Krystal Kyle & Friends

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 w...

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 all...

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. Briahna takes us through her experience at The Hill, why questioning a guest about her Zionist beliefs led to the loss of professional o...

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...

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...

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, a...

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 pla...

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 rappin...

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 t...

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 for...

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 perspec...

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...

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...

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 the...

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 spe...

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...

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. Notabl...

If you listened to this week’s State of the Union, you heard Biden proudly claim that nobody has a better record on Israel than he does — which is saying an awful lot, in a room full of militant Zionists, war hawks, and those getting their pockets lined by the American defense industry. To hear a president reaffirm his support and longstanding commitment to a genocidal ethnostate after more than 1...

Mehdi Hasan is here to talk to us about his latest reporting on the genocide in Gaza, an exciting new media venture, and more. In this episode, he sheds light on the dehumanization at the core of the genocide in Gaza, where as he puts it, Palestinian lives are simply treated as more expendable and less valuable than Israeli lives — and have been treated as such for a long time. Grassroots organize...

Marc Lamont Hill joins us to respond to a fiery exchange between Holocaust scholar and pro-Palestine advocate Norm Finkelstein and Shmuley Boteach, a Zionist rabbi, moderated by Piers Morgan. In this conversation, Shmuley takes Finkelstein to task for citing Lula’s comments on Israeli violence in Palestine, and calls into question his credentials as a scholar of the Holocaust, implying, as so many...

Our guest this week, author John Washington, is here to make the case for a wildly different immigration system, open borders. He argues this complete reimagining will end the cruelty of our current system, and benefit our country and the world. For more check out his new book: The Case For Open Borders . The inhumanity of mainstream American political discourse surrounding immigration is particul...

Comrade Taylor, welcome to the revolution? We dive into the sick, sick world of conspiracy theories and conservative frenzy around liberal darling Taylor Swift. Our guest RM Brown is a Youtuber renowned for his incisive, humorous commentary on left media, right-wing discourse, and everything in between. On Episode 160 of KK&F, we’re bringing him on to talk about what’s up with the Democrats (and w...

Kyle & Vaush get into it on KK&F this week on the upcoming presidential election, debates in left media, and Israel-Palestine. Listen to this episode to hear their thoughts on everything from podcaster solidarity to extremely troubling co-optations of anti-Israel sentiment online. As the ICJ moves to condemn Israeli violence in Gaza but fails to call for a ceasefire, we discuss recent updates on I...

This week we’re joined by journalist Owen Jones to talk about language the media uses to dehumanize Palestinians. We delve into this analysis of media coverage of Israel-Palestine because the terms used to report atrocities in Palestine, obscuring key information about Israeli aggression and massive Palestinian loss of life, enter (and ultimately dominate) the broader discourse of our political la...

We’re releasing this week’s episode early to respond to the groundbreaking case made by South Africa in The Hague against Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) of the UN is hearing charges of genocide brought against Israel by South Africa, alleging that Israel has violated the 1948 Genocide Convention. While the ICC, which prosecutes individuals on such cha...