Krystal Kyle & Friends

We’re calling out Pete Hegseth’s warmongering BS, talking progressive organizing in “deep red” zones of Trump country, and taking stock before the midterms with this week’s guest, Richard Ojeda, Democratic candidate for NC-09. As we near Election Day, Richard is on the ground campaigning 24/7, doing multiple events a day. What’s seemed impossible for many other Democrats to accomplish over the past decades has turned out to be a matter of meeting folks where they’re at, talking to them face-to-face about bread-and-butter issues, and acknowledging the financial squeeze working families in the region are facing. Richard’s campaign is sending a message: Write off “deep red” country at your own risk. Voters there want to feel heard, and they, too, are sick of Trump’s lies. But they need a viable alternative.

Speaking of Trump’s lies, Joe Rogan, whose massive platform made his turn from Bernie to Trump a topic of national conversation, is now turning away from Trump for Trump’s perceived betrayal of his agenda. He spoke this week to Michael Douglas on The Joe Rogan Experience about how Trump’s war in Iran has contradicted his image as the “no more war” president, an image supposedly meaningful to many of Trump’s voter base. We’re left wondering whether Trump ever actually committed to those promises in the first place. This is a man whose reputation as a warmongering president began in his first term, his war on immigrants at home is nothing new, and his funding of genocides in Yemen and in Israel are cornerstones of his international policy. So, confronting more bloodthirsty BS from Trump two years into his second term, is any of this really a surprise?

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Abdul El-Sayed and Jon Ossoff showed us how it’s done when they destroyed their Republican opponents on live TV during last week’s debates. Kyle is joined by Vaush, our special guest this week, for play-by-plays of our favorite moments, where Democratic nominees made MAGA look unhinged, bigoted, and out of touch with what American voters want to change. Jon Ossoff pretty much gave a masterclass in the Georgia Senate debate, a race in which he’s polling ahead. His viral line about his opponent “grabbing a billy club” to attack the march from Selma to Montgomery has already drawn a lot of public attention, especially as everyone tries to size up who has what it takes to represent the Democrats in 2028. Ossoff doesn’t break from the party establishment much when it comes to policy, but it’s telling that when it comes to strategy, he’s thinking about what it will actually take to win, and in order to win, he’s willing to get confrontational with opponents who deserve harsh criticism. Democrats have tried election after election to get MAGA out of office by appealing to respectability politics, and while Ossoff didn’t revert to the actual name-calling we associate with Trump, he decided to confront Collins for behavior and opinions that should get anyone disqualified from public office.

We also talk about the masterclass Abdul El-Sayed offers every time he’s given the spotlight, staying with the issues and avoiding undermining both from unsympathetic mainstream media and from hostile right-wing freaks. When challenged about his refusal to support sending aid to Israel, Abdul reiterated his commitment not to spend taxpayer dollars on foreign wars when funding is desperately needed to support his constituents and working-class people everywhere. He made the question about what Americans actually gain from having their country start and engage in bloody conflicts, and his very convincing answer is that actually, we have nothing to gain at all. These two examples of energizing, inspiring performances from Democratic nominees provide a path forward for the party that offers hope and success in 2028. Are the Democrats willing to take it? Kyle and Vaush get into it in our latest episode.

Thanks for tuning in. You can find this episode on major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and here on Substack.

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You’ll be thrilled to see political commentator Touré making a return to KK&F for a discussion on one of the biggest stories in recent memory. Nikole Hannah-Jones, domestic correspondent for the NYT and founder of the 1619 Project, wrote a piece in the NYT grappling with the ramifications of sending her daughter to an under-resourced public school from a young age. Najya, Nikole’s daughter, is the person directly experiencing those ramifications and has confronted her mother about the struggles of bearing the brunt of a decision based on principle, not on what was immediately best for Najya as an individual student. The story has brought national attention to the concentration of opportunities, resources, and investment in students in public schools serving majority-white, wealthy areas.

The conversation becomes personal as we consider the choices we’ve made as parents and have had made for us in America’s deeply unjust system of education. Touré describes attending PWIs, specifically private schools, throughout his educational career, sending his children to private schools as well, and describes not only the microaggressions and abusive behavior Black students face in those environments, but also how his choice reflected his belief that his children would benefit from a higher quality education than public schools could provide along with a sort of brand recognition that may ease their paths to success. A discussion of Hannah -Jones’ article brings us to a critical assessment of what it would truly take to achieve equitable outcomes for students in a robust public education system throughout the country, and what fight the left needs to fight to get there.

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Mike Prysner, this week’s guest and executive director of the Center on Conscience and War, knows what it’s like to be radicalized by firsthand experience of the brutality of the U.S. military. He joined the Army himself at age seventeen, right before 9/11, and was part of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So he witnessed the rhetoric that military leadership used to get buy-in from the rank and file tasked with waging war in Iraq, and he quickly noticed the disconnect between that leadership’s lies about the patriotic righteousness of its War on Terror and the solidarity that he felt for the people being massacred by that war.

