Breaking Points' New "Network" Features Neo-Cons and Squad Apologists
Let's Take a Deep Dive Into the Breaking Points and their Affiliates
After years of non-stop lies, many have moved away from the mainstream media and began going to alternative media sources. As a result, we’ve seen a lane of media emerge that positions themselves as anti-establishment or populist, but in the end are serving the same corporate interests of the mainstream media.
As writer Caitlin Johnstone put it in her recent article, titled: Kayfabe Populism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix:
It's so important that the public have no real say in US politics that the empire not only set up two oligarchic puppet parties which pretend to oppose each other, but also set up fake populist movements within each of those factions which pretend to be fighting the establishment within those parties.
Two legacy examples of this phenomenon in media are:
The Young Turks, a network that postures itself as opposed to the establishment, but often defends the democratic establishment and pushes neo-con propaganda on issues such as Syria & Russiagate.
Tucker Carlson, founder of The Daily Caller and a Fox News host, who postures as a populist. The issue is that he consistently pushes pro-war talking points on China and has many close connections to the neo-con establishment; such as his involvement with the dirty war in Nicaragua or the fact that he previously tried to join the C.I.A.
Both of these outlets are supported by the Republican and Democratic establishment. The Young Turks took 20 million dollars from Hillary Clinton donor Jeffrey Katzenberg and Tucker Carlson is allowed on the Rupert Murdoch funded Fox News.
The latest example of this type of corporate-backed “independent” media is “Breaking Points” - a self-described anti-establishment outlet, centered around hosts Krystal Ball & Saagar Enjeti, who left The Hill’s Rising last year in a public breakup after helping build the popularity of that YouTube channel, then started their own channel & show.
Rising Evolves Into Breaking Points
Rising was suspicious since its beginning. In its early days, it was hosted by Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton, a former C.I.A. agent. Back then, it did not have a populist slant to it, Sexton would often pump out mainstream neo-con segments such as an Interview with a former national security advisor to push Trump’s war with Iran.
The show began its populist bent when Saagar Enjeti joined. Robbie Martin, a journalist a researcher who focuses on neo-con infiltration of the populist right has pointed out that once Enjeti joined, “Rising” basically became a repackaged version of “the realignment”. On “Rising,” Saagar would often repeat neo-con talking about about China but frame it using the language of populism.
Examples of this are segments titled “John Cena's DISGUSTING Bow To China Reveals How Sold Out US Elite Is” and “NBA China problems show how corporations have sold out America”. This segment titled shows how Saagar pushed his China-bashing under the guise of being anti-elite and anti corporations. Eventually, after leaving the Hill, Krystal & Saagar announced they were starting their show rebranded as an “independent” channel. Upon deeper examination, the show represents a wealthier segment of the controlled opposition on the “outer edges” of the democratic/progressive and republican/libertarian establishment. They help determine the parameters of what is deemed “acceptable” political discourse. On their May 30th 1-year anniversary stream, they announced future expansion plans with “affiliated” outlets:
Shown in the Graphic above:
Core Members:
Krystal Ball, Breaking Points / Krystal Kyle & Friends
Saagar Enjeti, Breaking Points, The Realignment
Kyle Kulinski, Secular Talk, Krystal Kyle & Friends
Marshall Kosloff, The Realignment & Executive Producer at On Deck
Shows:
Breaking Points (YT)
Secular Talk (YT & Podcast)
The Realignment (YT & Podcast)
Krystal Kyle & Friends (Substack & Podcast)
Affiliated Outlets:
The Lever (Ghost Website & YT)
Status Coup (YT & Substack)
BIG by Matt Stoller (Substack)
The Real News Network (YT)
51/49 (YT)
The Intercept
This article will examine some of the most questionable elements within the group and their affiliates.
Krystal Ball
Krystal Ball, who ran for Congress as a Democrat, is also not free from corporate sin. Krystal has long since operated under the progressive guise while simultaneously sheep-herding her audience into the Democratic machine. Following her failed congressional run, Krystal went on to work under contract with the popular cable news network MSNBC as a pundit and show host.
Krystal has been quite set on the idea that “reforming the democratic party” is the best course of action for the working class, made clear in her book Reversing the Apocalypse: Hijacking the Democratic Party to Save the World from 2017. Although here, she correctly documents the descent of the Democratic Party, she rests on the case of turning the Democrats into the idle fantasy of defeating the managerial class and Silicon Valley giants via electoral politics, without once mentioning or calling for direct action throughout her entire career.
