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

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% to “administrative” costs [2]. Among the major donors to the PAC were venture capitalists and tech oligarchs including Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Stephen Schuler, and Regan Pritzker of the plutocratic Zionist Pritzker family. Another donor was Ball’s husband at the time, Silicon Valley attorney and CEO of Cognotion Inc., Jonathan Dariyanani [3]. Also curious, given her current political branding, is the fact that Ball in 2015 served as the hostess of a fundraiser for Magen David Adom, an Israeli emergency service [4]. The event would find her photographed standing alongside Zionist billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Krystal going balls-out in 2015

Who's FOXier?

Ball continued from 2018 to grow her audience on TheHill’s online political talk show Rising, which she initially cohosted with former Central Intelligence Agency officer Buck Sexton, who “completed multiple tours of duty as an intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, conducting field-based threat assessments in combat zones” [5]. Following Sexton’s departure in 2019, Ball was joined by Saagar Enjeti, a Tucker Carlson protégé from The Daily Caller. “Key to his appeal is convincing progressive audiences that, although a conservative, he is still a political outsider with views not too dissimilar from their own,” Alan MacLeod wrote in a 2021 profile of Enjeti for MintPress News:

Yet a look into Enjeti’s background and professional career suggests otherwise – that he is very much an insider and is pulling a similar trick to so many Republicans of late who are rebranding as anti-elite, anti-deep state warriors, all the while mainstreaming some highly problematic viewpoints to his audience. […]

Before becoming a populist media personality, Enjeti appeared to be training for the role of deep state official, pursuing an undergraduate degree at George Washington University and a master’s degree in security studies at Georgetown University, both DC-area colleges well known for their connections to the national security state. Enjeti also decided to study counter-terrorism studies at Israeli university IDC Herzliya. Situated on a former military base, the university’s board boasts a former head of Mossad and ex-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Meanwhile, its international advisory board is replete with US national security leaders, such as Robert Hutchings, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council; Stephen Peter Rosen, one time director of political-military affairs at the White House National Security Council; and ex-CIA Chief R. James Woolsey. […]

While still in university, Enjeti landed a job at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), writing policy briefs about the conflict in Afghanistan and analyzing the moves and strength of the Taliban. The ISW is a notoriously hawkish think tank funded by weapons contractors like Raytheon, General Dynamics and DynCorp, its board filled with retired generals and infamous neoconservative warmongers like Bill Kristol. […]

From the ISW, Enjeti later moved to the Hudson Institute, an equally neoconservative and pro-Iraq War think tank, where he worked as a media fellow until last year. Like the ISW, Hudson takes money from a cavalcade of weapons manufacturers, including Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.

Enjeti cohosted the Hudson Institute’s Realignment podcast with Marshall Kosloff, “perhaps best known to progressive audiences for making an unwanted appearance in the documentary film, The Lobby, which exposed Israeli government interference in domestic US politics,” MacLeod notes: “Kosloff is seen being paid to attend astroturfed protests against the Students for Justice in Palestine Movement.” The Realignment’s “concept […] is that there is a profound political realignment happening in America right now, as old political demarcations are broken down and new ones form,” writes MacLeod, who further observes: “In this sense, it is a similar notion to Rising and Breaking Points, except that it is being pushed by one of the most establishment-conservative organizations in America, raising questions about how genuine this realignment really is.” Ball’s Rising and future Breaking Points cohost “presents himself as an anti-war populist,” MacLeod continues:

But this is difficult to square with the fact that he chose to study counter-terrorism in Israel and to work for two of the most hawkish neoconservative think tanks in America – the very same think tanks whose principals laid the groundwork for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that Enjeti claims so vociferously to oppose. That an anti-war outsider could choose to work for the likes of the Kagan family does not compute. […]

On foreign policy, Enjeti seems to have been at least partially influenced by the Hudson Institute’s stances. […]

Enjeti has tried to square the circle of raging against the elites while leaving the system in place by blaming so many of America’s failings on China, combining populist rhetoric with Hudson-style foreign policy. In A Populist’s Guide to 2020, he claims that the malaise the country is in can be explained as in no small part due to “China’s economic warfare”.

