We’re wading into the trenches of the right-wing influencer flame wars! And while it inspires anything but confidence in the future of American political discourse, it’s also a source of important insight into MAGA world and its craziest, dumbest drama. This week’s guest, Will Sommer, covers the right wing media and influencer ecosystem for The Bulwark’s False Flag Newsletter. Will has kept a close eye on alt-right media campaigns like the most recent one to label Harley Davidson as woke and gay. As Trump 2.0 comes unglued and MAGA grifters search for their next payday, Will has studied their online playbook and can walk us through it.

The facts don’t care about Ben Shapiro’s feelings — The Daily Wire has fallen off sharply, its audience vanishing, and the company was forced to do an embarrassing round of layoffs. Now, Ben has been reduced to tactics such as running his videos as paid advertisements simply to juice the views. What are the factors behind this precipitous fall? We also discuss the failed effort to lionize Charlie Kirk, Laura Loomer’s latest bizarre allegations, and how the right’s virulent anti-semitism is ripping them apart. As Trump does his best to destroy the country and the world, at least we get to watch all of the worst people rip each other to shreds. And we hope you enjoy listening!

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Historical parallels between our autocrat-in-chief and the despots of the past abound. It’s hardly comfort to think that others have struggled under the many tyrants of history as we struggle now, but it is humbling and inspiring, of course, to see where mass anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist movements have prevailed and transformed their political circumstances. That’s why this week, our featured guest is NYU’s Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and our topic is the psychology of fascist dictators we can connect directly to one of its newest representatives, Donald Trump.

Part of telling the psychological story of an erratic, inhumane leader like Trump, Professor Ben-Ghiat shows, is by looking at a repeated pattern in similar leaders that went before him: Trump had a serious past (and an upbringing) in criminal activity well before he went into the White House. Putin, Berlusconi, Netanyahu, Hitler . . . all had pending investigations, criminal records, looked forward to using dictatorial power to clear their records and bend the system to excuse illegal activities.

We have so much more to talk about in this episode, including the creep of data centers and their increasing encroachment on our communities and on nature, plus our observations about Trump’s downward spiral and where, if ever, it will end. Thanks for joining us. This episode is available on major streaming platforms.

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Young Don is joining us for a special episode unpacking the midterms and analyzing the Roganverse’s shift away from Trump-world. The center of attention is the Trump campaign’s shameless struggle to run political opponents out of office. Bill Cassidy and Thomas Massie are Republicans who have largely voted along with Trump. But they’ve both recently been targeted by the President for insufficient loyalty. Cassidy earned Trump’s ire by voting for impeachment. Massie committed the unforgivable MAGA sin of shining light on Trump’s repulsive behavior by fighting for the release of the Epstein Files. As of this week, both Cassidy and Massie were ousted from office by Trump-associated primary opponents. We unpack what this means for the future of the Republican Party and for the future of essential bipartisan efforts to bring Trump to justice for the damning information contained in the Epstein files.

Trump is also getting a $1.7 slush fund from the IRS after pushing a lawsuit against that agency. It’s opened up the floodgates to Trump’s January 6 insurrectionists asking for payouts from the settlement. Even some Republicans have balked at this shameless theft of tax dollars to reward criminals. It remains to be seen whether they will actually thwart the effort or as usual, bend the knee to Trump’s depraved wishes.

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Episode 278 finds us in a frankly unprecedentedly juicy convo with someone who’s been in the inner circle of the MAGA influencer ecosystem and has all the tea on their shady coordination systems: Ashley St. Clair. Through her ascendance to national attention as a major MAGA influencer, Ashley saw firsthand how comprehensively the top brass of Trump’s Republican Party controls every aspect, aesthetic and ideological, of MAGA’s public image. Trump’s Republican Party is obsessed with show, not substance, when it comes to its degraded idea of leadership, and an essential element of that show is an image of femininity that women in the right-wing influencer ecosystem must adhere to.

The cornerstone of our conversation is an in-depth exploration of the major information Ashley spilled in recent weeks about the coordinated efforts of the Trump administration and its allies in media to dominate the narrative. We take a deep dive into the inside of the Trump machine, looking at its systems of communication (apparently a nest of group chats) and endless feedback loop of power between Trump and his influencer allies. That ultimately leads to the proliferation of dark money organizations routing around regulations as nonprofits, meanwhile giving Trump unprecedented financial support for his political agenda.

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With the help of our special guest Ryan Grim, in our latest conversation about the ongoing mess of a war Trump is waging on Iran, we take a close look at the media narratives shielding Trump from ultimate responsibility for that conflict. In one of those narratives, Saudi Arabia becomes a main architect of the war in pursuit of its own economic and political interests. This line we’ve been fed on Saudi Arabia’s position in the conflict might have made sense at the most basic level — it has been a close ally for the U.S. in the Middle East — but the narrative pays no attention to the fallout that this conflict has had on Saudi Arabia’s own industry, not to mention on the industries of other Gulf Arab states. The region’s luxury tourism industry has been devastated, and while the conflict may not fully impair Saudi’s ability to deliver oil, that situation is far more grave for the other countries relying on the Strait of Hormuz. Hence the recent refusal of the Saudis to allow the U.S. into their airspace, forcing Trump to backpedal on Project Freedom.