Worse, Ball has seemed to fully recover from the financial corruption scandal surrounding her former PAC, the People's House Project, in 2018. With a stated mission of supporting "working- and middle-class Democratic House candidates in the Midwest and Appalachian states”, Krystal used much of the raised money to fund her own salary, and gave less than 3% of the total raised money actually paid out for congressional candidates. The biggest donor to the PAC was Reid Hoffman, of LinkedIn & Paypal fame.
According to the Federal Election Commission, records show that Krystal paid herself $279,333 and only paid out $48,766 as contributions. The PAC also paid DNC connected law firm Perkins Coie almost $18,000.
Saagar Enjeti & Marshall Kosloff
The Realignment is a podcast hosted by Breaking Points co-host Saagar Enjeti and lobbyist Marshall Kosloff. As Alan Macleod reported in Mint Press News - the podcast, along with its two co-hosts, was previously funded by the Hudson Institute - a pro-Iraq war think tank funded by weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon and Northrop-Grumman.
The podcast’s guest list is full of hardcore neo-cons such as Mike Pompeo, Trump’s ultra hawkish secretary of state best known for trying to start a war with Iran and plotting to kidnap and kill Julian Assange.
Other guests of The Realignment podcast include:
Josh Rogin, a Washinton Post columnist who pushes for almost every war,
Josh Hawley, a neo-con senator who consistently pushes for a new cold war with China and pushed Biden to put harsher sanctions on Iran and Russia
Tom Cotton - an extremely hawkish senator who has supported war with Iran, the current proxy war with Russia and once wrote an op-ed arguing the U.S. military should deploy troops against anti-racist protestors domestically
According to Marshall’s Twitter Bio, the podcast is also a part of the Lincoln Network (@JoinLincoln), which “is boutique think tank that works with policymakers and tech innovators to promote market-oriented ideas to strengthen American innovation.” He’s a lobbyist.
The podcast’s two co-hosts also have extremely sketchy backgrounds. Alan Macleod reported that Saagar started his career at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a hyper-hawkish think tank - funded by arms manufacturers. Enjeti has also studied “counter-terrorism” studies at the Israeli university IDC Herzliya, which has a board full of former C.I.A. officials and former Mossad chiefs.
Saagar often slips in neo-con talking points into Breaking Points. He once hosted pundit Jacob Helberg, who said the United States needs to send arms to Taiwan and supported war with China - if they invaded Taiwan.
Enjeti failed to disclose that Helberg works for the think tank CSIS - which is funded by arms manufacturers, oil companies, western governments, and gulf dictatorships. This propaganda has had a telling impact on Breaking Points’ audience. When polled, 57 percent of their audience voted in favor of war with China over Taiwan.
Saagar even once admitted he supports American unipolar hegemony saying, “I want to write the affairs of the world, the rules of the road, I want to be the only blue water navy”.
Marshall Kosloff has an equally sketchy background. In the documentary on the Israel lobby “The Lobby,” Marshall is shown taking part in a neo-con funded, astroturfed counter-protest to a pro-BDS protest. When the documentary host pointed out that this sounded like astroturfing, Marshall responded by saying “This is astroturfing.” The protest was funded by the neo-con Hoover Institution. (starts at 14:30)
Like Enjeti, Kosloff is also a “Media Fellow” at the neo-con Hudson Institute. According to his Linkedin page, in 2014 he won the “Campus Activist of the Year” award from AIPAC, the Israel lobby.
The Intercept
Another component of Breaking Points’ affiliated network is the outlet “The Intercept.” The Intercept is infamous for censoring one of its co-founders, Glenn Greenwald, for accurately reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. Greenwald’s reporting was censored because of the evidence-free claim from former intelligence spooks that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian Disinformation.”
This claim has since been proven false, with mainstream media outlets such as Politico, The Washington Post, and The New York Times confirming the authenticity of the laptop. In his resignation letter, Greenwald offered a scathing critique of The Intercept. Greenwald wrote that The Intercept had become indistinguishable from the mainstream media outlets it was set up to oppose writing.
Rather than offering a venue for airing dissent, marginalized voices and unheard perspectives, it is rapidly becoming just another media outlet with mandated ideological and partisan loyalties, a rigid and narrow range of permitted viewpoints (ranging from establishment liberalism to soft leftism, but always anchored in ultimate support for the Democratic Party), a deep fear of offending hegemonic cultural liberalism and center-left Twitter luminaries, and an overarching need to secure the approval and admiration of the very mainstream media outlets we created The Intercept to oppose, critique and subvert.
Outside of Glenn Greenwald’s articles, the Intercept often tows the security state line on crucial issues. For example, the Intercept often pushed a pro-regime change line on Syria. They published an article titled “Russia Sows Doubts Over Chemical Attack in Syria, Aided by Pro-Trump Cable Channel” which claimed that anyone questioning the alleged Chemical attack in Douma, Syria was repeating Russian propaganda.