The bad guys in Enjeti’s story of American corporations relocating eastwards to use hyper-exploited Asian workers are not the corporations themselves, nor the US government, but the Chinese Communist Party, deviously convincing businesses to do so – a classic bait-and-switch maneuver.

“Corporations and the billionaire class sold us all out a very long time ago,” he states, sounding like Bernie Sanders, before claiming that doing business with China is akin to “American monopolies’ tacit cooperation with the Nazi regime before the outbreak of World War II.” […]

While Rising has a distinctly progressive audience, Enjeti has been pushing the Hudson [Institute]’s neoconservative talking points on foreign policy. Enjeti is an unabashed imperialist who wants the United States to control the planet. [6]

Enjeti attends a ufology conference.

Enjeti repeatedly used segments on Rising and Breaking Points to call for the banning of China’s TikTok – a neoconservative demand that would gain momentum following the proliferation of anti-Israel content on the platform in the aftermath of October 7, 2023 – and to vilify an ominously expansive Chinese Communist Party “trying to buy up Hollywood […] They tried to destroy the NBA, they’re trying to control American sports, they’re trying to buy up […] American cinema houses in order to control what can be seen,” he alarmed Rising viewers in 2020, warning them that the Chinese Communist Party was putting their children at risk [7].

Look out, establishment!

Ball and Enjeti exited TheHill’s Rising to create the seemingly independent Breaking Points in 2021, instantly receiving high-profile endorsements and hundreds of generous “lifetime” subscriptions. The program “immediately debuted at number one in the global politics podcast charts, comfortably overtaking well-established brands like Pod Save America and The Ben Shapiro Show,” MacLeod points out, adding, “They even received the ultimate plug with an appearance on and an endorsement from Joe Rogan, a veritable blessing from the pope of pop culture” [8]. Indie News Network, suspicious of their quick success, reported the estimate that Breaking Points in its first year was “generating between $300,000 - $400,000 per month” [9]. “Like Crossfire for millennials but liberated from establishment media, Ball and Enjeti’s new show […] taps into the thirst for indie political perspectives,” enthused Joe Berkowitz for Fast Company, a magazine owned by Joe Mansueto, executive chairman of investment research giant Morningstar, Inc., in what reads like promotional copy: “They wanted a well-produced internet morning show (and podcast) unbeholden to any corporate interests, which they view as the ruination of most, if not all, major media ventures.” Miraculously, the “audience-funded Breaking Points was already a success when it launched” [10].

Ryan Grim is busy doing hard-hitting investigative journalism. He doesn't have time to comb his hair.

In 2022, Ball and Enjeti were joined on Breaking Points by Rising alumni Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky, who brought their own strange associations. Grim, who worked briefly as a stock trader in New York City [11] – an unusual beginning for a firebrand leftist journalist – went on to write for HuffPost and The Intercept, a publication funded at that time by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, grandson of the Iranian general Mahmud Mir-Djalali, who took the side of the Shah at the time of the CIA-backed coup that ousted Mohammad Mosaddegh [12]. “By establishing The Intercept and recruiting the journalists who possessed Snowden’s leaks, the billionaire effectively privatized the files,” Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal explained to MintPress News readers in a 2019 profile of Omidyar that highlighted the alignment of the Intercept patron’s investments with the US foreign policy and CIA initiatives: “Not only did this delay their release, it denied the public access to the information in order to supply his stable of hired reporters with exclusive scoops that continue to appear years after they were leaked. To this day, only a minuscule percentage of the Snowden files have been made public” [13].

“And while he directs his fortune into many of the same politically strategic NGOs and media outlets that George Soros does in hotspots around the globe, he has never been subjected to the public scrutiny and often ugly attacks that dog Soros,” Rubinstein and Blumenthal add: “And yet Samantha Power, the former US ambassador to the UN and liberal interventionist guru, has explicitly praised Omidyar as someone who is following in the footsteps of Soros” [14]. “Over the years, Omidyar has invested alongside the NED as well as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in strategic locations around the globe,” they reveal in the second installment of their profile:

In fact, the NED’s media arm, the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), lists the Omidyar Network as a partner organization that is “tackl[ing] the root causes of the global trust deficit” in mainstream media.

