Krystal Kyle & Friends: Recent Episodes
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Krystal Ball and Kyle Kulinski dive into politics, philosophy and random BS with people they like. Krystal is co-host of Breaking Points. Kyle is host of Secular Talk on YouTube.
This week, after a truly unhinged DOGE presser in the Oval Office, Elon Musk in the halls of power is at the front of our mind. Join us and special guest Judd Legum to discuss Judd’s watchdog reporting on Musk’s abuses and follies in (unelected) office, where he’s keeping tabs on how the richest man in the world has bought his way into Trump’s right-hand position. Judd has been particularly important in exposing the dark past of some of Elon’s hackers. Watch below:
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As upsetting it is to read something titled “This Week in Musk” — we’ll take This Week in literally anything else, at this point — we’re loving Judd Legum and Caleb Ecarma’s newsletter Musk Watch, which keeps an eye trained on the decade’s nascent supervillain and the richest man in the world. Here’s the place to get cut-to-the-chase reporting about Elon’s follies and crimes against Americans (especially the extremely illegal ones), buying out federal employees, getting federal student loan data, gaining access to the Treasury for himself and his goons, and much more. It’s not a cheerful read, but it feels deeply necessary — especially as a timely, near-daily record of how our government is evolving around the whims of an unelected official.
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Judd’s coming on the show with us this week to bring This Week in Musk to KK&F. He’ll update us on the latest in the Musk coup and share the highlights that he and Musk Watch have been keeping abreast of. We hope you’ll join us! Paying subscribers get the full episode on video when it’s released Friday. Everyone else, tune in Saturday via Substack, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, and more.
Welcome to Episode 211 of KK&F, covering the Musk rampage against the federal government with journalist Gil Duran. Reporting on the first weeks of the Trump admin is basically reporting on the unfolding of a coup. Musk has gotten keys to the Treasury systems, and is rampaging through the government. In this episode with Gil, we cover the central ideology that has led to the rise of figures like Musk and now motivates his destruction of our federal government.
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Gil offers truly valuable insight into the psychology of Musk’s insane, unprecedented power play: his “shock and awe” tactics, eliciting praise from the far right that has assumed power, are protected by the certainty of a pardon from Trump if his antics go too far. That sense of security is why he felt comfortable doing a Hitler salute at the inauguration festivities, and why he’s empowered to destroy our government agencies for the sake of destruction. Elon’s true danger is that he wants to see how far he can go, and with Trump backing him, the limit to his power to make millions of lives miserable may not exist.
This episode is available on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and other major streaming platforms.
Shit hit the fan this week, to put it delicately, with Musk leading the robber barons in a rampage to destroy America’s shell of a federal government. With special guest Gil Duran, a journalist attuned to the ethos of Silicon Valley politics that’s now seeped into the mainstream with the rise of Musk, Andreessen and Yarvin, we survey the damage. Watch below:
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Breaking news this week has felt like a flurry of updates about Elon Musk’s latest efforts to kneecap what meager social supports the U.S. provides at home and abroad. With DOGE (barf), Elon’s taking control of the Treasury, lawlessly destroying entire agencies and as NYT reporting points out, his power to do so is basically unprecedented. It’s hard to have more conflicts of interest than the Tesla, SpaceX, and X owner does, and as an unelected part of Trump’s team, he has totally unchecked power to wreak havoc. We’re probably only seeing the beginning of the damage Elon is planning to do. Where, if anywhere, will it end?
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Terrifying as these questions are, they’re also deeply necessary to think about as the left gears up to organize against the second Trump administration and fight Elon’s predation of our government. We’ll have a special guest on this week for Episode 211 to take us through the last few weeks of the Elon coup and try to see where this derailed train is going. Paying subscribers can access full video Friday; everyone else can join us Saturday for the audio on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Dotcom bubbles, housing bubbles — as this week’s guest, Ben Norton, explains to us, the bubble itself is not new. But as a keen observer of our financial systems and their manipulation by the wealthy and powerful, Ben Norton gives us important insights into what makes this current bubble — and its coming implosion — even more dangerous. For the past few weeks, for example, billionaires like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffett have been dumping stocks, keeping an eye on any market instability or potential collapse. At this point, says Ben, the U.S. stock market has hit 200 percent of the GDP — higher than either the dotcom bubble or the Great Depression. At Davos, Jamie Dimon nodded to the bubble by observing that the stock market is very inflated.
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Pushing the issue to a potential crisis is the revelation that China can produce cheaper, better AI, and has been able to do so for a while. Air is starting to come out of the U.S. tech bubble already: in one day, over one trillion dollars of market capital in U.S. and E.U. tech companies collapsed. DeepSeek AI, the Chinese company completely revolutionizing the entire lucrative and hot-button field of AI, is open-source: anyone can access the code and understand how it works, for free. In our conversation with Ben, we chat about why this newest development is so important to the story of the U.S. stock market bubble, how and when a collapse could happen, and more. This episode will be available tomorrow on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and other major streaming platforms. Thanks for listening!
From Dimon at Davos to many of our own guests here on KK&F, there’s a lot of talk about an economic bubble. Trump’s return to power and the market volatility that this return brings with it only stokes these fears anew. And new developments in Chinese AI technology may be forcing things to a head. Kyle’s conversation with Ben Norton is below:
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Our expectations were low, but the first terrifying few days of Trump, round two have been worse than anyone could have imagined. Already we’re seeing the rollback of key civil rights legislation, attacks on immigrant communities, cutting immigration opportunities for refugees, and much more. After Elon Musk’s shenanigans on the Trump 2024 campaign trail, we expected oligarchs — Trump’s fellow elites — to bend the knee. And they have: Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, the three richest Americans, were all in plain sight at the inauguration. What seems even more galling (if not surprising) is that Democrats have bent the knee, too. On a scale of cooked to well done, says Mike Figueredo on this episode, we’re burnt. In his view, electoral change now seems possible: the line has been drawn, we’ve passed the threshold. Whether it’s a violent revolution or national collapse, Mike sees something other than government-led reform as the future of the country. For Kyle, it’s a question of understanding how bad the damage Trump does will be. Market downturns, austerity, economic collapse: these look like they’re lying in our path right now. Amidst all of this, you’d think the Democrats would learn to fight back — assuming they actually want to win.
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This episode is available as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Pardoning January 6th rioters. Drill, baby, drill. Attacks on anti-discrimination laws. Inviting oligarchs to destroy jobs. It’s been less than a week since the inauguration, and with Humanist Report’s Mike Figueredo, we have the opportunity to take an unflinching look at the horrible first few days of the second Trump administration. Watch below:
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Welcome to episode 208 of KK&F, where your hosts get into Biden’s final days for a special episode. As the sun sets on the Biden admin, it seems like until the last minute, Biden is asking, “Won’t somebody do something?” It’s a vibe that has haunted his whole presidency as for the last four years he’s performatively gestured toward shoring up essential policies like abortion rights, antitrust, and more, ultimately failing to enshrine Roe and bring Big Tech to heel because of the party’s own financial interests and conservative establishment. Listening to Biden’s account of the last four years, Biden is insisting that he himself wanted more— but he wasn’t able to build public confidence in his political commitments because he didn’t fully commit to building that confidence. Now, the policies Biden offered mealy-mouthed support will languish under Trump’s shocking and audacious plan to undermine what little his predecessor accomplished in office.
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So long, Biden. In this episode, we look back over his presidency, mourn the lost opportunities, note the accomplishments, and get ready for what’s to come. You can listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
A deep dive from your hosts this week on the ceasefire deal, Biden’s farewell speech, Bill Burr on right wing LA fire conspiracies, and the latest escapades of our tech-company overlords. Watch below:
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This week on Episode 207 of KK&F, British journalist Owen Jones joins us to help make sense of what Elon is up to in Britain, whether his boost of the far right Reform Party will prove successful, and what to make of his falling out with Nigel Farage.
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We’re so grateful to have Owen back on the pod to share his thoughts on everything from Elon’s British Invasion to the current state of the far-right frenzy that skyrocketed Trump back into the White House. He describes what it’s been like, from the perspective of a leftist British journalist, to watch Trump’s second ascendancy to power and to interview Americans espousing views that, in the U.K. and elsewhere abroad, would be considered even farther-right than they are here in the U.S. We’ve normalized that as part of our daily post-2016 political discourse, but it’s a sobering reminder that what we’re living through isn’t in fact normal — it’s a significant right shift that the left will be fighting for decades. What can we do to reverse those trends and rebuild class consciousness?
We hope you enjoy the conversation! This episode is available on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and other streaming platforms.
Not satisfied with dominating US politics, billionaire Elon Musk has decided to wield X as a tool for regime change in Germany and the UK. In both nation’s, he is promoting far right reactionaries he believes will best service his oligarchic interests. British journalist Owen Jones joins us to help make sense of what Elon is up to in Britain, whether his boost of the far right Reform Party will prove successful, and what to make of his falling out with Nigel Farage.
Watch below:
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Welcome to the show, Pisco of Lib & Learn! We’re thrilled to have him on the pod with us to discuss the current civil war hitting MAGA’s ranks and the future of the bromance between Trump and Elon (is it built to last?). Like the Democrats, Republicans have their own big tent that brings a vast array of political tendencies into a single party. From the paleoconservatives to Wall Street libertarians, across major divides over economic policy, Republicans don’t adhere to a single form of conservatism; rather, interpretations of conservatism abound, without the party’s top brass demanding more coherence and structural integrity to the party.
Take the ambiguity in the Republicans’ use of “populist” as a descriptor of their political project. If that word can be used to describe anybody from Steve Bannon to Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, and of course Donald Trump himself — all while ignoring the fact that these political figures actively reject popular policies for public welfare — it shows that the Republicans can serve up a broad span of austerity-focused policies while still applying a grassroots label.
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We discuss these party schisms, the future of robber-baron Elon Musk in Trump’s admin, and much more. You can tune in to this podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more. Thanks for listening!
This week we’re libing and learning with Pisco, who co-hosts Lib & Learn podcast, works as a lawyer, and can often be seen on Destiny’s stream. He wryly refers to himself as a Biden fan at the beginning of the episode — and we get into the outcome of the 2024 election, the future of the leftist leverage necessary to enact progressive policies, the nightmare Trump’s second admin is shaping up to be, and more. Watch below:
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We’re thrilled to simultaneously celebrate the New Year alongside 3 (!) years of KK&F. And we owe it all to you, our wonderful and intrepid listeners who share in our conversations with major public intellectuals, presidential candidates, leaders in the labor movement, and more. We can’t wait for another year — and a special thanks to the subscribers who keep us ad free for $5 a month. Just to indulge in a “KK&F Wrapped,” if you will, this year we got to talk with luminaries and essential political commentators like Ken Klippenstein, Ro Khanna, David Sirota, Adam Johnson, Medea Benjamin, Briahna Joy Gray, Ryan Grim, Katie Halper, and many more. Good things are in store for 2025 — and we hope you’ll continue to join us!
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This week, we’ll feature a special guest to ring in 2025 and stare with us down the barrel of the year of regime change, political turmoil, and undoubtedly leftist resistance that awaits. Taking a retrospective look at 2024, its political revelations, and its unfinished business, we’ll also put an eye forward on the end of the Biden admin and Trump’s return to office. Approaching a second and undoubtedly more secure Trump era is daunting, terrifying. But our guest is there to help us make sense of what’s ahead, and we hope it’ll be useful for you, too! This week’s episode will release Friday for paying subscribers on Substack and Saturday for everyone on major streaming platforms. We hope you’ll tune in.
With this week’s guest, Matt Bruenig, we debunk the biggest misconceptions and lies about single-payer healthcare. After the 2020 election, so many of us can mindlessly rattle off the most pernicious lines used among both conservatives and liberals to keep our healthcare system private. From zingers about wait times for care in Canada to (more than anything, it always comes down to this) the argument that we can’t afford to keep everybody insured, the case for private healthcare sure isn’t creative, but (among our representatives, if not among the American people) it’s held on for dear life.
Matt helps us flip that case on its head, pointing out the waste of money and talents that is our private healthcare system and the ways that single-payer can revolutionize this (beyond the most important thing of all, which is that nobody in this country is forced to suffer or die because payment forms a barrier to care). Matt indicates that there’s another way forward without the waste, privation, and cruelty of our current healthcare system, and in this episode, we like to think we make a strong case.
Thanks for listening! You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
We’re thrilled to offer you a thought-provoking conversation with socialist wonk Matt Bruenig, who founded the People’s Policy Project. In that capacity, he’s become one of the most knowledgeable and insightful proponents of a single-payer healthcare system. So, now that the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO has us all thinking about the dire straits to which private healthcare drives Americans, we’re sitting down with Matt to debunk the biggest points used against single-payer, and making the case for why it’s the best system we can have. Think of this as a helpful guide. Watch below:
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This week we’ve got Matt Bruenig with us to talk all things healthcare. In his research, Matt has consistently made a strong case for social-democratic programs, and recent news reminds us of why the United States’ refusal to adopt single-payer healthcare is so unique among wealthy nations — and so detrimental to its population. Luigi Mangione’s anti-private insurance manifesto and the popular support for someone taking the strongest possible stance as an enemy of the healthcare CEO class points to the importance of understanding how better healthcare systems would produce a different social life for us all.
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Our conversation with Matt will hit subscriber inboxes first via Substack Friday night. Everyone else, tune in Saturday via major streaming platforms. See you soon!
In our interview with Ken for KK&F Episode 204, we cover everything we know about Luigi Mangione so far and the media’s fascinating, highly telling reaction to every new revelation about the case. Ken published a separate article about how the Times, for example, has made a point of avoiding pictures of Mangione’s face — anyone on Twitter the last few days will understand why. Apparently he’s too hot for the Times.
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All of this points to the importance of the media’s role in managing public perception of significant events like the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s shooting, and we’re glad to have Ken with us to explain that importance and help us understand how the mainstream media is wielding it. You can listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other platforms.
Episode 200 features Juan David Rojas talking to us about how AMLO, Mexico’s Bernie, won. From strategic alliances with billionaires to successful public works programs, AMLO followed what our guest calls a “politics of pragmatism.” By keeping the media at bay and ensuring the rich paid their fair share, he was able to pursue a left-wing political agenda without becoming, as Democratic candidates in the U.S. often are, embattled by media opponents and a dearth of wealthy supporters.
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Our guest also makes the interesting observation that there’s a similarity to Trumpism here in the way AMLO was presented in the media — appearances in the news often featured one member of his government surrounded by opponents, answering for AMLO’s agenda (of course, very different from Trump’s). Now, we turn our focus to how this relationship between government and media will evolve with the new President Sheinbaum, and how her version of left-wing governance will be informed by AMLO’s legacy. We get into it plenty more in the rest of the episode! You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack, and more.
Thanks for joining us, Juan David Rojas! For Episode 200 (woohoo!) of KK&F, we’re shifting focus to the Mexican presidency and getting our guest’s takes both on the legacy of AMLO and the nascent leadership of the recently elected Claudia Sheinbaum. We also chat about the Onion takeover of Infowars, with the support of Sandy Hook families, plus a bit more retrospective on the 2024 . Watch below:
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Happy Week 200 of KK&F! To those who have been here with us from the beginning and to those who have just discovered the podcast — we’re thrilled to have you with us as we ask our heroes, adversaries, colleagues, and co-conspirators to help us make sense of this truly unprecedented political moment. And it feels more unprecedented than ever. As we stare down the barrel of another four years of Trump, it’ll be easy for the left to alienate itself, to become hopeless and atomized as Trump’s cronies do their worst in terms of destroying our social welfare programs (insofar as they exist) and putting people in danger just for trying to live their lives peacefully. Needless to say, unity and purpose among leftists seem more essential than ever. Luckily, we’re not an island — there are international examples of leftist success to which we can turn.
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For our two hundredth episode, we’re having special guest Juan David Rojas, a specialist on political economy and a columnist for Compact magazine, on the show to analyze the precedent set in Mexico, first by AMLO and now by Claudia Sheinbaum. The US’s southern neighbor has an amazing example of leftist electoral victory to offer, and we want to consider both how this took place and how the Trump years will affect the relationship between the US and Mexico. It’s sure to be a fascinating, insightful conversation, and we hope you’ll tune in!
Paying subscribers get access to the video conversation via Substack on Friday night. Everybody else, you can tune in through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more when the episode is released on major streaming platforms this Saturday.
Welcome to Episode 199 of KK&F, with special guest Ettingermentum for election results analysis. Watching many voters shift away from Harris, whether toward Trump or rejecting voting entirely, reminded us that many groups — for example, the disaffected young bros that seem to have broke for Trump in surprisingly massive number — were moved by the message of Bernie Sanders but, now that the only choice is between neoliberalism and Trump-style conservatism, have simply shifted to the right: those people are Republicans now. And the Democrats were never interested in them. The Democrats, rather, trotted out Liz Cheney time after time to tout the feasibility of consolidating party establishments — the last thing populist-inclined voters wanted to see or hear.
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As Bernie Sanders pointed out in a recent post-election statement, do we think the top Democratic operatives will learn anything from this? Probably not. Their jobs are cushy, and they’re used to hopping from Biden to Kamala to, who knows, Newsom or Buttigieg next time — or to a Republican if that’s where all the money goes. But because the rest of us are stuck with four years of Trump, we need to know what happened Tuesday night — and Episode 199 of KK&F has some good answers to start with. We hope you enjoy listening.
This episode is available as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Welcome to KK&F, where we’re making sense of the aftermath. With a race called much more quickly for Trump than many expected — he was declared the winner of Michigan around 5:30 AM EST the day after the election — it was clear that the race wasn’t even as tight as anticipated. Trump won every swing state and gained ground pretty much everywhere. What should the Democrats learn from this — and what are they willing to learn? Watch our convo with Ettingermentum below:
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We can’t even tell ourselves, “At least it’ll all be over tonight.” Who knows when they’ll call Pennsylvania? But at least we know for sure that tonight, November 5, we’ll see if people come out in droves to vote against Trump, as Democrats have exhorted them to do three elections in a row now, or if the election ends up being much tighter — or, of course, Trump is able to run away with it. So, we’ll be carefully watching results coming in tonight, hoping to know sooner rather than later whether Kamala’s political vision and sort-of-new path for the Democrats prevails. And we’re certainly looking forward to unpacking whatever’s heading our way tonight on this week’s upcoming episode of KK&F, where we hope you’ll come for your election deep-dive fix.
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Our friend Ettingermentum is rejoining the show to help us make sense of it all, from the big Election Day surprises we can’t even predict now to taking a look at what the next four years will hold, based on tonight’s big winner. Make sure to join us — this is an episode you won’t want to miss. Paying subscribers can watch the episode Friday via Substack; everyone else, you’ll get it free through major streaming platforms like Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more this Saturday night. Be safe out there and see you soon!
Listen to our contentious debate with Will Chamberlain on this week’s episode of KK&F. A major point of contention comes up between us and our guest around analysis of the conflict in Israel-Palestine, which Will makes clear he’s unwilling to perceive as a genocide. As we see it, events and tactics like the current starvation strategy Israel’s using in north Gaza make it clear that this event should be perceived as an ethnic cleansing. Will argues that not only does this framing not apply, but his own preferred candidate, Trump, wouldn’t allow for an event like this given that other allies in the region also wouldn’t allow for it.
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In terms of austerity, Will doesn’t believe that Trump will be an austerity president, but he does personally believe that the excesses of our government, its inefficiency in using the money it commands, point to the argument that spending cuts are in order and that we need to tighten our belts. Krystal argues that Trump’s plan to fund the government with tariffs and get rid of income tax will result in austerity, regardless of his policy proposals otherwise, and Will’s perspective is that this latest proposal from Trump is just eleventh-hour food for thought, not a genuine plan. We can certainly agree with our guest that Trump’s rhetorical and political style tends toward the wild and unpredictable — but, as in the case with his latest wacky proposal to seriously undermine a major source of revenue for our government, it’s hard to tell reality from fiction, and to know when we should be concerned.
You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
As promised, we’ve got a spicy debate for you this week, and it’s wide-ranging, debating the presidential election through everything from Israel-Palestine to Trump’s plans for austerity and mass deportation. Will Chamberlain joins us for a conservative vs. progressives debate on the latest hot-button issues, below:
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To say the least, we’re coming into a big week: this is our last show before the 2024 presidential election. Fittingly, we’ve got a spicy debate episode coming your way, where we’ll be debating pro-Trump conservative Will Chamberlain about whether Trump or Kamala would make the better president. Spoiler alert, you can likely guess our stance — and our guest is senior council at the Internet Accountability Project and the Article III Project, as well as a former staffer for Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, so you might be able to guess his, too. We’re looking forward to a lively exchange about the stakes of this election and what each candidate has to offer as the change of power from Joe Biden to one of the two becomes imminent.
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Chances are you know the drill: Paying subscribers can watch the full episode Friday night when the video is released on Substack. Everybody else, tune in Saturday through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more, and we’ll see you soon — as well as next week to analyze the aftermath of whatever’s headed our way Tuesday…
In this week’s conversation with Sam Butler about how Elon Musk amassed the wealth and influence to make a play for political power, Sam gives us necessary context about why this plan seems feasible. In places like Texas, where Elon has moved both his personal residence and the headquarters of some of the companies he owns, corporations have far more political sway, far fewer financial constraints. This analysis reveals Elon’s strategic thinking as he moves his operations from the blue state of California to conservative Texas, enabling the companies he controls to exert more power on the lives of both workers and local communities.
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It’s more than a little scary to think about where Elon’s power play is headed, and what degree of influence over society will be enough. Sam does a great job of taking us through how the political conditions Trump created have been favorable for Musk’s business ambitions and how their unholy alliance holds benefits for each. Now, as the election approaches (less than two weeks away!), our conversation turns toward the role Musk has played in the 2024 presidential race and, depending on the result, what his political involvement will look like going forward.
You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and other major streaming platforms.
Sam Butler is our guest on KK&F this week, discussing his fascinating (and chilling) article for Drop Site News about Elon Musk’s shadowy, ominous plan to turn his immense capital into political power.
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It seemed like he’d be happy to be head of a fabulously successful hybrid car company. Then the acquisition of Twitter, one of the most widely used and influential social media platforms, became the next opportunity for Elon Musk to put a jewel in his crown. And yet the entrepreneur has grown even more ambitious and rapacious in his clear desire to exert control over modern life. We just read this excellent, frankly bone-chilling article from Drop Site about Elon’s shady outlining of a project called “United States of America, Inc.” and its ties to the Trump campaign, in which Musk is investing tons of money and time. Because he wasn’t born in the U.S., Musk can’t be the president himself. What we’re left wondering is what position of power his current political maneuvering will open up for him.
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So, for Episode 196 of KK&F, we’re sitting down with Sam Butler, author of the Drop Site article, to talk about Musk’s deeply sketchy lottery and everywhere else on the Trump campaign that bears his fingerprints. Sam is also working on a documentary about Big Tech’s efforts to dismantle our democracy. We hope you’ll join us for the episode! Paying subscribers can tune in Friday via Substack for the full video; everyone else gets the audio via Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Podcasts on Saturday night. See you soon!
As the election looms, we’re debating a pair of fellow YouTubers, Hutch and Pondering Politics, on what the Harris-Walz campaign has shaped up to be. We’ve got an exciting debate for you on whether Kamala’s decision to pander to Republican voters instead of making meaningful concessions to the left is a necessary, sound piece of political strategy or a total miss.
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We’re nothing if not fair, of course, so our discussion delves into what has worked about the campaign — and what stands out is the excitement we felt as progressives about the decision to make Walz the VP nominee. At the same time, we remain strongly opposed to the campaign’s sustained refusal to condemn and pledge an end to the Israelis’ genocide in Gaza that the Biden admin keeps funding. There’s also the campaign’s unabashed pride in the endorsement it received from Dick Cheney and the relative weakness of its policy platform. Why are we watching the Democratic Party make itself even more palatable to Republicans when many Republicans themselves acknowledge Trump as a threat — and when Democrats could simply choose a message of economic support to entice disaffected voters inclined toward Trump but disgusted by his racist vitriol?
You can listen to this episode as a podcast now on major streaming platforms.
As the election looms, we’re debating a pair of fellow YouTubers, Hutch and Pondering Politics, on what the Harris-Walz campaign has shaped up to be. Is Kamala in a position to win in just a few weeks? Is their insistence on campaigning with Liz Cheney a political winner or death knell? Get our answers below:
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Hutch and Pondering Politics, welcome to KK&F! We’re three weeks out from the presidential election as of today, and those hoping for a Kamala Harris victory may find themselves anxious over whether a candidate handed a nomination, a hefty war chest, and ample goodwill to win back the party’s more skeptical elements is going to be able to pull off a win. Kamala’s squeaking out wins well within the margin of error in swing states, leading Trump by two points nationally. It seems like an unnecessarily tough spot to be in this late in the election cycle, given Trump’s deeply lackluster campaigning recently and the excitement of the ticket shake-up that led to Kamala’s installation as the nominee.
