Kyle Kulinski, Krystal Ball & Jill Stein: Don't Get Fooled Again!
Another DemExit? Let's Examine Closer.
Yesterday, Jill Stein’s campaign for President announced that pseudo-celebrity podcasters and YouTube hosts Kyle Kulinski and his wife Krystal Ball are “endorsing” the potential Green Party Presidential nominee - and lots of people are getting excited. Apologies to their fans and sycophants, but I’m going to throw a deluge of water on that excitement, coming from a fire hose of reality and past behavior.
“None of the Above” 2024
Let’s get this out of the way upfront. Right now, I am straight up anti-partisan, not simply non-partisan. I am on Team “None of the Above” for 2024 and loathe ALL of the candidates.
I don’t think we are voting our way out of this mess. NO CANDIDATE will be able to withstand the power of the Corporate Military Intelligence Apparatus. They can only play ball with it. I think this is all a distraction. We will likely end up with Donald Trump as President come January. That’s not an endorsement, it’s merely a prediction.
Being on Team “None of the Above” allows me to be highly critical of ALL of the 2024 Presidential candidates: Donnie “Tiny Hands” Trump, “Genocide Joe” Biden, Marianne “Orb Queen” Williamson, Robert F. “Boobie” Kennedy, Cornel “Curtis Mayfield” West, Jill Stein, Lars Mapstead, Claudia De La Cruz and the rest who are all running to be perceived, by many, as the biggest monster in the world.
We’re all losing, no matter who wins.
Was It Even Really An Endorsement?
Simply put - no. This is not a serious endorsement. It’s a sideshow. Look how it was presented. Krystal and Kyle had Jill as a guest on their “Krystal Kyle and Friends” podcast this week (published May 11). It also happens to be on her birthday. They both like Jill - Kyle might have even voted for her for President in 2016. I normally would put a link here, but I don’t want to give them any additional traffic or visibility. If you want to find it, you know where to look.
On May 11, Kyle recorded a happy birthday video (starts at 24:36) for her “Jill Stein Birthday Rally to Stop the Genocide” Zoom call she held for supporters, in which he says: “I want her to know that she has my support.” I don’t think he outright says “I will be voting for Jill Stein in November.” THAT would be an endorsement. It sounds like he was trying to have his cake while still giving himself the out that he never actually said the words.
Let’s look at how it’s rolled out. The tweet below was clipped from the stream and published to Jill Stein’s personal Twitter, which is being used for the campaign. At the time of this writing, I did not see this announcement anywhere else.
The video isn’t posted to her campaign’s website (at least that I could find at the time of this writing) though her team could just be slow in updating it. The last endorsement, from Jeffrey Sachs, was published almost 3 weeks ago, at the end of April.
Kyle hasn’t even retweeted this, nor has he mentioned it on his Twitter account as of May 15 at 2pm ET, nor has he made any public announcement anywhere besides this Zoom call (to my knowledge). That’s not a ringing endorsement to me.
Stepping Outside Their Lane? Puh-leeze.
To say the least, I am highly skeptical. It’s co-opting behavior. Krystal & Kyle are “progressive left” - aka shitlib - elitists. That doesn’t change on a dime. Let’s not forget that Marianne Williamson officiated their wedding a year ago, and they were all-in on Marianne, until they weren’t.
Are we just going to dismiss the simping they did for a known Israel hawk? Did they just not really care at all until October 7? Suspect.
Throwback to 2 years ago, when Breaking Points announced an “independent network” and we at INN analyzed it:
Breaking Points' New "Network" Features Neo-Cons and Squad Apologists
Their Friends And Media Will Come For The Greens
Just wait until corporate funded independent media starts digging into the Green Party’s inner workings. It’s not gonna be pretty how they present it. You’ll likely hear terms like “highly dysfunctional” from the left, and “hyper-woke” from the right.
My prediction is we will hear Krystal and/or Kyle make a statement sounding eerily similar to this by November:
“We love Jill, but sadly, there’s no real structure behind her. Even if she won, the entire Congress would stand against her like Republicans did to Obama, except for the Squad - MAYBE. Like they would have for Bernie. And, guyzzz - we can’t let Trump win again, can we? We already know the kinds of cabinet choices he’d make… The NLRB!”
"I mean, Biden sucks, but remember how bad Trump was?"
End scene.
Also at the federal level, it’s proven the people have no say over the donor class:
“…[a] percentage of middle class or lower-income people who support a particular policy has virtually no bearing on that policy's likelihood of being enacted. However, the more high earners support a policy, the more likely it is to come into effect.” - MSNBC, Aug 16, 2012.
Jill Stein getting more than 5% of the vote and federal funding for the Green Party - even if she’s able to accomplish that (which she couldn’t in 2016) - isn’t changing that, and these two know it.
Kyle’s “Political Evolution”
How can we take Kyle Kulinski seriously, given his arc from “Biden Bro” to “Marianne 2024,” to now seemingly again shifting his allegiance (and possibly endorsement) to Jill Stein - in just the past 18 months?
Here’s Kyle as a walking, talking contradiction - in 39 seconds - thanks to
for assembling.He seems to recognize that the Democrats won’t ever be what he wants them to be, but still got behind Biden. He tried in co-founding the Justice Democrats in 2017, and we all know what a train wreck that turned out to be. The entire thing got co-opted, progressive energy driven to elect candidates that became “Just Democrats”.
