German moving from Nuremberg and forming a broadcast network called “the Nazis” while claiming not to know what an actual Nazi is. I can believe that Rod Stewart did not know the full history of that name, but Cenk Uygur knew exactly who the historical Young Turks were, having written twice to deny the genocide before picking that name for his network.

Piker went to Rutgers and, after graduation in 2013, joined his uncle at The Young Turks. He started on the business side, but, by 2016, Piker had his own program, The Breakdown. That same year, Cenk publicly rescinded his earlier statements about the Armenian Genocide. He said he had mistaken himself for a historian. He later acknowledged the genocide. The network he founded, however, retained the name the Young Turks anyway.

If Cenk Uygur had a shred of decency, he would change his network’s name.

Piker meanwhile began streaming on Twitch in 2018 while still at The Young Turks. The network gave him a show called Agitprop, and then, in 2020, he left to stream full-time on Twitch. Agitprop is short for agitation and propaganda. The show was explicitly billed as an examination of post-capitalist ideas and was designed to do exactly what the name says: spread propaganda and agitate America’s youth.

Cenk Uygur now acknowledges the Armenian genocide and condemns the Holocaust, yet, in an October 2025 discussion, he used both atrocities to argue that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. After saying that the Holocaust and the pogroms against Jews were “disgusting,” he immediately then defended comparing Israeli soldiers to the SS. He invoked the Armenian dead, acknowledged that Turks had slaughtered them, and immediately returned back to his charge that Jewish history was being used to shield Israel while Israel supposedly does the same thing.

Cenk Uygur can admit that the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide were both real—but only to use both events as cudgels against Israel.

Hasan Piker made a related move on Pod Save America. While arguing that Israeli politics had shifted rightward, he cited the Armenian Genocide as an example of what Turkish nationalism had taught him to deny. He said the genocide was real, then turned directly back to his description of Israel as an apartheid state that the United States must restrain. Piker has repeatedly accused Israel of genocide—almost as a way of reducing the Armenian Genocide to just an amateur roadside gang murder.

Genocide is a word with a definition. It involves the intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.

Israel says its objective is to defeat Hamas, and it contacts civilians with evacuation instructions by phone, text, and leaflet before operations. It also forgoes strikes when it feels the likely civilian toll would be too high, and, by May of 2024, Israel reported facilitating the entry of more than 380,000 tons of food and 23,000 tons of medical supplies into Gaza. This was something the government did despite livid protest from many Israelis who felt that the population which had carried out and rejoiced at the massacre of October 7—itself arguably an act of attempted genocide—was being rewarded, coddled, and encouraged to continue the war.

Israel could commit genocide in Gaza if it wanted to, but it sends troops in to hunt Hamas militants door to door and room to room instead, putting its own soldiers in harm’s way to kill as few civilians as possible.

Hamas, in the meantime, uses human shields, hiding behind the very civilian population it is supposed to govern and forcing Israel to kill as many civilians as Hamas can manage. Hamas has repeatedly been caught sending civilians toward Israeli aid vehicles only to then fire through the civilians toward the IDF soldiers, forcing the IDF soldiers to return fire, and then blaming Israel for the deaths. Hamas hides command centers under hospitals and puts rocket launchers on apartment buildings.

Hamas leaders have openly bragged that they love death more than Israelis love life, which lays bare the difference between a force that treats civilian deaths as a cost to be avoided and one whose leaders glorify it. Even by Hamas’ own, questionable numbers, Israel has killed one militant for every civilian, which is the lowest ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare. Hamas knows that Westerners are soft, ideologically brainwashed, and completely ignorant of the realities of war, and uses civilians as shields specifically to weaken Western resolve. This has been so successful as of late in turning the world against Israel that it threatens to normalize the use of civilians as human shields worldwide.

Think of what the future of warfare will look like if using civilians as shields becomes normalized.

Both Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur have dismissed the use of civilian shields as an explanation for civilian deaths in Gaza; Uygur explicitly rejected Piers Morgan’s claim about Hamas using hospitals to hide command centers. This is in spite of the fact that Hamas brags about the practice. In a 2014 Al-Aqsa TV statement, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri praised civilians standing in front of Israeli airstrikes to protect homes and called on Palestinians to continue the practice. A NATO Strategic Communications Centre report quotes him saying, “I believe this strategy is proving itself.” The report also records an earlier Hamas spokesman saying civilians would continue to “serve as human shields.” 

Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker are willfully spreading propaganda they know is not true—or Agitprop, as Piker’s former show called it—to propagandize and agitate the public against Israel.

What is happening in Gaza is tragic, but it is Hamas committing the atrocities—not Israel. Calling Israel guilty of “genocide” is absurd. 

In 2019, while discussing American policy in the Middle East, Piker declared that “America deserved 9/11, dude.” Piker said that Hamas was “a thousand times better” than Israel. He has said he has no issue with Hezbollah and agreed to a comparison between a Houthi figure and Anne Frank. 

More recently, Piker told Axios that, “pound for pound,” the United States had committed more terrorism than al-Qaeda. Asked about his praise for Máo Zédōng, he called Máo “a great man of history” and described deaths from famine and mismanagement as mere “excesses.” Piker has denounced capitalism and said of landlords, “Kill those motherf—ers and murder those motherf—ers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their f—ing red capitalist blood, dude.”

Not to be outdone by his nephew, as Cenk Uygur wrote in 2025, “It is not antisemitic to say Israel controls Congress.” Promoting a 2026 interview, he claimed that “94% of Congress works for Israel” and that American presidents had been bribed by the Israeli lobby. During a July 2025 debate, Uygur called Israel “a genocidal terrorist state that thinks it owns America.” He said AIPAC had bought the U.S. government and concluded, “We’re occupied. We’re all Palestinians now.” In that same debate, he compared Israeli leaders to Germans rationalizing what they did to Jews. In 2026, he also described Israeli actions in Lebanon as following “Nazi logic.”

None of this is true. Uygur and Piker know these allegations are false. They spread the lies anyway.

And really the fault does not end with Uygur and Piker, as it also lies with the public at large. Uygur and Piker are nothing more than modern snake-oil salesmen, spreading lies for money. The real culprits are the investors who flood them with cash, the TV personalities who put them on the air, the politicians who share stages with them, and the audiences who tune in daily to listen to their drivel.

Falsehoods sell. Today, anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli, and anti-American lies are en vogue, and Cenk Uygur has been incredibly successful in America as a result. By 2017, The Young Turks reported more than 30,000 paying subscribers and 200 million monthly video views, raising $20 million from investors to expand. Celebrity Net Worth has Uygur personally worth $10 million.

Piker has an audience of around 3 million, and Celebrity Net Worth estimated his fortune to also be around $10 million. In 2021, Piker bought a Los Angeles home for $2.7 million. Piker told Wired that one of his first splurges after earning money on Twitch was leasing a Porsche.

There is nothing wrong with either man becoming wealthy in America. I commend people for doing well, as these men have, and as did Cenk’s father.

Doğan Uygur came here hoping his family would have opportunities they could never find in Turkey. He left a farm without electricity, earned an education, built a business, and brought his family to America where he built a second business even more successful than his first one. His son went to Wharton and Columbia, then built one of the largest independent media companies on the political left. Doğan’s grandson became wealthy speaking to millions of Americans from a room in Los Angeles. Doğan and his family have done remarkably well in America, and he knows it: the subtitle of Doğan’s 2020 memoir is “Stories and Life Lessons from an American Dream Come True.”

Doğan is also a proud father, though, and one with some of the same faults as his son. The actual title of his memoir is The Original Young Turk.