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We’re having Hutch and Pondering Politics on the show to analyze Kamala’s strategy in her two months of campaigning against Donald Trump for the 2024 presidency. How has she brought attention to key daily-life issues Americans face, and where has she failed to do so? Is the big-tent coalition she touts going to work in her favor when it comes to governing, or is she capitulating too readily to Republicans? We’ll get into all of this and more on Episode 196. Paying subscribers can watch it Friday when it’s released as a video on Substack; everyone else, tune in Saturday through your favorite streaming platforms, like Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Welcome back to Krystal Kyle & Friends! This week’s conversation is on the escalating conflict in Lebanon and the ties we and our guest, Omar Baddar, see between this crisis and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Omar provides insights into the “opportunities” for military escalation and struggle for dominance over Hezbollah that Israel sees in its current campaign in Lebanon. Because the U.S. plays such a major role greenlighting and funding Israel’s military activity, and because Biden refuses to set a true “red line” or rock the boat before the upcoming election, what we see now is Israel’s attempt to escalate as much as possible given a window of opportunity for unchecked violence.
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Some have compared the violence in Lebanon to the genocide taking place in Palestine. Omar points out the massive similarities — decimating infrastructure, targeting medics, killing civilians — while also indicating the potential of the strikes in Lebanon to expand into an even bigger regional conflict. Netanyahu’s recent remarks addressing Lebanese civilians, a pretty clear threat to reject Hezbollah or suffer the same violence as Gaza, opens up the possibility of sectarian civil war, just as it suggests that Netanyahu is totally ready and willing to repeat the genocide in Gaza that is still ongoing.
Thanks for tuning in. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and other streaming platforms.
This week brings heavy questions about the regional and global impact of conflicts — that is, Israel’s violent military activity — in the Middle East, as Israeli strikes in Lebanon kill civilians and open up the possibility of a much larger crisis. Turning to U.S. politics, we’re also turning a critical eye to the Harris campaign playbook less than a month before the election, where policy is taking a backseat to pretty much everything else. Is it too late to turn things around? Watch our conversation with guest Omar Baddar, below:
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It’s been a year of horrific crimes against humanity committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. Since Oct. 7, we’ve had many conversations on the show — with political commentators like Norm Finkelstein, Katie Halper, Mouin Rabbani and more — about the much longer history of Zionist brutality that has cost so many lives in occupied Palestine, about the career setbacks and losses people face for pushing back against Zionist settler colonialism, and more. Looking back, realizing that the unbearable horrors faced by Palestinians have become a daily reality for over a year, we continue to ask ourselves the same pressing questions about why our political representatives lack the moral compass and the temerity to demand an end to America’s role in the bloodshed; what it would take to end the culture of silencing and censorship that represses pro-Palestinian perspectives; and what it will take to end this genocide and rebuild Gaza for free Palestinian inhabitants.
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That’s the focus of Episode 195 of KK&F, and we’ll have a special guest on to join the conversation. Paying subscribers can watch the video episode when it’s released Friday. Everyone else, tune in Saturday via Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and your other favorite streaming platforms. We’ll see you soon!
Welcome to Episode 194 of KK&F, where we’re sitting down with the Vanguard to discuss whether the Harris campaign is poised to win it all — or whether they’re wasting this crucial moment. We talk about Democrats snubbing their base by leaning right on immigration, Republicans leaning left on abortion, and why the name of the game right now is trying to expand the party coalitions, courting independents, and getting those extra votes however it’s possible. But will it be enough for Kamala Harris, especially as some polls seem to suggest a gender gap in willingness to support her even among young people? Zac in particular is optimistic, and even though Trump was able to briefly revitalize the lackluster Republican party, his star seems to have set.
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There’s even more to hear in this week’s episode, like our conversation about the evolving situation with Israeli attacks on Iran, and Jack’s most recent filing in the Trump election interference case. We hope you enjoy it. Thanks for tuning in — this conversation will be available as a podcast via Pandora, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more starting tomorrow night.
We’re reuniting with the Vanguard to take on the fascinating character of J.D. Vance, plus discourse on Melania Trump’s new book and its shocking strong stance in favor of abortion rights. Tuesday’s Vance-Walz faceoff gave us new insight into Trump’s VP pick and the unique dangers he could pose as part of a second Trump administration. Mainly, we’re interested in the current state of affairs in the 2024 presidential race, and our guests have special insights. Watch below:
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The night of the vice-presidential debate has finally rolled around. Will J.D. Vance be made to answer for his participation in fearmongering and slander of Haitian immigrant communities due to a racist conspiracy theory? How will Walz, who became a standout in the running for Harris’s VP pick by calling Republicans “weird,” address both the ridiculousness and the real danger that people like Vance and Trump pose to American society as leaders? Was Vance a bad pick for Trump, as so many have been saying, or will we see a side of him on the debate stage tonight that justifies or at least explains the pick?
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All this and more on the upcoming Episode 194 of KK&F. Of course, as always, we’ll have a special guest on to take you through the madness with us and understand the highlights from Tuesday night’s debate. Paying subscribers can access the episode via Substack video this Friday. Everybody else, join us Saturday night via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
This week on KK&F, we’re talking to conservative journalist Sohrab Ahmari in order to figure out what’s missing from the Trump campaign’s political calculations for 2024. To cut to the quick of what made Trump 2016 so compelling for millions of Americans it seems necessary to assess Trump’s relationship with the media — which isn’t as antagonistic as Trump has successfully made it out to be. While mainstream liberal outlets of course downplayed Trump’s prospects and disregarded him as a serious candidate for a long time, it’s also true that those same outlets, as a result of their very outrage at Trump’s approach to the presidential race, gave him lots of free coverage, boosting his platform in ways that (for example) progressive candidates to the left of the Democrats never really benefited from.
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If you look at Trump’s most recent debate performance (and we’ve discussed it at length in recent weeks), you’ll see baseless claims that appeal to emotion and paranoia, without any grounding in basic fact or reality. That’s always been a hallmark of Trump’s rhetorical style, but as the far right has only gone farther in the last few years, and new figures like RFK Jr. have risen to amplify Trump’s fearmongering claims or to add new ones to the litany, could it be that Trump is actually getting out of touch? What else is contributing to what feels like a less potent campaign and a less effective message to America’s disaffected political outsiders?
You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
What’s left of the Trump 2016 secret formula in the comparatively unenergized and lackluster campaign we see before us? That’s what we’re talking to right-wing journalist Sohrab Ahmari about on this week’s episode of KK&F. Watch below:
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Conservative journalist Sohrab Ahmari rejoins the show to talk about how far Trump has fallen. What powered Trump’s successful 2016 campaign? Whatever it was — and we’ll be getting into exactly what it was with our special guest — it’s missing this time around. Trump may still be doling out the occasional Twitter zinger, but look at his recent debate with Kamala: he seemed discomposed and shaky, unable to land his far-fetched conspiracy theories and dogwhistles with the conviction he had years ago. Biden’s alarming debate performance back in June may have directed attention toward the then-struggling Democratic ticket and taken the heat off Trump, but with the Kamala-Trump matchup, the heat is back on. And Trump isn’t looking good. The gas is going out of his campaign, and polls show a close race favoring Kamala. Eight years after the campaign that took him to the White House, what’s been lost?
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Just a little over a month away (!) from the presidential election, we’ve got plenty of important insights to share with you in the leadup to November 5, as do our wonderful guests. Paying subscribers can watch this episode on Friday when it drops on Substack (and thanks for keeping us ad-free for just $5 a month!). Everyone else, tune in Saturday via Pandora, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
Krystal Kyle & Friends is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Adam Johnson of Citations Needed and Column blog is here for Episode 192, where we’re discussing his great new piece on Republican media strategy in the face of this latest Republican slander campaign. It gives us valuable insight into what Vance adds to the far-right playbook. As he points out, Trump doubles down when he’s called out for crazy stories like this! However, “slick former Yale law student and liberal media darling” Vance has a different strategy: appealing to standpoint theory, which Adam explains in the piece. His “smol beans” rural-Ohio whisperer schtick, dressed up in the Yale law degree, has always been a real and dangerous weapon the Trump campaign now gets to wield. After getting his flowers for seeming to expose a world that, yes, is wrongly reviled by liberal elites, Vance is just running with the strategy he’s developed, now using that authority to speak for an entire part of the nation he claims liberals just don’t understand. Will it be enough to win Trump and Vance an election? What long-term damage will it do to actually marginalized people in this country?
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It’s a serious topic, and we’re glad to have the singularly insightful Adam Johnson on to talk about it. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
We’re thrilled to have Adam Johnson, co-host of Citations Needed podcast and co-founder of Column blog, on the show to dig into what he’s calling JD Vance’s “blood libel media campaign” (and he’s right! that’s what it is!) against Haitian immigrants. How has the press handled Vance until now as a Yale-educated, heartland-loyal candidate, and how is this changing his perception? Why did it take this long?? All these questions, and more, below:
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Trump is calling out the Democrats after a second attempt was made on his life a few days ago. In a social media post, he seemed to blame Democrats for the event, saying they’d been escalating “politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust.” Vance is sticking to the party line: he’s said, “No one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months […] I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out,” according to NBC’s reporting on a recent event in Atlanta.
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Are Democrats really to blame for the assassination attempts? While Trump and Vance’s vitriolic comments about Haitian immigrants have created safety concerns for the immigrant communities they’re targeting, for them to call out Democrats for heightened violent rhetoric seems hypocritical, to say the absolute least. We’ve got a lot more to say about it, and we’ll be diving into that this week on Episode 192 of KK&F. See you soon!
This week’s episode features our analysis of the debate and our conversation with David about his exciting new podcast, “The Master Plan,” detailing how big money launched a successful coup to steal our democracy. Social media (especially X; we shudder to think about what’s making the rounds on Facebook) has been blowing up, since Tuesday’s debate, with both memes and rightful outrage about former president Donald Trump’s extremely racist fearmongering about immigrants in his back-and-forth with Kamala Harris. Commenting on unsubstantiated neo-nazi lies that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH are eating residents’ cats (???), Trump has since made this graphic, racist image a rallying cry, evoking it multiple times on Tuesday night to the visible disgust and derision of the Democratic nominee. This comment points to the dangerous cruelty, prejudice, and xenophobic rhetoric fueling Trump’s campaign: Tuesday’s debate performance offered zero substance, seeking instead to resonate with the least humane and most hateful impulses of the public. For him to succeed, again, in this way would be unthinkable.
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This week, we had David Sirota back on the show to talk about his new pod Master Plan — give it a listen! He’s been working on it for years at The Lever, and currently available episodes cover decades of top-secret government corruption, giving Sirota the chance to flex his formidable investigative-reporting skills. Here’s an opportunity to learn more about the profit motives guiding our government to sell out public interest, overturn our most cherished rights, and entrench its own corrupt power — David and his team has made it possible in this wonderful new podcast, which we discuss in our exclusive interview with him! You can listen to this episode as a podcast when it’s released tomorrow on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, and more.
From the unhinged anti-immigrant rhetoric at Tuesday’s presidential debate to Elon Musk’s insane Twitter harassment to David Sirota’s fascinating new podcast on corruption, we’ve got a full show for you this week with lots of exciting twists and turns. Listen to our analysis of the debate and to our conversation with David about his exciting new podcast, “The Master Plan,” detailing how big money launched a successful coup to steal our democracy.
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Debate night! After a tumultuous summer for the Dems, installing Kamala Harris as the new nominee and Tim Walz as her VP, we’ve got the first debate in which Harris and Trump will face off before the general election in November. So you can expect our show this week to have lots of analysis about this event — how this match-up compares to Trump versus Hillary in 2016; whether Trump tries this time to intimidate his opponent and break the basic rules of the debate; whether Kamala chooses to discuss policy or whether positioning herself as the anti-Trump is the most important order of the day.
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Besides that, though, we’re also excited to welcome David Sirota back to the show — to talk about his cool new podcast! Master Plan is “an investigative podcast series exposing the 50-year plot to legalize corruption in America” — a topic we take great interest in here on the show, and have covered extensively with a range of guests. David’s deep dive is thrilling for everyone familiar with his keen reporting and research skills, and we’re excited to get a preview of what’s coming. Paying subscribers can watch the conversation this Friday; everyone else can tune in Saturday via Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Welcome back to another week of KK&F! This week’s guest, Jordan Chariton, is an independent reporter known for his coverage of left movements and protests like those at Standing Rock, the grassroots organizing around the Sanders campaign, and much more. Over repeated trips to Flint, Jordan has been on the ground, understanding how local government actively covered up its failure to protect the public, poisoning the Flint community as a result of its active negligence. Now, we’re having him on the show to talk about his new book on the corruption he exposed.
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We hope you’ll enjoy this urgent and serious conversation revealing the true story of what happened in Flint, Michigan before and after the government announced the water crisis, how the local community continues to be affected by the tragedy, and who’s still paying attention to the suffering of working-class people when national public interest has long since turned away. We’re so grateful to Jordan for sharing his necessary reporting and insight with us. This episode will be available as a podcast tomorrow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Welcome back to another week of KK&F! We’re talking to Jordan Chariton about his bombshell reporting on the Flint water crisis. After years and years of government cover-ups and feet-dragging, and a hundred thousand lives affected, Jordan’s reporting gives us the answers we’ve been waiting for. Watch below:
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Independent journalist and Status Coup Founder Jordan Chariton has a new book out. It’s a bombshell about how rampant government corruption and inaction led to the Flint water crisis, detailing “political payoffs, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, falsified water data, threatened whistle blowers, and panicked phone calls” that led to over a hundred thousand people being poisoned by their own government. We the Poisoned: Exposing the Flint Water Crisis Cover-Up and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans was published last month, with a foreword by Erin Brockovich, and we’re thrilled to get to sit down with Jordan to talk about his urgent and insightful work on this major political scandal and public tragedy.
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Thanks for following KK&F and keeping our podcast going with exciting new episodes and brilliant new guests every week! You can subscribe for $5 a month to watch the video of our conversation with our favorite public intellectuals, politicians, and rabble-rousers, a whole day early — and our paying subscribers help keep us ad-free. Otherwise, episodes release via major streaming platforms every Saturday night, so you can find us on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Tune in for our conversation with Jordan, and we’ll see you this weekend!
What is classical liberalism? We get into the weeds with Joshua Reed Eakle of Project Liberal. Hearing “Project Liberal,” you might anticipate something cooked up by the American Democratic Party. But this is different: Joshua is making the case for a political and economic system governed by principles of free trade and competition. As per his own admission, it’s not a system premised on equality. It’s an assumption of the classical liberal worldview that under conditions of economic competition, not everyone will prosper. Rather, those whose skills the market favors will thrive, and those who can’t compete will live in relative want. When Joshua talks about classical liberalism embracing change, he’s pointing to its dynamic responsiveness to the development of technology, wants of the consumer, skills of the workforce, and more. That’s a responsiveness, though, ungoverned by human needs (as opposed to the wants of those with money to spend).
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Is there a better way? We make the case for social democracy in our debate with our guest, and we think you’ll be interested. You can listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Does liberalism create inequality, or does it just embrace change? When does economic freedom become institutionalized and entrenched as oppression? Is there room for a left-liberal alliance to defeat Trump? These are the big-ticket questions we’re getting into with Project Liberal’s Joshua Reed Eakle in this week’s debate. Watch below to see who wins!
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Welcome back to KK&F! For Episode 189 of the show, we’re sitting down with Project Liberal’s Joshua Reed Eakle for a good old-fashioned (and good-natured) debate. Does liberalism or social democracy offer a better path forward for our society? As the name suggests, Eakle is going to take us through the case for liberalism, as well as the basics of his organization. Setting out to “advance the cause of a free and open society,” Project Liberal champions a political ideology that pushes back against what it views as growing authoritarianism. In doing so, it avoids positioning itself either on the right or on the left, where, in its view, extremists lie. From our perspective, though, a central aspect of social democracy’s appeal is its distinguishing itself from both the right and the center in favor of a progressive politics built around strong social support networks.
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What’s authoritarian about that? We’re excited to see what our guest has to say about his project and about our debate in this week’s episode! Paying subscribers can watch the full video episode Friday on Substack (and thanks, as always, for keeping us ad-free). Everyone else, tune in Saturday via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Our guest this week, Jesse Ventura, former star wrestler, Governor of Minnesota, and Green Party presidential candidate, talks about the collusion between Dems and Republicans, his electoral history, the corruption of money in politics, and the shortcomings of third-party runs in the current presidential election cycle. He’s been on the show before to discuss these issues, and we’re excited to have him back years on to discuss how the rigamarole of American party politics has evolved (or devolved) since then.
We’ve also heard an increasing number of attacks on Tim Walz from the far right, which takes issue with his history securing free meals for schoolchildren, supporting gay students at the high school where he was a teacher, and more. From one former Governor of Minnesota to the current one, Jesse fires back at the right in Walz’s defense and shows how “weird” his conservative detractors really are.
Thanks for tuning in! You can listen to this podcast tomorrow on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Former pro wrestler, Governor of Minnesota, Green Party candidate, and alum of the show Jesse Ventura joins us again as we reflect on lessons learned and unlearned from the DNC, corruption in America’s so-called two-party system, the struggles of third-party presidential runs, and more. Watch the exclusive interview below:
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In Episode 187 of KK&F, we sit down with your favorite Twitter account Ettingermentum to talk about Kamala and the Democrats’ political fortunes for 2024. Back when Biden had just landed a real dud of a debate performance in late June, you’ll remember that his fellow Dems were quick to criticize, and a few started calling for his exit from the 2024 Democratic ticket. Kamala Harris, his successor to the presidency and his current VP, seemed like the natural choice for his replacement. But part of the Twittersphere also sounded concerns about Kamala. Could she appease centrists wanting nothing to fundamentally change and an increasingly vocal left critical of Biden’s refusal to adopt broadly popular social programs?
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With our friend Ettingermentum, we look at the polling and see why the predictions of Kamala’s detractors didn’t end up bearing out. There were no tradeoffs to be made between Biden and Kamala: his base has moved to support her, where voters more leery of the aging, anti-progress Biden have proved more likely to back the Kamala-Walz ticket. Why is this? And will it be enough to carry her over the finish line in November? You can get answers to all these big questions in our wide-ranging deep dive of a conversation, Episode 186 of KK&F. This episode will be available tomorrow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Confused about what the polls have to say about Kamala’s viability for the presidency? Want to know how the Dems’ fortunes have shifted since Biden’s debate, where a slight national preference for Trump has changed into a growing margin for Kamala? We talked to your favorite Twitter account @ettingermentum (he’s also got a Substack!) about whether we should have listened to all that fearmongering about Kamala’s candidacy or not (spoiler: not, but there’s a lot more to be said about it). We also make some very strong predictions about who’s going to win it all in November. Watch below:
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Welcome back to KK&F! Whether you caught that wild (and tech-difficulty-fraught) X convo between Elon and Trump last night or deliberately stayed away — we can’t blame you there — the livestream certainly marked a new phase in the relationship between two of our society’s most volatile, powerful oligarchs. Elon has endorsed Trump, and following a multi-week period of massive momentum for Democrats surrounding the Harris-Walz ticket, it certainly feels like Trump’s star is comparatively dim — the polls reflect it. So the opportunity to talk to Elon on an X livestream, drawing listeners on an increasingly Trump-sympathetic platform, felt like an ideal situation for Trump (albeit, again, one with lots of glitches).
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In this week’s episode of KK&F, along with plenty of other points of interest, we’ll touch on this bizarre Trump-Elon interview, their often bizarre exchanges on immigration, nuclear power, and more, and on the past few weeks of Trump’s campaigning, during which he’s felt more reclusive than usual. According to the New York Times, the stream drew over 1.3 million listeners, a reminder of the strong pull Trump has among X’s right-wing set and the increasing favor the platform has shown to him under Musk’s direction. We’ll unpack all of that and more with a special guest this week.
You can watch our conversation Friday as a paying subscriber; everyone else can tune in Saturday through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
When we last convened for an episode of KK&F, Kamala was still looking to fill the VP slot on the Democratic ticket. Since then, VP pick Tim Walz has received an outpouring of enthusiasm from the left-of-center and relief from progressives, but at the same time, the right has looked for weak points to hit him on (and it must be said, Walz doesn’t make it as easy as Vance does). Now, after some comments from J.D. Vance calling Walz’s service and dedication into question, the right is attackingWalz, who served for over twenty years in the National Guard before deciding not to complete the preparation to retire as a command sergeant major. By his own admission, Walz was partially motivated by the desire to make political statements about events like the Iraq War. So it’s not that Walz has the kind of tawdry history in his service career that the right is implying — but it’s sure to be only one scandal the right tries to manufacture before November.
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Omar and Kyle also speak at length about the awful revelations regarding the Israeli detention camps, where Palestinian prisoners are brutalized and sexually assaulted (as recently released footage documents), and about the Biden admin’s position on and response to this information. As they point out, Democrats and Republicans are in a perpetual race to see who can support Netanyahu’s genocidal regime more, and the right’s tactic is to paint Democrats as antisemitic, a claim that Democrats often scramble to reject in the wrong ways. They also discuss developing political crises in the region: at this point, is war with Iran inevitable?
Thanks for tuning in. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Journalist Omar Baddar joins Kyle for a conversation on potential war between Israel and Iran/ Hezbollah. Is it inevitable? Will the US join on the side of Israel? We’ve got a full show for you this week! Watch below:
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In her comments on the current state of the ‘24 race and on the current Biden presidency, this week’s guest, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, talks us through what would come after a ceasefire for her administration. To her, it’s vital that the U.S. joins negotiations with a strict adherence to international law, not clear and bloodthirsty favoritism for Israel, as is the current policy. It must recognize the ‘67 borders drawn for the region and demand an end to the occupation in Gaza and throughout all of Palestine, as well as a removal of all troops. Jill points out that threatening to support a boycott could be a necessary and effective tactic to ensure Israel’s compliance if it does not follow guidelines for a lasting peace. The flow of weapons from America to Israel must, above all, be stopped.
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Jill Stein, as always, has insightful takes on the latest developments in national and international politics, and we delve into them in this wide-ranging interview, including Jill’s vision for her campaign following Biden’s exit and Kamala’s entrance, Trump’s racist remarks in a recent interview, and more. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
With this week’s special guest, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, Krystal and Kyle dive into Jill’s vision for her campaign following Biden’s exit and Kamala’s entrance; Trump’s racist remarks in a recent interview; how Jill would work to establish a lasting peace in Palestine following a ceasefire; and much more. Watch our exclusive interview below:
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New numbers suggest Kamala has tightened the race with Donald Trump; J.D. Vance seems only, with his peculiar lack of charisma and tasteless attacks on women, to be dragging that ticket downward. Democrats’ new robust response to Vance’s extremely unpopular, unrelatable schtick — “you’re weird!” — has the right whipped up into a frenzy of the exact sort of respectability politics they claim to oppose. Consider Vivek Ramaswamy’s comment in a longer tweet screed against the charges of “weird”: “This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest.” Scolding like that doesn’t really work in the Trump-era Republican Party, given that nobody tosses off quick burns about “haters and losers” quite like the man himself. But it is interesting that Republicans are so bothered about their perceived uncoolness and unpalatability that they’re reverting to logic their standard platform regularly goes against.
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It’s been, safe to say, another weird week in American politics, and an extremely disturbing one globally, as information about grave physical and sexual abuses of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention comes to the fore. After some reservists were detained for questioning about these abuses, protesters attempted to storm the base, Sde Teiman, voicing their unequivocal support for these gross human rights violations and those who committed them. As always, we’ll have a special guest on to talk to us about what’s going on at home and abroad. Paying subscribers (for just $5 a month!) get to watch the video when it drops on Substack this Friday evening. Everybody else can tune in Saturday via Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and other major streaming platforms. Until soon!
The old Kamala is back. That’s our guest Cenk Uygur’s pronouncement as he glosses Kamala’s shifting fortunes over the course of her political career. Initially favored as a rising star in the Democratic Party, Kamala looked like an early favorite for the nomination in the 2020 cycle, sweeping the first debate, before things seemed to go wrong suddenly and without clear cause. As Krystal points out, she’s a cautious kind of politician, and the moves she made for the presidency toward the end of her unsuccessful campaign seemed out of touch and lackluster. Now, she seems to be hitting many of the right notes again for a liberal audience exasperated by the uncharismatic and ineffectual Biden. But will it be enough for voters determined not to continue voting in supporters of Zionism and genocide? Will Kamala successfully differentiate herself from Biden’s tremendously unpopular and cruel unconditional backing of Israel?
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We talk about all of this and more in Episode 184 of KKF! Join us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more for the podcast release of this episode.
