AOC Doesn’t Owe Marjorie Taylor Greene a Damn Thing (and Cenk Uygur Knows It)

The Anti-Establishment Industrial Complex is dead wrong about bridge-building with white nationalists.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

I woke up this Sunday morning fully prepared to do absolutely nothing of political consequence. I had already written my articles for Saturday and Sunday — they were done, queued, finished. My wife and I had plans — brunch, maybe some television, the kind of deliberately unproductive Sunday that a man who spends most of his week dissecting the slow-motion collapse of American political sanity has genuinely earned. I was going to let the news cycle spin without me for one morning. The work was done. I had made peace with this decision.

Then I turned on YouTube.

Jesse Dollemore and his wife, Brittany Page — a Marine veteran turned political commentator and a licensed therapist who grew up escaping a white supremacist household in Idaho, two people whose credentials for this particular conversation are frankly more relevant than most — were playing a clip. I recognized the face before I recognized the voice. I braced myself the way you brace yourself before a car accident you can see coming but cannot stop. And sure enough, the YouTube gods delivered what they always deliver when Cenk Uygur opens his mouth: a master class in confident wrongness.

I keep aspirin on deck for exactly these moments. Listening to Cenk’s fuzzy logic is a cardiovascular event waiting to happen. The man has a gift — and I do not use that word lightly — for making arguments that sound like political analysis but function more like a stress test for people who actually read. My blood pressure does not negotiate with The Young Turks. It simply rises. The mere sight of him is enough to make me reach for the medicine cabinet.

But here we are. Again. Because Cenk Uygur looked directly into a camera and called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “terrible,” “deeply counterproductive,” and “selfish” for refusing to build coalitions with Marjorie Taylor Greene. He said her position — that aligning the left with documented white nationalists does not serve the movement — was “exactly what Israeli supporters want.” He called it a betrayal of the anti-war cause. I watched it twice. I am still not over it.

I have written about Cenk Uygur before. Several times, across multiple platforms, over the course of more than a year. Not once have I written about something good or praiseworthy that he has said or done. That is not because I have been searching for reasons to dislike him. It is because he keeps giving me new ones.

Cenk moves in circles that include some people I genuinely respect. Don Lemon. Brian Tyler Cohen. David Pakman. These are men whose work I follow and whose judgment I take seriously. The fact that they have maintained cordial professional relationships with Cenk says something about their capacity for grace that I, frankly, do not share. I met Cenk briefly at Politicon in Pasadena back in 2016 — a fleeting introduction in the way that political conventions produce fleeting introductions. I was never a fan of his debate style, which has always struck me as volume mistaken for substance. But debate style alone is not a reason to write someone off entirely. What I cannot extend the same generosity toward is a documented pattern of behavior that stretches across years and has consequences for real people.

Cenk Uygur is, at his core, a Bernie Sanders dead-ender who has never fully processed what his faction’s behavior cost this country. During the 2016 primary, The Young Turks’ anti-Hillary Clinton sentiment was not a whisper — it was a sustained, high-decibel campaign that treated Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as functionally equivalent choices for people of conscience. I am not entirely certain whether Cenk voted for Clinton in the general election. What I am certain of is that he was one of the loudest voices in a movement that made “Bernie or Bust” feel like a principled stand rather than the political malpractice it turned out to be.

The numbers on this are not ambiguous. According to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — a survey of roughly 50,000 people, not a Twitter poll — 12 percent of Bernie Sanders primary voters cast their ballot for Donald Trump in the 2016 general election. That is more than 1 in 10. And when you add the voters who went third party or simply stayed home, more than 1 in 5 Sanders primary voters did not vote for Hillary Clinton. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — the three states that swung the election — the number of Sanders-to-Trump voters exceeded Trump’s margin of victory in each of them. I do not argue with people anymore when they tell me that TYT’s relentless pro-Bernie posturing and institutional hatred of Hillary Clinton was a meaningful contributor to that outcome. The math is right there. The conclusion is not a stretch.

This is the man now lecturing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about political strategy and coalition building.

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Let us steelman Cenk’s argument for exactly as long as it deserves, which is one paragraph. His position is that the Republican versus Democrat divide is a manufactured distraction, that Marjorie Taylor Greene has demonstrated genuine opposition to the war machine and the Epstein-adjacent power structures, and that progressives who refuse to find common ground with her on those specific issues are letting ideological purity get in the way of actual results. He said AOC’s characterization of Greene as a white nationalist was “terrible” and accused her of “splitting the anti-war movement.”

