Progressive Spotlight: Krystal Ball.

There was a moment recently when I was with friends who are completely apolitical, and the subject of Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl came up. Being that I ignore culture war politics, I kept my mouth shut. That’s when a friend mentioned a video they had seen on Instagram featuring two women, where one had to explain to the other that Puerto Rico is part of the United States.

I obviously knew that person was Krystal Ball, and I was amazed at how her “Puerto Rico is part of the U.S., dear” line resonated beyond traditional political theater and was cracking through the algorithms of people who avoid politics like the plague.

As a follower of politics and close watcher of independent media circles, I shouldn’t have been surprised that Ball’s one-liner would capture the cultural zeitgeist. Ball, for her part, is among the most effective voices on the political left. That she’s built a following among people on the right—given her proximity to that side of the aisle through the show she co-hosts with Saagar Enjeti, “Breaking Points”—makes her perhaps the most important political commentator the left has to offer. While they likely often disagree with her, there’s a contingent that at least respects Ball’s perspective. Forget meeting people where they are—Ball is in their ears, constantly.

For the better part of a decade and a half, Ball has quite expertly navigated treacherous political waters. Back in the Tea Party era, she ran for Congress as a Democrat in an overwhelmingly conservative district of Virginia, where she grew up, and lost (a fake scandal over a Halloween photo sealed her fate). Only 28 at the time, corporate media execs, particularly at MSNBC, saw Ball as someone who could help raise their profile among younger viewers—critical for a cable news network with disproportionately higher ratings among older audiences.

But in 2014, Ball crossed a red line at MSNBC. With the 2016 election on the horizon, she aired a monologue imploring Hillary Clinton not to seek the presidency. Ball’s razor-sharp analysis proved prophetic.

“We are now in a moment of existential crisis as a country,” she told her audience. “We are recovering slowly from the Great Recession, but as we pick our heads up and look around at where we’re heading, we don’t like what we see. Only 28% say the country is headed in the right direction. Sixty-seven percent are dissatisfied with the wealth distribution in this country. And as corporate profits soar to new heights, working folks get the shaft, sharing in virtually none of the gains of this recovery. It’s clear now that we have two economies: one for a thin slice of educated elite and one for everyone else. That is this moment. So I ask you, does Hillary Clinton sound to you like the right person for this moment, in a time when corporations have hijacked our politics, enabling them to reap all the profit without feeling any compunction to do right by their workers?”

“Is someone who sat on the rabidly anti-union board of Walmart for six years the right person to restore workers’ rights in a time when we’re still reeling from a global financial disaster brought on by foolhardy bank deregulation?” she continued. “Is someone who recently took $400,000 to give two speeches at Goldman Sachs the person we need to wrest control of the asylum back from the banking inmates? Someone who at those paid speeches reassured the Masters of the Universe in attendance that they were being unfairly persecuted, that, in her words, the banker-bashing was unproductive and indeed foolish. Someone whose husband, by the way, did much of the deregulating that got us into trouble in the first place.”

Then she dug in the proverbial dagger: “I must say—don’t run, Hillary. Don’t run.”

Ball barely had a sliver of the influence she now enjoys, making her decision to (respectfully) take on someone who, at that point, was seen as a shoo-in for the presidency, that much more dangerous. And she paid a price. Ball was pulled into a meeting and later told that “every time I was going to do another monologue on Hillary Clinton, I had to get it approved by the president of the network,” she told Jacobin.

Not surprisingly, her show was eventually cancelled.

It proved to be a massive blunder by the corporatists at MSNBC and serendipitous for Ball, who eventually became the host of The Hill’s daily political show, “Rising.” This is when her star, no pun intended, began to rise, as she and Enjeti effectively became the faces of populism on both sides of the aisle.

While the show became a massive hit, the pair left “Rising” to create their own independent platform, “Breaking Points,” in 2021, mostly out of a desire to have greater editorial independence.

The subscription-based show has more than 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube alone, with most clips easily garnering over 100,000 views.

Ball and Enjeti are known to engage in civil but sometimes fiery debates, with immigration often being the most intense. And while they have divergent opinions, they largely find common ground on various issues including free speech, civil liberties, money in politics, corporate power, and more.

Ball has used the platform to lambast anyone and anything she sees as a threat to the working class. And her recent back-and-forth with U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, instantly went viral, demonstrating how easily corporate-bought elected officials wilt when they leave the protective cable news bubble.

For the perfect encapsulation of Ball’s talents, look no further than her take-no-prisoners evisceration of U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, who, in her words, is “the worst—he’s just the fucking worst,” kicking off her 11-minute takedown with old video of the senator passionately defending private equity firms. “His mentality,” Ball said, “is donor first, through and through.” The segment, titled “Krystal ENDS Cory Booker’s Career,” has nearly half a million views on YouTube.

The way the corporate Democrats are acting, we’ll likely see more videos from Ball exposing supposed champions of working people. It’s great for us—not so much for the feckless politicians propping up corporate interests.

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• Logo courtesy of shop.breakingpoints.com, and image courtesy of Breaking Points on YouTube. Changes were made.