Where to begin this week? There’s the demise of the Biden campaign and the rise (though not without critique) of Kamala Harris; there’s Netanyahu’s speech to Congress; there’s the speculation about Harris’s shot at the presidency and the question of whether an open convention would have been better (we think so!). Don’t worry — with our insightful guest Cenk Uygur of TYT, we don’t miss a thing. Watch below:
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What a week! Kamala Harris has secured the delegates she needs to become the presumptive Democratic nominee after news broke last week of Biden’s decision to drop out. Still apparently healing from a bout of COVID, Biden is nowhere to be seen and has yet to address the nation (off X, formerly known as Twitter, that is). Between Charli XCX edits of Kamala’s “coconut tree” comments and MSNBC musings over whether two women could run on a ticket, there’s plenty of speculation on who the VP will be, What kind of relationship Kamala will establish with Bibi, and much more.
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Don’t worry: we’re wading into all of this discourse and more this week on KKF. We’ll have a special guest on, as always, to think through this fascinating and confusing new stage of the 2024 election, and the video will drop this Friday for paying subscribers. Everyone else can tune in Saturday through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Compared to the tired, infuriating binary of Biden-Trump, our guest this week, Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver, has his pitch ready: “I'm under the age of 80, I speak in complete sentences, I'm not a convicted felon.” Indeed, Oliver’s age, opposition to two-party politics, anti-war political commitments, and more make him, for many voters, a viable alternative to Biden-Trump. Browse his website and you’ll see that he’s eager to work with states to decriminalize abortion, but also supports the Hyde Amendment, banning public funding from being used for abortions. In other words, his platform encompasses a number of positions traditionally associated with left and right, informed by his support for personal freedoms and wariness toward a controlling government.
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In this episode of KKF, we chat with Chase about his analysis of the 2024 election, who he expects to be running against, what his path to the White House will be, and more. Thanks for tuning in — you can listen to this episode as a playlist when it’s released on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Is the 2024 presidential race due for its biggest shake-up yet? The fruits of Nancy Pelosi’s labor are apparently paying off, as Biden’s apparent determination to stay in the race has subsided, and he’s entertaining the idea of dropping out. Though a case of Covid may prevent an official announcement, the past few weeks of discussion about the state of the Democratic ballot for 2024 are reaching a head, and the consensus forced around Biden in 2020 and maintained by the party establishment until now has started to crumble. In this week’s episode, we talk to someone who’s definitely running in 2024 — libertarian candidate Chase Oliver — and get his sense of what the race will look like. Watch below:
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Thanks for joining us for another week of KK&F, where we cover a national and international political landscape that seems to get more chaotic with each passing week. The assassination attempt on Trump at a rally last week seems to have slowed the pace of calls for Biden to drop out; shifting to condemn politically motivated violence, Dems find themselves in a fundamentally different conversation around the election than the one that predominated last week. Now, we’ve got a Trump VP pick, a Republican National Convention in full swing — in other words, plenty to talk about.
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We’ve certainly got a lot to talk about with the Libertarian Party’s presidential pick, Chase Oliver, who’s our special guest this week! This year, we’ve been fortunate enough to sit down with multiple candidates for the 2024 presidency, all from third-party backgrounds, and we’re looking forward to catching up with Chase about why he’s running, his projected road to the White House, what he as a presidential nominee thinks about the latest developments in the race, and much more. Paying subscribers can watch the episode Friday on Substack; everyone else can tune in Saturday through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other major streaming platforms. See you soon!
Join us for an important convo with Jeremy Scahill about his recent major reporting for the Intercept, the creation of his new outlet Drop Site News, the state of national politics, and more. As the will-he-won’t-he drop out surrounding Biden’s 2024 candidacy hits a fever pitch after over two weeks since a disastrous debate, the future of the presidential race looks increasingly unstable. But neither Biden’s detractors nor his supporters can close the deal yet. Watch our discussion below:
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Jeremy Scahill is partnering with Intercept co-worker Ryan Grim to launch a new independent media outlet. Eleven years ago, Jeremy co-founded the Intercept, which has become a mainstay in the landscape of investigative reporting — now, with Ryan (also a friend of the show), he’s creating Drop Site News to further increase the presence of independent media outlets in the mainstream-dominated, often left-hostile conversation.
Already, Jeremy has published a blockbuster piece including interviews with Hamas leaders, that delves into their motivations for October 7th, their views on civilian deaths, and their perspective on the Israeli response.
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This week, joined by Jeremy, we’ll discuss his new reporting, the desperate need for a robust left-wing media scene, and what the goals for Drop Site News will be. We hope you’ll join us! Video will be released for paying subscribers on Friday. Everybody else can tune in Saturday through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and other major streaming platforms.
Well, folks… In the words of a Democratic House member, “I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue.” Thursday wasn’t the time to be a sentient, rational person with coherent thoughts about our country’s strategy and future — that held true for the presidential debate audience and for its two participants. Exchanging blows over golf handicaps and engaging in some he-said-he-said over Trump’s alleged “suckers and losers” comment about veterans, Biden and Trump did an admirable job of avoiding serious discussion of childcare policy, climate change, and more. Biden revealed more of the same in his unconditional support for Israel, while Trump clung to violently xenophobic rhetoric in his comments on immigration (which he made as frequently as possible).
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When we think of the figureheads of the Democratic Party, we can’t help but think of people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose commandeering of the DNC cemented much of the party elitism and anti-democracy that has brought us the fatally flawed Biden 2024 candidacy. That’s why we’re so excited to speak this week with Jen Perelman, who’s challenging Debbie to take over as representative for Florida’s 25th district. In our wide-ranging conversation, we chat with Jen about her vision for the district and her substantive political differences with her opponent, and much more.
Listen to this week’s episode on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and other streaming platforms.
Why was last night’s debate so awful? How the hell can the Democratic Party keep getting away with this? In the shadowy back rooms where the DNC makes decisions, how has the self-proclaimed party of the middle class lost touch with such determination and shamelessness? Understanding that story means understanding the legacy of people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz — and imagining what it would be like to have different people in power. Jen Perelman is challenging Debbie for Florida’s 25th district. Watch our convo below:
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It’s a week of big news. Julian Assange has been released from British prison — he’s free! On Monday, he pleaded guilty to the charge of releasing classified governmental material, and he’ll be heading back to his native Australia soon. We’ve extensively covered — including in interviews with his father and brother — the case for Assange’s freedom and the crime against whistleblowers that his persecution has presented for many years now. After tireless grassroots efforts to fight his extradition, it’s deeply heartening that Assange can now walk free, though a tragedy that justice was so long in coming.
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This week, Jen Perelman joins us to discuss the campaign she’s running for U.S. Representative in Florida’s 25th Districts — against the one and only Debbie Wasserman Schultz. We look forward to talking with her about Debbie’s legacy in the district and in national politics, the change Jen seeks to provide, and her path to victory. We’ll also have plenty of spicy takes about the forthcoming presidential debate this Thursday. See you on Friday if you’re a paying subscriber — and everyone else can listen to the full episode via major streaming platforms this Saturday!
With this week’s guest, Briahna Joy Gray, we discuss the upcoming debate and the two main presidential candidates’ respective prospects. But we also dive into Briahna’s recent firing at The Hill, with her insight into why this is part of a larger, worrying trend.
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Briahna takes us through her experience at The Hill, why questioning a guest about her Zionist beliefs led to the loss of professional opportunities, the political landscape of Palestine advocacy in media right now, and much more in this exclusive interview. We’re thrilled to have her on the show, and we hope you’ll enjoy the conversation! You can listen in on Spotify, Substack, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
We’re grateful to Briahna Joy Gray for taking the time to do this exclusive interview with us — where we cover her recent firing from The Hill, the silencing of left commentators on the issue of Israel’s genocidal actions, the upcoming drama from the 2024 election, and more. Watch below:
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Welcome back! This week we’re pleased to have the opportunity to talk to Briahna Joy Gray about her recent firing from The Hill. In case you missed it, Briahna has been an outspoken critic of Zionism, and after an exchange with a Rising guest who challenged her support of women surrounding the Oct. 7 attacks, she lost her job. She’s since raised awareness of the precarious positions anti-Zionists occupy in center and even left-of-center media, and we’re looking forward to talking to her both about her individual experience and about her broader critique of free speech suppression regarding Israel-Palestine.
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You can tune into this episode a whole day early by becoming a paying subscriber today — that gives you access to video of our weekly convos, released Friday night on Substack. (Thanks to those already contributing to help keep us ad-free!) Everyone else, we’ll see you Saturday night when the podcast episode is released on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Annelle Sheline, our guest this week, previously worked in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in Near Eastern Affairs. She had only been there a year when she decided to publicly resign. Annelle tells us that while she was unsure of the impact her resignation would have, since she was a relatively junior employee, others encouraged her to reconsider and to go public even though they could not do the same.
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According to Annelle, although the number of people who have taken the action she took is relatively small, a larger number of American government workers have more quietly resigned — or even retired early — out of refusal to condone the Biden admin’s aid of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The thought of burning all professional bridges in a “one-company town,” she notes, dissuades many people from doing so. It requires throwing out all one’s professional connections and work experience. Annelle believes she’s relatively lucky to be able to return to her academic background in think tanks. Still, some of those who don’t resign, publicly or quietly, have been writing anonymous letters and joining protests. There may not be sufficient rejection of Biden’s genocidal Israel policy among governmental workers. But the number of dissenters is growing.
You can listen to this conversation as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
We’re welcoming Annelle Sheline to KK&F for an exclusive interview about her choice to publicly resign from her job in the State Department over the atrocities currently unfolding in Gaza. Annelle explains to us why she spoke out against the Biden admin’s gross involvement in war crimes, what other government workers seeking to take similar action are up against, and what kind of special treatment Israel receives from the federal government. All this and more, below:
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Last week, Briahna Joy Gray was fired from her job hosting Rising after being accused of antisemitism. After Gray interviewed the sister of an Israeli hostage, visibly taking issue with the woman’s demands that she “believe women” about what Israelis experienced in the Oct. 7 attack, she received notice from The Hill that her employment would be terminated — and she’s since spoken out about how this firing equals the suppressing of speech for a perceived anti-Israel slight. She also points to how Katie Halper was similarly fired from The Hill — part of a greater trend of progressives being punished for speaking out against or reacting negatively to Zionism.
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We’ll have a great guest on this week to talk about what Briahna’s firing means for left media, plus much more. Join us when the podcast drops Saturday on Spotify, Pandora, Substack, and more — or join us early for the Friday evening video release by becoming a paying subscriber today. See you soon!
Ben Norton is our guest this week, talking to us about the context and implications of the recent presidential election in Mexico. Claudia Sheinbaum will be taking office after running on a platform involving the alleviation of poverty and the expansion of social support systems. It’s thrilling to think about what she and her administration are prepared to do for the working people of Mexico, and this election provides an important example for progressives in the United States looking to follow suit.
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One major question that comes up in our conversation with Ben is how much political change Sheinbaum will be able to effect in the presidency — given the more conservative tendencies of the United States under Biden. As the U.S. is a global hegemonic force capable of preventing the solution of social and economic problems it’s produced for neighbor nations, we discuss with Ben if Sheinbaum will be able, as president, to tackle the issues that matter most to Mexicans.
This episode is also available on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more!
Ben Norton is our guest this week, talking to us about the context and implications of the recent presidential election in Mexico. Now that our neighbor country has a leftist woman in office, progressives in the States are left wondering what will be possible for President Sheinbaum to accomplish, what kind of cooperation or undermining she can expect from Biden’s admin, and more. Dig into these questions with us and Ben, and watch below:
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A progressive woman will assume the role of Mexico’s next president, marking a bright spot in recent political news. Claudia Sheinbaum won big after running on a platform to improve social welfare programs, increase minimum wage, and more. This also means that the presidency of AMLO, whose leadership has brought important wins for the working class, is coming to a close. It’s a great time to think about the political landscape in Mexico that led to the election of a progressive female president, and to reflect on what AMLO was able to accomplish in office. As Mexico shifts left and delivers for its working class, why does its northern neighbor fail to do the same?
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Journalist Ben Norton is joining the pod to walk us through the significance of the recent elections and the broader political context surrounding them. We’re thrilled to have him on the show, and we hope you’ll listen in! Paying subscribers get access to the video when it’s released Friday night on Substack. Everyone else, tune in Saturday through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Welcome back to KK&F, where we’re joined by Norman Finkelstein to go behind the scenes on the prosecution of Israel in the international courts. South Africa, according to Norm, has repeatedly showed up to the courts demanding new provisional measures, and while none were given in February, the courts judged in March that the situation had sufficiently deteriorated to require new measures. Then, as human rights advocates and organizations across the world began in May to raise the alarm about Israel’s planned offensive in Rafah (which has since caused unthinkable suffering and devastation), South Africa continued to press the case against Israel.
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Israel has been furious about the allegations brought against them, insisting that their slaughter of thousands of Palestinians only amounts to a few problems that don’t add up to a humanitarian crisis. The challenge for South Africa and other entities sympathetic to Gaza’s plight, Norm points out, is that the court has been unsure who to believe in these exchanges. Now, as Israel continues to deny the existence of a humanitarian crisis and images of unbelievable horror and pain pour out of Rafah, the court has said in no uncertain terms that it doesn’t believe Israel any more.
What does this mean for further proceedings, and for potential prosecution of Bibi and the other war criminals? We talk through all of this and more with Norman Finkelstein this week. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Thanks to Norman Finkelstein for joining us again on the pod for a conversation about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine and the response of the international community (and its judicial institutions). Norm’s turning our attention to the last few months of proceedings against Israel in the international courts, and to the latest developments — which could mean arrest warrants for Bibi. Watch below:
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Late last week, the ICJ issued a ruling that Israel must stop all military operations in Rafah. On Sunday, the IOF murdered dozens of Palestinians in a strike on the area, and those still alive and trapped in the region are desperate to find somewhere else to go. Many went to Rafah in search of safety from other strikes in other regions and are now further displaced. Israel is continuing its unconscionable practice of declaring refugee camps safe — only before destroying them with 2000-pound bombs, mutilating civilians and causing mass death and dismemberment. The ICJ ruling isn’t enough to prevent these atrocities. What will cause the leaders of powerful governments, Biden among them, to rethink their blind support of Israel in the middle of a genocide? When will they decide that enough is enough? And why haven’t they done so already?
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Norman Finkelstein is back on the pod this week to talk through these questions with us, examine the ICJ’s ruling, and help us think through what else is on the table for the international community to halt Israel’s violence. We’ve had him on before to talk through a variety of issues, especially the silencing of pro-Palestinian academics and commentators in so-called “free speech” discussions. This episode will be available Friday to paying subscribers and Saturday via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and other major streaming platforms to everyone else. See you soon!
Thanks for tuning in to Episode 175 of KK&F with Ken Roth. A growing number of countries support arresting Netanyahu for Israel’s grievous crimes against humanity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Biden stands alone in the way he has used his position of power to shut down critique, and now judicial proceedings, against Netanyahu. He’s made it clear the U.S. won’t play the role it’s promised to play as a world power in upholding international law. This reveals the total hypocrisy in the U.S.’s interpretation of what global leadership requires. But sadly, because of the vested financial interest our country has made in the genocide, it doesn’t come as a surprise, either.
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We sat down with Ken Roth to unpack the case the ICC is making against Netanyahu and how successful it’s likely to be, what kind of international consensus is building around it, and whether Biden’s refusal to cooperate will be a major hindrance. Ken’s an expert on this topic, so we think you’ll appreciate his essential insight! You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Ken Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, joins us to walk us through the potential of arresting Netanyahu that the ICC has raised, why Biden and the U.S. establishment oppose it, and more. Watch below:
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In one of the latest updates on Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine and the (often lack of) response from the international community, the chief prosecutor of the ICC is now looking to have Benjamin Netanyahu arrested for war crimes. (There would also be arrest warrants for other leaders of Israel and Hamas.) Even though other nations like France and Belgium have gotten behind the prosecution, Biden, of course, is staunchly opposing what’s clearly the upholding of international law — he thinks the arrests would be “outrageous.” It’s just another example of the U.S. locking arms with Israel in support of relentless bloodshed.
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What is the basis of the arrest warrants, and does the ICC have a solid case? We’re talking to Ken Roth about it on this week’s episode of KK&F. As an attorney and former executive director of Human Rights Watch, Ken can provide insight, based on years of experience in this field, into where these developments will lead. We hope you’ll enjoy this very timely episode. It will be released Friday by video on Substack and Saturday through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
In the multi-track beef that’s unfolded in the past few months between rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake, reputations have been tarnished, #1 hits have been released, and parents have been pulled into the fray. Beginning in late March with “Like That,” the beef now encompasses nine songs (and counting?), giving each rapper a platform to call his opponent’s character into question, slight his rapping skills, and diminish his place of importance in modern pop culture. How did this all start, and where will it end?
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We tackle these questions with music critic Anthony Fantano, who leads us through the backstory and gives us a breakdown of this explosive back-and-forth. We hope you’ll enjoy this fresh new pop-culture focus on KK&F, and we can’t wait to hear what you think. You can listen to this episode as a podcast when it’s released tomorrow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Anthony Fantano is breaking down the beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar on this week’s episode of KK&F. Where did it start? What keeps everybody tuning in? Who’s winning? We get into all of this and more in our convo with Anthony. Watch below:
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Music critic Anthony Fantano is on the pod this week! You’ve heard about the chart-topping rap beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, which kicked off in March and has since produced #1 hits, allegations of a secret daughter belonging to Drake (see “Meet the Grahams”), and even more brutal disses about Drake’s pursuit of underage women (that’s “Not Like Us”). Who’s winning the exchange, and how is this a significant moment for music and for pop culture in general? We trust Anthony to tell us: he’s a well-known Internet personality and talented analyst of modern music (check out his YouTube channel here). We hope you’ll enjoy what’s sure to be a spicy, hilarious, and very timely episode of KK&F, adding some pop-culture commentary to our podcast!
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Remember that you can watch our interview on video via Substack Friday night as a paying subscriber —it’s just $5 a month to access our content a day early and on video! Everyone else, tune in Saturday via major streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Pandora to listen to the episode as a podcast. See you soon!
Hundreds of people around the country, largely on college campuses, have been arrested and assaulted by police for peacefully engaging in pro-Palestine encampments. The persecution of these people, and the infringement of their First Amendment rights, reveals how solidly our political establishment backs Israel at any cost, and how willing it is to compromise the so-called foundational values of this country in order to avoid challenging Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign in Palestine. There have been far too few courageous voices in American politics taking on this status quo. Jill Stein is one of those voices, and in our exclusive interview, we check in with her about the shocking details of her arrest, her ongoing advocacy for Palestine, and how it fits into her view for the presidency.
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On this episode of KK&F, we have the opportunity to talk to Jill about what a third-party, pro-Palestine presidency would mean for the nation, how she plans to fight this uphill battle, and why fighting back against two-party hegemony is more important than ever. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
In the latest installment of our series interviewing presidential candidates, we’re honored to sit down with Jill Stein, who’s running again on the Green ticket. Recently, she was arrested at an encampment at WashU — she talks to us about what’s at stake for those protesting the genocide in Palestine, and why it’s so central to her politics, alongside her plans for the election. Watch below:
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We’re so lucky to have 2024 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on the pod this week, where we’ll be delving into her run for the presidency and her advocacy for an end to the genocide in Palestine. Just last week, Dr Stein was arrested at a pro-Palestine encampment at Washington University, where cops terrorized the protesters and violently arrested 100. In other words, she has seen firsthand how universities and local police departments are teaming up to repress outcry against our government and universities’ complicity in the genocide. In our interview, she speaks with us about her experience and shares the political analysis that led her to put herself at risk at the encampment.
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We’ve also got plans to talk to Dr Stein about her campaign — what’s different from her last campaign, how she plans to win, what kind of an alternative to the Democratic Party the Green Party presents, and more. We hope you’ll tune in for a wide-ranging and insightful conversation with a major political figure and peace activist. Paying subscribers can access the conversation through video on Substack Friday night; everyone else, tune in Saturday night through Pandora, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
Violence against peacefully protesting students is now taking place at an unfathomable scale. Hundreds of protesters were attacked and arrested at Columbia; hundreds more were also assaulted and rounded up at UCLA, across the country. And dozens of schools in between are mounting their own solidarity encampments, and facing massive repression from the alliances of universities and local police forces.
These alliances are not new. They characterized the university’s response to protests against apartheid in South Africa and against the Vietnam War. What’s especially disturbing is that from the local level to the federal level, our government is, on the whole, utterly failing to protect these young people peacefully exercising their right to protest a genocide. The failure of leadership from Biden in particular — a president who has and will again demand the youth vote as the anti-Trump — is galling. Students across America are being left at the mercy of cops’ batons as they lose their housing and face total uncertainty in their academic careers.
We talk with Zaid Jilani this week about this massive uprising that’s sweeping the country, the insidious response from universities and governments, and what any principled free speech advocate should be doing right now about it. You can listen to this podcast when it’s released tomorrow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
You’d think every conservative who’s drawn attention to “free speech on campus” as a way of platforming right-wing causes would, in the case of students being violently arrested and repressed this week, stick to their (proverbial this time!) guns. As the news this week showed us, quite the contrary. Zaid Jilani joins us to discuss the horrible violence waged by the American police state against college kids this week, and why both the liberal and conservative establishment in American politics have abandoned the principles of the First Amendment by abandoning these students. Watch below:
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Friend of the pod Zaid Jilani has been on KK&F before — now he’s coming on to talk about the campus protests sweeping the US. As law enforcement and administration team up to terrorize students protesting university investments in occupied Palestine and other ties to the genocide, the cause of free speech on campus — object of much conservative hand-wringing — is revealed to be an utter sham for these universities. What matters is maintaining the status quo, even when it means endangering young people exercising First Amendment rights.
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How exactly does the crackdown on campus encampments reveal the hypocrisy of right-wing free speech warriors? And what does this phenomenon tell us about the state of higher learning in America? These are all questions we want to address with Zaid. We hope you’ll join us.
Paying subscribers can access this episode on Friday evening. Everyone else, you can listen in on our conversation when it’s released on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and Substack on Saturday night. Thanks for tuning in.
The high visibility of student protests on social media have brought conversation on the genocide in Gaza to the fore. Dave Smith, a libertarian comedian, is also thinking about the unforgivable atrocities Israel has perpetrated in Palestine, and to that end, he recently debated Dennis Prager and Batya Ungar-Sargon (alongside Cenk Uygur). In this debate, Dave shares his fiery and brilliant perspective, making a clear case for boycotting, sharing why his politics lead him to support a ceasefire, and much more. Now, we’re talking to him about the aftermath of the debate, touching on the wildest points made by the other side, why he continues to voice his support for Palestine, and much more.
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This episode is available tomorrow on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
From university uprisings to viral debates between the left and right, the question of Palestinian liberation — and Americans’ support for it — is at the front of everyone’s minds this week. Especially ours! That’s why we talked to Dave Smith about the debate he did on the topic with Dennis Prager and several other notable commentators a while back, which has garnered tons of views and generated major conversation on the left and the right alike. We got him for an exclusive interview to talk about it. Watch below:
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Welcome back to KK&F, where, this week, we’re talking to libertarian comedian Dave Smith. Smith has made a spirited condemnation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in no uncertain terms. A few days ago, he was part of a debate (with Cenk Uygur, versus Dennis Prager and Batya Ungar-Sargon) on Israel-Palestine. Given the different political commitments and tendencies existing within the broad group of Americans who reject Israel’s crimes against humanity, we’re excited to check in with Dave this week about why the assault on Gaza is such a huge issue for him, how it connects to his perspective as an outspoken libertarian, and more. We think it’s going to be a great convo. Tune in soon!
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Paying subscribers can listen to this episode when it drops Friday night on Substack. Everybody else, join us Saturday via Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more!
CodePink activist Moataz Salim is our guest this week, talking about the organizing efforts he’s been part of in support of Palestinian liberation. All eyes are on pro-Palestine organizers right now, as students have set up encampments at Columbia (after months of enduring surveillance, chemical attacks, arrests, and doxxing). They’re making a powerful, highly visible statement against the endless slaughter of Palestinians by Israelis (and with U.S. funding), not to mention the grievous actions of their school to silence students who oppose the genocide.
Moataz is on Capitol Hill every day, confronting them with his humanity, as Krystal comments on this week’s episode. Congress is showing its true colors by (often proudly) voicing its support for an ethnic cleansing campaign, and Moataz’s courageous work is holding them to account. In this episode, we cover the essential organizing work Moataz is doing, how he and other Americans are tirelessly bringing visibility to the Palestinian cause, and more.