Mike works to support conscientious objectors speak out against what it’s like to be in the service, or why they’re choosing a different path. As we see from the work of the Center on Conscience and War, many people who did join the military in search of benefits like free college and healthcare are standing up against the institution that relies on promises of economic stability in order to recruit people to war. We talk about how conscientious objectors are speaking out, what risks they’re taking, and what support systems we can build to make it possible for increasingly disillusioned members of the U.S. military to grow a movement of conscientious objectors that can fundamentally destabilize our war machine.

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The usual suspects currently burning American democracy to the ground are also leading the torture, kidnapping, and murder of civilians abroad in order to terrorize and exploit foreign countries, reminding us that our struggle for freedom against our government is intimately and inextricably tied to the struggle of people across the world This week, we talk to the courageous independent journalist Camila Lourdes Galarza, whose recent reporting on American strikes conducted on fishing boats in the Caribbean tells a story our government tried to bury: Thanks to intel from a government source, the attacks were revealed to be a covert CIA operation. Through the strikes and countless other acts of terrorist violence, the U.S. made an opportunity to establish imperialist power by shedding the blood of innocent people abroad. And we have yet to build our own power to take on our government and hold it accountable to make sure this never happens again.

Rather than letting that scare us and allow us to stand down while others risk everything, we all need to think of this as as a moment in which we fully commit to internationalism within the American left and build the power first to oust Trump and his imperialist agenda from office, and next to dismantle the system of American hegemony that has empowered presidents from both political parties throughout the history of this country to push regime change and enact mass murder abroad.

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Gil Durán rejoins KK&F to talk about the tech overlords doing a hostile takeover of American democracy, multibillionaire prepping for the apocalypse, and why it’s so necessary for this political issue to become front and center. Among the sordid cast of characters we discuss are Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and every other ungodly rich (and therefore dizzyingly powerful) denizen of the shady crypto, surveillance tech, and AI world. They’re currently building the resources that will get them through the apocalypse they’re causing — and they’re making sure we won’t be that lucky. People like Musk fully comprehend how lucrative it will be for them to exploit all our data, destroy our earth with AI centers, and dip out to Mars.

And in the meantime, they can make sure their anti-democratic projects avoid regulation by buying out our government! As we look ahead to the presidential elections of 2028 and reflect on the most recent lessons from the midterms, we see that distrust in AI and demand for its regulation (and increasing disappearance from public life) has become a major part of the conversation. Will the Democrats have the courage to actually adopt that plank and, in so doing, face up against the tech world terrorizing and oppressing their constituents?

Gil, thanks for rejoining! We highly recommend The Nerd Reich to anyone looking to gain knowledge on this extremely important topic. You can listen to our conversation as a podcast episode on major streaming platforms.

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This episode with Garrison Lovely, we survey the recent and horrifying Hugging Face AI hacking scandal, a reminder of the high stakes of our battle against AI’s stranglehold on our society. If you need another reason to worry about our future under the tech overlords, enter the Hugging Face hack, an event in which a small “collective” of AI agents generated by OpenAI tricked their cybersecurity tests and sent hundreds of other AI agents to raid Hugging Face’s database for information on how better to overcome those security tests. During that time, the agents sent 70,000 messages and files on a communal message board, tampered with their logs, and accessed secure data. Making AI as powerful and ungovernable as possible is, of course, what our current oligarchs want to do: AI’s vendors will push artificial intelligence into every part of our lives that is available for surveillance and monetization. In our conversation with Garrison, we look into the latest crisis in AI-world to see where all of this is taking us and if there’s an off-ramp before the edge of the cliff.

Under these circumstances, the Left needs to offer a rigorous analysis of the ethical concerns about AI, bringing them to the forefront and showing that these hacks are far from isolated incidents. They hold the potential to surrender all our private information to even more unstable and extractive technological operations controlled by our class enemies; the most recent hack is only a sign of much more to come. Bracketing this important area of struggle is an even bigger one: the corrupt and exploitative capitalist system that will expose and sell off our data, build AI data centers to drink up our water, and prioritize profit margins over human life. As such, this is an opportunity for us to talk to Garrison about why we should all be concerned about the unregulated development of AI, who’s stopping the regulation from happening, and how the Left can intervene.

We’re honored to have Garrison join us for this conversation as an expert, and we’re grateful to you for listening! You can listen to this episode on major streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.

