Pro-Palestine protests have been a feature of Columbia's campus since October 7. Now, Donald Trump has issued an ultimatum to the university: get control of your campus or lose $400 million in Federal funding. But the target of the measures wasn't just security, but the Middle East Department too, which Columbia has agreed to place into five years of 'academic receivership'. 

This week we take a deeper look at the ideology behind the unrest. One protester’s placard stuck out, it read: “Why make me study Said if I’m not allowed to use it?”. The placard was referring to academic Edward Said and this question gets to the very heart of the Columbia protests and the anti-Israeli sentiment felt on many American campuses today. 

Edward Said was the author of a book called Orientalism that changed American universities forever. You can’t understand the Gaza protests without understanding Orientalism. But just how much is this radical 1970s academic text influencing contemporary thinking about the Middle East? 

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Luigi Mangione appears in court this week. He stands accused of murdering a healthcare CEO in cold blood. It’s not the first time a well heeled winner has been celebrated for his embrace of political violence. Today we look at the West German woman who paved the way. We dive into the phenomenon of breaking rad.

Eli Lake tells the story of Ulrike Meinhof and the infamous Red Army Faction. 

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Credits: 

Our interview with Bettina Rohl was translated into English and read by Anna-Carolin Augustin.

Our voice actors were Constantine Gregory and Priscilla Hagen.

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Ronald Reagan’s speech in front of the Berlin Wall in 1987 is legendary for its six simple words: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

And two years later the wall fell. In another two years, the Soviet Union came crashing down. Many factors led to these moments. Among them: the failures of communism, the bravery of dissidents, and America’s role in challenging the “evil empire,” at least that’s what Reagan called it. 

The dissidents—many languishing in gulags—heard America. They heard President Reagan. And many lived long enough to see their tyrants topple. One of them even went on to lead Czechoslovakia, the country that jailed him. His name was Václav Havel.

In today’s Breaking History, Eli Lake argues that Havel’s experience as a playwright and dissident helps explain how plain truths defeat communist lies. 

Eli also compares Reagan's Cold War politics with Trump’s approach to Vladimir Putin. This comparison is more pertinent than ever after the showdown in the oval office on Friday. 

Before any talks, Trump and his team made it clear that Ukraine would not get back the territory stolen by Putin. Trump excluded Ukraine from the negotiations, and accused Volodymyr Zelensky of being a dictator—a comment he now denies.

Then, on Friday, Zelensky showed up to the White House to sign the critical minerals deal. The deal would give the U.S. access to half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in perpetuity. In exchange, Zelensky wanted security guarantees. Trump said no.

The Romans would recognize this as tribute. The Mafia would call it protection money. 

Eli unpacks all of this and so much more.

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Every now and again, a work of art is so profound that it breaches the boundary between fact and fiction and affects current events. And if you had to rank the most politically resonant artworks American pop culture has produced in the last 50 years, the 1991 film JFK would top the list.

More than any document, this film codified the murder of JFK as a conspiracy in the minds of the American people. Directed by the most celebrated filmmaker in America at the time, Oliver Stone, JFK featured Kevin Costner as a character who said that President Kennedy was killed as part of a government conspiracy.

The film was so influential that Congress passed a law in 1992 that ordered government agencies to find and, ultimately, release hundreds of thousands of secret CIA files relating to the assassination. Now President Trump has ordered the declassification of all remaining records.

Many Americans never thought Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone—or they questioned if he was involved at all. But by the end of the Cold War, the JFK truthers were considered fringe and paranoid. Oliver Stonge changed that.

In today’s Breaking History, Eli Lake argues that JFK made conspiracy theories go mainstream. Tinfoil hats were no longer just for oddballs. They were for everyone. 

And the U.S. government has played a big role in that. After all, whether or not Oswald acted alone, the full array of facts still remain to be shared.

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Last month, L.A. burned. It was one of the most predictable disasters on record. A century of development on land whose ecosystems were forged in wildfire; years of increasingly regular blazes; months of low rainfall. The National Weather Service even issued an explicit warning: This was coming.

