Krystal Kyle & Friends

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...

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...

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...

We’re at the peak of a season of hyper-consumerism, where the main struggles covered in mainstream media are not low wages and long hours for retail workers but supply chain issues delivering late holiday gifts. Against this backdrop, Max joins us for a necessary conversation on the mainstream narratives putting customers’ convenience over workers’ needs, the ongoing legacy of Reagan-era fetishiza...

Steven Donziger joined us for an exclusive interview this week, describing his experiences in prison for the crime of exposing Chevron’s environmental destruction. He was just released last week to serve the rest of his sentence at home. Steven still isn’t free, but as we discuss in this episode, there’s hope that his supporters can turn the tide — in his case and beyond. Advocacy from leftist gro...

This episode finds us sitting down with political writer Freddie DeBoer to discuss his work and ideas, particularly a debate around the popularity of the Left’s platform. In a recent piece for the New York Times, Freddie argues that major leftist electoral losses (think the two defeats of the Sanders campaign) can’t be written off as election-rigging; they must be explained by the fact that social...

This week, we’re joined by professor of political science Adolph Reed Jr. to discuss the power of organizing versus mobilizing, how to address capitalism as a root problem, the task of getting money out of politics, and more. We explore how and why the left has fallen short of building robust, lasting coalitions, and why it’s so important now. We also get into the central issue of money in politic...

This week, with guest David Doel, we talk about the business of labeling our politics as leftists. For someone like Kyle, who feels terms like “social democrat” might apply alongside elements of terms like “libertarian socialist,” a single label doesn’t necessarily jump out. After all, what is made to seem radical and revolutionary in mainstream U.S. politics is moderate in other industrialized co...

This week’s guest, Katie Halper, takes us through the country’s strike wave and other current events with her trademark humor and sharp political insight. Katie speaks openly about the frustration and despair she’s felt with electoral politics since the defeat of Bernie 2020, but she also points out the political developments that are giving her hope, and can give you hope, too. As the host of The...

This week’s guest is Katie Rader, a professor of political science at Christopher Newport University, who was involved with Jacobin, YouGov, and the Center for Working Class Politics’s recent study on the kind of candidates, messaging, and political strategy that can win working-class votes and deliver for those voters. (You can read the study here.) How can leftist political campaigns build bona...

This week’s guest, TJ Kirk, gets us to think about atheism, nihilism, morality, and the social role of religion. You might know TJ from his YouTube presence as The Amazing Atheist, where he’s discussed his atheist perspective in front of millions of viewers. Kyle’s conversation with this week’s guest gives us the opportunity to reconsider conventional takes on our value systems: on the topic of ni...

This week, the story at the front of our minds is the recent unwelcome development on the budget bill: because establishment Democrats like Manchin and Sinema are determined to deliver for their corporate donors, Americans won’t be getting the broad Medicare expansion, paid family leave, and free community college provisions that they were promised, among other things. As KK&F alum David Sirota po...

This week's guest, Jonah Furman, gives us a crash course on why John Deere workers are striking, why the proposed contract was a no-go, and what’s at stake for the labor movement at large. Taking a look at the conditions that brought the workers to reject the proposed contract, John Deere management is using a strategy dating back to the beginning of capitalist exploitation: dividing workers to pr...

This week, Ken Klippenstein joined us for Episode 42 of Krystal Kyle and Friends, giving us the scoop on national security, the political clout of big business, what’s new with the Left’s best friend Kyrsten Sinema, and our current media landscape. Recently, Ken has broken big stories for the Intercept on Kyrsten Sinema’s class on fundraising (leave it to the experts!) and CIA-backed Afghan resist...

How can we contextualize Biden's leadership style with the Obama years? How do the important deals get made in US politics — and what can leftist agitators do to make the deals they want to make? We address questions like these with this week's guest: Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for the Washington Post. From the budget bill to the debt ceiling and beyond, Jeff speaks to the key poli...

This week, David Sirota joined us on Krystal Kyle & Friends to discuss everything from his latest foray into film to his perspective on current events, particularly the holdup of the budget. David explains the strategy corporate lobbyists are pushing to kill the reconciliation bill — breaking its link to the infrastructure bill, which they hope to pass. By joining the bills, however, progressives...

In this week’s episode of Krystal Kyle & Friends, we discuss current events alongside the history of corporate greed condoned by the government. This is told through the lens of the 2008 financial crash, a story brilliantly brought together in the documentary The Con by writer/director Eric Vaughan and producer Patrick Lovell. Vaughan and Lovell join us to explain how the story of government regul...

Hi all: here’s a reminder about the weekly Krystal Kyle & Friends posting schedule. Paid subscribers receive videos of our weekly conversation at 9pm on Fridays through Substack. Audio conversations are available through Substack, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more on Saturday evenings, and we post a weekly sneak peek on Tuesdays at 9pm. To become a paying subscriber, just press the button...

This week, we’re joined by Faiz Shakir as we dive into the left pressures on the Biden administration, the challenges and rewards of creating independent media, the future of the reconciliation package, and much more. After the Bernie campaign, Faiz has shifted to independent media work, founding  More Perfect Union  — which provides coverage of the labor movement, from the unionization effort in...

Krystal Kyle & Friends  gets psychological this week — with a little help from our friends Charlie and Ben of  Charisma on Command . In this episode, we dig into the famous personalities of the 2016 election (and how Hillary’s false. poorly-acted “outsider” role may have cost her public support), Democrats’ poor campaigning tactics for the California gubernatorial recall election, and much more. B...

In this week’s episode with guest Matthew Hoh, we strip away the layers of deception and manipulation that have been used to manufacture public consent for the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Whether the supporters of America’s ruling class are weaponizing the stories of Afghan women and girls’ suffering to call for war, or claiming that the U.S.’s business in Afghanistan is that of building schools inst...

This week on Krystal Kyle & Friends: updates on the defamation suit filed by Mike Lindell, Sydney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani; the latest in bipartisan corruption and personal gain from government contracts; and, of course, our special conversation with human rights attorney Steven Donziger, on his landmark case against Chevron. This interview offers rare insight into the full story of Donziger’s in...

This week, we sit down with your favorite Funky Academic, Irami Osei-Frimpong, to discuss the importance of institutional participation in our social and political lives, the illusion of choice that liberalism supports, and much more. Irami asks you to imagine being a vegetarian who has thirteen choices of meat for dinner. That’s the way we look at the dysfunctional, punishing healthcare programs...

On today’s episode of Krystal Kyle & Friends, we’re thrilled to bring you a conversation between Krystal and Senator Bernie Sanders. Countless people were drawn into leftist politics and movements through Bernie’s 2016 campaign, which rejected Trump’s empty appeals to the working class and introduced a movement based on class struggle and solidarity. In the Senator’s own  words,  “If there is goin...

In 2015, Dan Price did something we wish would keep happening: as the CEO of Gravity Payments, a credit card company, he raised Gravity’s minimum yearly salary to $70k — and lowered his own salary to $70k from over a million dollars. In this week’s episode of Krystal Kyle & Friends, we talk to Dan about this choice, from its catalyst to its effects. How does he respond to the CEOs who insist that...