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This week with the guys from The Vanguard pod, Zac and Gavin, we talk about the firestorm surrounding Hasan’s recent remarks about Zionism. When conservatives tried to drag Abdul El-Sayed through the mud for having campaigned with Hasan, made a public statement clarifying that Hasan did not speak for the campaign. And, of course, it still wasn’t enough for the MAGA ghouls! Rogers, the Republican opponent whose bigotry truly knows no bounds, took the opportunity to shift the goalposts by demanding an even more outright disavowal, and he wasn’t the only one. Realizing that placating the right wing only empowers it, we on the left have the opportunity in moments like these to decide when it’s time to call b******t and back each other up; we can learn lessons to help with future decisions by looking at what we gain and what we lose from a more measured response.

That takes us to another episode highlight: our conversation about presidential prospects on the left, especially all the conversation surrounding a potential AOC run. She’s been an incredibly powerful voice for the left and a champion of other progressive candidates like El-Sayed; at the same time, she’s made strategic errors worth considering in an analysis of her electability. The recent comments denigrating “Woke 1” didn’t help, and for reasons we’d relate to the firestorm El-Sayed has recently faced. Watching her adopt the cornerstone of the right-wing playbook, singling out wokeness simultaneously as Democratic virtue signaling and as a stifling force in our culture, we have conflicting opinions about how much she’ll benefit from this move. It’s a debate that’s swirling within the left right now, and we have a slice of it here for you on the show this week.

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We’re grateful to Wajahat Ali, writer of The Left Hook on Substack, for his keen insight as our special guest for post-Dem primary discussion! Waj is a fantastic chronicler and analyst of the most depraved and inhumane dimensions of the Trump presidency, helping us to understand the systems in place and the coalitions of right-wing goons that prop Trump up, even when they have their reservations about him. At the front are his “broligarch” lackeys, the robber-barons like Musk and Bezos, the white supremacists finding in Trump a vehicle for virulent racism, the religious fanatics whose attraction to Trump (as we point out) feels totally inexplicable. And while these groups expect to use Trump, despite his flaws, in different ways to pursue their political ends, we also see that they share the basic political analysis that white men, and white men alone, deserve to wield power over our society and consolidate all of its vast resources for their pleasure.

This analysis sounds dire, but things are really that bad, and that urgent: as the American class continues to struggle just to make it day to day, living in fear of a medical emergency, it’s preyed upon and exploited by tyrants and tycoons who want to take every last penny from them in the workplace and leave them with nothing. So with these more sober reflections in mind, we also turn toward a bright light in the growing movement of popular support for democratic socialists running for government positions. We spend time with the recent victory of Angie Nixon in Florida’s Democratic primary for the Senate, looking at her as a bold fighter capable of providing a path forward to justice and hope as the conditions of life become ever more untenable.

So, amidst the gloom of Trump’s ongoing war on the working class, we also have cause to celebrate when we find real fighters to show us the way. Thanks to Waj for joining us, and thank you for listening! This episode is available as a podcast on major streaming platforms and here on Substack.

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We’re getting ready for a potential MAJOR win for democratic socialists by talking to candidate Oliver Larkin. He’s running in the Dem primary for FL-25 in a primary that will take place in just a few days, where he’s a bright spot in a larger movement of leftist candidates fearlessly championing Medicare for All. Oliver talks to us on this week’s episode about his campaign and the issues motivating it. He’s taking on an opponent funded by the working class’s enemies — Palantir, OpenAI, Wall Street banks (we’re not kidding). We want Oliver and his grassroots movement, not the dirty money of the biggest and most exploitative corporations to win. (You can donate to him here.) So we hope you’ll listen to this conversation about what will hopefully be another victory for the left, and for all of our future.

Oliver is also willing to call out far-right hypocrisy in a way few people are. We discuss a major moment he had on Fox News, calling Trump a pedo as the host nervously tried to redirect the conversation. While he was given questions fearmongering about crimes caused by immigrants, Oliver went there and said what all electeds should have the courage to say: the man in the country’s highest office has actually made sure that the justice system doesn’t pursue justice for victims of child sex abuse — because Trump is himself implicated in the Epstein cabal. Republicans profess to own the issue of protecting children, but their leader is the real person children need protecting from.

An absolute cornerstone of Oliver’s platform is Medicare for All. Of course, on KK&F, that’s a policy we regularly foreground as among the most important (if not THE most important) measures the American government must pass to keep its people alive and prevent them from drowning in debt. And as Abdul El-Sayed’s primary victory in Michigan reminds us, voters are having the exact opposite reaction to M4A than establishment Democrats and the entire right wing want them to: they’re voting in its champions because they recognize its central importance to the well-being of every resident of this country. When Oliver’s and Abdul’s opponents on both sides of the aisle hand-wring about “pie in the sky” ideas from out-of-touch lefties, remember that these policies are winning!!! Turns out people don’t want to struggle to have children and raise a family, get medical care, and make a living. Nor should they have to, and Oliver makes that very clear in our discussion of his campaign.

Thanks for tuning in, and thanks for subscribing. This conversation is available as a podcast on major streaming platforms.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit krystalkyleandfriends.substack.com/subscribe