Doomscroll: Krystal Ball
Added 2025-09-02 21:00:08 +0000 UTCWelcome to Doomscroll. This episode marks the first year of the show! I’m excited to kick off our fall program with a very special guest: Krystal Ball, a political commentator and a co-host of Breaking Points.
Breaking Points is a “top 10” politics podcast on Apple charts. It’s novel format pairs progressive and conservative co-hosts to survey a wide range of news and opinion. By offering independent perspectives from both the left and right, Breaking Points seeks to realign American politics with the popular will. In addition to the daily news, Ball co-hosts a weekly conversation podcast with her husband Kyle Kulinski, an alt-media commentator, at Krystal Kyle & Friends.
Breaking Points launched in the summer of 2021. Previously, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjetti were co-hosts on The Hill’s Rising, beginning in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Earlier, Ball was a regular contributor to MSNBC and co-hosted The Cycle from 2012 to 2015. She regularly appears on mainstream programs like MSNBC, Fox, CNN and more. Perhaps no other commentator has so closely tracked the rise of American populism from both inside and outside the media establishment. Krystal Ball joins me to discuss:
The seismic shift of American politics. We see a hard break to the right and left. The center cannot hold.
We chart a course back to social democracy (???) on the level of electoral politics and in 21st century policy.
Zohran’s historic win in NYC has demonstrated that the Sander’s program works. Outsider candidates can expand the electorate and activate non-voters.
Has the internet become real life? How do online audiences correlate to real world political coalitions? This is perhaps the most essential question of our moment.
Whenever I’m not listening to extremely niche or insane internet politics, like the Comrade High Commander of the Intergalactic Worker’s League (this is real), I get my mainstream news from Breaking Points. I highly recommend adding the show to your podcast rotation. Once again, thank you all for your support over the past year. I’m excited for the future of this project:
Krystal Ball: Unabashed Left Populism | Doomscroll
On this week’s bonus episode, we explore the looming threat of AI, transhumanism and solve "the Elon Musk situation". We ask; what is the left-wing version of tariffs? And why should the left support economic protectionism?
If you’re new here, check out some of these previous bonus episodes from the archive:
Doomscroll: Francis Fukuyama II
Doomscroll: Francis Fukuyama II
Doomscroll: Catherine Liu 2 II
Comments
I liked it at the time but the assertion is a little simplistic and omits the rest of the story: punk saw the union movement as part of the Institutions precisely because that movement was failing after the neoliberal attack. It rebelled against hippies for similar reasons, that they were co-opted, even though the hippies were also individualists, sometimes libertarian in their own way.
projotce
2025-10-09 01:08:27 +0000 UTC"Punk rock was a rebellion against the disciplined, organized trade unions of the time. It was not a left-wing rebellion. It was a libertarian rebellion against trade unionism... We have just mistaken a lot of what is today 'left-politics' that's actually libertarian philosophy and libertarian policy." - J.C.
Christopher Rieth
2025-09-03 15:35:59 +0000 UTCIndustry plant.
Jd_____
2025-09-03 06:14:27 +0000 UTC