Unlike Saudi Arabia, though, Israel is actively fueling the flames of this war and likely will continue to do so as peace talks advance and a potential permanent end to the conflict comes into view. Hugh Hewitt was willing to say out loud what many others are thinking: that Israel should blow up the negotiations to pursue its own political interests. Israel’s massive strike on Beirut after last month’s ceasefire agreement is an object lesson in precisely this craven willingness to place civilians’ lives in danger in the name of regional dominance. Our conversation then turns to the future: what will make peace possible? And what might make Trump and Netanyahu want to undermine it?

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Through its coverage of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the American media basically wrote the playbook for how to sell a genocide. Adam Johnson, our guest for this week, has just published an in-depth, scathing analysis of that playbook — his book is appropriately named How To Sell A Genocide. Our conversation with Adam goes into detail on the media strategies that gave us mass complicity and acceptance among the American public in the face of a despicable crime against humanity that depended upon support from Biden as it later would from Trump.

While Fox News and other right wing media were proudly and openly genocidal, the strategies deployed by the traditionally liberal mainstream press were more subtle. They were also potentially more consequential given that it was a Democratic President who oversaw the bulk of the murder, starvation, and displacement. Biden has faded into the shadows of American politics now, but we can and must ensure that an inescapable and central part of his legacy is the role he played in enabling Netanyahu and his ghouls to end, destroy, and uproot so many lives. Adam’s book provides a comprehensive overview that should be studied by historians and taught to students for years to come in hopes that “Never Again” may one day mean something.

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Tehran University’s Professor Mohammad Marandi joins us for Episode 275 of KK&F, where we talk about why Trump’s war on Iran is and will be a failure, as well as the Epstein class war crimes that everyone should be talking about. Trump’s war on Iran began over a month ago, reflecting his administration’s willingness — eagerness — to go against the law and the demands of the American people to pursue bloody imperialist conflict. Professor Marandi offers insight into why, in Tehran, the prevailing perception of this war is that it is a loss for the U.S. He imagines that even Trump’s generals warned him about the senseless strategy (or lack thereof) that he has now pursued. At this point, we’re watching the U.S. self-destruct in its pursuit of maximum bloodshed and maximum “victory.”

We also connect this conflict and the U.S.’s bungling of the so-called peace talks to a bigger failure on the global scale: other countries, watching the U.S. launch a campaign of destruction, have not spoken out. The lack of outrage, in powerful and wealthy countries like Italy and the U.K., refuse to put any pressure on the U.S. to end the war. And that’s what enables Professor Marandi to say, in what will be a major focus of conversations to come: “This is far bigger than Trump.”

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Welcome to Episode 274 of KK&F, featuring special guest Toure as we talk about the new war crimes the U.S. is threatening Iran with. Pete Hegseth just reminded Iran, amidst a ceasefire to the conflict that has wrought devastation in Iran and killed hundreds, that the U.S. is ready to pursue an endless path of bloodshed and destruction, down to the last bomb in its arsenal. It’s a glaring violation of the basic principles of the ceasefire to which our country committed. And it might be a war crime!

Taking a look under the facade of America’s commitment to international peace and democracy — a facade that appears more cracked than ever during Trump’s endless, baseless war — we talk about the U.S.’s violent posturing, how it’s being perceived by Iran, and the instability and lack of control that our country’s defense forces are hiding. This could, we argue, mark the beginning of the end of American hegemony.

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For Episode 273 of KK&F we’re talking to reporter Murtaza Hussain from Drop Site News to talk about the latest juncture of America’s war in Iran. Today, Iran officials join the U.S. for peace talks in Islamabad. Iran has submitted a ten-point plan to establish peace in the region, and it remains to be seen what Trump is willing to accept. He’s pretending that working to prevent future Israeli bombings in Lebanon was never part of the deal, part of his erratic and profoundly untrustworthy strategy. No matter what, knowing our president, he’ll find a way to tout the outcome of his disaster of a war as a win. But the plan proposed by Iran requires major concessions from the U.S., which, in its hubris, has previously made clear that it expects absolute capitulation from Iran. At the same time, all is not lost — Trump has accepted the framing of the talks Iran has provided, and made it clear that he’s desperate for some resolution. What remains to be seen is just how much he can swallow given the weak negotiation position the US enters with.

We cover a lot more in this episode, from the conflict’s economic ramifications to Europe’s reaction, Israel’s role in and perspective on the war, and much more. We’re grateful to Murtaza for joining us for this conversation, and we hope you enjoy. Thank you for keeping us ad-free! You can listen to this episode on major streaming platforms.

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She proudly owns the title of “the biggest pain in Ron DeSantis’s ass” — so you know Angie Nixon, candidate for Senate in Florida, is doing something right! Angie’s status as probably the most vocal and involved state legislator comes from her background as a union organizer, as well as an organizer for other grassroots causes. Angie is fighting for these causes in a state run by some of MAGA’s biggest names, whose victories have been supported by massive, craven rollbacks of voting rights.

As Angie puts it, there’s “more of us than there are of them.” Though Trump and the Mar-a-Lago set have sought to create the Sunshine State in their own image, we have cause to believe that coalition can’t hold, and Angie’s potential win in the Senate race would be a major sea change. As she points out, Trump has a Democratic representative! And hey, he voted by mail. Krystal and Angie have a lively conversation about Angie’s grassroots, pro-union and progressive campaign, what it means for the state of Florida, and what her path to the seat is.

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