While I may have many valid criticisms of Cenk, I respect the fact that he admits when he’s wrong, and more importantly, he will stick to his “guns” when he believes he’s right, and will not step back until that point when he realizes he’s wrong.
Despite the fact that Cenk is clearly guessing about many things about the things that the progressive community needs to do or what lies ahead for them, Cenk comes closer than anyone else to being right. In fact, out of sheer luck, Cenk came SO close to starting the progressive movement we need, but he turned away because he could not see what he did right and he could only see what everyone involved was doing wrong.
What happened in the 2024 US election was foreseeable, and if you look at what happened, you can actually see that Cenk was SO close to pinpointing what was going wrong.
It’s why I stick around the TYT community, when by how I am treated at times I should say “Frak YOU all! I’m outa here!” One of these days I expect Cenk to ask “Hey, how do we really figure out what’s wrong, what we’re doing keeps failing.”
I am going to say: “Hey Cenk! Have you heard about this ‘Science’ thing? They got this neat stuff called ‘Academic Research’ and this other stuff called ‘Historical Analysis’ and all kinds of things like ‘Psychological Research’? I bet if we use this ‘Science’ thing, we could figure it out, or make a pretty good educated guess.”
Or Elon Musk will give me a billion dollars. Dunno which is more likely.
I appreciate your insights, @vanidackp, but sometimes the way you frame your points can come across as dismissive to the rest of us who are also deeply invested in this cause. Keeping an inclusive tone would be great so we all feel encouraged to contribute.
I think everyone here is doing their best, and none of us have all the answers. If we each take responsibility for one research area, we could really pull together something powerful. Since you’ve put so much thought into research-driven strategies, maybe we could turn these into a concrete initiative—like a research committee or a resource hub? That way, we can keep building on your insights in a way that benefits everyone.
I believe we’re all on board with bringing more research-backed strategies into our work. How about we start implementing some of these ideas directly instead of revisiting the same critique?
@mggbwmn8 I’m not trying to be dismissive. I’m deeply frustrated because going in the right direction is going to take a lot of people working on it, a lot of resources and money, and some really good planning that collectively comes from the movement.
As I’ve done a lot of research, I can see this and point out a lot, but when it comes to a collective movement, one person means very little to effective, substantial change. Many people have to collectively see the right direction, and decide it’s where we need to go.
It’s like I am a droplet in a wave of water, and I am trying to get the wave to get to where it needs to go. It’s never going to be something I am ever going to be able to accomplish on my own, but if I start yelling at the other droplets, maybe some will catch on, and if other droplets see where the wave needs to go (perhaps my estimate is off) they start yelling at loud as they can to get the other droplets to go there, and so on until the wave goes where we need it to go.
There will be many leaders in this movement, but I will not be one of them. My patience for nonsense has died, and I will not accommodate fools. But when those leaders need advice about where to go next, or adversarial factions try to subsume or destroy them and/or this movement, I will be there to help protect it.
He seemed to spend as much time (if not more) calling out things other people got wrong, but I respect that he had to go in order of his thoughts, and his effort to try to go over one or two things he got wrong seemed sincere.
I’m disappointed that he called out called out conspiracy theorizing over Republicans stealing (or post-election pushing back against the results of) the vote as something that has now been proven wrong. Two things:
The Republicans won the election and so did not need to invoke any of their plans to resist a Democratic victory. This does not prove, in any way, that such plans did not exist. Cenk’s reasoning here is uncharacteristically bad.
Now that TYT has some time on its hands, and has raised funds on the back of their election coverage, it would be great if they would do more to investigate the now-well-established practice of purging legitimate voters pre-election, and investigate if provisional same-day ballots are being counted properly. In general, ongoing coverage of the integrity of the voting system should be something that every investigative and analytical news organization does, but the clear victory of the Republicans in the recent Trump/Harris race does not somehow delete the need to understand if some legitimate votes are being denied under cover of looking to eliminate illegitimate votes. If TYT does not have the resources to investigate these matters on its own, it certainly does have the resources to make a few contacts and invite world-class analysts on the show from academia and elsewhere who could speak to the hard matters here.
I am not (at all) saying that the Democrats would have won, but I am saying that there is evidence that Republicans did succeed in denying legitimate registered voters the right to vote (my main information coming from Palast’s Vigilantes Inc documentary). If he hasn’t been already, then it is past time that Palast be interviewed on TYT, and if not him, then someone who can speak with authority to the ongoing problem of Republicans purging legitimate voters.
Please let’s remember that one of the actions that Trump took early in his previous administration was hiring Kobach out of Kansas to work on Trump’s “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity”.
Kobach focused on purging voters, including many legitimate voters. He did not seem to care if he flagged many false positives.
The commission seemed to be disbanded without accomplishing the system damage that Trump was seeking, but this helps show how long and hard Republicans have been working to prevent legitimate registrations and vote-counts.
Establishment Democrats by and large have not done a great job in shining a light on this issue. I think it is up to organizations like TYT to take more initiative to look into it and/or interview those who are looking into it.