Cenk Urguy

Cenk Uygur was born in a Muslim family and his parents were religious, but ever since he got out of his house and became an activist, he has adopted a ‘hardcore agnostic’ way of life. He has also openly claimed that he is a hardcore atheist.

He had a long term affair with his family therapist, Wendy Lang, and eventually got married to her and the couple got blessed with a son and a daughter in 2010 and 2012 respectively.

Cenk Kadir Uygur was born on 21st March 1970 in Istanbul, Turkey. Since his parents deemed Turkey unsafe, they moved to the USA when Cenk was 8-years-old and the family spent the next few years in New Jersey, where he spent most of his childhood later.

He got enrolled in East Brunswick High School in Jersey. He constantly got bullied at the school because of being a Muslim but there were many who supported him. These experiences shaped Cenk as a teenager and he turned agnostic later.

Cenk then went on to pursue his graduation in Management from Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and he represented the Turkish Students Association in the college. Despite being a management graduate, he chose Law as his post graduation programme and did Jurius Doctor Degree from Columbia Law School.

He got his very first job at a prolific law firm ‘Drinker Biddle & Reath’ in Washington D.C and then went on to work for ‘Hayes and Liebman’ in New York City.

Cenk Uygur started with political activism and writing columns for newspapers and magazines back in college. He was extremely critical of feminism and the organized religious groups and frequently wrote articles about them, mostly in the ‘The Daily Pennsylvanian’. In an article he wrote about the genocide of Armenians, and expressed a controversial opinion that it wasn’t actually genocide. But later in his life, he regretted ever writing the article and says that he didn’t know enough about the matter then.

In 2002, he founded ‘The Young Turks’, with the intention of creating a liberal political and entertainment show. The show later went on to become the most successful online news show, bringing Cenk in limelight. The YouTube channel for the show has more than 3 million subscribers as of now and over 1 billion overall views on the channel. The videos are also available on the show’s official website and podcasts.

In 2011, Current TV hired Cenk to create a similar show for them and tweaked the name a bit to ‘The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur’. The show ran for two good years and was taken off air in August 2013, while ‘The Young Turks’ continued its run online.

Cenk was also a part of MSNBC when he got hired in 2010 as a substitute anchor and a contributor to the show. Later, he went on to become the prime time news anchor for the show and worked there for more than a year, until he resigned, citing the reason that he was being considered for a low profile weekend spot, which would be an insult to his talents.

Later in 2011, Cenk launched Wolf-Pack, a long term project, which came into existence during the time when ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement was at its peak. With the launch of Wolf-PACK, Cenk aimed to organize a convention in which the ways to end the ‘Corporate Personhood’ were discussed.

In his career as a political and social commentator, Cenk has received several honours such as the ‘Emperor Has No Clothes Award’ from Freedom From Religion Foundation, which he shared with Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the ‘Humanist Media Award’ from American Humanist Association.