This episode is available as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
CodePink’s Moataz Salim is our guest this week, talking about the organizing efforts he’s been part of in support of Palestinian liberation. As a Palestinian-American activist going toe to toe with the American government bankrolling his people’s genocide, Moataz is speaking truth to power in the belly of the beast, even as he mourns his own family members. It’s a true profile in courage and an example we can all learn from, and we’re honored to speak to him. Watch below:
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Meet the protestor who’s standing up to Congress. We’re talking to Palestinian American Motaz Salim about his recent activism with CodePink (remember our convo with Medea Benjamin?) to get in Congress’s face about its continued support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Moataz has lost an unfathomable 100 family members to Israel’s slaughter and is determined to confront those in power with his own humanity.
Because Congress depends upon a lack of accountability in its support of militarism and murder in foreign countries, meeting and learning from the people who attempt to hold them to account is essential.
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Tune into our conversation Friday of your a paying subscriber, Saturday via Spotify, Pandora, and other major platforms for everyone else. See you soon!
Medea Benjamin has had an incredibly busy week on Capitol Hill. First, there’s talking to the less-than-allies: publicly challenging the Secretary of Defense, who’s on the record saying there’s no evidence of genocide in Palestine. Same thing with Samantha Power, who has written about, studied, and spoken on genocide and human rights extensively in her political and academic career. She and her co-organizers have also attended a hearing regarding journalist safety, raising, of course, the massively overlooked tragedy of journalist killings in Gaza. At the same time, there are bright spots too — talking, for example, with Rashida Tlaib about potential bills and resolutions to support Palestinians and oppose the genocide.
We talk about these incredible efforts, the Freedom Flotilla, and much more on this week’s episode of KK&F. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and more.
This week we’ve got the most incredible conversation prepared for you — with a leading antiwar activist, Medea Benjamin of CodePink. “Involved” is an understatement when it comes to the commitment Medea has been making in the past weeks and months to Palestinian liberation and an end to the genocide in Gaza. We were lucky enough to sit down and talk to her about how the efforts she’s part of responding to the unthinkable atrocities of Israel in Palestine, and what they’re building toward. Watch below:
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Iconic peace activist Medea Benjamin will be joining the show this week to talk about her advocacy for Palestinian liberation and the state of the cause in U.S. organizing, her support of Julian Assange, and other causes to which her work has been essential over the past decades. We’re thrilled to speak to her about what it’s like to dedicate one’s life to global peace from within a country seemingly bent upon destroying it, and to get her unique perspective on what it means to be an anti-war organizer during the genocide in Gaza that has horrified the world.
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Her political journey has included SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), founding CodePink (a leftist, feminist anti-war organization), a run with the Green Party for Senate, and of course, countless vital protest actions across the globe. We’re honored to have her on the show, and we think you’ll love this conversation. Paying subscribers can find the video of our discussion on Substack by Friday night; everyone else can tune in Saturday for the podcast via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Ana Kasparian, host of TYT, reminds us of the line that will get trotted out millions of times before November to hosts of disenchanted voters tired of Democrats’ empty promises and full coffers for war: “Democracy is on the line.” So why is the Democratic Party insisting on Biden? Back in 2020, when the pickings for candidates supporting Medicare for All were incredibly slim but not zero, and there was at least a plurality of options for center-left Democrats promising some small departure from the status quo, you could at least say it looked like the Dems were trying. Now they’re making no attempt to put forward a candidate who speaks to Americans’ most basic moral concerns.
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What will be the result of this ethically bankrupt approach? We talk about this and much more on this week’s episode of KK&F. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
We’re talking to Ana Kasparian (among many other things!) about why she isn’t going to vote for Joe Biden, not in the primary and not in the general election. She lays out an extremely compelling case pointing out Biden’s willingness to put all his power and legitimacy on the line for Israel’s genocide, why the Democratic Party can do better, and why Biden and Fetterman are the same side of the political coin. Watch below:
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You know Ana Kasparian as the co-host of TYT! She’s been front and center in leftist media for years now, and she’s got invaluable insight into how progressives can provide essential alternate perspectives on current events. We’re thrilled to have her on KK&F this week — for the very first time — for an exclusive interview regarding her experiences in left media over the past years, her view of how progressive outlets are handling coverage of the genocide in Gaza, and the forthcoming presidential election.
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Uncommitted votes and blank ballots as means of rejecting Biden’s support of the violence in occupied Palestine have picked up major traction. They represent an expression of popular will against apartheid that the Democratic Party can’t ignore — or certainly shouldn’t, if they want to win our votes. How will the Biden admin respond? We’ve discussed this before on KK&F, but as the Uncommitted movement in primary elections grows, we’re checking in with Ana to see whether Biden faces a credible threat that could force him to switch strategies on Palestine. Tune in Friday night if you’re a paying subscriber, Saturday night to hear the full audio on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
A recent Atlantic article by a student at Stanford lamenting the purported silencing of Zionist voices and the aggressiveness of pro-Palestine voices on campus might give the impression that defenders of Palestinian liberation, and not of Israeli apartheid, hold the most sway in American institutional settings. These pieces frame the current crisis as intellectual: the unjust violation of free speech against Palestinians’ rights.
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But again, as Palestinians’ lives are literally on the line — after nearly six months of ongoing violence in Gaza — our purpose is to reframe these kinds of viral Zionist arguments to place emphasis on the actual mass suffering, death, and privation taking place among the Palestinian population at the hands of the IOF. In this episode, we undertake that kind of reframing with our guest, whose expertise on this topic helps shed new light on Israel’s decades-long subjugation of Palestine and why it’s an issue we should care about.
In this episode of KK&F, Mouin Rabbani joins us for an essential conversation on the latest in Israel’s brutal war on Palestine. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Thanks to Mouin Rabbani for joining us for an important convo on Israel-Palestine. As the Biden admin continues massive weapons shipments to Israel and Israel continues to block vital aid shipments to Palestine — especially with a famine looming — it’s important as ever to analyze our government’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and to consider the kind of institutional power we could wield to end that genocide. Watch our discussion below:
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The United States abstained this week from a vote in the UN Security Council that ultimately supported a ceasefire in Gaza. It has also refused to fund the UNRWA, a UN organization providing aid to Palestine through March of next year. Meanwhile, the IOF continues to commit gross atrocities in its genocide in Gaza. After more than six months of this brutality, the response of the American government to the genocide continues to appall and surprise us. How can our leaders be so willfully blind to Israel’s disgusting actions? Even more importantly, how can they actively condone and support those actions?
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Fresh off his debate on the Lex Friedman podcast, Mouin Rabbani, a Middle East analyst with deep knowledge of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, will help us answer these deeply urgent and disturbing questions as we address the violence continuing to unfold in Gaza. Paying subscribers can watch our full video interview Friday. Meanwhile, everyone else should tune in Saturday through all major podcast streaming platforms. See you soon!
Katie Halper joins us to discuss Zionist backlash against Jonathan Glazer’s recent movie The Zone of Interest. Glazer was the only awardee to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza in his speech, in which he rebuked the co-optation of Jewish identity and the trauma of the Holocaust by violent supporters of an ethnostate. The movie, as we note, has clear and resonant parallels to modern-day violence: it presents the idyllic life of oppressors shadowed by the ever-present but never-quite-seen suffering of their victims.
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For Zionists to take issue with this film tells us everything we need to know about their absolute dismissal of Palestinians’ humanity and complicity in the violence that Israel’s very existence is currently premised on. Humiliation and cruelty are part of the system. We talk about much more in this episode, including Katie’s debunking of the oft-said statement that Israel protects Jews and why that statement is so harmful. You can listen to it tomorrow when it’s released on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Discourse around last year’s celebrated film The Zone of Interest, portraying the idyllic life of a Nazi commandant and his family right next to the horrors of Auschwitz, gives us an opportunity to reflect with brilliant political commentator Katie Halper on the harmful narratives equating Jewish identity with Zionism, why the film is actually such a brilliant depiction of the banality (and celebration) of brutality, and why IOF soldiers TikToking their crimes against humanity is an important facet of Israel’s deeply evil campaign of annihilation. Watch below:
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Welcome back, everyone! We’re happy to have you here for another week of KK&F and looking forward to continuing our in-depth coverage of the unfolding genocide in Palestine with guests who provide unique and powerful perspectives on Palestinian solidarity; the history of the conflict between Israel in Palestine; support of the Zionist cause in American media and government; and why support of Palestinian liberation can and should not be conflated with antisemitism. This week’s guest, Katie Halper, is a regular on KK&F, and we’re thrilled to have her back for more conversation on the latest developments in Gaza. As Jared Kushner touts the repurposing of murdered Palestinians’ homeland as “valuable . . . waterfront property” for Israel, we have so many examples of the American ruling class’s thirst for blood in Gaza and unabashed support for the Israeli ethnonationalist project. We’ll be discussing this project, and the support it receives from the American establishment, in this week’s episode.
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Paying subscribers can join us on Substack Friday night for the full video episode; everyone else, see you Saturday on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts for the audio episode!
Certain shifts in the American establishment response to Israel’s genocide in Palestine suggest that the Biden admin has begun to feel the pressure put on it by pro-Palestine organizers across the country (and around the globe). From massive protests to coordinated labor actions and more, the American working class has taken a massive stand against its government’s support of mass violence. Notably, as we move through the primary season of the presidential election, many have found a high-visibility way to express their dissent: voting Uncommitted, as almost 50,000 people did recently in Washington State.
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Omar Baddar joins us to unpack this movement and think about the power of electoral organizing as one of multiple political tools available to members of the Palestinian liberation movement abroad. We talk through the latest developments in American policy surrounding Israel-Palestine, including waning support for Netanyahu, and much more. We hope you’ll enjoy this latest episode of KK&F, which will be available tomorrow through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Recent reporting from Jacobin shows that Biden is sending Israel weapons every 36 hours. A new Prime Minister, Mohammed Mustafa, will lead the Palestinian Authority and head the formation of a new government. As the U.S. continues to simultaneously enable violence and exert pressure on the Palestinian Authority, we track the response of Americans who object to their nation’s support of genocide — and find electoral means of voicing discontent through the Uncommitted vote in the Democratic primary. With Omar Baddar, we’re discussing Israel-Palestine and the Uncommitted vote movement in the U.S. on KK&F this week. Watch below:
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We invited Omar Baddar, an analyst of the Israel-Palestine conflict and a prominent voice critiquing Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, on the show for Episode 148, just before the end of last year. Now we’re having him back to provide urgent, necessary updates on how the genocide has progressed, how American politicians have changed their stance on US support of Israel (if they have at all), longer-term critiques of Biden’s comments from State of the Union and his overall approach to Israel-Palestine, and more. We hope you’ll join us for this essential deep dive with a respected voice on this crucial issue.
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The last time Omar came on the show, he pointed out how some progressives have risen to the challenge of opposing Zionist war hawk colleagues in Congress — and how others have fallen short. Especially after Democratic primary elections that showed strong support for non-commitment to the party in the face of Biden’s bankrolling a genocide, it seems more important than ever to check in on how those who publicly identify with the progressive movement have actually allied themselves with the interests of the international working class.
You can listen to this episode when it’s released Friday for paying subscribers via Substack and Saturday for everyone via Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
This week, we bring political commentator Briahna Joy Gray on the show to debate the big question: Where, if anywhere, does the Democratic Party deserve credit? And when does it become dishonest to ignore the real gains made by the current administration? Certainly, in the past few years, we’ve seen movement in the right direction, and state democrats in the Midwest passing phenomenal legislation, suggesting that a new future for the party could be possible.
Is it worth voting for Biden if he’s the democratic candidate to preserve labor gains and block another disastrous Trump term in office? Or is there a real possibility for a third party to succeed even in a rigged American political system? We weigh our options, and discuss much more, in this week’s episode.
You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
A high-energy debate between your KK&F co-hosts and political commentator Briahna Joy Gray is the latest on KK&F, and we think you’ll enjoy it. Join us for a conversation on if and how third parties can help us break out of the establishment bind in which American politics is currently locked, and whether the promise they offer outweighs the benefits of reforming and working within the ever-imperfect Democratic Party. Watch below:
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Briahna Joy Gray is returning to the show for a debate on third parties in American politics. In light of Dr Cornel West’s Green Party candidacy, we will discuss whether third parties can offer a meaningful alternative to the two-party system and its “lesser of two evils” appeal? Can third parties win? Are they worth supporting? And what is the best way for the left to advance a real working class agenda given the realities of the American political system?
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We’ll be taking on these questions in this week’s exciting debate, which we hope you’ll join us for. Paying subscribers can join us for our video conversation when it’s released via Substack on Friday. Everyone else, tune in Saturday when the podcast audio drops on Saturday via Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, and more.
In this episode of KK&F, Sohrab Ahmari joins the show to discuss how right-wing populism makes the attempt to reconcile conservative social views with leftist economic principles. Our conversation takes the form of a debate: What do left- and right-wing populists have in common? On what issues can they unite — if they can at all?
Per Sohrab’s description, right-wing populists hold opinions that are significantly separated from the economic analysis they put forward, suggesting that they’re not simply leftists waiting to be reached and won over through economic issues. But Sohrab also suggests that circumstances may call for coalitions between right- and left-wing populists, and we think about what those might look like, if they’re possible.
Thanks for tuning in. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack, and more.
Social conservatism comes into conflict with economic leftism in this exciting episode of KK&F, where we’ve brought writer Sohrab Ahmari onto the show to get into his book Tyranny Inc. with us — and to think about how right-wing populism makes the attempt to reconcile conservative social views with an economic program whose elements might be at home in a social-democratic system. It’s an opportunity for a debate on which side of this tenuous reconciliation ultimately wins out over the other — because the way we see it, you just can’t have it all. Watch below:
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Listen now (75 mins) | What happened on the debate stage in Milwaukee among Republican presidential candidates last Wednesday — and what’s Trump got to do with it? In this special episode of KK&F, we give you a detailed breakdown of the first debate of the campaign season. Analyzing everything from spicy exchanges between the candidates to who came out on top Wednesday night (and whether or not it’s enough to threaten Trump’s lead), we’ve got a comprehensive look at the debate that we think you’ll enjoy. Watch clips and listen to our conversation here.
Listen now | Welcome to Episode 137 of Krystal Kyle and Friends, featuring special guest Matt Karp. The focus of our conversation is this: How do we build a party apparatus worthy of support from working-class voters — and capable of making good on its promises?
Listen now | This week on KK&F, we’re bringing you a heated debate with our guest, Michael Tracey, on the topic of Trump’s indictments. Michael maintains that a reasonable person wouldn’t judge Trump’s behavior as criminal. Of course, the Trump campaigns and presidency have heavily featured a high degree of political theater, so that it’s possible to take the stance — as Michael does — that the charges of (for example) election interference that the former president now faces are taking his politicking too seriously. But we take the other side of the debate: that Trump worked to undermine the 2020 election and took meaningful steps toward doing so. The indictments he faces are legitimate, and in our argument, we lay out the reasons why.
Listen now | This week on the pod, we’ve got writer Freddie deBoer joining us for a conversation about the fate of the Bernie movement, the bona fires of progressives in Washington, and the all-important question of how to relate to leftist electeds — especially when they stray from their professed principles.
Listen now (108 min) | From conservative media outlets to the campaign trail, there’s nothing the right loves to obsess over more than wokeness. Their claim is that an obsession with political correctness has veered into authoritarianism — and that culturally, intellectually, and politically, we’re all worse off for it. We think it’s worthwhile to open up a debate about whether or not this argument actually holds up. Aren’t powerful Republicans the ones moving to restrict abortions, gay marriages, and a host of other basic rights? When leftists attempt to oppose military aid to Israel or criticize right-wing governments, right-wingers in power quickly lose their concerns about censorship, political targeting, and suppression of free speech. Which side can rightfully be accused of authoritarianism?
Listen now | With the return of The Vanguard hosts Zac & Gavin to KK&F, we’re looking at the field of 2024 presidential contenders. The frustrations and letdowns of the Biden presidency — expected, to be fair, from someone who promised wealthy supporters that “nothing will fundamentally change” — have us thinking about what it would mean to have a substantial progressive challenger going toe-to-toe with Biden this election. To that end, we break down Marianne Williamson’s presidential prospects, taking lessons from the Bernie 2020 run in order to map out her potential road to the nomination.
Listen now | This week, we’ve got an exciting debate with Representative Ro Khanna, who joins the show to share his perspective on Biden’s debt relief plan, progressives’ endorsement of Biden, and much more. Congressman Khanna has emerged as a leading elected critic of the Biden administration’s slow and incremental approach to student debt relief in the wake of a Supreme Court Ruling which struck down their initial efforts. Following the Supreme Court decision, we’ve been tracking Biden’s attempts (and lack thereof) to use executive power to follow through on the promises he made to working people on the campaign trail. How do these attempts measure up?
This week we had the chance to speak with the always game Congressman Ro Khanna. There was a lot to get into! Congressman Khanna has emerged as a leading elected critic of the Biden administration’s slow and incremental approach to student debt relief in the wake of a Supreme Court Ruling which struck down their initial efforts. Biden is continuing to push forward, pursuing another avenue for debt relief using the Higher Education Act, however he’s chosen a lengthy approach which will delay any potential relief for years. This comes as student debt payments, which were in forbearance during the pandemic, are set to restart with potential devastating consequences for the economy and personal finances.
Listen now | Our guest this week, Dr. Wilson of Debunk the Funk, joins us to address a topic of much debate: Are RFK Jr.’s vaccine claims totally false? As we point out in our discussion this week, while the presidential candidate hasn’t explicitly placed his anti-vaccine rhetoric at the core of his campaign, these ideas have driven his career — and are now front and center in the political discourse surrounding him. We expect certain vaccine conspiracy theories to get more airtime from their connection to a high-profile political figure. So we sat down with Dr. Wilson to get to the (scientific) heart of these conspiracies. What does the scientific evidence point to? Just as interesting: why, if proven untrue, do conspiracies persist?
Listen now | Welcome to Episode 130 of KK&F: a can’t-miss debate between your KK&F hosts and libertarian presidential candidate Mike ter Maat. We’ve got an episode that we hope will challenge and interest you with its lively, contrasting opinions on central social and economic issues: on the table are minimum wage, crypto, regulating Wall St and a lot more.
Listen now | This week, we are joined by Federalist writer and Counterpoints host Emily Jashinsky to debate the topics of recent anti-trans laws, drag queen story hours, Bud Light boycotts, and more. We also turn to Trump’s indictments and the right’s sudden concern for two-tier systems of justice. We’re grateful to have Emily on as an interlocutor, and we think you’ll find the conversation lively and challenging.
Listen now | With the insight of our guest, Brad Moss, we dig into the thirty-seven charges of mishandling of classified documents brought against the former president. What particular instances do these charges refer to? What kind of sentence could Trump face, if he is found guilty — and how could this disrupt both the Republican primary and the election itself?
Listen now | Our guest Touré gives us a compelling, fascinating, and insightful account of who made the hip-hop of the 1980s that changed the way we listen to music, who listened to it, who got the profit, and what anti-establishment political speech came out of this music. We think you’ll appreciate Touré’s analysis of capitalism’s role in the production of hip-hop music, a role that fits into a narrative of corporate greed and increasing monopolization.
Our guest this week, FD Signifier, has done incredible deep dives on black conservatism — the media narrative around it, leading figures in this “niche group,” and the reality of political leanings within the black community. According to FD, while every election cycle since Obama’s second term has seen news stories on whether black voters will break away from the Democratic Party and vote Republican, the truth is that black voters tend to be left of the Democratic Party — and those whose conservative viewpoints are showcased on national media are being used to fit a false narrative in favor of conservatism.
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We also weigh in on whether we should be more worried by a Trump or a DeSantis presidency, looking at the “creative malevolence” of DeSantis on social issues versus Trump’s massive incompetence and despicable record on those same issues. Together, we evaluate Kyle’s proposal that Trump is the Republicans’ least electable general election candidate — but also that he isn’t necessarily guaranteed to lose to Biden. Find out more by listening to the audio above — you can also find it on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and other streaming platforms.
This week’s guest, F.D. Signifier, joins us to give his perspective on the history of black conservatism. He’s a YouTuber known for insightful analysis of black media; we’ve asked him about everything from the expectations and reality of the Obama presidency to media narratives about black voters’ support of the Democratic Party. Watch below:
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Every year we seem to hear a new round of speculation about whether black Americans may drift towards the Republican Party, is there anything to the punditry? We are excited to have YouTuber FD Signifier on this week to grapple with this question and to break down the history of black conservatism in America. It’s a particularly relevant topic give the recent launch of Senator Tim Scott’s presidential campaign and new revelations about Justice Thomas’ corruption. Subscribe so you can get early access and the full video version.
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In the meantime, Biden and McCarthy have reached a deal on the debt ceiling, holding off the borrowing limit ($31.4 trillion) until the start of 2025. Good thing, because the country was poised to run out of money by June 5th, less than a week from today. Bad thing, because of course, austerity is a key principle structuring the deal the two negotiators struck, and it leaves us wondering what else the president could have done to set the terms of negotiation.
Republicans set the terms pretty early on: there would be no suspension of the borrowing limit if Democrats did not agree to spending cuts on public welfare programs. Now, as the deal goes to Congress, we know what those cuts (all $136 billion of them) look like. In large part they involve means-testing government benefits, requiring middle-aged childless adults to meet a work expectation in order to receive SNAP and TANF benefits. People aged 18 to 49 are already forced to meet the requirement in order to get the benefits. Biden’s moratorium on student loan payments is over, and he won’t be able to put another one in place. And $30 billion that was earmarked for COVID relief will no longer be put to that purpose.
No worries, though: We’re still spending where it really matters! Amid all of this hand-wringing about belt-tightening, the military budget will still hit $886 billion next year.
We’re releasing our convo early this week to give you the latest news as debt ceiling negotiations reach the eleventh hour on Memorial Day weekend. With David Dayen as our guest, we dig into the political scene unfolding in the debt ceiling negotiations, from key figures (Biden and McCarthy) to what’s on the docket for spending cuts thanks to Republican austerity — and no thanks to Democrats’ negotiating prowess.
Republicans have made it clear that the debt ceiling itself is their concession — they’re doing all they can to set the terms of this parley. Is Biden, hailed by centrist Democrats during his campaign as the great negotiator capable of reaching across the aisle in a way his further-left counterparts could not, actually living up to that promise? Or are we seeing the Democrats giving in and playing by Republicans’ rules of the game? We answer all these questions and more on this week’s episode. You can listen to this conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more. Thanks for tuning in.
Are Biden and McCarthy about to reach a deal on the debt ceiling? If so, they’re coming in just under the wire — next week, June 1, the government could run out of money for essential spending, so negotiations have reached a fever pitch. While the deal won’t lock down dollar amounts for specific spending areas, it will dictate how much can be spent on the military, housing, education, and more. The decision (or lack thereof) will have a huge impact on American life — and we want to know how. That’s why we’ve brought reporter and editor David Dayen to KK&F for an exclusive conversation. Watch below:
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Welcome back to KK&F — time to talk about the debt ceiling, which has brought up pressing political questions we want answered alongside those we definitely, definitely don’t. (An example of that last one, from a truly cursed Politico headline: “Guess who just bid $100K for McCarthy’s used chapstick.” You can’t unread that. It was Marjorie Taylor Greene.) But back to the questions we do want answered. As Democrats face off against Republicans to lower the debt ceiling and Republicans negotiate with them for cuts to social spending, who holds the power? How is the Biden admin responding to this gridlock, and how does this response measure up to the “master negotiator” narrative that Biden has crafted for himself? What are the Democrats willing to give up to achieve their political goals, and what can that tell us about the direction the party is headed in?
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Luckily, we don’t have to go it alone in our search for answers. We’re joined this week by David Dayen, whom you know as a writer for the Intercept and executive editor of the American Prospect. David’s been covering the debt ceiling negotiations lately, and we think you’ll appreciate his insight into the latest on Capital Hill. We certainly have, and we’re excited to share our conversation with you. Paying subscribers can tune into the episode when it’s released Friday evening on Substack; everyone else can listen through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and your other favorite streaming platforms on Saturday. Thanks for joining us!
Media fawns and humiliates themselves over Secretary Pete, Ron DeSantis sinks to new lows in his war on trans people, and Kyle reveals that time he almost had to debate Alex Jones. We have a lot to talk about on this week’s episode of KK&F. And we’re thrilled to be joined by Jason Nichols a leftist who frequently appears on Newsmax.
Jason discusses his strategy and goals for appearances, his views on “platforming” extremists, and how he stays sane in the face of insanity.
Thanks for tuning in! You can listen to this episode as a podcast
Media fawns and humiliates themselves over Secretary Pete, Ron DeSantis sinks to new lows in his war on trans people, and Kyle reveals that time he almost had to debate Alex Jones. We have a lot to talk about on this week’s episode of KK&F. And we’re thrilled to be joined by Jason Nichols a leftist who frequently appears on Newsmax.