Since this article, whistleblowers within OPCW, the chemical weapons watchdog that inspected the site at Douma, leaked documents to Wikileaks that prove the chemical attack was, indeed, a false flag operation.
In 2018, The Intercept also published an article after Trump’s bombing of Syria titled: “Dear Bashar al-Assad Apologists: Your Hero Is a War Criminal Even If He Didn’t Gas Syrians” that implied critics of the dirty war in Syria were supporting Bashar-Al Assad.
The Intercept has even hidden documents that could have prevented the dirty war in Syria. As journalist Whitney Webb reported in Mint Press News:
The Intercept waited until 2017 to publish documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that proved the so-called “moderate rebels” were actually being funded by the Saudi Arabian government. The Intercept has also whitewashed large jihadist elements within Syria’s U.S.-backed rebels.
The Intercept once used Bilal Abdul Kareem as a source ion 2016, a “journalist” who is a member of Syria’s al Qaeda affiliate, Al Nusra.
The Intercept even went so far as to give a softball interview to one of Syria’s al Qaeda leaders.
They have repeated the state department line on Nicaragua publishing an article entitled “How Nicaragua uses anti-terror laws against protestors to suppress dissent”. What the article fails to mention is that the “protests” were actually a violent coup attempt supported by the C.I.A. cutout the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)- where Sandinista supporters were tortured daily.
Highly problematic, The Intercept has partnered with Bellingcat, a pro-war propaganda outlet closely connected to the U.S and U.K governments with intel ties.
The Intercept was founded with $50M donated by Pierre Omidyar, a billionaire and co-founder of eBay. Omidyar himself has been involved in financially supporting western regime-change operations around the world.
Journalist Mark Ames reported on leaked documents that show Pierre Omidyar funded the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, along with western governments. In a lengthy investigation on Omidyar journalists for The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal and Alexander Rubinstein reported that Omidyar uses his wealth to advance Washington’s policy of regime change and has partnered with C.I.A. cutouts such as USAID and the NED. Blumenthal and Rubinstein wrote of Omidyar:
Behind the image he has cultivated of himself as a “progressive philanthropreneur,” Omidyar has wielded his media empire to advance the Washington consensus in strategic hotspots around the globe. His fortune helped found an outlet to propel a destabilizing coup in Ukraine; he’s helped establish a network of oppositional youth activists and bloggers in Zimbabwe; and in the Philippines he has invested in an oppositional news site that is honing corporate surveillance techniques like a “mood meter…to capture non-rational reactions.” Meanwhile, he has partnered closely with the leading arms of U.S. soft power, from the U.S. Agency for International Aid and Development (USAID) to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — acting as a conduit for information warfare-style projects in countries around the world.
The Intercept has also been widely criticized for opposing grassroots movements that upset the democratic party. For example, political Comedian and pundit Jimmy Dore has pointed out that many reporters from the Intercept such as Ryan Grim were opposing his campaign to Force a Vote on Medicare for All. In Dore’s view, this was The Intercept running interference to protect politicians from having to answer to the grassroots campaigns that helped get them elected in the first place. He said the Intercept's interference was to:
take the heat of of politicians, who are abandoning you , Ryan grim is running interference for those politicians that are abanding you, that’s what the Intercept and Ryan Grim are there to do.
Matt Stoller
The final figure in the Breaking Points universe this article will examine is reporter Matt Stoller. The network includes his Substack, titled “BIG by Matt Stoller.” Stoller often does good work on domestic politics, but has extremely hawkish foreign policy views namely on China. Journalist Daniel Bessner in Jacobin Magazine reported that Stoller supported Biden’s ramping up tensions with China because “the Chinese government’s goal is to get rid of democracy worldwide.” and because “the CCP is the modern Nazi Party. Stoller pushes the idea the West is supporting an “international global order” that China is trying to subvert. As journalist Robert Wright wrote
Stoller says China’s goal is “to subvert the current international global order.”
Stoller is often seen collaborating with Krystal and Saagar to push neo-con propaganda about China. In his appearance on Rising, Stoller fear-mongered about China infiltrating Hollywood and the N.B.A., and claimed the U.S. government was too soft on China, using language and tactics aligning similarly with Russiagate narratives.
Stay tuned for more updates from Indie News Network on this developing story.
Read the follow Up investigations into Breaking Points here:
Thank you for this. It confirms what I've heard on Breaking Points.
You should have found a way to include Hassan Piker in the mix. Probably the most insidious and sophisticated OP of them all.