Here is what AOC actually said, speaking at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics: “I personally do not trust someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a proven bigot and antisemite, on the issues of what is good for Gazans and Israelis. I don’t think that it benefits our movement, in that instance, to align the left with white nationalists. I don’t think it serves us.”

So yes — I suppose AOC is the childish one here. How dare she refuse to extend good faith to a documented bigot and antisemite who spent six years making her professional life a harassment campaign. Shame on her for having standards. Shame on her for understanding that the credibility of a movement is determined in part by who you are willing to stand next to. Shame on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for knowing exactly who Marjorie Taylor Greene is because she has been living with the evidence longer than any of us. SMH.

I have written about Cenk Uygur four times now. In each piece I named the behavior with as much precision as the evidence warranted. I called out his asymmetric outrage — the double standard by which Kamala Harris courting Liz Cheney was a moral catastrophe but Cenk spending two and a half hours on Tucker Carlson’s couch was brave independent journalism. I named the Peter Thiel-adjacent funding. I gave him the rhetorical benefit of the doubt that his conduct had not earned.

I am done doing that. After several pieces dancing around the full conclusion, I have to just come right out and say it. The evidence is now so overwhelming, the pattern so consistent, the behavior so thoroughly documented across so many years and so many contexts, that I cannot in good conscience draw any other conclusion. Cenk Uygur does not merely negotiate with white supremacists. At this point, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and hangs out with white supremacists like a duck — it might just be a white supremacist duck.

The receipts are not hard to find. In 2017, Cenk was forced out of Justice Democrats — the organization he co-founded, the one that launched AOC’s political career — after the discovery of blog posts his own organization described as “sexist and racist.” At least a dozen women’s, LGBTQ, and Democratic organizations denounced his past comments as sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Islam, and antisemitic. Bernie Sanders retracted his congressional endorsement within 24 hours of making it. In 2013 — not 2003, but 2013, when Cenk was in his forties — he ran a segment on The Young Turks rating women by how attractive they would need to be for a man to let them perform oral sex. That same year he used the n-word repeatedly on air. In 2015 he hosted former Ku Klux Klan leader and neo-Nazi David Duke on The Young Turks in a segment about Jewish control of institutions. A Black journalist named Andrew Jerell Jones filed a racial discrimination complaint against TYT, alleging that Cenk told him complaining about racial bias was a fireable offense and that he should shut the fuck up and deal.

Then there is Ben Dixon, a TYT contributor who quit publicly and on principle — on a rival platform, on camera — because TYT was platforming people who, in his words, wouldn’t hesitate to take away his rights. He called out Cenk and Ana Kasparian by name. He didn’t want out quietly. He wanted people to know exactly why he was leaving. And then there is Mondale Robinson, the Mayor of Enfield, North Carolina, who quit TYT live on the Benjamin Dixon Show. He said he could not be part of a network normalizing conversations with people who wouldn’t hesitate to strip away his rights as a Black man. He named Cenk. He named Ana. He made sure the record was clear. Two Black men. Both looked at what TYT had become from the inside. Both said no publicly and paid a professional price for it. That is not a coincidence. That is a pattern. And patterns are evidence.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican family. Her mother was a house cleaner and school bus driver. Her father was an architect who died of lung cancer in 2008 with no health insurance, his medical bills nearly costing the family their home. When she was five years old, her family moved from the Bronx to Yorktown Heights in Westchester County — not because they wanted to leave, but because in America your zip code determines your destiny, and the schools in Yorktown Heights were better. She went back to the Bronx after college and worked as a bartender and waitress to help her mother keep the lights on. And when Ted Yoho called her a “fucking bitch” on the steps of the Capitol in 2020, she stood on the House floor and told the country that those words were not new to her. She had heard them before. In restaurants. In bars. In every working-class space where a young Latina woman was expected to absorb whatever men felt entitled to throw at her. This is who she is. This is the life she brought to Congress. And the Republican Party decided from the moment she arrived that she was a target.

Timeline One: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Six-Year Campaign Against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

2019 — Before she was even elected to Congress, Greene livestreamed herself outside AOC’s office yelling through the mail slot, calling her “crazy eyes” and “nutty Cortez” and demanding she come out and face her. Her crew defiled the visitor’s book outside the office with derogatory comments. This was not a political disagreement. This was harassment with a camera crew.

September 2020 — Greene posted a photo of herself on Facebook posing with an assault rifle next to images of AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. Caption: conservatives need to “go on the offense against these socialists.” A sitting member of Congress. A gun. Photos of three women of color. Posted publicly.