Jason discusses his strategy and goals for appearances, his views on “platforming” extremists, and how he stays sane in the face of insanity.
Watch below for our in depth discussion on how and why to go into the lion’s den:
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A nationwide writers’ strike; widespread outrage in response to the murder of a homeless man by an ex-Marine on the New York subway; Biden’s advocacy for the implementation of austerity policies in the long run. We have a lot to talk about on this week’s episode of KK&F. This excellent piece by Adam Johnson, written right after Jordan Neely’s killing at the beginning of this month, captures the increase of violent attacks on homeless people by
an anti-social climate of vigilantes viewing it as their job to step in and use ad-hoc violence to “deal with” social ills caused by poverty, a lack of care, and the mental strain of baked-in precarity.
Whence this vigilantism? As the protectors of the capital-owning class, police forces across the United States are paid to terrorize homeless communities, destroy their encampments, incarcerate them or fine them (and incarcerate those who can’t pay) for sleeping outside on public land, and generally threaten their survival. God forbid, of course, that wealthy city residents should be aesthetically offended by the desperate attempts at survival of those whom the American housing sector has failed. Johnson’s point in this piece is to bring to the fore the role of the media in demonizing and dehumanizing homeless Americans, whipping up a conservative panic around their continued existence in public places, and inciting those absorbed by that panic to outright violence.
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Daniel Penny, the man who killed Jordan Neely, was arraigned a few days ago, charged with second-degree manslaughter — “reckless homicide.” Neely died after Penny choked him for several minutes. In his analysis of this murder being treated by government and media as anything but, Adam Johnson indicates the complicity not merely of conservative but also of liberal media in solidifying the narrative: homeless people are the threat, killers like Penny are society’s protectors. David French’s recent piece on Neely’s murder, which follows a brief summary of the killing with whataboutism on subway harassment of women, is so wretched it’s almost surprising. But it’s the perfect example of the flagrant work being done among all the allies of the capital-owning class to construct a narrative that portrays innocent people killed in broad daylight as eliminated threats to society.
That work is far-reaching in its audience and its efficacy. In response to Neely’s death, New York Governor Hochul commented, “There’s consequences for behavior.” (She was referring, of course, to what she perceived as Neely’s harassment of fellow subway riders, not to the murder.) While addressing his plans to target homeless people on the New York subway, New York City Mayor Eric Adams claimed that “You must remove the cancer to start the healing process.” Removal, consequences: more violence, more murders of people struggling to survive in the world’s richest country. These are the crimes we need to care about. How to continue to foreground and fight this urgent issue as leftists? This will, of course, be one of our topics of discussion with this week’s guest, Jason Nichols, host of In the Lions’ Den on Newsmax. We’ll have plenty more to talk about — paying subscribers can join us Friday for the full conversation, while everyone else can tune in Saturday when the audio drops on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else you get your podcasts. See you soon.
To the wonderful “friends” in Krystal Kyle & Friends — we’re away this week, with Krystal and Kyle on their honeymoon following their wedding this past weekend. We’ll be back soon with more coverage of breaking news, leftist theory and strategy, and analysis of the major issues the working class is facing in our country today. We’ll see you soon! But we’re so grateful to you for joining us on the political and creative journey that is KK&F — one that has been so important and special to us — so we thought we’d share a special moment from this weekend:
It was a perfect day. We couldn’t have been happier to share it with beloved family and friends. The podcast has been an incredible opportunity to work together on the things we love, and you’ve all made that possible — thank you. Back soon!
Acting as the attorney for the families of those killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, Mark Bankston played a central role in the crucial defamation cases against Alex Jones for his dangerous, highly public denial of the shooting. Now, he explains what constitutes defamation — and why that label can get so controversial. It’s tied in, of course, to an analysis of current events. Just a few weeks ago, Fox News paid $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems in a settlement over claims that 2020 election conspiracy theories spread by Fox resulted in harm to the company.
Fox’s massive resources, along with the popularity of its claims of election fraud, have emboldened the company to make and stand behind such conspiracies. Who has the power to fight back, and on what legal grounds? What kind of speech is protected under American free speech rights, and what crosses the line into defamation? These are the questions we’re lucky to have Mark to answer for us, and we’re glad you’re joining us for the discussion. You can listen to this conversation as a podcast when it’s released later tonight on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Taking us from the heartbreaking case of the Sandy Hook victims’ families fighting Alex Jones’ defamation to the more recent case against Fox News, attorney Mark Bankston reveals the complexity of free speech issues at the heart of defamation cases. If you’re looking for a primer on the Fox News case, and more broadly on the rights individuals (and corporations, treated under law as people!) have to defend themselves against harmful speech, this is the KK&F episode for you. Watch below:
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In his work as attorney for the families of children killed at Sandy Hook, Mark Bankston has taken on defamation cases against Alex Jones, whose sharing of false information denying the Sandy Hook shooting eventually resulted in his having to pay $965 million to the plaintiffs. The high-profile cases against Jones lasted years; they exposed both the power of conservative media to spread dangerous lies and the tireless fight of both the families and their attorneys to combat those lies and reveal the harassment and harm that resulted from them.
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Now, we’re turning to Mark to tell us about major defamation cases in the news lately, from the lawsuits against Fox News to the comments unfolding between conservative commentators Candace Owens and Stephen Crowder. We’re releasing this conversation early this week — on Thursday, paying subscribers can access the full video content of our conversation, while everyone else will be able to listen to the audio when it’s released in the evening. A huge thanks as always to those who make our work possible by subscribing for $5 a month — you help keep KK&F ad-free. You can find the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
News of Clarence Thomas’s expensive gifts from a billionaire GOP donor has sharpened our sense that the rich and and powerful play by different rules — and benefit accordingly. Other Supreme Court justices are benefiting, too. Reporting out of Business Insider just today shows that Jane Roberts, wife of Chief Justice John Roberts, took in $10.3 million over the course of eight years for connecting top lawyers with firms and corporations. (And, as TNR reports, Congress has known about it for months — but we’re just finding out about it now.) Then there’s a story from earlier this week in Politico about the chief executive of a top law firm buying property co-owned by Neil Gorsuch nine days after Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. Politico also reports that since the purchase, the law firm, Greenberg Taurig, has interacted with Supreme Court cases twenty-two times.
It’s a bleak picture of the state of our judicial system, bought and paid for with corporate and billionaire dollars. What do we do with that picture, and how does it come together? How can we change it? We’re digging into these questions with insightful political scientist and writer Corey Robin, and we hope you enjoy the episode — it’s available on Spotify, Substack, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Corey Robin wrote the book on Clarence Thomas and judicial corruption — literally. So we’re thrilled to have him on the pod this week to break down the scandal surrounding the Supreme Court justice lately, taking us through the larger narrative of money in politics, the influence of right-wing billionaires, and why the story is bigger than “corruption.” Watch below:
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Krystal Kyle & Friends welcomes political scientist and journalist Corey Robin to the pod this week as a sharp analyst of conservative history and of the current firestorm surrounding Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his acceptance of decades’ worth of gifts from a right-wing billionaire. Harlan Crowe donates to the Republican Party; he’s also given Thomas use of his private jet, his yacht, and his private resort, where Thomas has hobnobbed with his wealthy friends. Seems like a textbook case of corruption. Right?
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Corey’s take is more interesting and complex: per his interpretation, corruption is a limited way of framing the powerful relationship between Thomas and Crowe. Thomas is unapologetic about his conservative votes on the Court; the kind of inroads made between right-wing billionaires and political figures that he’s now being criticized for are very much in keeping with his political ideology. At hand is the multilayered, multi-decade story of Thomas’s using his political power on the Supreme Court to protect and entrench money’s influence in politics, turning to the constitutional right to free speech for help. It’s a fascinating account that does more than point out a quid pro quo; it is, in Corey’s words, a “teachable moment” for our politics.
We hope you’ll join us this week to get Corey’s insight and hear our discussion of his work. Paying subscribers can tune in Friday to get the full video conversation, while everyone else can check out the audio when it’s released Saturday on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
With this week’s guest, Daniel Nichanian, we dive into the recent trend of GOP “culture warriors” failing to make successful bids for school board seats in recent Midwestern elections. Krystal points out that given the relatively large pool of resources these candidates often have to draw upon for smaller local elections, many expected the far-right strategy to win these elections through virulent anti-trans and anti-CRT platforms to be more successful. But in fact, these candidates have fallen short, and Daniel’s analysis reveals that while right-wing candidates are still using anti-LGBT messaging to win elections elsewhere in the country, progressive candidates’ focus on issues immediate to the improvement of learning conditions may well be helping them pull ahead. Learn more and join us for the full episode above.
You can listen to this conversation on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Brandon Johnson’s election, far-right candidates losing school board elections, TikTok censorship of the Marianne Williamson left: these are the things we’re covering in this week’s episode with “election lifeline” Daniel Nichanian. Daniel founded the political magazine Bolts, where he’s currently editor-in-chief; you might know him, as we do, from his truly indispensable coverage of local elections across the country. That’s why we were so thrilled to sit down with Daniel and look at a political phenomenon that defied our expectations of the right gaining ground by spending big on small elections. (Plus a lot more.) Watch below:
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This week we’re welcoming writer and editor Daniel Nichanian to the pod, where we’ll be diving into everything from the election of Chicago’s new Mayor Brandon Johnson to the midterm elections and conservative fearmongering around issues of trans rights. Daniel is founder and editor-in-chief of political magazine Bolts; in his own writing, he regularly covers the topics of criminal justice and voting rights.
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Given his emphasis on local politics, we’re excited to hear from Daniel on the topic of a notable trend in recent school board elections: conservatives who build their campaigns on so-called “culture” issues are falling flat. This reporting from Politico explains how, looking at the recent Illinois and Wisconsin elections, GOP candidates were no match for their Democrat opponents, especially where those conservatives leaned on attacks on critical race theory, transgender students’ rights, and similar far-right rhetoric. What can be learned from the campaigns of the winning Democrat and teachers’ union candidates, and what does this say about the educational system Midwestern voters want to see in their community? We’ll dig into it this week with our guest.
Join us Friday for the video of this conversation if you’re a paying subscriber (only $5 a month). Everyone else can tune in Saturday through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
We've got a wide-ranging and thought-provoking conversation with author and political commentator Norman Finkelstein, covering everything from the 2020 Sanders campaign's strategy and messaging, the current state of American politics, political appeals to the working class, and more. Norm joins us to talk about "hyper-wokeness," both its manifestations in the 2020 presidential election and beyond. How do identity politics and class struggle interact, and how did we see that on debate stages and campaign trains? What role should identity politics play in political discourse at large? Norm has plenty of thoughts to share on these topics and we hope you'll join us for the debate.
This episode is available as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
All things left, all things identity politics, all things cancel culture, plus his new book: “I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It,” that’s what’s on the docket for our interview with Norm Finkelstein today. We've got a wide-ranging and thought-provoking conversation covering everything from the 2020 Sanders campaign's strategy and messaging, the current state of American politics, political appeals to the working class, and more. Watch below:
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Following last week’s deep dive on the potential fate of Trump’s criminal case, we’re pleased to bring you an in-depth conversation with a deeply insightful political thinker whose work we’ve long kept up with. We’ve been looking forward to sitting down with Norman Finkelstein to discuss his advocacy for the pro-Palestine movement, his own political journey, his assessment of the state of the American left, and much more.
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The author of eight books and a former professor of political theory, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University following a highly public back-and-forth with Alan Dershowitz, whose work he strongly criticized. Given the airtime expended on mainstream American media over the supposed silencing of conservatives, and the comparative lack of coverage of the professional consequences faced by leftists who voice critiques of Israeli policy toward Palestinians, we want to hear from Norm about whether he’s noticed changes in the responses to and struggles faced by the pro-Palestine movement in the U.S. and abroad. Paying subscribers can join us Friday for the video episode on Substack; everyone else, join us when the audio drops Saturday evening on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
In Episode 119 of KK&F, we’re joined by lawyer and journalist Bradley Moss to learn the ins and outs of Trump’s developing criminal case. Now, as Trump actually heads to court, we’ll see how his base mobilizes around their perception of the former president as wrongfully accused or persecuted, and how Trump himself continues to refute the charges he’s facing. The case will, we expect, be a major point of focus as we head into a new season of presidential campaigning, and we’ll continue to talk about how mainstream media will respond to case developments, as well as how the Republican Party will be forced to respond. You can listen to this episode as a podcast when it’s released tomorrow on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Let’s get into it: Where is Donald Trump’s criminal case going? As of early this week, he’s been pleading guilty to allegations of falsification of business records, setting a record as the first president charged with a crime. Now that he’s been indicted, questions remain: How long will the trial take — could it cut into or run pas the 2024 election? How will it rile up Trump’s base (or not), and what shock waves will it send through the political landscape of the far right? And of course, how will it shake up the playing field of Republican presidential hopefuls for 2024? We’ve got lawyer and journalist Bradley Moss on to explain. Watch below:
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Happy Tuesday! Donald Trump has been arrested. Today, during his arraignment, we got to see the indictment he’s facing, which includes 34 felony counts. The felonies in question refer to his alleged falsification of business records connected to hush money paid to Stormy Daniels during the ‘16 election. If found guilty, Trump could serve up to four years; today, in Manhattan criminal court, he pled not guilty. Prosecutors, however, argue that he “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”
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We’re at the beginning of a landmark trial, uncharted territory for the American legal and political system: no other former president has ever been charged with a crime. There’s a chance that the trial will go into or reach past the 2024 election, which (to say the very least) opens up a new series of questions about what the presidential race will look like. How does this criminal case affect the landscape of Republican presidential hopefuls and their affinity for or disavowal of Trump? What would it mean for Trumpism if the former president is found guilty? We’ll be getting into these big questions on the show, and we look forward to having you with us. Paying subscribers can access the full conversation as a video on Friday evenings, and everyone else can tune in Saturday through Pandora, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
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What is Steven Donziger up against? In our extensive conversation with him this week, we ask him to walk us through the charges he faced as a result of targeting from Chevron, how he appealed those charges, and why it’s significant that this appeal won’t be considered by the Supreme Court. Steven explains that he was charged with contempt of court and sentenced to 6 months in jail back in 2021 for refusing to hand over personal electronic devices to Chevron for their perusal. A district attorney had refused to prosecute him, but when a federal district court judge appointed a friend of his (who worked for a Chevron firm, it bears noting) to go after Steven, private corporate prosecution led to Steven’s sentencing.
As Steven, himself an attorney, points out, this degree of unapologetic, outright corporate power being wielded for private prosecution is truly unprecedented. We hope you, like us, will appreciate hearing from Steven on this crucial case, reflecting on how corporate power and lack of accountability goes all the way up the American judicial system. Remember that you can listen to this episode through Spotify, Substack, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
This week we bring you an exclusive interview with attorney Steven Donziger on the Supreme Court’s recent rejection of his appeal. Learn from Steven himself about the “retaliation campaign” he faced from a corporate behemoth for exposing Chevron’s environmental destruction in Ecuador, why it’s so important that the Supreme Court refused to consider his appeal, and much more. We’ve talked to Steven at various points throughout his grueling struggle for freedom from Chevron’s unjust attacks, and this latest development truly reveals how Steven’s case is important for a strong critique of corporate power at the level of federal government. Watch below:
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One of the most fearless and inspiring guests we’ve had on KK&F is Steven Donziger, the lawyer known for taking on Chevron over their environmental destruction and harm to farmers and indigenous people in Ecuador. If you’ve followed Steven’s story, you’ll remember that he was given a six-month jail sentence back in September of 2021, found guilty of criminal contempt charges on the basis of a refusal to give up personal electronic devices. Now, just yesterday, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, which rested on the case that a federal court district judge acted outside of his powers in putting Donziger’s case in the hands of three special prosecutors. While the liberal Supreme Court justices voted to reject the appeal, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh dissented, with Gorsuch writing the following in the dissent:
However much the district court may have thought Mr. Donziger warranted punishment, the prosecution in this case broke a basic constitutional promise essential to our liberty. In this country, judges have no more power to initiate a prosecution of those who come before them than prosecutors have to sit in judgment of those they charge.
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The dissenting opinion is a fascinating insight into conservative justices’ views on what’s at stake in the Donziger case, and of course, we’re also asking why the liberal justices didn’t see fit to consider the appeal. This week we will have a chance to hear from Donziger himself about this injustice from the so called liberals on the highest court. Paying subscribers will have access to the full video on Friday. Everyone else can tune in for the audio on Saturday when it’s released on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Welcome back to KK&F, where the great Matthew Zeitlin gives us a primer on the conditions that led to the March 10 fall of SVB (Silicon Valley Bank), which had been involved with nearly half of tech companies backed by venture capital. He also helps us understand the significance (and the truth) behind Biden’s claim that what the Fed did for SVB following its failure was not a bailout.
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How should we assess the admin’s decision to guarantee uninsured deposits — is Biden right that because taxpayer dollars aren’t going into the bank to revive it, we can’t call this a bailout? Or is this a useful framework to think about the government’s decision to take unusual action to shore up a floundering financial institution?
Thanks for tuning in. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, and more.
Matthew Zeitlin is on the show this week, taking us through the fallout from the SVB crash and explaining everything you want to know but are too afraid to ask about it — from what this incident could tell us about the future of the economy to the lessons we can take from the 2008 bailouts. What becomes politically possible for the government in terms of financial policy when it comes to shoring up the resources of the elite? And can we imagine these same political possibilities being available to ordinary people? Watch our discussion below:
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After a powerful last episode with the Shiptons on Julian Assange’s fight for freedom, we’re turning back to the issue at the front of your mind: the SVB bailout and what it tells us about who gets government bailouts (read: big banks) and who gets the crumbs (read: the American public). We’re bringing Matthew Zeitlin on this week to walk us through the questions we’re all asking: Who is paying for the bailout? How does this stack up to the actions the government took to shore up big banks in 2008? What priorities is the Fed revealing here, and what should we as the American left do with this information?
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Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlinSince SVB collapsed and had all its depositors bailed out, investors, bankers, and even elizabeth warren have called for boosting the deposit insurance limit — with some even calling for a temporary guarantee of all deposits grid.news/story/economy/… 2:00 PM ∙ Mar 21, 2023Matthew reports on business, econ, and finance for the Grid, and has contributed to the NYT, New York magazine, The Atlantic, and more. One of his latest pieces for the Grid, drawing on the SVB collapse, makes the case that “Federal deposit insurance should be much higher, and perhaps even unlimited, at least for a little while,” ensuring the ability of depositors to access their funds in the wake of a bank collapse (under the FDIC limit that’s been set — currently $250,000). We’ll be digging into the greater economic reforms that might be sparked by the SVB catastrophe — and you can join us for the conversation. The video will be available to paying subscribers on Friday evening, and everyone can tune in Saturday via Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
April 11 marks the four-year anniversary of Julian Assange’s incarceration in a maximum-security prison. Back in October, he appealed the decision to extradite him to the US, where he faces life in prison; his health is suffering as he waits to hear the decision on the appeal. Since the beginning of his incarceration, Gabriel and John Shipton, Julian’s brother and father, have worked tirelessly to share the urgent story of the repression he’s faced for drawing attention to American war crimes. Now, their documentary, Ithaka — evoking both an “international odyssey” and an eventual homecoming — tells that story more powerfully than ever, and they’re doing a tour across the country to accompany the film’s release.
This episode is available on Substack, Spotify, Pandora, and everywhere else you get your podcasts!
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Gabriel and John Shipton rejoin us to discuss their powerful documentary, Ithaka, the story of Julian Assange’s persecution and incarceration for whistleblowing on US war crimes, as well as an account of his family’s advocacy to free him from prison and prevent his extradition to the United States, where he faces a potential sentence of 175 years in jail. We’ve had the Shiptons on the show before to discuss Julian’s unjust treatment for essential reporting, and we’re honored to have them back to hear about how their documentary tells the story that should be at the center of leftists’ concerns about a free press. Watch below:
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It’s deja vu all over again: the American government is bailing out banks. “What,” asks a recent piece by Bloomberg’s Michael Tobin and Hannah Miller, “was Silicon Valley Bank to the world of startups and venture capital? Practically everything.” Everything indeed: it has been “the single most critical financial institution for the nascent tech scene” since its incipience forty years ago, and until just this week it was the sixteenth-largest American bank by assets. SVB, a titan of the tech sector, thrived alongside venture capital, as past KK&F guest Branko Marcetic writes for Jacobin — but fears of inflation giving way to higher interest rates and a lower volume of available venture capital, among other things, spelled trouble.
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Now, though it’s a word Biden won’t use, a bailout is what we’d call the measures our government is taking to shore up SVP’s spectacular fallout. (The head of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or the 2008 bank bailout, is calling it a bailout, by the way.) Goodbye to taxpayer dollars (and lots of them) that might have gone to establishing universal healthcare, funding public education, building any of the social welfare programs we so often hear there’s not enough money for. To understand why this is such a damning moment for the Biden admin, how it exists on a continuum with the financial crash of 2008, and how the Left can respond, we’re inviting reporter Matthew Zeitlin on the show. Paying subscribers can tune in Friday to watch our convo — and as always it will be available to everyone Saturday through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
This week, we’re welcoming Marshall Kosloff to Episode 115 of KK&F. Marshall’s pod The Realignment, co-hosted with Saagar Enjeti, covers issues of the country’s political shift relating to mainstream media, national security, economic policy, and much more. We’re thrilled to have Marshall on Krystal Kyle & Friends this week to discuss the latest stories that have interested him and Saagar on The Realignment, what forms of realignment are manifesting in the United States’s political, economic, and social terrain, and why this shift is taking place — as well as our usual coverage of the latest in this week’s news. Thanks for joining us for another week of KK&F — we’re so glad to have you.
You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and more.
If you’re looking for international inspiration in the world of labor organizing, look no further:
David Adler @davidrkadlerHoly shit. French trade union CGT cut the power to Amazon facility in Morlàas to protest Macron's pension reform. "We have placed Amazon in energy sobriety, because we are looking for billions to finance pensions, and we believe that this money is there."bfmtv.comRetraites: Dussopt salue un “vote de responsabilité” après l’adoption de l’article 7 au SénatLe Sénat a voté l’article 7 de la réforme des retraites, sur le report de l’âge légal de départ de 62 à 64 ans.3:50 PM ∙ Mar 9, 2023
3,247Likes858RetweetsYou’ve probably seen incredible footage over the years of France’s empowered labor movement shutting down corporate greed and governmental austerity with bold, unapologetic strike actions. Now, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) has shut off an Amazon facility’s power, identifying the massive consolidation of capital in the mega-corporation’s daily operations at Morlàas — and forcing Amazon into “energy sobriety” to show how important resources must instead be invested in the financing of pensions, under threat from Macron, who seeks to reform France’s pension system against the interest of workers.
This particular display of organized labor power links Amazon’s excess and waste of essential resources with the privations of working-class life under neoliberal austerity. And it reminds us in the United States that the conditions of exploitation for American workers are the same. While Amazon workers here in the U.S. struggle to make a living, face retaliation for union organizing, and literally die on the job, the value they create goes straight to the pockets of an elite and conservative few. We might think about what it would be like for labor unions to be able to cut power to Amazon facilities across the United States. But, of course, we should also think about the strategy and dedication to labor organizing necessary to make this action possible.
On to our guest this week, Marshall Kosloff of The Realignment podcast:
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Thanks for joining us last week for a truly special conversation with Marianne Williamson, who’s just launched her 2024 bid for the presidency. Our discussion of key policy items for progressives in the coming presidential race, how leftist candidates can take on Biden’s austerity and broken promises, and hostile media coverage of a working-class political agenda has us thinking about what we’ve learned from the 2020 presidential election — and, of course, how things could be different this time around.
While we asked Marianne about her agenda and vision, the White House and the corporate press treated Marianne’s announcement with mockery and derision. Watch the cackling smug response of White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre here along with Marianne’s response. You can decide for yourself who the “serious” people really are.
Marianne Williamson @marwilliamsonThey might think it’s a joke, but there’s nothing amusing about people going bankrupt from medical debt or children going to bed hungry. Marianne2024.com The Recount @therecountWhite House Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre, when asked if President Biden is annoyed by Marianne Williamson (D) announcing her 2024 presidential bid:“Just not tracking that. I mean, if I had a ... crystal ball, then I can tell you ... If I can feel her aura …” https://t.co/zy5NU67UAN1:51 PM ∙ Mar 7, 2023
5,554Likes770RetweetsOf course the condescension and dismissal of pro-working class ideas is nothing new but it’s a signal that the fight for 2024 is truly joined.
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This week we are excited to be joined by Marshall Kosloff of The Realignment podcast. Marshall is also a frequent contributor to Breaking Points where he’s a fan favorite for his nuanced analysis. We can’t wait to hear his take on the current political moment.