The NED was founded in 1983 following a series of scandals that exposed the CIA’s blood-soaked covert actions against foreign governments. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” NED President Carl Gershman told the New York Times in 1986. “We saw that in the Sixties, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”

Another NED founder, Allen Weinstein, conceded to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” [15]

Many of Omidyar’s investments work to vilify the government of Vladimir Putin, and the billionaire also appears to have taken a particular interest in media projects supporting regime change in the Philippines, Ukraine, and Syria. Interestingly, Ryan Grim’s contributions to Omidyar’s Intercept included the articles “Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election” and “A Call with a Killer: Trump Called Rodrigo Duterte to Congratulate Him on His Murderous Drug War: ‘You Are Doing an Amazing Job’”. Meanwhile, Grim’s Intercept colleague Mehdi Hasan, who today enjoys favorable coverage on Breaking Points (“Mehdi Hasan TAKES DOWN Unhinged ‘Fascist’ on Jubilee”; “Mehdi Hasan DISHES on MSNBC Israel Coverage”; etc.), gave Omidyar such articles as “Dear Bashar al-Assad Apologists: Your Hero Is a War Criminal Even If He Didn’t Gas Syrians” and “Chechnya Is Trying to Exterminate Gay People. Our Silence Only Emboldens Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov”. It is not surprising, then, that when Grim joined Rising, he came under fire from Danny Haiphong and other leftists for parroting US State Department propaganda about supposed Chinese oppression of Uyghurs [16].

Grim and his fellow Intercept contributor Jeremy Scahill would go on to set up their “independent” project Drop Site News on Substack, bringing Intercept editor Nausicaa Renner, Intercept reporter Murtaza Hussein, and Intercept “donor relations manager” Casey Quirke along with them. Indie News Network highlighted the spinoff of Drop Site as part of a broader trend of high-profile journalists like Bari Weiss, Mehdi Hasan, Taylor Lorenz, Ana Kasparian, and Van Jones going “independent” on Substack [17], a platform that received substantial investment from Andreessen Horowitz [18]. In keeping with The Intercept’s heritage of accepting CIA-aligned billionaire largesse, Drop Site was the fortuitous recipient of a $250,000 Soros grant in 2024 for the establishment of a “MENA [Middle East and North Africa] desk to bridge a critical information gap in independent journalism” [19].

Emily Jashinsky expresses her enthusiasm for Masa tortilla chips.

Conservative commentator Emily Jashinsky is the weakest link of the Breaking Points quartet, her homeliness and broadcast-unworthiness lending her an un-bimbo-ness and faux-authenticity that serves to efface her deep interconnectivity with the corporate Republican establishment. Jashinsky interned at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and wrote for The Washington Examiner and The Federalist before joining Grim on Rising and then departing with him for Breaking Points [20]. Concurrently, she hosts The After Party as a member of “The Megyn Kelly Podcast Network”, Jashinsky and Kelly both being part of the Red Seat Ventures stable along with Tucker Carlson, Piers Morgan, and many other high-profile “independent” personalities. As discussed in “Let’s Get Retarded; or, Tucker Carlson and the Illusion of Independence”, Red Seat Ventures is the conservative podcast arm of Fox Corporation’s Tubi division.

Got some junk food you want Emily to promote? Here's where you hire her.

Jashinsky is the only member of the Breaking Points quartet to advertise her affiliation with Red Seat Ventures, but multiple indications point to Breaking Points itself being a Red Seat client, emulating the Red Seat formula of participation in a video podcast ecosystem of mutually reinforcing hype with known Red Seat affiliates. Breaking Points, for example, regularly treats Red Seat interviews as news items with such stories as “Tucker Carlson CALLS OUT Bari Weiss: ‘Neocon, Liar’”; “Tucker Carlson SOUNDS OFF on 9/11, Charlie Kirk, Israel, Kash Patel”; “Tucker HUMILIATES Kevin O’Leary on Data Centers”; “‘DESPICABLE’: Piers Morgan GRILLS Israeli Rep on Gaza Children”; “Krystal and Saagar REACT: Piers WILD Nick Fuentes Interview”; “Piers Morgan Tells Mehdi Hasan: YOU WERE RIGHT on Israel!”; “Megyn Kelly RIPS Fox News REVEALS Pro-War MANDATE”; “Megyn Kelly REVEALS Israel Pressure Campaign”; and “Megyn Kelly DISMANTLES Ben Shapiro’s Epstein Denialism”. Additionally, Saagar Enjeti has appeared on Red Seat programs The Tucker Carlson Show and The Megyn Kelly Show, while Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim have both guested on Piers Morgan Uncensored.