May 2021 — Greene chased AOC out of the House chamber and screamed at her in the hallway, falsely accusing her of supporting “terrorists and antifa.” Nancy Pelosi called it a “verbal assault” that may warrant an Ethics Committee investigation. Greene also called AOC “a scared little girl that is pretty stupid and doesn’t know anything about the economy,” and tagged her and Squad colleagues as the “#JihadSquad” on social media.

March 2025 — On The Eric Bolling Show, Greene said AOC had “no life experience” — never married, no children, only worked in a bar. “This is a woman that has really no life experience and has no life wisdom.” This from a woman who spent her congressional career amplifying QAnon, pushing the Jewish space laser conspiracy, and harassing colleagues.

May 2024 — During a House Oversight Committee hearing, Greene told Rep. Jasmine Crockett — the only Black woman on the committee — that her “fake eyelashes” were messing up her reading. AOC immediately defended Crockett: “That is absolutely unacceptable. How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person.” Greene turned on AOC: “Are your feelings hurt?” AOC: “Oh girl, oh baby girl, don’t even play.” Greene told AOC she didn’t have “enough intelligence” and refused to apologize. The committee chairman ruled her attack on Crockett did not violate rules — which is when Jasmine Crockett raised her now-legendary point of order: “If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?” Crockett later told CNN that Greene’s eyelash comment was “absolutely” racist in its intent.

Timeline Two: The Republican Party’s Pattern of Attacks on AOC

July 2019 — President Trump told AOC and the other members of the Squad to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” Three of the four were born in the United States. All four are American citizens. Nancy Pelosi: “When Trump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to Make America Great Again has always been about making America white again.”

July 2020 — Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida confronted AOC on the Capitol steps, put his finger in her face, called her “disgusting,” “crazy,” and “out of your freaking mind” — then walked away and called her a “fucking bitch” within earshot of reporters from The Hill. His non-apology cited his wife and daughters as character witnesses. AOC’s response on the House floor: “Having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man.” Kevin McCarthy said Yoho’s non-apology was sufficient. Rep. Roger Williams of Texas was standing right there and said nothing.

February 2023 — After Republicans voted to remove Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, AOC stood on the House floor and named what she was watching: “There is nothing consistent with the Republican Party’s continued attack, except the racism and incitement of violence against women of color in this body. I had a member of the Republican caucus threaten my life and you all rewarded him with one of the most prestigious committee assignments in this Congress.”

So after all of that — after every single bit of that — Cenk Uygur’s position is that AOC is the problem for not extending trust and coalition space to one of the architects of that record. Let me make sure I have this right. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has spent her entire congressional career being screamed at in hallways, targeted in Facebook posts with assault rifles, called stupid and a terrorist sympathizer and a fucking bitch, told to go back to a country she was born in, watched a colleague threaten her life and get rewarded with a committee assignment, defended a Black colleague against a racist attack only to be turned on herself — and Cenk wants her to jump on board because Marjorie Taylor Greene had a crisis of conscience?

If Greene is genuinely sorry — if this alleged transformation is real and not simply a recalibration after Trump turned on her — then she knows exactly where to start. She apologizes to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Publicly. Specifically. For the mail slot. For the assault rifle photo. For the hallway. For the eyelashes. For the intelligence comment. For six years of treating a colleague like a target. Cenk hasn’t asked her to do that. Not once. Not publicly. He has put the entire burden of bridge-building on the person who absorbed the abuse and zero burden on the person who delivered it. If Cenk were anything less than a grifter dressed up as a revolutionary, he would say so.

As I have stated before, I do believe Marjorie Taylor Greene was genuinely duped by Trump in the way that cult members are genuinely duped by cult leaders — identity fusion is a real psychological phenomenon, and true believers feel the leader’s betrayals as existential threats. That is real. But here is what did not belong to Trump: Pizzagate. Greene’s involvement in the conspiracy that sent an armed man into a Washington DC pizza restaurant to “liberate” children from a satanic cabal predated her MAGA conversion. She brought that conspiratorial worldview with her. Trump didn’t create it. He just gave it a bigger stage. And none of it has been renounced. Not Pizzagate. Not the Jewish space laser — and as I have stated before, that one hit differently because I was a few blocks away when those fires tore through Los Angeles and I knew people who lost everything in them. Not the antisemitism. Not the racism. What’s been renounced is Trump. The worldview that produced all of it remains exactly where it has always been.

So when Greene’s feelings are hurt by AOC calling her a proven bigot and antisemite, I am genuinely unmoved. You do not get to spend six years making someone’s professional life a harassment campaign and then expect graciousness on a timeline set by a man who has never once been in your position.

