Krystal Kyle & Friends

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 incredible case against the fossil fuel behemoth Chevron. From start to finish, Donziger explains how he became involved in the fight to hold Chevron to account for destroying the Amazon and poisoning the Ecuadoreans who called it home, all in the name of a profit motive. Fighting Chevron’s attacks from house arrest, Donziger wants to bring his story to light — the story of how a massive corporation has evaded justice for exploiting the environment, and how the attempts to uncover and publicize this exploitation have been stifled.

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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 that are available to most working people in this country. The free-market virtue of choice, embraced by the U.S. ruling class over the evils of socialism, guarantees that we must be free if we’re at liberty to choose our fate. But when the choice on the table is “Medicare for all who want it,” and we have either a vastly underfunded, under-enrolled public option or a prohibitively expensive private one, can we say that the liberal illusion of choice is bringing us prosperity? Would it be such an infringement of our freedoms if the U.S. government guaranteed high-quality healthcare for all, like it or not?

To get the whole conversation on audio, find our podcast on Substack, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more. Thanks for joining another week of Krystal Kyle & Friends.

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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 going to be a class war in this country, it’s about time the working class won that war.”

The reconciliation bill negotiated by Senator Sanders includes significant items like a renewable energy standard, universal pre-K, and 2 years of community college. It also is a very long way from being final or complete. Will Democrats allow the parliamentarian to kill the PRO Act or the renewable energy standard? Will corporate democrats demand sweeping changes and dramatically lower the pricetag? We get to these questions and more on this week’s episode of Krystal Kyle & Friends. Listen now on Substack, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.

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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 paying poverty wages is good for business? What kind of ideology was he exposed to as a CEO, and what made him turn away from it? Dan answers all of these questions and more in Episode 31 of Krystal Kyle & Friends.

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This week, we were lucky enough to invite Briahna Joy Gray onto Krystal Kyle & Friends. Former senior politics editor for the Intercept and national press secretary for Bernie 2020, current host of Bad Faith podcast and Current Affairs contributing editor, Briahna has brought her gifts to the American left in a number of ways, and we had the opportunity to talk to her about her work and political journey on this week’s episode of the show. 

Briahna wants to talk about the weakness of the liberal consensus that is held together by the power and riches of the Democratic Party. She knows it’s not working for us, and she knows we’ve noticed. An essential part of the Bernie campaign was the task of acknowledging and mobilizing the real, material hurt that working people face in everyday life: debt, massive medical bills, poor housing, feeding a family on poverty wages. For while these are things that everyday Americans tend to think about the most, the Democratic establishment is eager to pass them over, offering empty, performative gestures to ignore constituents’ cries for help. It doesn’t have to be this way, no matter what the party insists.

We’re so grateful to Briahna for sharing her time and wonderful insight with us. Don’t forget to check out her podcast, Bad Faith. And to listen to this episode as a podcast, find Krystal Kyle & Friends on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in, everyone.

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You might be inclined to think that the story of drug criminalization begins with the Reagan administration, or with the culture of substance use in the Sixties. Ismail Ali says otherwise. Ismail is this week’s guest on Krystal Kyle & Friends; he’s from MAPS [Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies], an organization that produces research on the healing and therapeutic potential of psychedelics.

The task of reframing our society’s perception of psychedelic use is a big one, but as you’ll hear in this week’s conversation, it offers a great deal of positives — which decades, and even centuries, of drug policing have fought to hide from us.

Where does the story of government control of substances start in the United States? In our conversation, Ismail traces it back to the 1800s, following a line of prohibitive legislation, but he also draws upon a history of colonialism that predates the founding of the United States. Understanding why certain substances are criminalized in the U.S. means more than understanding their chemical composition. It means understanding how different religious groups have interacted in the past centuries, how different societies have developed moral codes, and, more recently, how drug criminalization has been used to continue the legacy of colonialism into the twenty-first century.

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This week, we were honored to hold a discussion with Gabriel and John Shipton, the brother and father of American hero Julian Assange. As we mention in our introduction to this conversation, the violations of First Amendment rights and basic human rights that led to Assange’s incarceration have an impact on all of us. We’re humbled to share this episode of Krystal Kyle & Friends with you.

In our last post, we discussed the basics of the unjust imprisonment of Julian Assange, founder of whistleblowing org WikiLeaks. Now, Gabriel and John reveal details about Julian’s current living conditions, the discovery of fabricated testimony against him, and the U.S. media’s determined blackout of his case.

For so many of us, the feelings of patriotism that this weekend’s holiday is supposed to drum up has been forever changed by the information that Julian sacrificed to share with us. We know that the American government’s demand for unquestioning allegiance comes at the cost of safety, health, freedom, and life for millions of people across the world. We also know that the values that supposedly build our national character — freedom to express ourselves, to question, and to speak to our beliefs — can be bought and paid for, whisked away for the Department of Defense’s convenience.

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We’re thrilled to report that Hasan Piker — you know him as HasanAbi, the wildly popular leftist Twitch streamer and commentator — joined us for this week’s episode of Krystal Kyle & Friends. Hasan provided his trademark keen insight on the key leftist struggles of our moment, what’s wrong with the infighting among leftist political commentators, how we can productively critique progressive lawmakers, and much more.

We had to kick off the episode by talking about this week’s big story: Britney Spears gave testimony on the cruel, exploitative nature of her thirteen-year conservatorship. With her most basic rights thrown away to the discretion of her father, Britney detailed the truly horrific abuse that has followed the loss of her autonomy.

Working seven days a week without control of her money, denied the most basic power over her body: Britney’s story is a chilling example of the linkages between ableism and the restriction of reproductive rights. It’s also a story of labor abuses. The call to #FreeBritney is an essential feminist mandate: nobody should have to live this way.

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On to this week’s episode of Krystal Kyle & Friends. We brought siblings David and Margaret Talbot onto the show to talk about their work unearthing and portraying leftist history.

For historians of the ‘60s and ‘70s, one of the most pressing questions to ask is: What did the revolutionary movements of this period get right, and where did they go wrong? Of course, David and Margaret give us thought-provoking and insightful answers — on modern cynicism toward leadership; movements’ source of direction and inspiration; the importance of coalition-building; and the role of solidarity in the revolution. There’s an unbelievable wealth of knowledge to gain here. We’re grateful David and Margaret took the time to spell it out for us, and we think you’ll enjoy.

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I’ve come to believe that this is the defining characteristic of my generation: keeping our options open.

Pete Davis begins his 2021 book Dedication: The Case for Commitment by describing the modern refusal to commit with a low-stakes example. “Infinite browsing mode” is perfectly captured by an evening spent trawling the full Netflix database, rejecting each movie option in case a better one comes along. But in his appearance on this week’s episode of Krystal Kyle & Friends, Pete makes it clear that the stakes of indecisiveness are far greater than permanently scrolling through media sites. Our conversation inspired us to reflect on the value of commitment to ideals, principles, political movements. How well are we serving ourselves and our world by refusing to stand by what we believe in? And when there’s room for us to commit ourselves to these projects, how can we make the leap?

As Pete points out, the victories we achieve through commitment tend to be quiet success stories. Hollywood prefers to glamorize stories of epiphanies and “big breaks” — single moments that change a person’s life or redefine their sense of self. Given that the escape from infinite browsing mode is hard-won and often difficult, we can’t expect to watch the value of commitment play out on the big screen in popular culture. But the personal and social enrichment that these commitments yield, Pete argues, is what makes it all worth it. We’re inclined to agree.

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