Beyond Red Seat Ventures, Breaking Points appears to have an interest in publicizing Fox products generally. “One of Donald Trump’s economic advisors, Kevin Hassett […] got grilled by [Fox News host] Maria Bartiromo,” Jashinsky enthused during the opening of the May 27, 2026 installment of Breaking Points [21], for example. Five days earlier, on May 22, Ball and company solicited cheap attention for Murdoch’s network with the story “WTF: Fox Guest Wearing FULL MASK ON AIR???” [22]. Breaking Points has also devoted more than one segment to promoting the debut of TMZ’s new Washington news bureau, TMZ of course being another Fox company. Most damningly, on May 26, Enjeti informed viewers that Breaking Points had transitioned its premium subscriber services to Supercast [23] – conveniently enough, a mere three months after Fox Corporation announced Supercast’s acquisition by Red Seat Ventures [24].

Accepting that a vast and growing appetite for anti-Zionist news commentary exists on the internet, Fox Corporation has simply decided to corner the market with programs like The Tucker Carlson Show and Breaking Points, working in subtle ways all the while to undermine and misdirect anti-Israel sentiment – a crucial task for Zionism in a historical moment of US imperial decline, the continuing challenge to Israel mounted by the Axis of Resistance, and rising anti-Semitism on a global scale. Tellingly, while Breaking Points reports consistently and compellingly on Zionist influence and Israeli abuses, its commentators confine themselves to the acceptable liberal paradigm of sympathizing with Palestinian victims while denouncing acts of armed resistance as “senseless, barbaric atrocities” as Ball described Hamas’s actions of October 2023 [25]. More embarrassingly, Jashinsky and Grim even lent credence to the Israeli claim that Hamas had deliberately massacred infants [26].

Another component of the Breaking Points approach to deforming the discourse on Israel is its centering of Jewish perspectives, inviting the likes of Gideon Levy, Norman Finkelstein, Antony Loewenstein, J Street lobbyist Jeremy Ben Ami, and Part of the Problem host Dave Smith (“seen regularly on The Greg Gutfeld Show and Red Eye on Fox News, as well as Kennedy on Fox Business Network” as his YouTube profile boasts [27]) to discuss the Zionist problem and US foreign policy while excluding and stigmatizing consideration of its Jewish racial dimension.

"Part of the Problem"

Enjeti, not unlike paranormal enthusiast Carlson, is a self-described “UFO freak” [28], though he typically keeps his commentary much more sober. As opposed to Carlson’s elaborate efforts to muddy dissident discourse with supernatural and science-fiction elements, Enjeti’s amiable grins and occasional silliness serve to conceal his essentially sinister nature as an ambitious populist fraud with extensive connections among the powerful Rockbridge Network, a coterie that includes Vice President J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, Oren Cass, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen. Enjeti is known to be a personal friend of Vance [29] and has appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show as well as on David Sacks’s All-In Podcast. Marc Andreessen was welcomed by Enjeti on Breaking Points, and Oren Cass has appeared as Enjeti’s guest on that program as well as Rising.

Perhaps most disturbingly, Enjeti told interviewer Lex Fridman in 2024, “There are two people who I so deeply respect for their political bets: Peter Thiel and Donald Trump” [30]. That one of Israel’s most frequent critics on YouTube could profess to “deeply respect” two figures as contemptible and mired in Zionist turpitude as Peter Thiel and Donald Trump in 2024 betrays the echoing hollowness of the system-approved YouTube anti-Zionism epitomized by Breaking Points and the Red Seat Ventures stable. Given their varied associations with establishment conservatism, Israeli interests, and intelligence-linked entities and projects, ersatz populists Saagar Enjeti, Krystal Ball, Emily Jashinsky, and Ryan Grim themselves ultimately represent nothing more than plastic chips being staked in some power player’s “political bet”.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Endnotes

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Points

[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/people-s-house-project/C00639997/expenditures/2018

[3] https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/people-s-house-project/C00639997/donors/2018