This week it’s our pleasure to bring you an exclusive conversation with 2024 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. Like you, we’re interested in hearing about Marianne’s plans to address class warfare and social injustice in the United States, how her political journey led her to become an advocate for key progressive policies and against rampant economic inequality, and how she plans to take on both Biden and Trump this election — and win.
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Through her time as an author and a figure on the national political stage, Marianne has gained insight into the intense disparity between the most advantaged and the least advantaged Americans, revealing the difficulty of survival for those who are “locked out of the club” and the way that our system is rigged for those with the keys to the castle of elite privilege. As she tells it, she plans to shine the light on the inherent problems with this system — but also to transform it for the improvement of working-class life in America. This is what she views as the role of the politician, and in this wide-ranging interview, you’ll hear how she envisions herself stepping into that role as the nation’s next president.
We hope you enjoy this special episode of Krystal Kyle & Friends. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Pandora, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Krystal and Kyle sit down with presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. In this exclusive interview, they press her on foreign policy, how she will overcome establishment opposition, and how she will handle a condescending and contempt-filled establishment media. She reveals whether she can beat Biden and Trump, her pitch to “normie” Democrats, and why this run will be different from the last one. Watch below:
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Our very first KK&F guest. A powerful advocate for peace and justice, both in the 2020 presidential election and beyond. Marianne Williamson truly needs no introduction — but as she’s announced a second presidential run in 2024, the first person in the field to challenge Joe Biden as of yet, we’re bringing Marianne back on the show for a wide-ranging discussion of what will be new about her 2024 campaign, what issues are at the front of her mind as a presidential candidate, what she learned from the last round, and, of course, how she plans to win.
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Universal healthcare, free child care, paid family leave, and other key progressive policy planks will be at the heart of her 2024 campaign, according to the Washington Post. We’re interested to hear how her ideas on social welfare programs, civil and economic rights, and the core values of love and justice she represented in her 2020 campaign have evolved in the wake of a global pandemic, the 2020 George Floyd protests, new energy in the labor movement, and an incrementalism Biden admin. There’s much to discuss with the one and only Marianne Williamson, and that discussion is taking place on this week’s episode of KK&F — so you’re in the right place!
Because of Marianne’s Saturday announcement, our posting schedule will be a bit different this week. Paying subscribers can watch this episode as a video when it’s released this Sunday. We’ll be releasing the audio shortly afterward on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and your other favorite streaming platforms. Thanks for tuning in!
Why would the FBI pay a “violent felon” — who actually managed to fly under the radar because his appearance as a potential fed was so strikingly obvious — to work secretly and internally against racial justice organizers in Denver? With Trevor Aaronson of the Alphabet Boys podcast joining us to lay out the details of this harrowing story, we learn how and why Mickey Windecker got onto the FBI payroll to provide information to the Feds about anti-racist protesting and organizing work in Denver over the summer of 2020.
What emerges is the story of a man who strove to stoke violence and discord through deeply disturbing means — encouraging the destruction of neighborhoods, bringing weapons to organizing spaces, putting activists in peril. We’ll talk about why the FBI’s agenda here is so significant, and what lessons the left can take away from this governmental attack on crucial grassroots activism.
Thanks for tuning in to Krystal Kyle & Friends. You can listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
We’re grateful to have Trevor Aaronson on the pod this week to discuss his reporting on FBI infiltration of the racial justice movement in Denver almost three years ago. Aaronson tells the story of how Mickey, a fifty-year-old outsider in military fatigues who talked a big game about his past history of combat, joined a group of young activists and fought to dispel their suspicions about his motives — only to inform on and threaten the group in exchange for checks from the FBI (to the tune of $20,000). Watch below:
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Another train derailment this week, and Trump is on his way to East Palestine, OH, to make the case that he has the political vision to address the crisis there, gearing up for the ‘24 presidential election (which he’s already thrown his hat into). Never mind the fact that Trump played a central role in creating the conditions that set up Norfolk Southern trains to wreak havoc across the country: he slashed regulations for oil trains and prevented the implementation of an Obama-era rule that would require the updating of trains’ braking designs from actual nineteenth-century technology. And while a far-right leader is trying to cash in on the tragedy caused in part by his own deregulation, of course, centrist Democrats are hardly anywhere to be seen — Biden himself has not made a visit, and it may not surprise you that Pete Buttigieg hasn’t either. (He’ll do it when the “time is right” — maybe waiting for the air to clear, though East Palestine residents don’t have that luxury.)
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This week we’re happy to have Alphabet Boys Podcast’s Trevor Aaronson on the show to discuss a story we mentioned recently. Trevor has reported on the invasion of Denver’s Racial Justice Movement by an infiltrator paid by the CIA, a shocking and urgent piece you can read here at the Intercept. Now we’re having Trevor join us on the show to talk about how the FBI put actual government resources into suppressing and threatening racial justice organizing during the demonstrations of 2020. We hope you’ll join us. Paying subscribers can catch the video of our convo when it’s released here Friday, and everyone else can tune in for the audio when it’s out Saturday on Pandora, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
David Sirota joins us on the show this week to discuss what has become a horrific environmental disaster for East Palestine, Ohio, where residents have reported serious health issues and animals dying from the pollution. Add to that the struggle that those affected by the toxic chemical release will face as they grapple with the United States’ punishingly cost-prohibitive healthcare system for the care that they need. In so many ways, what happened in East Palestine speaks to the government’s profound failure to protect Americans both in the workplace (as in the case of overworked rail workers with no sick leave) and at home. It also shows that the cause of organized labor is capable of confronting and organizing around that failure, and that if the Democratic Party had lived up to its promises to fully stand with labor in December, thousands of people’s lives would be very different right now.
Thanks for joining us for this essential conversation. You can listen to this episode as a podcast when it’s released tomorrow on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
David Sirota joins us to discuss the issue at the front of our minds — the Norfolk Southern train derailments that have created massive health and environmental issues as a result of corporate greed and our government’s refusal to stand with organized labor. In this episode, we dig into the corporate decisions that led to the disasters in East Palestine and (just Thursday morning) Detroit, how they could have been prevented, and the reality that local residents are already facing.
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Welcome back to KK&F. This week, on our minds is the unimaginable devastation in Turkey and Syria, where over 41,000 people have lost their lives and cities have been brought to the ground. As many as five million people are in emergency shelters, many in freezing temperatures. According to current U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and former Republican Senator Jeff Flake, $85 million in humanitarian aid to the region will suffice. But compare this number to the aid the U.S. has given to the Ukraine — why won’t the government approve something on the order of the billions of dollars in support it’s sent to the Ukraine since the start of Russia’s attack nearly a year ago? Moreover, why can’t Biden permanently lift U.S. sanctions in Syria, argues former KK&F guest Branko Marcetic in a piece for Jacobin, since the earthquakes prompted him to temporarily halt the sanctions for the next six months? Thinking about these questions means addressing the U.S.’s imperialist and capitalist motives in its global interventions, which have prevented it from offering an adequately humanitarian response to the massively fatal crisis that has devastated Turkey and Syria over the past week.
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The Intercept @theinterceptDeconstructed podcast: @trevoraaronson breaks down the FBI’s infiltration of the racial justice movement in 2020 interc.ptHow the FBI Infiltrated Racial Justice Protests in 2020A new podcast from reporter Trevor Aaronson details the story of an FBI informant who infiltrated the racial justice movement in Denver.11:05 AM ∙ Feb 10, 2023
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Considering how those motives translate to repression and racist violence here in the U.S., we’re bringing Alphabet Boys Podcast’s Trevor Aaronson on the pod this week to delve into his reporting on how a violent criminal was paid by the FBI to disrupt, inform on, and attempt to sow violence in Denver’s racial justice movement. It’s a gutting story that captures how U.S. intelligence mobilized against antifascists and protestors of police violence during the 2020 uprisings, and we think this story deserves your attention. Tune in Friday if you’re a paying subscriber, and Saturday through Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, and more to give it a listen.
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We know we can’t flip a switch and institute socialism. But how long that process will take and what its end result will be is a debate that often polarizes the American left. Matt Bruenig and others have spoken and written in favor of adopting something like the Nordic model, which centers on a strong welfare state. He also sees value in the example of Alaska’s social wealth fund and in worker co-ops, supporting ownership of your own workplace. This is to say that in Matt’s view, we can find elements of the socialist society we want to build in the world as it exists today. It’s “nothing crazy” — these policies and programs have huge support and remain important institutions for the public good in the communities where they have been established.
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Thanks for subscribing to KK&F! You can listen to this episode in podcast form on Spotify, Substack, Pandora, and more.
Welcome to the show, Matt Bruenig! We’re glad to have the inspiring policy analyst and leftist political thinker on the show to talk about the big-ticket question: what socialism looks like in practice. Answers to the question can be found everywhere from Marxist writings to real-life examples across the globe, depending on who you’re asking. We’re going to Matt with this big question because his research on the policies that make for a strong and supportive social welfare system — single-payer healthcare, child tax credits, parental leave, just to name a few — help illustrate and ground our discussion in programs that improve quality of life for everyone, not just for the rich.
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Policy analyst and leftist commentator Matt Bruenig is joining the pod this week. Through lefty think tank People’s Policy Project, Matt has brought attention to the importance of single-payer healthcare, a child tax credit program, and other elements of a robust welfare state. He’s also contributed to debate about the implementation of socialist policy, supporting the “Nordic model” as an example of how a leftist society could be structured.
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Curious about what the Nordic model is, how we make the case for single-payer healthcare, and why the Democrats went so wrong by dropping the child tax credit program? This week’s episode answers your questions. Tune in Friday if you’re a paying subscriber to catch the video recording of our conversation — it’s sure to be a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion. And the audio will be available to everyone when it’s released Saturday evening through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
This week on KK&F, Corin joins Kyle for a “politics and chill” session on gun policy, the Austin food scene, and DeSantis’s politics of conservative outrage. What we note about DeSantis’ militarization of conservatives around this issue is his ability to plug into the “outrage of the day” — harnessing the energy of right-wing opposition to Biden’s perceived attack on their way of life. Kyle makes the case that this is a major point of differentiation between Trump and DeSantis that could make all the difference when it comes to the future leader of the far right. Trump is (believe it or not) “less online,” losing traction as he revisits older issues like the 2020 presidential election. In a match-up between the two, would DeSantis emerge stronger, better able to speak to the topics that get his base whipped up into a frenzy? We break things down in this week’s conversation.
Corin @cornchipsssIn Austin backstage w @KyleKulinski ready for tonight’s breaking points live! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🙌🙌 12:38 AM ∙ Feb 4, 2023
322Likes7RetweetsThanks for tuning in. You can listen to this conversation as a podcast on Spotify, Substack, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Our topics of conversation on KK&F this week cover a wide range — everything from a serious discussion of gun policy in the U.S. to the state of the food scene in Austin, where we’re recording this week. Join Kyle and Corin (in a delightful reunion of the Kyle & Corin Show) as they catch up and delve into the items on their minds this week. Watch below:
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From millennials’ apparent passion for avocado toast to their “refusal” to buy homes, we’re used to hearing about how the younger generation’s new values (read: dwindling economic mobility) confounds and frustrates their older peers. Now that Gen Z has entered workforce, they’re the topic of the latest hand-wringing op-eds about how nobody knows how to work (read: stoically suffer exploitation on the job) these days.
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A fearmongering headline from Yahoo News just made the rounds online: Gen Z isn't ashamed of 'job-hopping' and will even quit unfulfilling jobs without a backup plan, study finds. For mainstream news outlets looking to scare up more labor-related stories from a conservative angle, reporting like this is bread and butter. We might get so wrapped up in asking “Are young people really quitting jobs they don’t like?” and considering differences in generational attitudes that we skip over the most important question: What’s wrong with that? What’s commendable about sticking to a job that makes you feel unhappy and unfulfilled? When low-wage work leaves you struggling to make ends meet and leaves you wanting more, where’s the shame in taking a better offer when it comes along?
On the other hand, if we’ve observed anything over the past few years, it’s that young people also aren’t ashamed of organizing to improve their workplaces when jobs fail to pay the bills, provide good healthcare, and create safe environments for their workers. Younger workers played a central role in the first unionization campaigns at Starbucks locations, and they have ever since. A Gallup poll from 2021 showed support for unions among people ages 18 to 34 at 77 percent. Young people are far from the only ones responsible for the incredible current momentum in the labor movement. But they’ve had an essential part in it already — and they’re just getting started.
Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquitThe fuck you I quit generation will save us all 1:10 AM ∙ Jan 23, 2023
98,121Likes8,187RetweetsWelcome back to another week of Krystal Kyle & Friends. This week, we’re reuniting the Kyle & Corin Show: Corin is joining us for a convo about the latest in this week’s updates on politics, culture, and current events. Paying subscribers can watch the video of our discussion when it’s released Friday night; everyone else can tune in Saturday through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more. See you soon!
Ken Roth is joining the show this week to discuss how he lost a fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School for reporting on human rights abuses. What Ken, the “godfather of human rights,” experienced when the Kennedy School found out about his criticism of Israel is a powerful lesson in the repression of dissent at elite institutions.
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Larry Summers, Alan Dershowitz, Steven Pinker: Harvard refuses to remove these people from its payroll regardless of their extremely public links to Jeffrey Epstein, allegations of sexual abuse, the list goes on and on. Students recently walked out of a Harvard classroom to protest the school’s continued employment of John Comaroff, who has been accused of sexual misconduct (accusations that Harvard then failed to do anything about, and is now facing a lawsuit for this mishandling). When it comes to employing people who may put students in danger instead of teaching them, the university doesn’t back down. But when it comes to reporting on human rights abuses, when that reporting challenges the status quo, the school — like so many other powerful organizations — isn’t above blacklisting.
Kenneth Roth @KenRothIf only it were a trend for universities to protect academic freedom even in the face of pressure to suppress views that some sectors dislike. The problem is real. A firmer university commitment is needed for the solution. trib.alAbcarian: Two universities that tried to squelch academic freedom have backtracked. Here’s hoping that’s a trendTwo cases of reflexive censure reversed: Harvard re-invites an Israel critic to take a fellowship. Hamline University regrets calling an art historian ‘Islamophobic.’5:54 PM ∙ Jan 27, 2023
16Likes5RetweetsWe’re grateful to Ken for coming on the show, talking to us about his story, and helping us understand how those who speak out about human rights abuses in Israel are regularly silenced. Thanks for tuning in for this important conversation. You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Pandora, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
This week, we’re joined by Ken Roth, formerly of Human Rights Watch, about how his criticism of Israel cost him a fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School. Up for discussion in this episode is the question of how elite institutions like Harvard view reporting on Israeli apartheid as a challenge to their political status quo — and how they work to silence dissent. Watch below:
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In the news this week, an awful reminder of the alliance between American law enforcement and the property-owning class — and its value of profit over human life. This article from the Guardian describes how police officers killed 26-year-old Sudanese refugee Chiewelthap Mariar as he finished working a shift at an Oklahoma meatpacking plant after being fired. The officers have tried to justify the murder by claiming that Mariar was armed. But a coworker who filmed the officers’ fatal attack on Mariar (and was later fired for doing so) said that he was working with a band cutter from the plant.
After witnessing the murder of their coworker, Seaboard Foods workers were forced to get back to their shifts. This is the latest and most grievous in a series of attacks on workers’ health and safety at Seaboard, which was investigated by OSHA last year and forced to improve working conditions after OSHA found that the company did not document workers’ illnesses and injuries on the job — and then retaliated against those workers for taking time off. But it’s horribly clear that working conditions at Seaboard are as unacceptable as ever, and that the company is willing to unite with police to threaten its workers’ lives, all in the name of keeping the production line going.
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This week we’ll be speaking with Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, who was initially refused a Harvard Kennedy School fellowship for speaking out against Israel’s human rights violations. We’ll talk to him about the conditions in Israel that led Human Rights Watch and others to condemn their treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. Especially in light of a new right wing government that is pushing the boundaries of political extremism. And we’ll of course tackle our own government’s willing blindness and complicity in this human rights atrocity.
Kenneth Roth @KenRoth"If Roth—a highly respected establishment figure with a global platform—can be targeted this way for speaking out against Israel’s abuses of Palestinian human rights, where does that leave Palestinian and allied student organizers like us?" More needed. thenation.comHarvard Changed Its Mind on Ken Roth—Not on Allowing Free Speech About PalestineIf even a highly respected establishment figure like Ken Roth can be targeted for speaking out against Israel’s abuse of Palestinian human rights, where does that leave student organizers like us?2:44 PM ∙ Jan 24, 2023
52Likes10RetweetsThis episode will be available as a video to paying subscribers on Friday night. Everyone can tune in this Saturday via Pandora, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more. Thanks for tuning in.
Right-wing radicalization, especially on social media, is a huge focus on the podcast this week. We’re joined by YouTuber Lonerbox as he takes us through the history of right-wing censorship and the arguments for and against free speech, Trump’s engagement with and mobilization of a far-right fringe via social media, and much more.
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When should the left call for censorship? When do hateful words become life-threatening actions? These are the questions we’re grappling with, and they’re urgent ones for the left to address.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more. Thanks for tuning in!
It’s been a strong week for Republican villainy — and that’a a high bar to clear. The GOP continues its all-out assault on public welfare, as Iowa Republicans proposed a bill that would cruelly restrict who qualifies for SNAP and what quality of food they receive from the program. If your lavish lifestyle includes having multiple cars or more than $2,750 on hand, members of the Iowa GOP don’t believe you should have access to food stamps. And if you do qualify under their suffocating means-testing, you wouldn’t be allowed to buy “meat, flour, butter, cooking oil, frozen prepared food,” according to Luke Elzinga of the Iowa Hunger Coalition.
Right-wing radicalization, especially on social media, is a huge focus on the podcast this week. We’re joined by YouTuber Lonerbox as he takes us through the history of right-wing censorship and the arguments for and against free speech, Trump’s engagement with and mobilization of a far-right fringe via social media, and much more. When should the left call for censorship? When do hateful words become life-threatening actions? These are the questions we’re grappling with, and they’re urgent ones for the left to address.
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Welcome to KK&F, Lonerbox! The YouTuber has documented everything from the trials and tribulations of the British Conservative Party to the current debate on abortion, mainstream coverage of the war in Ukraine, and British transphobia. Now he’ll be joining us for Episode 108 of KK&F to discuss the latest in this week’s current events, as well as his own experiences building a large leftist platform and his approach to left independent media.
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And what a week it’s been. As Kyle reports on Secular Talk, female lawmakers in Missouri will be forced to follow a new dress code. Just another mask-off example of the Republican Party’s hypocrisy when it paints itself (often through transphobic legislation) as the party protecting women. Over on Breaking Points, Krystal and her co-host Saagar discuss Biden’s own display of hypocrisy surrounding the classified documents found in his former office. Will Democrats take an interest in this latest breach of security?
We’ll take on the week’s biggest news with Lonerbox, and we hope you’ll join us. Paying subscribers will get the full video of our conversation on Friday through Substack. Everyone else can tune in on Saturday via your favorite podcast host — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
This week’s guest, YouTuber Philion, traces the roots of today’s online misogyny to the pick-up artists of the 2000s and beyond, looking at how alpha male culture has made its way into almost every corner of the internet, from finance to fitness. Movements like #MeToo have changed public discourse so that today’s equivalents of the pick-up artist can’t get away with expressing themselves the way they might have done twenty years ago. But even without descending to the manosphere’s hidden, rotten core, it is (as any woman online knows) sadly too easy to see that that it’s alive, well, and a massive influence on modern culture. The internet has become a place where men of all ages can become radicalized around a hatred and distrust of women, and a dangerous, unfulfilling idea of masculinity. How will it be possible for the left to confront this? And what, exactly, are we up against?
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We dive into these questions and more with Philion, this week’s guest, and we’re grateful to you for joining us. Remember that you can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
This week’s guest built a huge YouTube platform by digging into the “deep, dark rabbit hole” of financial scams, bizarre cultural phenomena, and more. He’s used it to uncover and document the bizarre world of alpha males in modern Internet culture. Events of the past few weeks — in particular Andrew Tate’s arrest in Romania on human trafficking charges following his online attacks on Greta Thunberg — reveal how necessary it is to reflect on how misogynists find digital niches to spread their ideas and indoctrinate others. Now, Philion joins us to talk about what he’s learned from his reporting on the manosphere — and from his own observations about online content, from the fitness world to cults and beyond.
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On January 8th, two years and two days after the right-wing January 6 coup at the Capitol in D.C., a mob of Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings and and the presidential home in Brazil’s capital, Brasília. The violent infiltration was motivated by the rioters’ opposition to current left-wing president Lula da Silva, who was inaugurated at the beginning of the year and campaigned on fighting social and economic inequality. Some of Bolsonaro’s backers have accused Lula of election fraud, and as per CNN reporting, had been preparing for the coup attempt by camping in the capital since the announcement of Bolsonaro’s loss in the election. By acts of violence, fearmongering, and destruction, they made it clear that Lula’s return to the presidency will be met with resistance from a fascist right emboldened by years of power.
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It’s an opportunity to think about the similarities in ideology and tactics between American Trumpism and Brazilian Bolsonarismo after election losses — and how the Lula and Biden governments (with their own vast political differences) handled right-wing attacks. Who can forget the surreal (if not totally surprising) experience of watching law enforcement stand by and allow right-wingers to invade the Capitol? While Lula has called out the Federal District’s military police for their failure to act, his government has also removed right-wing public officials responsible for upholding public safety, and hundreds of arrests have been made. Cognizant of the fascist threat to his democratic and leftist program, Lula’s administration is taking action against right-wing hostility in the week after his inauguration.
We hope you’ll join us for this week’s KK&F conversation. Paying subscribers can watch the video of our discussion this Friday, while the audio will be available to everyone via Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more on Saturday. See you soon.
Thumbnail image from CNN, “Déjà coup: How election lies sparked the violent attack on Brazil's government.”
Krystal Kyle & Friends is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
We talk to Will Menaker of Chapo Trap House about what’s at stake here for the “ultra-MAGA contingent” posing a roadblock to McCarthy’s confirmation. We’ve got a number of different theories which might actually combine to explain the standoff: McCarthy just doesn’t have the confidence of his colleagues; people like Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert see him as a sellout and would prefer an even further-right Speaker; some the holdouts have made conflict their brand, and negotiating isn’t the point; others are committed to an older Tea Party-style agenda about low debt ceilings and balanced budgets. How will the contest for the speakership set the tone for the proceedings of this Congress?
We’re glad to have Will with us to unpack the insanity unfolding in D.C.’s halls of power, and we think you’ll appreciate his insight. Remember that you can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Welcome to the longest contest for Speaker of the House in 164 years. (What the hell was going on in 1859?) If you’re following the latest drama in Congress, you know that former Minority Leader of the House, California Republican Kevin McCarthy, just can’t seem to get the votes to become Speaker of the House. But why are elements of his party holding the votes hostage? What’s on the table for them to win? That’s the focus of our discussion with this week’s guest, Chapo Trap House co-host Will Menaker, as well as the question it opens up more broadly: about how the Trump wing of the Republican Party butts heads with the other factions, and whether it’s outgrown Trump himself.
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The first episode of a new year — and of the third year of KK&F. Sunday marked our show’s second birthday, and since we launched the pod with our first episode, a conversation with the inspiring spiritual and political thinker Marianne Williamson, we’ve been truly blown away by the perspectives of our incredible guests, the insight we’ve gained both on foundational leftist theory and on current events, and most of all, by the support we’ve gained from you, our incredible audience. We’re thrilled to be able to bring you this show every week for over two years now, and proud that the contributions of our paying subscribers keep us ad-free and available to everyone.
We’re excited to introduce another great guest to the show this week, someone who’s had a profound impact on left media over the last few years and brings a delightful trademark humor to his insightful commentary on current events. Will Menaker of Chapo joins us to dig into the week’s news, including 2022’s wildest Twitter event with the jailing of Andrew Tate after an online exchange with Greta Thunberg. Plenty to talk about here, and we’re looking forward to sharing it with you.
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This episode of KK&F will be sent to paying subscribers Friday. Everyone else can tune in Saturday through Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and more.
This week, we’re joined by the TV host and author Touré to discuss his book The Ivy League Counterfeiter, a gripping and thought-provoking story about elite crime and punishment. Specifically, what kind of elite crime merits punishment? In Touré’s book we found an incredible opportunity to think about the legalized forms of financial corruption and predation that take place every day in ivory-tower enclaves. Cliff, the Ivy League Counterfeiter, simply moves from the “officially sanctioned” public theft that Ivy League students perpetuate on Wall Street to another form of scamming that has instead been criminalized. While the scams of big banks, stock exchanges, and consulting firms go unpunished (if anything, they’re incentivized), informal, unsanctioned versions of these scams — like counterfeiting — land you in big trouble. Our conversation with Touré about his incredible book reveals the true criminal behavior of our most “official” and “professional” financial institutions, and calls into question why they, too, haven’t been met with prosecution — yet.
