a future to believe in

Bernie Sanders endorses a Californian who defends crude sex ratings of women


By Michael Finnegan Staff Writer
6-7 minutes

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Cenk Uygur, host and co-founder of “The Young Turks” online talk show, defended the Harvard University men’s soccer team for rating the sexual appeal of female students.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Bernie Sanders endorsed a California congressional candidate Thursday with a long history of making crude and degrading comments about women and provocative statements about Jews, Muslims and other groups.
The Democratic presidential candidate said Cenk Uygur, founder and co-host of “The Young Turks” online talk show, is “a voice that we desperately need in Congress” to fill the seat of former Rep. Katie Hill of Santa Clarita.
In one episode in 2013, Uygur ranked women on a scale of 1 to 10 on how likely men would be to let them perform oral sex on them.
Uygur also defended the Harvard University men’s soccer team in 2016 for ranking the sexual appeal of female students on a scale of 1 to 10 on a widely shared “scouting report,” including explicit descriptions of potential sex acts with the women.
“We’ve been doing it for as long as humanity has existed, so they put it in a Google doc — not guilty,” said Uygur, who has promoted Sanders on his program.
In 2007, Uygur used the n-word multiple times in a show about Duane “Dog” Chapman after the celebrity bounty hunter used the racial slur.
Uygur, 49, described himself in a telephone interview as a champion for women’s rights who should not be criticized for having “frank conversations about sex” on his show. The problem with the Harvard team’s appraisals of the women, he said, was not that they rated their sex potential; it was that the roster became public.
“I’m not going to be the thought police and police what their private comments were,” he said.
He also said “The Young Turks” used to have a policy to use the n-word epithet when quoting racists in order to mock them, but stopped doing it after complaints from black activists.
Sanders spokeswoman Anna Bahr did not respond to email inquiries about Uygur’s remarks.
Will Rodriguez-Kennedy, president of California Young Democrats, a group that backs Sanders, called on the Vermont senator to withdraw his endorsement of Uygur.
“We think that he doesn’t necessarily reflect the movement that Sen. Sanders has built,” he said.
Sanders called Uygur “one of the outstanding progressive journalists in our country.
“He has shown enormous courage in standing up to the greed and power of the corporate elite, and has spent his entire life fighting for justice and the needs of the working people of our country,” he said.
For Sanders, Uygur’s derogatory remarks about women could prove embarrassing. The senator apologized in January after accusations emerged of sexism, sexual harassment and pay discrimination by male supervisors in his 2016 presidential campaign.


Sanders initially told CNN that he’d been unaware of complaints in his 2016 campaign. “I was a little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case,” he said.
Days later, amid mounting criticism, he was more forceful. “What they experienced was absolutely unacceptable and certainly not what a progressive campaign or any campaign should be about,” he said.
Last week, the Sanders campaign severed ties with staff member Darius Khalil Gordon after the Washington Free Beacon published anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs that it said were from his Twitter feed.
A former Republican, Uygur is now one of the Democrats vying in California’s March 3 election to represent the state’s 25th Congressional District, which covers Simi Valley, Porter Ranch, Santa Clarita, Palmdale and part of Lancaster. Hill, a Democrat, resigned in November amid accusations that she’d had affairs with congressional and campaign staff members.
California’s Democratic establishment has lined up behind one of Uygur’s rivals, Assemblywoman Christy Smith of Santa Clarita. Her supporters include Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Republicans in the race include former Rep. Steve Knight, who was ousted last year by Hill, and George Papadopoulos, an advisor to President Trump’s 2016 campaign who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the Russia scandal.
Uygur, a Turkish immigrant who has a law degree from Columbia University, is a former MSNBC host.
Many of his most provocative remarks have been compiled in video snippets posted on Twitter in recent weeks by a New York Democratic activist, M. Mendoza Ferrer, who is unaffiliated with any presidential campaign. She said it seemed Uygur had built his online platform denigrating women and others, and now that he’s a Democrat running for Congress it bothered her that his audience of mainly young men was tuning in.
“Once this stuff came to light, anybody would be sort of horrified,” she said. “I was horrified.”
The clips she unearthed included a 2012 segment of “The Young Turks” in which he said conservative Orthodox Jewish men and Muslim women in heavy religious attire were “wasting their lives.”
Uygur, who was raised Muslim and now describes himself as agnostic, said Thursday that he was referring to fundamentalists, and he’s offended they think he “will rot in hell.”
“I believe the things they believe are not correct, yes,” he said. “If they want to spend their whole lives following an ideology that I don’t believe is correct, that’s on them.”