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Who’s Foxier – Krystal or Saagar? Breaking Points, Fox, and the Corporatization of Zio-Critical Media

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Launched in 2021 by energetic and superficially likable commentators Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Breaking Points is today among the top political programs on YouTube. Joined the following year by Emily Jashinsky and Ryan Grim, the popular show, as its Wikipedia entry uncritically accepts the format, “includes one left-wing populist anchor (Ball) and one right-wing populist anchor (Enjeti), who provide news and commentary from an independent platform, separate from the mainstream media” [1]. The quartet’s putative independence warrants scrutiny, however, their mouthing of economic populism and ostensible anti-Zionism notwithstanding. Ball, previously a Democratic congressional candidate and contributor to MSNBC and HuffPost , was in 2017 and 2018 the treasurer of the People’s House Project PAC, which raised funds for Democratic candidates but came under fire for allocating, according to Open Secrets, 69.74% of its money to People’s House Project staff salaries and another 12.82% ...
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Moses Hess at the Nexus of Marxism and Zionism

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  Radically as Marxism and Zionism would part ways in the twentieth century, it is interesting to observe that the two ideologies’ early histories are intertwined in the person of Moses Hess (1812-1875), a Jewish radical Hegelian thinker and contemporary of Marx whose 1862 Zionist manifesto, Rome and Jerusalem , predates Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State by more than three decades. Hess, like Marx, was born in Germany’s Rhineland to a merchant father who intended for his son to pursue a life of religious study. As Hess recorded in his diary, however, “the Talmud utterly repelled me” [1]. His adolescent intellectual awakening saw him drawn to French socialism and to the works of Baruch Spinoza and G.W.F. Hegel, whose thought would in different ways shape the course of Hess’s philosophical and political development. Under the influence of Hegel, Hess would in his early years stand out as a “dialectical Idealist” as opposed to a dialectical materialist, as his fellow left Hegelian Mar...
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