[4] https://afmda.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/AFMDA-annual-report-2015_v006.pdf

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Sexton#Central_Intelligence_Agency

[6] MacLeod, Alan. “Saagar Enjeti: The Pseudo-Populist Mainlining Neocon Ideas into Progressive Politics”. MintPress News (July 2, 2021): https://www.mintpressnews.com/saagar-enjeti-pseudo-populist-mainlining-neocon-ideas-progressive-politics/277833/

[7] Enjeti, Saagar; and Krystal Ball. “Krystal and Saagar REACT: US Considers BANNING TikTok”. Rising (July 8, 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4Y5lblkAHg

[8] MacLeod, Alan. “Saagar Enjeti: The Pseudo-Populist Mainlining Neocon Ideas into Progressive Politics”. MintPress News (July 2, 2021): https://www.mintpressnews.com/saagar-enjeti-pseudo-populist-mainlining-neocon-ideas-progressive-politics/277833/

[9] “Breaking Points: Multiple Revenue Streams / James Li from 51-49 Podcast: Breaking Points’ Affiliate Breakdown” INN Newsletter (June 27, 2022): https://www.innnewsletter.com/p/breaking-points-multiple-revenue

[10] Berkowitz, Joe. “Why Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar Became the No. 1 Political Podcast in a Week”. Fast Company (June 12, 2021): https://www.fastcompany.com/90646413/why-breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar-became-the-number-one-political-podcast-in-a-week

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Grim

[12] https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Pierre_Omidyar

[13] Rubinstein. Alexander; and Max Blumenthal. “How One of America’s Premier Data Monarchs Is Funding a Global Information War and Shaping the Media Landscape”. MintPress News (February 18, 2019): https://www.mintpressnews.com/ebay-founder-pierre-omidyar-is-funding-a-global-media-information-war/255199/

[14] Ibid.

[15] Rubinstein. Alexander; and Max Blumenthal. “Pierre Omidyar’s Funding of Pro-Regime-Change Networks and Partnerships with CIA Cutouts”. MintPress News (February 20, 2019): https://www.mintpressnews.com/pierre-omidyar-funding-of-pro-regime-change-networks-and-partnerships-with-cia-cutouts/255337/

[16] “Ryan Grim Useful Idiot for the US Empire and the New Cold War on China”. BeTheChange (October 11, 2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtuRnxW3ftk

[17] “Legacy Media, Masked as ‘Independents’, Are Starting a Substack. WHY?” INN Newsletter (October 15, 2024): https://www.innnewsletter.com/p/legacy-media-masked-as-independents-inn-news-126-100924

[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substack

[19] https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/grants/past?grant_id=OR2024-95115

[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Jashinsky

[21] Grim, Ryan; and Emily Jashinsky. “Iran VOWS RETALIATION After US STRIKES”. Breaking Points (May 27, 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdGtOnfr4ek

[22] Ball, Krystal, et al. “WTF: Fox Guest Wearing FULL MASK ON AIR???” Breaking Points (May 22, 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWc7W5cwfTo

[23] Enjeti, Saagar; and Krystal Ball. “Trump BOMBS Iran as Israel LIGHTS Up Potential Deal”. Breaking Points (May 26, 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPneZuIYHO4

[24] https://archive.ph/dFJmH

[25] Ball, Krystal; and Saagar Enjeti. “Krystal & Saagar DEBATE Israel Response to Hamas”. Breaking Points (October 12, 2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LfMYEu_mI4

[26] Grim, Ryan; and Emily Jashinsky. “Horrific ATROCITIES Uncovered in Israel and Gaza”. Breaking Points (October 11, 2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hX4JOuQj_M

[27] https://www.youtube.com/@PartOfTheProblem

[28] Enjeti, Saagar; and Krystal Ball. “Obama: ‘ALIENS ARE REAL’”. Breaking Points (February 16, 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lalFNLMsjmQ

[29] “Krystal Ball on Saagar’s FRIENDSHIP w/J.D. Vance – Is Breaking Points’ Independence COMPROMISED?” Casa del Vanguard (January 27, 2025): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEP_Doo283Q

[30] Fridman, Lex. “Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics”. The Lex Fridman Podcast ep. 454 (December 8, 2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xz8i90Hp2A