Krystal Kyle & Friends

In our discussion with Ben Meiselas, we touch on how Trump’s approval rating has only gone up among supporters since the resurgence of discussion surrounding the Epstein case. In other words, people performatively invested in "protecting children” and calling attention to high-profile sexual abusers are not bothered by Trump being an Epstein linked possible pedophile. Epstein has publicly said tha...

On KK&F this week, we’ve got Tommy Vietor on the pod to talk about the Dems’ Tea Party moment. About a month after he announced plans to “phase out” FEMA, Donald Trump is now scrambling to back up his policy after the recent flooding disaster in Texas — with over 120 now dead. We discuss the tragedy as one that was profoundly avoidable; nobody should have been abandoned to die by their government....

This is Episode 233 of KK&F, where we’re talking all things Big Beautiful Bill with David Dayen. The New York Times just released an article explaining how the hell a bill designed to gut our healthcare system and hike the debt ceiling is making it through the House and Senate. Totally absent from the considerations of House and Senate Republicans voting for the bill is any interest in the well-be...

Zohran Mamdani won big in New York, and Dems are having a meltdown about it. How dare a Muslim socialist focusing on helping working people win the class war prevail over a disgraced sex offender? Cuomo had dark money on his side and used it to spread a message of fear about crime and homelessness in the city, trying to scare people into voting for the status quo. Cuomo and the media also baseless...

This week we sat down with TYT’s Cenk Uygur to hash out our disagreements on how to approach Trump 2.0. This debate comes in the midst of Trump and Netanyahu’s regime change war in Iran and as we await Trump’s final decision on whether we will start directly bombing Iran ourselves. Notably, a number of MAGA voices have vocally opposed direct engagement. Does this anti-war commentary represent a ge...

For Episode 230 of KK&F, we sit down with YouTuber and lawyer Pisco and talk about the devastation and terror that Trump has brought upon immigrant communities in the U.S. Recent protests in L.A. reflect the anger of city residents at the cruelty of ICE agents abducting their neighbors. We take a look with Pisco at the political conditions that created these protests, as well as the brutal local a...

We’re thrilled to have Former AOC chief of Staff, Saikat Chakrabarti on the podcast this week! Saikat is a co-founder of Justice Democrats as well as AOC’s former chief of staff. That’s to say that he’s played a hugely important role in progressive politics over the past years and has his finger on the pulse. By his own account, he decided to run when he saw Democrats doing nothing as Trump ascend...

In this conversation with Naomi Klein, we identify the destructive rampaging of the Trump government as an incredibly nearsighted political program: it’s not building a sustainable and just government for the well-being of future generations. On the contrary, it’s running everything into the ground for a quick buck. Naomi mentions that even though aforesaid tech overlords have no scruples when it...

Kyle asks our guest Omar Baddar in this week’s episode whether a recent growing consensus in the international community (outside of the U.S) that Israel’s genocidal actions must be stopped is cause for hope. It’s true that countries like the U.K. and France have offered, as Krystal puts it, “strongly worded letters” reacting to the IDF shooting at ambassadors in Jenin, to new and horrifying infor...

On this week’s episode, Hasan Piker gives us a bombshell report of his recent detention by CBP during his return to the U.S. from France. Like us, he’s heard the stories about people getting stopped at the airport and being asked invasive questions about their support for Donald Trump. On his way out of customs, CBP stopped Hasan and took him to a detention area in the airport, where they proceede...

Lisa Gilbert joins the podcast for Episode 225 to help us understand how Trump is pulling a scam right out in the open with his crypto coin. Right now, Public Citizen is calling for Trump’s crypto activities to be investigated, because it’s clear that as Trump hawks crypto, a small fraction of wealthy investors actually see returns on the coin, and (to top it all off) a bill goes through Congress...