Kyle also has advocated for ranked choice voting, insisting that until that’s in place, 3rd party candidates effectively have no chance. Why did he all of a sudden change his position? (h/t once again to
for the editing).How can we POSSIBLY trust his political instincts? When was the last time he was right about supporting a candidate?
How Does Endorsing Stein Benefit Krystal And Kyle Financially? Could It Hurt?
Simply put, they don’t keep making big money with their podcasts backing losing horses. They are not going to risk tanking their livelihoods over a political endorsement of a 3rd party candidate, when their base is entrenched in the duopoly:
Both Krystal and Kyle have YouTube channels with over 1 million subscribers and the algorithm is friendly to their content, allowing them to gain new subscribers. See SocialBlade for more on this.
The Krystal, Kyle & Friends podcast is doing well - with 46,000 free and between 1,000 and 20,000 monthly paid subscribers - just on Substack alone.
Two years ago, Breaking Points had more than 40,000 paid monthly subscribers. They gained 10,000 paid subscribers in the first 2 days. That was when they had about 600k subs on YouTube, so I’m guessing they doubled their monthly paid subscribers in parallel.
Kyle’s podcast, The Kyle Kulinski Show/Secular Talk has another 2,600 paid subscribers on Patreon as of this publishing.
Throwback to when we analyzed the Breaking Points’ revenue streams in June 2022:
Krystal and Kyle largely cover the US political horse race on their individual shows, inadvertently helping the Democrats define the policies that their base might want, but everyone on the inside knows the corporate donors will never allow them to enact. They still want to play within this system and win personally, but don’t appear to be as concerned about the financial health of the rest of the country. They get called “the far left” by people like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, completely marginalizing everyone who think Krystal and Kyle are centrists at best (like me and LOTS more independents). They are definitely corporate apologists - Krystal even more than Kyle.
Kyle’s subscriber base is largely progressive lefty Democrats (amazing there are any remaining at this point!) - holdouts from the Bernie Sanders days who are still blind to how much the party loathes them. Somehow, these people still believe in the viability of federal electoral politics to accomplish big things for the 99%. They think you can play nice with corporate interests, beg for what you want and being ignored - while not being outright confrontational, shaming, hostile or antagonistic towards them. They thank their masters for the scraps they occasionally do get thrown their way. They won’t EVER make power uncomfortable.
Krystal’s listener base is even more centrist and corporate-leaning than Kyle’s, partially due to her co-host on Breaking Points, Saagar Enjeti, a right leaning independent with deep ties to the defense-industry-funded Hudson Institute. Krystal has never had a job in media that wasn’t for a mega-media corporation, until she and Saagar left The Hill’s Rising and went on her own 3 years ago to start Breaking Points, partially funded by 700+ $1500 “lifetime memberships” - and we all know that the average Joe can afford to blow that kind of cash on a podcast membership, right? She plays to the professional managerial class (or PMC). Essentially, she’s very similar to CNN’s Kaitlin Collins with slightly less restriction, for the people who don’t watch TV anymore.
Krystal, Kyle and their fans want to continue to live very comfortably off of this current structure and largely just complain from their studio, wishing it were different but doing very little about it - besides voting harder next time - while the world burns around them. They express zero interest in organizing or activism, actually engaging the massive following they’ve managed to build for themselves or guiding them to act.
They are corporate media-lite royalty; both being popular media personalities managing to stay in the space & thrive financially for over a decade - not many can say that.
Is Reid Hoffman Somewhere Behind The Scenes?
This is total speculation on my part, but this could be a scheme and request from her old friend, DNC behind-the-scenes venture capitalist Reid Hoffman. Look into the PAC of hers he funded.
Throwback to investigating Krystal’s funding links in 2022:
Breaking Points' Billionaire Funding Ties / The Story Behind #BreakingPoints & Max Alvarez
Constant Vigilance, Head On A Swivel, Skeptical Of Everything And Everyone
It is nice to have hope where it is warranted, but the establishment is very keen on preying upon that hope to keep you engaged with their inflated personalities that mostly tow the line. We must continue to be vigilant to look out for this nonsense, especially in an election year where the Democratic candidate they endorsed in 2020 and would normally be pushing is weak: abetting ethnic cleansing in Gaza and overseeing an economy that the top 5% of income earners think is great, but the bottom 95% see is squeezing them - WAY more than it did under the last guy, who was also decidedly terrible and they have fear mongered against.
The goal and motivation for people like Reid Hoffman is to suggest that it’s ok to not back Biden right now, and instead to steer “progressive” energy into a campaign the Democrats plan in every way to torpedo from the inside out. Once the election is over, the Democrats will challenge the authenticity of their votes in court in any case where a Green vote made a difference.
Again - apologies to anyone who reads this and gets upset. I have seen this soap opera a few times already and I am tired of it. The third party candidates are selling hope to an audience desperate for it, but they offer no real path to victory, nor a roadmap to deal with the nonsense once (or rather, if) they step foot into the White House. A website with policies on a page is great, but they are just rhetoric and theoretical. They don’t deal with real-world challenges and sabotage that the Dems and Republicans would assuredly apply.
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