What does it say about our political landscape that the people most interested in a new scandal involving Cenk Uygur are writers for right-wing media? It's not what you think it is.

On Friday, Breitbart News, the Washington Times, the Daily Banter and the Independent Journal Review featured stories on Uygur and the revelation the founder of The Young Turks, or TYT as it's known, wrote years ago with a flair for sexism and misogyny.

You might say: Well, obviously, the right wingers love that. Anything that makes the left look bad is manna from heaven. You're right, of course. But there's more. I could not find one liberal or neutral outlet reporting the scandal. There's a reason, I think. Uygur isn't important to liberals despite his identifying as a leftist, but he's sure-as-hell interesting to the right.

The Wrap's Jon Levine dug up some of Uygur's old blog posts and found doozies involving his apparent fetish for breasts, rules for dating ("orgasm by the fifth date"), and something about picking up, or pretending to pick up, underaged girls. Then there's the one about women being genetically inferior.

Uygur has apologized for his caddishness, but he added that the old posts dated from a time when he identified as conservative. His thinking, hence his political views, have evolved, he said. He stressed his record of advancing the interests of women.

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I think it's important to take this at face value. At least at first. Everyone has the right to change their minds, even if that evolution begins with troglodytic musings. Everyone, I believe, is deserving of redemption. Uygur apologized, and from what I can tell, he seems sincere.

But this must be weighed against another fact. The Wrap found a current TYT staffer who said anonymously that Uygur is "a knucklehead. He's a boy. He talks about women the way I talked when I was 13." And there was more.

A few things. Uygur is 47 years old. In 2004, the year of one of the most heinous posts, he was around 34 years old. He was not then and is not now a boy. In portraying Uygur as less than a middle age man in a position of responsibility and power, this staffer does more than refusing to hold him accountable. He trivializes Uygur's dehumanizing view of women. But in trivializing what most women would not find trivial, he helpfully tells us far more about The Young Turks than Uygur's old posts did.

This is not a man who has evolved.

I don't mean to suggest Uygur is not a leftist. I'll take him at his word on this, though that should offend thoughtful leftists, men I mean, who do not talk about women as if they were 13-year-old boys. I can say with certainty, however, that Uygur is not a liberal, for liberals do not habitually dehumanize human beings and do not dedicate their efforts to opposing liberal political parties.

Liberals, frankly, do not see Uygur as part of their world. I think that's why no liberal outlets have run stories on his scandal. He just does not matter. He does matter, however, to right-wingers.

I would guess that, from Breitbart's perspective, anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal, so there's is no difference between Uygur and, say, Vox's Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias, even though a world of difference separates them. But I think there's another reason. Uygur and the extreme right have a lot in common.

I'm not just talking about the clear tonal similarities betwen TYT and Breitbart (a similarity Uygur refuses to recognize). I'm talking about their politics. Allow me to illustrate by citing Alan Wolfe, who explained, in the Chronicle Review in 2004, the difference between conservatives and liberals. Wolfe wrote:

Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe that policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes. Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency -- conservatives always find cases of emergency -- the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.

I don't find it hard to put "The Young Turks" in place of "conservatives" in most of the sentences above. My point here is that Uygur's leftism, if you can call it that, is not that far from the conservatism he said he left behind years ago when he wrote with a flair for sexism and misogyny. It is a conservatism that appears to remain central, if the anonymous TYT staffer is an indication, to the administration of his fast-growing media enterprise.