According to many political commentators, a liberal victory in the Canadian election wasn’t in the cards. So why did it happen? We tackle this question with this week’s guest, David Doel of The Rational National. The answer has to do with Trump. Trump’s trade wars and tariffs on Canada; his repeated jabs about Canada the 51st state; and his isolationist vision of the U.S.’s role on the global stag...

Economics professor emeritus and renowned political commentator Richard Wolff joins the show to turn a critical eye on Trump’s trade war with China. When we think about the U.S.’s unique position in the global economy in the age of Trump, we think about its power to cause harm — to threaten and cow other countries into submission by making them bend to economic pressure. As a nascent economic supe...

Ben Norton is a journalist and the founder of Geopolitical Economy Report focusing on international economics, which makes him the perfect guest for an episode centered on why Trump’s tariff tantrum isn’t going the way he hoped. When Trump threatened China with tariffs, many of us understood that of course, his main priority wasn’t the welfare of working people looking for more American jobs — it...

This week we talk to two grassroots Dem candidates interested in blazing a new trail for a worn-out, uninspiring party: Jackson Franklin and Kat Abughazaleh. In our interview with Jackson, we hear about the key policies he supports, including Medicare expansion, strengthening unions, banning corporate lobbying, and treating economic inequality as a serious issue. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has “personal...

Insane escalations in the trade war Trump’s waging with China, grants being pulled from universities in the name of combating antisemitism, and more: it’s been another crazy week under the Trump regime. We got Michael Tracey on the show to talk to us about it. We could be staring down the barrel of a global recession as Trump slaps trade partners with major tariffs, particularly triggering a crisi...

Investigative journalist Greg Palast is rejoining the show to discuss the dire straits into which a recent Trump executive order is putting our country. Each week has its fresh horror, and Krystal’s conversation with Greg delves into the latest. Greg has a seriously impressive background in shining a spotlight on the Republican agenda of making sure people can’t vote so the far-right oligarchs can...

In a special episode featuring your two hosts, we discuss Trump’s long game for a regime: taking the so-called presidency again in ‘28 and continuing to wreak whatever havoc doesn’t fit into the next four years. (Not to be too doomer about it — don’t mourn, organize! ) He’s got the usual cast of characters running amok, from Steve Bannon telling Chris Cuomo that Trump will take that third term (an...

This week’s guest, Robert Weissman, walks us through the current climate of grassroots and organizational pushback against our government’s current self-destruct mode. To make a long story short, it’s not looking easy on the ground — but essential victories prove that there’s a limit to the number of times Trump and his cronies can buy out justice and rely on a conservative Supreme Court to do the...

For Episode 216, we dive into the dumbest trade war ever with political writer Lule Savage. Trump has promised to go full steam ahead with tariffs that could devastate industries and cause massive job loss in Canada. Leveraging 25 percent tariffs on most exports would significantly affect the Canadian economy and destabilize the relationship between the countries. Trump has since pulled back some...

As Krystal puts it in this week’s episode during a discussion of the latest in Elon Musk’s quest for world domination, Elon thinks he’s Ready Player One, and we’re all NPCs. Rep. Maxwell Frost joins us to assess the damage. As our conversation takes a deep dive into the insights Maxwell has to offer into the psyches of two billionaire egotists, we talk about one of the biggest shockers of the Trum...

This week we get a bombshell report from reporter Greg Palast regarding voter suppression that changed the 2024 election results. In our exclusive interview with him, Greg alleges that the 2024 election results are not valid; without the gross Jim Crow-era abuses of voting rights that predominated during this election, Kamala would have gotten an extra 3.5 million more votes, clinching states like...

With Judd Legum of Musk Watch, we review the highlights (lowlights?) of This Week in Musk and, given the trends in Musk’s escalating power, what a Next Week in Musk might look like. From the insane reveal that Grimes objects to her ex’s bringing their son to hang out with Trump to careful analyses of Musk’s attacks on the various branches of government, we’ve got a full show covering all the point...

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 M...

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,...