We hope you enjoy this episode of KK&F. You can listen to this conversation through Pandora, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more!
Greetings from sunny Miami, where we’re wrapping up our second year of KK&F! The final episode of 2022 is a conversation between Krystal and Touré, a writer who documents the fall from grace of a former classmate and newcomer to the élite Ivy League world. The subject of The Ivy League Counterfeiter attended a top-level prep school and Columbia University through scholarships, but became swept up in counterfeiting, a journey Touré masterfully describes in what reads like a “made-for-Hollywood script” but is instead a powerful, fascinating true story. That, plus Touré’s insight as a cultural critic into the biggest artist scandals of the year, is the focus of our conversation this week.
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Friends of the show know we don’t exactly think of the Ivy League as the be all-end all of real intellectual culture in this country. Yet out there in the world, places like Harvard and Yale — often little more than glorified tax-evading hedge funds that post endowments the size of small nations’ GDPs, and award degrees to the next generation of the élite — have a pretty good rap for churning out future leaders, people fit to take the reins of the free world.
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There’s a lot to unpack there. But we’ll start with a fascinating story by TV host and writer Touré: his recent book The Ivy League Counterfeiter, which reveals how someone with “all the opportunities in the world” went on from his prep school and Columbia education to pursue illegal riches. Touré analyzes court documents and interviews with his former classmate and friend whose counterfeiting work led him into a “criminal underground” that seemed to contradict what he’d been raised to do.
In our discussion with Touré, we’ll learn more about the Ivy League Counterfeiter, asking how those with immense opportunities and expectations fall into criminal schemes — and what kind of behavior élite Ivy League circles actually allow. We hope you’ll join us! The interview will be released Friday on Substack for paying subscribers; everyone else can tune in Saturday through Pandora, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Krystal Kyle & Friends is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
It seems like every few days a new free-speech scandal, UI nightmare, or flame war goes down with Musk at the reins of Twitter. (Maybe you like knowing how many views your Tweets are getting, but it feels like the latest unwanted design nightmare under the leadership of the guy who proposed single-lane car tunnels under Los Angeles.) Matt, along with other journalists from outlets like CNN and the New York Times, found his Twitter account shut down over commentary on the site’s new policy surrounding the sharing of people’s real-time location info.
Why did Musk focus on banning the promotion of other, “competitive” social media platforms like Mastodon on his site, a policy so inflammatory that it’s since been rolled back? And why were some social media platforms the focus of his ban, while others, like TikTok, remained untouched? Our purpose in the conversation with Matt is to get a sense of the political and economic agenda behind these decisions — it may not be as easily spelled out as “free speech” for all.
Thanks for tuning into Krystal Kyle & Friends and merry Christmas! You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Substack, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
He’s back! Journalist Matt Binder has been reinstalled on Twitter after being suspended by Musk for commenting on the suspension of that @ElonJet account, which was accused by Musk of “doxxing” in one of his latest dust-ups on the site. Now, Binder is joining us for the latest episode of KK&F to talk about the massive issues of free speech Musk is perpetuating as Twitter CEO — when his stated purpose was to make Twitter a “free thinker” haven. Watch below:
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Welcome back to KK&F. Last week we dug into the latest updates on the FTX scandal, as the biggest crypto exchange was besieged with fraud allegations. This week, we’re doing a deep dive on a social media superpower at the precipice of collapse, and the agenda of the man at the wheel. Journalist and commentator Matt Binder is joining us to make sense of the story of Twitter’s place in (online) public life, how Elon Musk changed its course, and whether everybody’s predictions of “the end of Twitter” have any truth to them.
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Maybe, earlier this week, you took a Twitter vote on whether Elon Musk should keep his post as Twitter CEO. Elon himself set up the poll and promised to abide by the result, but after the vote didn’t go the way he hoped, he’s switching up the way that “policy-related polls” will be held: only Twitter Blue subscribers can weigh in.
If you’re willing to drop $8 a month to weigh in on Musk’s latest schemes, you’ll make your voice heard in this little pay-to-play “democracy.” But we’ve also seen the reports that Musk’s reign as Twitter CEO has caused massive instability for the platform, with significant implications for the way information and public opinions are shared. This interesting MIT Technology article points out that, though we might think of Twitter as a frequently goofy, petty marketplace of less-than-ideas, the site holds a precious chronicle of the last decade-plus of history. What is Elon going to do with it? Who, if anyone, will help him decide? That’s our focus on this week’s episode of KK&F, and we hope you’ll join us.
This episode will be available to paying subscribers on Friday, and to everyone on Saturday through streaming platforms like Spotify, Pandora, and more.
Want to get rich quick? In a country with massive wealth disparity and intense precarity caused by expensive housing, healthcare, and education, scams and schemes profiting off of everyday people are literally all around us. This week’s guest Coffeezilla has made it his focus to analyze modern-day scams, to understand how their messaging plays into social and financial concerns and gets the buy-in of people who might otherwise be skeptical. He makes the excellent point that today’s hucksters are able to “sell the dream tailored to the specific person,” understanding what kinds of struggles and goals different people have — and convincing them that you have the product to make their problems go away.
How does this fit into the current fiasco in the crypto world, the fall of FTX? Coffeezilla leads us through the charges against SBF, the government’s response to violation of campaign finance laws, and where this story could go from here. Thanks for joining us, and remember that you can listen to this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Pandora.
This episode gives us not only an in-depth view of the major upset in the crypto world with the fall of FTX, but also the opportunity to get to know Coffeezilla, YouTube commentator extraordinaire who’s built a platform around digging into scams (medical, financial, all the way up to SBF). We think you’ll enjoy this conversation about the scam that’s rocking national news and changing the way we think about cryptocurrency — and the role that government regulation should play here. Watch below:
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Just hours ago, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former head of the crypto exchange FTX, was charged with multiple counts of fraud for his illegal funneling of money from FTX into his other venture, trading firm Alameda Research. As the story comes out, it’s clearer and clearer that SBF hoped to invest tens of billions of laundered dollars in political power. Reporting for CNBC shows that customer funds were fraudulently transferred between FTX and Alameda and funneled into both Democratic and Republican political campaigns, allowing SBF to flex his financial muscles and exert pressure on American electoral results — in pretty flagrant violation of U.S. campaign funding laws (and if you’re violating our already dark-money-friendly laws, it’s got to be bad).
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No surprise, but we’re returning to this fascinating story for Episode 103 of KK&F with special guest Coffeezilla, self-professed “Internet Detective Exposing Scams” through YouTube reporting — check out his interview with SBF right here. While the mainstream press was writing puff pieces on SBF, Coffeezilla was seeing right through his bullshit.
We’ll talk to him about how the spectacular fall of the crypto world’s Lehman Brothers has come to be one of the most high-profile financial crashes in our memory, how federal prosecutors are handling this case (and where this kind of prosecution could go from here), and what FTX-gate means for the futures of crypto and campaign finance are probably the big questions on your mind. They’re the big questions on our minds, too, and we look forward to digging into them with Coffeezilla on this week’s episode.
Refresh your memory and get up to speed on SBF’s truly wild fall from grace with some recent reporting from Krystal and Kyle. Breaking Points has this recent primer on SBF’s indictment to explain the situation (we’re sure there will be new, even crazier details to add by the time Friday comes around). And over on Secular Talk, Kyle shares the breaking news of SBF’s arrest. This should tide you over until our episode comes out on Saturday (Friday for our paying subscribers), with all the latest on this quickly unfolding story.
“Real OG” radio host Thom Hartmann joins us for an interview that’s been a long time in the making; Thom is a major influence for Kyle, someone whose coverage of leftist issues inspired him to work in left independent media. He joins us to talk about money in politics, the legal precedent for the treatment of corporations as people (bet you didn’t know that this precedent goes all the way back to 1886), and much more. In our discussion, Thom describes how the constitutional amendments so central to American liberty (freedom of speech, equal protection under the law) became the target of nineteenth-century railroad corporations seeking human rights for their capitalist enterprises.
We connect this history to our present moment to understand how corporations have been building power through appeals to constitutional rights for more than a century — and how we can fight back. Thanks for joining us for this important conversation. You can also listen to this episode through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Coming off a busy and fun week of live shows, we’re giving you a one-of-a-kind crossover episode between KK&F and Kyle’s Secular Talk. Between our regular show and Secular Talk, we’re covering everything, from Kanye West’s appearance on InfoWars (and what Alex Jones expected versus what happened) to Kyle’s convo with someone he describes as an idol of his, Thom Hartmann. Hartmann is a celebrated radio host (yes, that Thom Hartmann Show), whose progressive commentary on current events over the past few decades has become a staple of left media. Here’s the conversation:
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Welcome back to another week of KK&F, and thanks to those who joined us for last week’s essential conversation with Jonah Furman about the Senate’s decision to block a rail strike — as well as Biden’s role in pushing for that vote, refusing to get the votes to support the workers, and, as we’ve seen so many times, accepting a decision that is by no means set in stone for someone with executive power. Now, we’ve heard from the unions who did not agree on the deal without sick leave: they’re paying close attention to how those in the halls of power are responding to a “humanitarian issue.” And unlike many of those politicians, the leaders of those unions are saying that the unions will use their political power in support of their membership.
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Quoted in a CNBC report, Tony Cardwell, president of the Brotherhood of Maintenance Way Employees Division, drew attention to the hypocrisy of what Senators are willing to accept for themselves and what they’re willing to impose on American workers. He had these words for elected officials referring to the paid sick leave demand as a “gimmick”:
They (Congress) have [sick leave], their staffers have it. Many government employees have it. Most corporations provide some form of sick leave for their employees. So I find it completely irritating that they would call it a gimmick.
Great point: If paid sick leave isn’t such a big deal, why does Congress insist on having it? They have unlimited sick days! Yet another insane moment in American politics, emblematic of our Congress’s approach to governing: rights for me, but not for thee. Rest assured that if the Senate insists on having some workplace benefit, we should be demanding that thing, too. But we shouldn’t expect them to support us when we ask.
We’ll continue to reflect on the power dynamics between the federal government and the growing labor movement in episodes to come. We hope you’ll join us for a new and exciting episode of KK&F later this week (Friday for paying subscribers, Saturday for everyone on streaming platforms like Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts). See you soon!
Listen now | One common theme in our conversations at KK&F — which has been around just a few weeks longer than the Biden presidency, letting us follow and comment on Biden’s methods of governance from the very beginning — has been the way that this White House denies its access to certain forms of presidential power when it could benefit working people most. We’ve compared Democrats’ and Republicans’ willingness to avail themselves of measures and roles like executive orders, parliamentarians, and so on in order to get things done.
Listen now | Welcome to our hundredth episode with commentator Farron Cousins, our guide to Florida politics and how it’s shaping the nation. The big question is whether the rise of DeSantis means the collapse of Trump. We discuss how the two major right-wing figures are pitted against one another for future presidential campaigns. Perhaps the greatest plus for Trump would be the major three-ring circus in the mainstream media if he were to announce his candidacy: what we learned from 2016 is that outlets like CNN, despite their professed opposition to Trump’s politics, were willing to give him billions of dollars’ worth of free media by covering his every move during the presidential campaign season. The idea that liberal media might do more for Trump than anyone else by feeding into his plays for national attention isn’t even galling anymore — we’ve seen this before.
Listen now | This week’s episode with writer Matt Stoller takes us to that million-dollar question (probably more than a million-dollar question, actually): Is crypto just a scam Can’t we apply all of the negatives of crypto to fiat currency? Isn’t it all made-up on some level? Matt argues that the governmental institutions that support fiat currency, as well as its societal usage, draw an important distinction between, say, the dollar and the bitcoin. He also responds to the contention that crypto’s strengths lie in its decentralization and frictionless transfer by making the case for a stronger U.S. banking system in general. There’s nothing necessary or unavoidable about the woes of our financial system, which he traces to corruption.
Listen now | This week, Marianne Williamson joins us to share her own analysis of the big midterm elections earlier this week, saying we have new proof that the Democratic Party shouldn’t be afraid to put its foot on the accelerator and go for the bold legislation and robust social programs that Americans clearly have an appetite for. Instead of sizing up Tuesday’s electoral offerings as the very limit of what voters will break for — assuming that this is as far left as they will go — she argues, “Think what will happen if we go all the way in the direction of progressive policies that we know American people will support.”
Listen now | According to this week’s guest, economic analyst Rana Foroohar, the Democratic Party is facing an existential crisis. Those who were active in government during the start of neoliberal policymaking — and who perhaps even worked to implement it — are in the same party as new legislators who have seen the catastrophic effects of those policies on the working-class people they represent.
Listen now | We’re grateful to Alexandra Hunt for delving into the tough issues of the “manosphere,” toxic masculinity, and how the left should view and respond to sexual frustration among young men. She considers young men’s increasing radicalization by far-right figures around issues of sexuality to be an issue the left should take on, and one that has major implications for our political system.
Listen now | Even among fellow Conservatives, former PM Liz Truss’s agenda registered a shock. She pushed policies of deregulation that directly attacked working people, while cutting taxes for the wealthy. And, as of Thursday, she’s out of office. Now the party will be tasked with putting up another Prime Minister to carry out a political program that lacks public consent.
Listen now | After years of a pandemic, layoffs, the beginning of a recession, and so many other hardships for working people, why should we be reassured by centrism? What makes this political vision attractive at all, and why do we still have to contend with it? We’ve seen how Biden has scaled down or outright abandoned the central campaign promises that made his candidacy bare-minimum palatable to many leftists. We’re turning to the work of Jacobin writer Luke Savage (especially in his new book,
This episode of KK&F has a lot to offer — especially a thoughtful conversation with a writer we truly admire, Jacobin’s own Luke Savage, who’s just written a powerful new book on centrism. But we’ve also got Kyle’s attempt at a solution for the war between Russia and Ukraine (you be the judge), our analysis of the imperialist, extractivist motives behind that war, whether we’re actually headed for nuclear war, and more. Watch below:
Listen now | Welcome back to KK&F — this week we’re joined by Katie Halper to discuss how she was dismissed from her appearances on The Hill’s Rising in retaliation for her coverage of Israeli apartheid. As ironic and counterintuitive as it sounds, conservatives literally make a career out of crying “cancel culture.” And when right-wingers do face consequences (books pulled from shelves, Twitter accounts permanently banned) for spreading dangerous misinformation, you’ll notice that we keep hearing from them — now on the topic of endangered free speech. But when independent left-wing reporters like Katie tackle significant issues dealing with human rights abuses — issues that reveal the U.S.’s own hegemonic interests in the Middle East — they’re kicked off platforms that tout themselves as open-minded and intellectually diverse.
Listen now | Comedian RM Brown joins us this week for a conversation about bringing comedy to left politics, right-wing attacks on basic freedoms — from trying to shut down gay marriage to book-banning frenzies — and where our movement’s priorities should be right now. As you’ll see in this exclusive interview, he views our current moment as an opportunity for a “collective project” for public well-being (think housing, healthcare, student debt) that will help us build power and deliver on everything Republicans are trying to take away from us right now (with all but outright consent from the Democrats).
Listen now | Welcome back to KK&F, where we’re confronting capitalism with sociologist and leftist thinker Vivek Chibber. We’ve brought him on the show to discuss everything from what it means to be a socialist, why we can’t take our eye (and our organizing) off of electoral politics, what role incrementalism should play in our politics, and much more.
Listen now | Welcome back to Episode 90 of KK&F. Our guest this week, Ryan Grim, has given us a great line to help us think about how the Biden admin has positioned itself on major issues like labor and climate, offering some improvements (e.g. through climate funding) while continuing to uphold an establishment status quo that is hostile to the working class. “If you’re used to getting punched in the face with both hands, this is progress.”
Listen now | Welcome back to KK&F, where we’re joined this week by political commentator, comedian, and Chapo Trap House co-host Matt Christman. Following the news of more legal struggles for Trump’s allies, we’re taking a look at how the former president and the members of his political team have survived various attempts at prosecution and alienation from their base of supporters — and why (if at all) that might be about to change.
Listen now | Welcome back to Krystal Kyle & Friends — minus the Friends this week, as we’re giving you a special episode of in-depth conversation between our two hosts. This week, we’re focusing on COVID policy, from vaccines and masks to lockdowns, in terms of what health and safety precautions have shaped American life in the past two years. We’re taking this opportunity to examine how the imposition of these health measures has changed public thinking about our collective duty to one another, the way we protect and advocate for kids growing up during and post-COVID, and more ethical questions we’ve faced since the onset of the pandemic.
Listen now | COVID didn’t start the struggles that American teachers face today. It did, however, force our country’s educators to face new political and economic threats. Now, as teachers stand up and fight back on picket lines across the country, we’re also asking questions about what our educational system could and should look like. What new roles could public education play in students’ lives, and why is it so important that we fight for them? This is just the beginning of our conversation with historian, author, and educator Eric Blanc, and we hope you enjoy.
Listen now (86 min) | From an assessment of the motives behind Trump’s retention of classified info to explainers on the Espionage Act, Special Access Programs, and everything else that’s further complicating the debacle at Mar-a-Lago, our guest Ken Klippenstein joins us to demystify the raid on Trump’s property and give us some insight into what comes next.
Listen now | In an exclusive interview, Jesse Ventura takes us through his journey as an antiwar advocate, a pro wrestler, and a famously successful third-party candidate for Governor of Minnesota. Ventura is known as a major, widely renowned wrestler, and he explains how wrestlers like him brought significant attention to Saturday night wrestling. But as we know from his legacy as an organizer within the wrestling community, Ventura brought attention to the unfair contracts and compensation that he and his fellow wrestlers received. He’s carried this spirit of class struggle with him into his advocacy against war, where he brought attention to the draft as a method of exploiting young working-class people to the benefit of the wealthy.
Listen now | This week, we’re bringing you a lively discussion — and some friendly debate — between KK&F host Kyle and our friends Adam and Sitch of the Sitch & Adam show. Adam and Sitch have positioned themselves as enlightened centrists, taking a critical stance on some issues at the core of traditional left politics but embracing progressive ideas like Modern Monetary Theory. That is to say, there’s plenty of room in this conversation for beliefs to be challenged, new ideas to be introduced, and the latest in big news — from the Alex Jones trial to the limitations of Roe v. Wade — to be discussed from different political angles.
Listen now | If you told me a cosmic ray hit Washington and flipped everyone’s brains, giving Schumer the Machiavellian cunning of a Republican and giving McConnell the guileless approach of a Democrat, that might be a more plausible explanation for this display than the truth.
Listen now | We’re thrilled to bring Zac and Gavin of The Vanguard podcast onto the show for Episode 82 of KK&F. These terrific guests bring wit and welcome insight to their exploration of today’s independent media landscape — and of what that landscape can tell us about free speech, misinformation, and freedom of the press in the United States. Zac and Gavin see their
Listen now | This week, we’ve prepared a conversation for you with the brilliant scholar Gary Gerstle, whose research on what defines the global neoliberal order can also help us understand what might bring that order to a close. We’re sharing this conversation on the heels of the news that Manchin, who’s made no secret of his opposition to Biden’s most meager proposals for social welfare, will
Listen now | In an episode months in the making, Krystal Kyle & Friends’s Kyle Kulinski is joined by psychologist and political commentator Dr. Jordan Peterson. For Kyle, it’s the “perfect situation” of getting to speak with someone whose work in psychology and philosophy has been particularly interesting to him — but who differs from him significantly on most political issues. They’re here for a back-and-forth on everything from Twitter controversies to Trump, economics, liberal versus conservative mindsets, and interpreting the results of Kyle’s personality quiz.
This week’s episode — Number 80 for Krystal Kyle & Friends — gives us the chance to do a deep dive with a scholar of American social and economic history. Gary Gerstle is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge; his books include
Listen now | Sixty-one percent — a majority — of Americans support the legalization of abortion. Yet in last week’s Supreme Court decision, five out of nine judges voted to overturn the prior decision that federally protected abortion as a right. As we’ve seen from the extremely contentious appointments of Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and more, everyday people don’t even have a direct say in who gets to be on the court, much less in the life-changing opinions that the court hands down.
Listen now (103 min) | This week, the Supreme Court landed the death blow to Roe vs. Wade, a decision which federally protected the right to abortion. Trigger laws are taking effect; abortion clinics are closing. It will take the grassroots struggle of working people to make abortion — an essential element of basic healthcare — not only legal across the nation, but also free and easy to obtain in a way it has never been before. We’ve seen all too clearly that the Supreme Court won’t deliver when it comes to protecting our basic rights, and when our lives are on the line, the Democratic Party has only performative, empty gestures to offer.
Listen now | Welcome back to Krystal Kyle & Friends, where we’re joined by Humanist Report host Mike Figueredo. Our conversation with Mike is wide-ranging: We talk with him about everything from his experiences as a “veteran” leftist commentator and the way his work has evolved over the years, to the invigorating prospects of the energized labor movement, to the personal story of Mike’s coming out to his family. His trademark wit, candor, and brilliant insight make this episode an essential listen.
Listen now | This week’s guest, journalist David Wallace-Wells, speaks with us about the defining issue facing humanity, climate change — and the task of getting our government to treat it as such. Currently, fossil fuel corporations are free to chase endless profit at the expense of our health and safety, and our planet’s future.
Listen now | Thanks for joining us for another week of KK&F — this one centering on the Colombian presidential elections, drug wars, and more. A left-wing candidate has taken the lead in the first round of voting; his right-wing opponent, who has styled himself as anti-establishment and anti-corruption, has his own charges of corruption to deal with. To get a fuller sense of what’s happening and what’s to come in the runoff, we’re joined by journalist Toby Muse, author of
Listen now | The brutal killing of nineteen children and two teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas has left us in national mourning, as the sickeningly familiar news of a school shooting continues to trickle in. As we learn more about the inaction of law enforcement on the scene and the agony of the children seeking help in their final moments, we confront one question above all: What will it take to make sure this never happens again?
Listen now | This week’s guest is the inimitable Doug Henwood, economic journalist and analyst — and the person we’ve come to in order to discuss the crypto crash of just a few weeks ago. Whether you have a deep understanding of all things blockchain and are looking to hear a left-wing perspective on the recent turmoil, or whether you’ve never heard of a “stablecoin” before, we think you’ll enjoy Doug’s sharp analysis of why cryptocurrencies have become so popular, what they seem to offer beyond our current system, and how they fall short.
Listen now | Professor and historian Harvey Kaye and Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America Alan Minsky join us on episode seventy-two of Krystal Kyle & Friends. These two give their sharp insight into how Democrats are doing on the issues we care most about, like economic inequality and poverty — and how they’ve positioned themselves on these issues in the past.
Listen now | This week, we’re joined by Ari Rabin-Havt, deputy campaign manager for Bernie 2020. Ari recently released a book, The Fighting Soul: On the Road with Bernie Sanders, that gives an insider’s view of the groundbreaking campaign. The book provides funny, surprising, and moving anecdotes that give the reader unusual insight into the man behind the campaign — a campaign that deliberately steered away from focus on its central figure, encapsulated in its famous slogan, “Not Me, Us.”
Listen now | In this episode, Marianne explains how the divide between Turner and Brown — and some current “progressive” electeds’ rush to side with the status quo — bears lessons not only for this singular race, but for the Democratic Party more broadly. Progressives can earn their name by standing behind essential policies like debt cancellation and Medicare for All time and time again — choosing to back away from these policies or their champions when reelection is at stake means that the desire to hold power comes first, and the responsibility to use it wisely comes second. Now, Democrats have allowed themselves to become a party of moneyed interests: even those who call themselves progressives aren’t willing to confront the establishment forces that uphold the status quo.
Listen now | After inspiring millions through her work as a campaign chair for Bernie 2020, Nina Turner has gone on to fight for the democratic-socialist vision of single-payer healthcare, student debt cancellation, and housing as a human right through two campaigns for a congressional seat in Ohio’s Eleventh District. She’s rejoining us on KK&F to talk about her political vision and work since she last came on the show.
Listen now | This week, author and organizer Daisy Pitkin joins KK&F to break down the Amazon Labor Union’s thrilling win — but also to give us a sense of what comes next and what this victory means for workers attempting to keep up the momentum of unionization at Amazon, Starbucks, and other mega-corporations.
Listen now | This week, for Episode 67 of Krystal Kyle & Friends, we sit down with Paul’s Ego of Deep Fat Fried. Self-described as “an educational show made by and for the uneducated,” the beloved show offers everything from a review of President Biden’s first year in office to a meticulous
Listen now | In this episode, we talk to progressive candidate Amy Vilela about the campaign trail for Nevada’s First District and the fight for Medicare for All — why we can’t get discouraged, why there’s never going to be a “perfect moment” for this policy to be enacted, but why we can’t wait any longer. Amy’s voice is an essential one within the discussion of strategy for Medicare for All, and we think you’re sure to appreciate what she contributes to this urgent conversation.
