Cenk Uygur of ‘The Young Turks’ Explains Why He’ll Vote for Hillary Clinton

After supporting Bernie Sanders for president, Cenk Uygur, founder and host of “The Young Turks,” tells audiences that “begrudgingly, reluctantly, but yes—affirmatively—I will be voting for Hillary Clinton.”

He explains: “So, I’ve got all these problems with Hillary Clinton, I’ve got all these videos explaining all the systemic corruption around her. Then why am I voting for her? Well, it’s very simple. … Yes, her opponent is worse. Significantly worse.

“I’m not in the camp that this was an easy decision,” Uygur says. He believed that if voters had been given the opportunity to hear from Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, for instance, they might have elected her. “But the reality is,” on the eve of the election, “Jill Stein is at 2 percent.”

“The vote is not the most important part,” Uygur says. “The most important thing is activism. It was civil rights activists like Martin Luther King that got us the change we needed. It was women’s rights activists who got us the 19th amendment where women got the right to vote.” Activism is “the part where you have the most power, even though you don’t realize it.”

Does voting for Clinton mean Uygur supports her? “No,” he says. “It just means I have two realistic choices and I’m making one of them,” and “on day one, in hour one, we plan to protest her.” And that includes demanding “that she gets big money out of politics for the next election.”

“I get it,” Uygur continues, “but cutting your nose off to spite your face” by voting for a third party “doesn’t help you get out of the trap” of the two-party system. “What it does is it leaves you nose-less. OK? It’s a very bad strategy. The correct strategy is you live to fight another day.

“So yes, we avoid fascism. Check. Then we go fight the establishment. Check. And then we win. Check. That’s how it works.”

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly