Episode 8 Sneak Peak

Meet Piper!

KB: This week we wanted to introduce you to an integral part of the KKF family, Piper Winkler! Piper is an incredible young woman set to graduate from Harvard, passionate about left politics and with an absolutely brilliant mind. She’s been working behind the scenes to put together these newsletters and help us pull together the show every week so we wanted to make sure you get to know her and why we feel so lucky to get to work with her every week! Below is a transcript of a brief interview Kyle and I did with Piper.

But first! We’re thrilled to get to talk to the one and only Glenn Greenwald for this week’s episode. Make sure to sub to get the video on Friday. It should actually go up earlier in the day this week assuming all goes according to plan. As always the audio is free to all with no ads on Substack and any podcast platform.

And now here’s Piper!

KB: I want to introduce you to a critical part of the Krystal Kyle & Friends family, the one and only Piper Winkler, who does all kind of things for the show. She helps to draft the newsletter; she does the pre-interviews for us and helps us come up with ideas. She's a central part of making this whole thing work, so we wanted you to meet her.

A little bit of backstory: the way that I met Piper was at a Harvard for Bernie event, back before COVID, back before we knew that the DNC was once again going to destroy the Sanders campaign. It was a beautiful moment, and Piper gave an incredible speech, which everyone should watch.

Piper, we're so excited to get to work with you. Tell the people a little bit about yourself: where are you from and how did you get into politics?

PW: I'm currently a senior at Harvard University. Originally, I'm from the great state of Illinois — and consider myself a Midwestern leftist — but I've since moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I've become focused on organizing around issues of housing and homelessness. 

While I've considered myself a socialist for a long time, I believe that an essential part of being a socialist is becoming active in the struggles that matter to you. That started for me when I became a freshman at Harvard and began working at a local homeless shelter. I worked with a lot of great people there, and I made friends among the guests. But what constantly jumped out at me every time I stepped into the shelter was the fact that people have been made to depend upon donations for things that they deserve as a human right. Working in that environment radicalized me toward the fight for a homes guarantee. That took me to the Bernie 2020 campaign and, after that, to DSA. I'm currently the co-chair of Harvard YDSA, which has been in operation since June of last year.

KK: Many people's top issues come back to something very personal to them, something that shapes their ideological framework. In my case, one of my top issues is Medicare for All, and that probably has a lot to do with the story of my father, which leads me to advocate so strongly on this front. Is there a backstory as to why housing and homelessness became your top issue? 

PW: Working at the shelter, I made a lot of close friends whom I constantly saw advocating for themselves and for other people in the homeless community — outside the gates of an institution with a $40 billion endowment. Harvard spends $750 on each of its fancy lawn chairs, but at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it donated a tiny fraction of its wealth to support homeless services in Cambridge. This is profoundly radicalizing, especially when you realize that your close friends struggle every night to find a place to sleep, and then they wake up the next morning and start the same struggle all over again. 

I'm constantly reminded that the university has the power to provide far more support to the community and deliberately chooses not to, especially as a major landlord in Cambridge. At the same time, the university continues to exploit its workers; the COVID crisis provides the perfect example of this exploitation. Harvard workers have gone without sick leave during the pandemic. The president of the school, while he had COVID, continued to have campus workers come in to clean his house -- and then some of those workers got sick.

This is obviously horrifying. It’s more than a matter of morality, where you know deeply in your heart that something is wrong. That knowledge doesn't matter if you don't organize with other people to build the power to change things. It's easy, at elite institutions like Harvard, to pat yourself on the back and say, "I know this is wrong, and I certainly wish it was some other way." But if you don't organize, especially with labor — the people with the power to stop the flow of value — no individual’s moral stance on Harvard is going to make any difference.

KK: You referenced DSA a little bit earlier. How active are you in DSA? How active is DSA on campus?

PW: Our YDSA chapter is relatively new; we're busy organizing our campus as democratic socialists, working on projects related to supporting labor and student debt cancellation. But our work also goes beyond Harvard's gates. Our biggest project is related to housing justice in Cambridge. 

Last April, our chapter members began showing up to Cambridge City Council meetings. Alongside other community advocates, we raised the alarm that the city was not providing appropriate shelter to homeless people. Both before and during COVID-19, people have had to sleep in congregate shelters, where they often have to stay in very close proximity to other people. First of all, the city should have worked to secure Harvard dorm rooms, which were sitting empty, and to provide them to people living on the streets right outside of those dorms. That did not happen. But since then, we have argued that the city should use empty hotel spaces for non-congregate shelter, especially because there has been far less travel to the area, meaning that there are many empty hotel rooms at the same time that there are people in Cambridge without a place to sleep. 

With organizers from Boston DSA, we've built a pressure campaign, Project Right to Housing, that advocates for the city of Cambridge to use FEMA's full reimbursement for emergency housing. This, in my opinion, goes to show that people in DSA are deeply involved in the politics of their community; they want to improve people's situations immediately, but they also connect this work to longer-term projects, like housing decommodification, which is exactly what I'm hoping to do. 

KB: This is your senior year — what do you think you want to do after you graduate?

PW: No matter where life takes me after Harvard, I'm excited to keep organizing with DSA. I think there is great value in being part of a 90,000-member organization, where I pay my dues and have a fair, democratic say in how we continue to organize around the power of the working class. I feel that I have comrades all over the country, and that there will always be important work for me to do. 

KB: What was your favorite episode so far?

PW: I truly admired Senator Nina Turner's work on the Bernie 2020 campaign. At the same time, in conversations like the one she had on your show, she continues to show us that it's not about a single campaign; it's not about a single leader, but instead about a plan to bring working people into the halls of power. That's something she argues for so consistently, and the fact that she emphasizes the words "unbought and unbossed" demonstrates that in her current run for Congress, she's not trying to build power for herself. She's trying to enact an overarching vision of how we're going to dismantle all of the corporate and self-serving institutions that steal wages from working people or deny them healthcare. We shouldn't have to ask for things like Medicare for All; we should build the power to say, "We're taking it, and there's nothing that you can do about it."