Kyle Kulinski

Early life

Kulinski was born on January 31, 1988, to a family of Polish and Italian descent and raised in Westchester County, New York. He graduated from New Rochelle High School in 2006 and earned a bachelor's degree in political science with a minor in psychology from Iona College in 2010. His father, Albert Kulinski, owned a Chevrolet dealership in New Rochelle and died in 2011. Kulinski credits his father's death, which he believes resulted from inadequate healthcare, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the works of Noam Chomsky as influences on his political views.

Career

Kulinski launched a YouTube channel called Secular Talk in spring 2008 while a political science student, presenting news with a brash, in-your-face tone and profanity. Disillusioned with President Barack Obama by the end of his first term, he began publishing videos full time and started The Kyle Kulinski Show on BlogTalkRadio, pushing his subscriber count above 100,000. By 2015 he was making a living from the channel, and on December 16, 2022, it crossed 1 billion views.

In September 2025 the show ranked 37th among top-rated podcasts on YouTube in the United States. After the 2016 presidential election, Kulinski co-founded Justice Democrats with Cenk Uygur, Saikat Chakrabarti, and Zack Exley. He and Uygur resigned in late 2017, and Kulinski later criticized the group's strategy and its aligned congresspeople for not withholding votes from Nancy Pelosi in exchange for a Medicare for All vote. On January 1, 2021, he and Krystal Ball started the podcast Krystal Kyle & Friends, whose guests have included Jordan Peterson, Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, and Andrew Yang.

Views

Kulinski describes himself as a social democrat, left-libertarian, agnostic atheist, secular humanist, and an international centrist. He advocates single-payer healthcare, free public college tuition, a federal living wage, reduced military spending, military non-interventionism, abolition of capital punishment, infrastructure spending, legalization of euthanasia, and legalization, regulation, and taxation of drugs and prostitution, and has praised the Nordic model.

He has criticized religiously motivated opposition to abortion, arguing that his interpretation of the Bible permits it. He believes campaign finance policy distinguishes progressive candidates from the mainstream Democratic Party, which he calls Republican-lite. He considers the 2023 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip a genocide and voiced support for 2024 pro-Palestinian campus protests, comparing them to Iraq War and Vietnam War protests. He opposes biometric employee management as rank authoritarianism disguised as corporate efficiency.

Electoral politics

Kulinski supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and voted for Jill Stein, though he called Hillary Clinton the lesser of two evils against Donald Trump and urged swing-state voters to back her. After Trump's election, he believed progressives could lobby Trump for infrastructure spending and economic protectionism, and he criticizes the Never Trump movement. He again supported Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primaries but said he would not back Joe Biden after Biden became the presumptive nominee, stating that if Trump won re-election, critics should blame him, as it would show that candidates like Biden need progressive support.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan and television host Joy Reid criticized this position. In March 2023, Kulinski attended Marianne Williamson's 2024 campaign launch, and Williamson credited him for bringing young male supporters. On August 4, 2026, he endorsed writer Dan Greaney for the 2028 Republican presidential primaries, citing Greaney's support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.