If you took a shot every time Cenk Uygur said the word “anti-establishment,” you would require medical attention before the first commercial break. The man has worn this phrase down to a nub. It has been deployed so relentlessly, against so many targets, in so many contexts, that it has been entirely drained of coherent meaning. We are now at the point where the word demands interrogation: what does anti-establishment actually mean? Because if the establishment you are raging against is corporate Democrats and mainstream media, but your alternative coalition includes Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and a platform that once welcomed David Duke — then you have not left the establishment. You have found a different one. One with worse politics, a more documented history of dehumanizing people who look like me, and a business model that rewards outrage over accountability. Does being anti-establishment mean being friends with people who have spent their careers establishing themselves as white supremacists? Because if it does, the word is not a political position. It is a brand. And brands, as we know, are for sale.

Tucker Carlson has been correct about things. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been correct about things. The truth is indifferent to the character of the person delivering it, and pretending otherwise would make me no different from the people I’m criticizing. Tucker’s opposition to the Iran war is correct. His criticism of the foreign policy establishment’s addiction to military intervention is largely correct. These things are real. But you are not insane for questioning the sincerity of a man who has never abandoned a single one of his documented racist positions. Tucker Carlson’s apology for helping elect Trump — delivered in a podcast with his brother Buckley — occurred in the same sitting where Buckley called Kamala Harris “Cackling Camel Toe,” where Tucker said Obama “really hates white people,” where both brothers called the George Floyd protests a “manufactured crisis designed to get rid of white cops.” That is not a redemption arc. That is a man updating his political brand while his core worldview remains exactly where it has always been. His anti-Israel positions, to the extent they are sincere, are soaked in a Christian nationalism that treats Jewish people as chess pieces in an apocalyptic end-times storyline rather than as human beings deserving of protection on their own terms. One correct take does not erase a decade of Great Replacement rhetoric mainstreamed to a prime-time audience of millions. Decency is the floor, not a redemption arc.

Which brings me back to where I started, and to the conclusion I have been building toward across four pieces and more than a year of documentation. Where before I would say that Cenk pals around with white supremacists and expects the rest of us to negotiate with them, my sentiments have evolved. Not because the evidence weakened. It got stronger. Not because I extended more benefit of the doubt. I extended less, because he earned less. I have watched this man platform David Duke. I have read the blog posts his own organization called horrifying. I have documented the Black journalists and contributors who walked out rather than be associated with what TYT was becoming. I have watched him call AOC “terrible” for knowing exactly who Marjorie Taylor Greene is, while never once asking Marjorie Taylor Greene to account for what she has done. At this point the duck isn’t just in the room — it’s running the pond, charging admission, and telling everyone else their standards are the problem.

Cenk Uygur is collecting checks — from crypto operations with Peter Thiel adjacency, from a platform built on performative outrage, from an audience trained to mistake volume for virtue — while cause-playing as a revolutionary. He is not building anything. He is not protecting anyone. He is not making the movement stronger or the coalition broader or the politics more honest. He is doing what he has always done: harvesting grievance and calling it journalism. And when a Congresswoman who has spent six years absorbing harassment, racism, and sexism from her own colleagues declines to extend trust to one of the people responsible for delivering it, Cenk Uygur calls her selfish.

AOC was right. She was right on the merits, right in the moment, and right about who Marjorie Taylor Greene is and what she has never actually walked back. The brunch got pushed. The aspirin got opened. This piece got written.

Cenk Uygur, please — for the love of everything this movement is supposed to stand for — do the world a favor and fuck off. Not aggressively. Not dramatically. Just quietly. Pack up the ring light, close the laptop, let the crypto check clear, and go somewhere peaceful where your unique gift for being loudly, confidently, catastrophically wrong about everything cannot hurt anyone. Go touch some grass. Adopt a hobby. Learn to bake. Do literally anything that does not involve opening your mouth about progressive politics, because every time you do, Fox News gets a bumper sticker and the rest of us get a migraine.

You graduated from Columbia Law School and the Wharton School of Business. Two of the most prestigious institutions in the country handed you credentials that most people spend their entire lives working toward. And the primary lesson you appear to have extracted from that experience is how to grift with a vocabulary. You can say ‘anti-establishment’ in four languages and it still means nothing coming from a man who takes Thiel-adjacent money, platforms David Duke, and then lectures a Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx about who she is allowed to distrust. That is not political analysis. That is a con with a podcast.

Go away, Cenk. Seriously. We will be fine. AOC will be fine. The movement you keep claiming to lead will actually breathe easier the moment you stop trying to run it from a studio couch. The duck has quacked its last quack for today. We can see the checks from here. Goodnight.