The wave of electoral energy surrounding and resulting from the Bernie 2020 campaign has given us plenty of lessons on how the left can field candidates and platforms that don’t just promise everything we need, but can actually deliver on those promises. Amy Vilela is one particularly inspiring candidate we’ve been watching — she cites Bernie’s landslid…
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This week’s guest on Krystal Kyle & Friends is Amy Vilela. Amy is a champion of policies like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and her advocacy has brought her from Bernie 2020’s massive Nevada caucus victory to her own run for Congress as a progressive Democrat in Nevada’s First District. We’re thrilled to take this opportunity to speak to a leftist candidate whose personal knowledge of the inequality and injustice in this country has led her to bring her vision of justice to a congressional race.
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Among the policies Amy plans to fight for in office are the construction of social housing, a just transition for fossil-fuel workers under a Green New Deal, ending cash bail, and more. Like Bernie Sanders in his 2020 housing platform, she’s calling for a homes guarantee for a 2025 end to homelessness, an issue woefully unaddressed in liberal political circles (and cruelly weaponized by conservatives in political discourse). We hope you’ll look forward to hearing from Amy about how her progressive agenda will fit into the political terrain of Congress, what her experience as a leftist candidate has been, and what’s coming down the road for her campaign. Paying subscribers can join us Friday for the video conversation; everyone else can listen for free on Saturday, when audio will be available on Substack, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
This week’s guest, Amazon union organizer Christian Smalls, describes how solidarity between workers sets the stage for the massive unionization efforts currently being mounted by Amazon workers in different parts of the country. While Amazon can hire union-busting firms, pay for endless propaganda, and so on, these workers are tirelessly holding conversations, negotiating, and building support for a union that can win them the protections, compensation, and workplace democracy they need.
Our conversation with Christian also reminds us that even though big-name progressive politicians have attempted to signal their support for unionizing Amazon workers through retweets and posts, real solidarity extends into meaningful action, and support for workers facing exploitation from one of the world’s biggest corporations should be a real litmus test for our electeds. We talk about what this external solidarity looks like, along with much more on this episode of KK&F.
You can listen to this episode as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
We feel so lucky to have had Amazon union organizer Christian Smalls as our guest on KK&F this week. Speaking from his own experience as an Amazon worker, Chris lays bare the ways Amazon treats its workers as disposable, talks about the greatest issues the workers face, and gives us some greater insight into why Amazon union drives are so important — fo…
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There’s going to be a union election among employees at a New York Amazon facility this month. The warehouse, which is in Staten Island, could become the first unionized element of the corporate behemoth that is Amazon, which prides itself on providing the cheapest items, as quickly as possible — at the expense of its workers’ health and safety. As workers died on the job, were told to keep working through a dangerous storm, and went without PPE during the pandemic, Amazon continued to expand its profits more than ever before. And one of the key voices bringing attention to the worker exploitation that brings Amazon its profits is Chris Smalls, this week’s guest on KK&F.
Christian Smalls @Shut_downAmazon11 Months ago how it started VS how it’s going. The odds we’ve defeated are already historical we’re set to Vote Next Friday‼️ before then we will have 1 more HUGE Rally at JFK8 in Staten Island next Sunday @ 3:30pm calling all of NYC to show up for workers @amazonlabor #ALU ✊🏾 March 13th 2022
55 Retweets135 LikesIn Staten Island, workers are rallying, having conversations, and building solidarity in advance of the union vote later this month. Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse that attempted to vote for a union last year will have the opportunity for a second vote, as Amazon’s flagrant union-busting tactics to prevent and influence the vote caused it to be overturned by the NLRB. The workers in Staten Island are up against a ruthless, craven corporation in their struggle to unionize, but, as Chris can tell us, they’re definitely up to this fight.
In this week’s episode, we’ll be talking to Chris about his tireless organizing for a Amazon union, from the earliest days of the pandemic until now. He can give insight into what a union would mean for Amazon workers (and for American workers in general), how he and other organizers are taking on this massive task, and what’s ahead for them. We hope you’ll join us for this conversation.
Paid subscribers can watch this conversation when it drops on Friday evening. Everyone else can listen to it as a podcast on Saturday through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
This week’s guest is Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who shares his insight on how the situation relates to Middle Eastern politics Reflecting on the resounding call for sanctions that’s currently coming from Washington, Dr. Parsi recalls the U.S.’s recent seizing of the Afghan central bank’s funds. This move, which attempted to paint a veneer of charity by putting half of the stolen assets into a humanitarian fund, was a clear grab for power and control over those who have suffered for decades under U.S. militarism. In the case of Russia, sanctions won’t convince a dictator to cease violence against innocent people in the Ukraine. They will, however, visit economic devastation and instability on innocent people in Russia. We believe there’s a better way.
This episode of KK&F is available to everyone through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Thanks for joining us for Episode 64 of KK&F. This week, we’re joined by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. With Dr. Parsi, we discuss why this moment demands that the U.S. disentangle itself from hawkish, war-bent alliances, how the situation relates to Middle Eastern politics, Dr. Parsi’s strong c…
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This week, we’re taking an essential opportunity to seek knowledge on how the U.S.’s own hegemonic interests and foreign policy maneuvers have helped to set the stage for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While conservative voices from both major political parties refuse to acknowledge their country’s role as warmonger and escalator of the conflict in Ukraine, many American leftists are rightfully calling attention to the the double standard the U.S. has set for itself. See the piece below (Jeremy Scahill for the Intercept):
The Intercept @theinterceptPutin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine highlights some ugly truths about U.S. and NATO interc.pt/3vHVUDf by @jeremyscahillPutin’s Criminal Invasion of Ukraine Highlights Some Ugly Truths About U.S. and NATOThe fact that Putin is trying to justify the unjustifiable in Ukraine does not mean we must ignore the U.S. actions that fuel his narrative.interc.ptMarch 7th 2022
17 Retweets52 LikesAmong other things, Jeremy points out the hypocrisy of the U.S.’s condemnation of Russia’s use of cluster munitions in Ukraine. Sadly, Washington’s denuciation of these weapons — which should absolutely be banned — rings hollow. The article covers the U.S.’s long history of use of these weapons, ranging from the Vietnam War to a bombing in Yemen under the Obama presidency. What comes through clearly is that, in its determination to cement itself as the global power, the United States holds itself to a different standard of action, one that is unaffected by humanitarian considerations.
Perhaps one of the greatest hypocrisies also lies in the U.S.’s consideration of lifting sanctions on Venezuela not because those sanctions have been cruel, repressive, and devastating for Venezuelan citizens, but because the U.S. is in need of new oil sources. It’s a glaring reminder that these sanctions aren’t imposed to force just outcomes or to hold enemies accountable. These moves all fit into our country’s greater interest in controlling resources and holding the people with access to them at its mercy.
On this week’s episode of KK&F, we’ll take a closer look at our role in the world with a special focus on oil politics and the Middle East with Dr. Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute.
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You can listen to this episode of KK&F on Friday as a paid subscriber; it will be released on Substack. The episode will be available to everyone on Saturday through Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
We’re joined by foreign policy advisor Matt Duss to discuss the future of the conflict in Ukraine. What comes next? Matt is wary of the calls to sanction, ramp up military action, and escalate the conflict — after all, so many of these calls are coming from the Beltway, where war hawks and defense contractors would love to see a World War III. To him, the question for this moment is “How do we protect human life most effectively?” That doesn’t mean plunging millions more people into financial destitution through sanctions, or creating a no-fly zone that will launch us into a much more dire situation. Instead, the moment for diplomatic discussion and resolution is here. We hope that the most will be made of it.
You can listen to this conversation as a podcast on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more. Thanks for tuning in.
Joining us this week is Chapo Trap House co-host Felix Biederman. We get into the Chapo origin story, what it’s like when your podcast is on the front page of the Times, and Felix’s analysis of the period of precarity and despair that everyday people are living through. And we return to take a look at the 2020 election.
As he does in projects like Chapo and Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, Felix isable to speak to the despair of a generation promised a future that years of economic instability have taken away. Faced with mountains of debt and the exploitation of the gig economy, young people are staring down economic crisis. With Felix, we gain insight into how we ended up here, and what the stakes are for everyday people.
Audio of this conversation is available on Substack, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more. Thanks for tuning in.
Felix Biederman isn’t just your favorite person on Twitter. He’s an insightful political commentator, co-creator of the institution that is Chapo Trap House, and to top it all off, this week’s guest on Krystal Kyle & Friends. We get into the Chapo origin story, what it’s like when your podcast is on the front page of the Times, and Felix’s analysis of t…
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Felix Biederman is joining us on KK&F this week. You know him from a variety of projects — the beloved podcast Chapo Trap House, which he co-hosts; the podcast Time For My Stories, where he revisits iconic TV shows with fellow Chapo host Matt Christman; and Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, an incredible documentary series on the history of MMA. Through these creations and more, Felix has given voice to the widespread disillusionment and desperation that’s set in for so many regular people after the 2008 crash and the lost opportunities of the Obama years. His insightful, often hilarious critiques of the Democratic Party and of the ruling class at large have helped no small number of people find themselves on the left.
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We have plenty to talk about with Felix this week, starting with his political journey and the experience of building Chapo, a truly iconic institution in left media. From its unequivocal rejection of Hillary Clinton-style neoliberalism to its support for a left revived by the two Bernie Sanders campaigns, Chapo has been essential to so many of us navigating the political landscape in the past few years. We’re looking forward to hearing all about that from Felix — but we’re also interested in getting his takes on where the Biden administration has brought us and where the left can go from here.
Video of our conversation will be available on Friday night through Substack for paying subscribers. Everyone else can access the conversation as a podcast when it’s released on Saturday through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and more.
This week, Ben Burgis joins us to talk about the current events at the front of your mind. One of the major lightning rods for political discussion in the past weeks has been the movement to push Spotify to censor podcaster Joe Rogan. Among the things we discussed with Ben are what the prevailing narrative gets wrong about Rogan, how to understand his politics amidst the accusations of far-right sympathies that are ascribed to him, and how this fits into a larger story of censorship and free speech — a story in which the left can play a serious role.
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You can listen to this conversation as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and more.
This week, Ben Burgis joins us to talk about the current events at the front of your mind. One of the major lightning rods for political discussion in the past weeks has been the movement to push Spotify to censor podcaster Joe Rogan. Among the things we discussed with Ben are what the prevailing narrative gets wrong about Rogan, how to understand his p…
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Ben Burgis is a columnist for Jacobin magazine, host of Give Them An Argument, and an author. This week, he’s the guest on episode fifty-nine of Krystal Kyle & Friends, and we’re thrilled to have him. At Jacobin, Ben has debunked the statistics that promote the U.S. as a stronghold of economic freedom; critiqued U.S. foreign policy in Latin America; argued against the alienating practice of cancel culture; and made resonant arguments in favor of democratic socialism.
We have a lot to cover with Ben from his career as a leftist journalist to today’s current events to his new book revisiting the life and work of Christopher Hitchens. That book, Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters delves into the many phases of Hitchens life from when he was at his best exposing the Clintons and Henry Kissinger to when he was at his worst carrying water for George W Bush and his neocons.
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Ben’s latest for Jacobin is a piece on the “antidemocratic” nature of the Supreme Court — how it safeguards a reactionary status quo, how it prevents the expression of the popular will, and how it keeps the same people at the helm of our society.
Read the article below if you’re looking for a sneak preview of this week’s conversation. Subscribe now if you’d like to receive the video of our conversation one day early, on Friday night. The audio podcast will be free to all once it releases on Saturday through all major streaming platforms, including Pandora, Apple Music, Spotify, and more.
Jacobin @jacobinIf we’re serious about enacting pro-worker policies in this country, we need to counter the Supreme Court’s power to override the will of popular majorities. The Supreme Court Is an Antidemocratic Monstrosity. We Should Break Its Power.Instead of celebrating Stephen Breyer’s retirement, we should be weakening the Supreme Court’s power. Popular majorities should determine the course of our society — not nine unelected lawyers.jacobinmag.comFebruary 1st 2022
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Our conversation with this week’s guest, Johann Hari, moves from the individual to the collective as we discuss the digital algorithms that keep us locked into online life and the ways of resetting our consciousness — both personally and societally — that can lead us to a better way of being.
You might know Johann Hari from his books, including Lost Connection: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions (2018) and his newly released Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention. We focus on the latter, drawing on various perspectives — from the content creator to the everyday consumer of online media — to understand how the online world has eroded our collective attention spans, and to hear Johann’s argument on how we can reclaim them.
Our conversation with this week’s guest, Johann Hari, moves from the individual to the collective as we discuss the digital algorithms that keep us locked into online life and the ways of resetting our consciousness — both personally and societally — that can lead us to a better way of being.
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Joining this week on KK&F is Johann Hari, a journalist on the issues of modern technology and mental health. He’s taken an incisive look at how deeply personal struggles with depression and anxiety can be addressed through robust support programs, as in a recent co-authored article for VICE entitled “Why Basic Income Is A Mental Health Issue.” And he’s written about how our fixation with technology is eroding both our mental health and important social relationships — but also about why this is more than just a matter of personal fortitude, one person’s choice to log off. His work tells us about what keeps us logged on: in his words, why our attention isn’t lost but stolen.
We’re excited to talk to Johann about the often exhausting, overwhelming online spaces we inhabit, what keeps our society scrolling and posting, and how we can reclaim some part of our attention span and sanity, changing our relationship to this technology. And, of course, we want to cover his arguments for bold social programs to address the crises of mental illness and anxiety faced by millions of people across the country. Join us this week for Episode 58 of Krystal Kyle & Friends, where we’ll get a crash course on how you can reclaim your brain from the online discourse. We all need it.
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You can find the audio version of this episode when it releases on Saturday through Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, and other major streaming platforms. Paid subscribers will receive the video through Substack on Friday.
In this conversation with author and journalist Peter Goodman, we delve into Peter’s argument for “how billionaires devoured the world” — how a few people with a lot of money are able to command massive control over our politics, our culture, our society at large. It’s also an opportunity to think about the world we might build instead. What rules and regulations could be implemented to stop our billionaire overlords? Do we need an entirely new political system to ensure that nobody reaches Amazon CEO levels of power ever again? We discuss all of this and more on this week’s episode of Krystal Kyle & Friends.
We’re excited to introduce you to our conversation with this week’s guest, the brilliant Peter S. Goodman, but first we’re sitting down for a drink with Jen Psaki.
The Recount @therecountPsaki on voting rights bills failing: "My advice to everyone out there who's frustrated, sad, angry, pissed off, feel those emotions, go to a kickboxing class, have a margarita, do whatever you need to do this weekend, and then wake up on Monday morning, we gotta keep fighting." January 21st 2022
1,047 Retweets3,578 LikesThe Biden admin’s time in office, clocking in at a full year as of yesterday, has been marked by failed initiatives and the dashed hopes of those who welcomed Biden as a potential champion for a progressive agenda. We saw this in the rise and fall of the budget bill, with the lapsing of the desperately needed child tax credits, with every time the president refused to bring Sinema and Manchin in line but proudly distanced himself from Bernie Sanders. (As we’ve seen on Krystal Kyle & Friends and beyond, nobody has fought harder for the most bold, necessary ideas from this presidency than Bernie Sanders, and certainly not Biden himself.)
So it’s disquieting that, after a year of lofty promises and near-zero delivery, the best pep talk the Biden admin can give to galvanize the country is to hit the punching bags or pour ourselves a drink. Political campaigns like Sanders’s rallied legions of volunteers to raise cross-country support for his agenda. But as Biden allows the right wing of the Democratic Party to run the show and asks the rest of the country to sit back and watch, it’s no wonder that Americans are increasingly discontented with the failure of each passing bill. The voting rights initiative falling flat shouldn’t come as a surprise, and it won’t be the last failure of its kind, either, if the Biden admin keeps the same playbook.
On to this week’s guest. We’re joined by Peter Goodman, who’s written superbly for the New York Times about the cult of heroism our culture has constructed around billionaires. He’s a master at exposing the lies used to build up this myth — how these high-flying capitalists depend on pilfering from their workers and getting easy breaks from the U.S. government. (You can read one of his articles here.)
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We’re going global this week with Peter S. Goodman, the New York Times’s global economics correspondent. In his writing, he’s captured the myth of heroism that billionaires build by themselves, about themselves — how the ruling class is building a narrative to justify and rationalize their dominance, and how this move is accompanied by a turn inward, a reflection on how their success comes from something inside them that makes them, well, better than us.
“In the pandemic, it was C.E.O.s in many, many cases all over the world who were the heroes,” Mr. Benioff said. “They’re the ones who stepped forward with their financial resources, their corporate resources, their employees, their factories, and pivoted rapidly — not for profit, but to save the world.”
— Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, from “CEOS Were Our Heroes, at Least According To Them,” Peter S. Goodman, for the New York Times
Peter’s work, then, is a look at the man behind the curtain, who’s asking us to pay no attention. In his NYT piece and in his book, Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World, he points out the scaffolding of government-enabled economic perks that keep these false superheroes rising above the masses. And he questions the value of this “heroism,” particularly in the age of COVID. Here, wealthy governments’ failure to provide a robust response to public-health crises opens the floor for big corporations to do the bare minimum and earn kudos (while their workers earn next to nothing).
We desperately need to dismantle the individualistic cult of heroism that surrounds billionaires — those who slash workers’ wages and protections to turn an extra dime for themselves, strong-arm the government into offering them tax breaks, and offer halfhearted gestures at charity to the very people they’ve wronged. We’re thrilled that Peter will be joining us for that conversation. If you can’t wait until Saturday for the interview, subscribe now to get video access on Friday. And if you can’t wait till Friday, check out Peter’s writing online.
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You can find the audio version of this episode when it releases on Saturday through Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, and other major streaming platforms. Paid subscribers will receive the video through Substack on Friday.
This week’s guest, Henry Williams, gives us a look into how he and the Gravel Institute team have built a major digital platform to spread leftist ideas and debunk reactionary claims. As a Columbia undergrad, Henry helped to launch and run the campaign of Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel, the antiwar champion who put the Pentagon Papers in the Congressional Record. Now, as the co-founder of the Gravel Institute, he’s built a home for essential video primers on the struggles we face under capitalism — which have racked up a massive, eager online audience. We think you’ll enjoy hearing about Henry’s game-changing work, and we’re grateful to you for tuning in.
You can listen to this episode on Pandora, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other major streaming platforms.
We’ve got a fantastic guest on this week: Henry Williams of the Gravel Institute, here to talk to us about his political journey building the Institute, his time with the Gravel campaign, and his insight into the present moment. But first, we have to talk about the weird sense of déjà vu we got this week while watching Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, talk about how far-fetched it is that Americans could possibly want anything more out of the current White House.
The Hill @thehillReporter: "So the sense is things are going well [at the White House], there's no need for change right now?"
Jen Psaki: "We could certainly propose legislation to see if people support bunny rabbits and ice cream, but that wouldn't be very rewarding for the American people." January 14th 2022
399 Retweets2,240 LikesRemind you of anything?
Ibrahim @IbrahimpolsWow. Howard Stern and Hillary Clinton mocking Bernie for offering free college: “Chocolate milk for everybody!” December 6th 2019
1,406 Retweets8,462 LikesFrom bunny rabbits and ice cream to chocolate milk, the Democrats have a long list of things they love to refuse to give us. At the top of that list, though, are universal healthcare, free higher education, and a decent public-health response to the pandemic: actual things that actual people are asking for, with sincerity and urgency.
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Hello, friends of the podcast! While Dr. Peterson unfortunately was unable to join us this week, we’re very excited to bring on Henry Williams and Henry McGowan, two of the masterminds behind the Gravel Institute. You might know them as the Gravel teens, the team behind Senator Mike Gravel’s principled and inspiring run for the presidency in 2020. After the end of the campaign, however, this team pivoted toward building a longer-lasting platform for leftist education and political analysis, and the Gravel Institute was born.
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“We're a crowd-funded organization creating short videos to combat right-wing disinformation and bring progressive ideas to new audiences.”
On the Gravel Institute website, you’re invited to watch videos with grabbing titles: Can socialists win elections? How capitalism exploits you. Why America lags behind. In short, they’re all designed to answer the essential questions that American leftists run up against during conversations with friends, political debates, and during their personal political journeys. After the passing of Senator Gravel, an antiwar people’s champion, last year, the Institute carries on his legacy, advocating for direct democracy and against U.S. imperialism and militarism. They’ve logged hundreds of thousands of subscribers to their online content, breaking into the online demand for accessible political education that has often been swallowed up by right-wing PragerU.
We’re thrilled that the Gravel Institute team is joining us this week, and we hope you’ll listen in. Paid subscribers can access the video when it drops Friday night on Substack. Everyone else can access the audio as a podcast, released Saturday night, on major streaming platforms like Pandora, Apple Music, Spotify, and more.
The Fed remains a mystifying, secretive institution that defies classification. It combines elements of a public, governmental entity with elements of the private banking system. It’s run by a government-appointed team and owned by banks (through non-transferable stock). Confused? We can’t blame you. This week’s guest, Christopher Leonard, is the author of The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. He takes us through the ins and outs of the Fed’s history and proceedings, giving us a big picture of how, at this institution’s behest, the rich keep getting richer.
Lords of Easy Money’s story leads us to today’s inequality and financial instability. In other words, it’s hard to fully understand our current moment of fiscal crisis without having a grasp on how the Federal Reserve was the key architect of past decades of financial policy, and whose interest that policy was made in. We’re grateful to Christopher for joining us. Remember that you can listen to this episode on major streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Pandora — and thank you for joining us, too.
It’s been a year since the Capitol riot. The Democrats are fangirling over Dick Cheney and listening to Hamilton, so it’s hard to say what we’ve learned or improved upon as a society. Around this time last year, Thomas Frank joined us for a thoughtful conversation about who gets to claim the term “populist,” the movement’s specific historical roots in the Left, and liberal commentators’ efforts to link populism to senseless and reactionary violence. We concluded by thinking about how today’s American left can dust off the Populist movement’s most valuable lessons — about grassroots power, transparent governance, and more — to reject the idea that we should leave it all up to experts. That strategy isn’t working, and it never has.
In fact, the failure of experts to deliver for working people is what Episode 55 of KK&F is all about. Christopher Leonard is joining us to discuss the material of his terrific new book, Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. The story he tells — about how everyday people have surrendered the politics of fiscal policy, about how power over this policy has been ceded to a dwindling yet increasingly powerful elite — is vital to understanding modern inequality and poverty. Like last year’s conversation with Thomas Frank, it yields important suggestions on how the Left can reshape its politics to better tackle the issues we face.
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New year, new episode of KK&F. We’re rolling up our sleeves and diving into the hidden history of the Fed with Christopher Leonard, business journalist and author of the forthcoming book Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. Christopher is no stranger to probing historical reviews of America’s wealthiest institutions. He also authored Kochland, a look at the power that Koch Industry wields in society, both below and above our radar. Now, we’ll be talking with him about his most recent work and getting the full story of how the Fed shaped the past ten tumultuous years in the U.S. economy.
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Lords of Easy Money takes a look at the past and at the future. Understanding the monetary policy pursued by the Federal Reserve is an integral part of understanding where we’re at today — why we face economic instability, why economic inequality has reached a dramatic high. Christopher highlights policies like quantitative easing to tell the story of how the economic elite have led our country into this position of financial precarity. But this vantage point also allows us to think about how financial policy can be reshaped, and we’re glad to have Christopher with us to make sense of where we go from here.
Paid subscribers can watch new episodes on Fridays, when the video drops on Substack. Everyone else can listen for free through streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more when the episode becomes available on Saturday.
Happy first birthday, Krystal Kyle & Friends. With guests from Nina Turner and Thomas Frank to Noam Chomsky and beyond, we’ve covered a lot of ground this year, and we’re so grateful to you for joining us. We’ve debated the popularity of today’s socialist project and discussed how it will be successful going forward; we’ve taken stock of today’s Democratic Party, and with this week’s guest, Chris Hedges, we’re thinking about whether we should move beyond that party.
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In the new year, we’re returning to a familiar question: is it possible to build an alternative to the Democratic Party, and how could it make concrete gains for the working class? Chris helps us think it through, contextualizing the “lesser evil” argument we hear every election cycle with the real assaults on civil liberties that Democrats have perpetuated in recent decades. This conversation was an opportunity for us to rethink the meaning of “lesser evil” as it’s used in contemporary politics, but also to imagine a political framework where votes are motivated by a positive leftist movement, not a false choice between two corporate parties.
This week, to ring in the new year, we brought author and journalist Chris Hedges to KK&F. Our final conversation of the year was an opportunity to reflect on the political struggles that have marked the past year, as well as to look forward to the opportunities and struggles that the Left will face in the year ahead. There’s nobody better to think thro…
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