Unfortunately, when Chekhov’s fire arrived, everything that could go wrong, did. A key reservoir was being repaired when the blazes began. The hydrants didn’t have enough pressure. The state hadn’t cleared the dry vegetation near the hills of the Palisades and Malibu that is kindling for the seasonal wildfires. L.A. mayor Karen Bass didn’t have much to say to the citizens. You can’t blame local officials for the weather, but it seemed to most observers that Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom had created their own perfect storm of Californian incompetence.

Something has gone wrong. The fires are indicative of something rotten in the Golden State. 

But it wasn’t always this way. California was once a place where industry and imagination locked arms and showed us how great the human experiment could be. It secured democracy by manufacturing the weapons that won World War II. It built the dream factory of Hollywood; it gave us Silicon Valley and personal computing. It gave us Dr. Dre and Dr. Strangelove. Without California there are no hippies, no tech bros, no gangsters in our rap music, no hardcore in our punk, no Boys on our Beach, and no movie stars. 

In other words: When we surrender California, we surrender the dreams that built the American century. 

To understand how and why California surrendered, we have to travel back to the 1970s—a decade of despair and decadence, not just for L.A., but especially for San Francisco, as it became the petri dish for the values that now define the state’s politics and governance. It is a story of sex, drugs, scandal, and terror, and to understand how Democrats began to accommodate a radical left that has burrowed deeply into the state’s bureaucracy, courts, and political machines, the revolution of the San Fran ’70s explains a lot.

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Donald Trump, just sworn in as the 47th president, was reelected to be a wrecking ball, a middle finger, the people’s punch to the Beltway’s mouth. And while this populist moment feels “unprecedented,” it’s not. The rebuke of the ruling class is encoded in our nation’s DNA. 

We have seen populist leaders like Donald Trump before. He stands on the shoulders of Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, Alabama governor George Wallace, and Louisiana legend Huey Long. There have been populist senators, governors, newspaper editors, and radio broadcasters.

But only rarely has a populist climbed as high as President Trump. In fact, it has happened only once before. 

The last populist to win the presidency was born before the American Revolution. He rose from nothing to become a great general. His adoring troops called him Old Hickory, and his enemies derided him as a bigamist and a tyrant in waiting. His name was Andrew Jackson, and he’s the guy who’s still on the 20 dollar bill. 

On today’s debut episode of Breaking History, Eli Lake explains how Andrew Jackson’s presidency is the best guide to what Trump’s second term could look like. 

Credits: Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency; PBS

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Sometimes the news moves so fast, you have to look closely to know if you’ve seen it before. And that’s what this show is about. Breaking History breaks down the news, by breaking down history. We cover everything from LBJ and the Roman Republic to Donald Trump and the chaos at Columbia. This twice a month show from The Free Press delivers the best historians, authors, and reporters by mining the archives of human experience to figure out the present. George Santayana wrote, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Tune in to Breaking History to resist the repetition.

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*This episode originally ran on December 23, 2024 on Honestly with Bari Weiss* 

Did you know that the Americans who wrote nearly all of the Christmas classics were . . . Jewish? Many of these songwriters were the children of parents who had fled Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe during the great wave of immigration between 1880 and 1920.

Sammy Cahn, the son of Galician Jewish immigrants, wrote the words to “Let it Snow!” and was known as Frank Sinatra’s personal lyricist. There is also Mel Torme, the singer-songwriter responsible for composing the timeless “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” His father fled Belarus for America in the early 20th century. Frank Loesser, a titan of Broadway and Hollywood musicals, wrote the slightly naughty “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” He was born into a middle-class Jewish family, his father having left Germany in the 1890s to avoid serving in the Kaiser’s military. Johnny Marks, the man who gave us “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”—yes, he was also one of the chosens.

Then there’s the greatest American composer of them all, Irving Berlin. His “White Christmas” is one of the biggest-selling singles in the history of American music. Berlin’s earliest memory was of watching his family’s home burn to the ground in a pogrom as his family fled Siberia for Belarus before emigrating to NYC in 1893.

Eli Lake explores why and how it was that American Jews helped create the sound of American Christmas.

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*This episode originally ran on November 12, 2024 on Honestly with Bari Weiss* 

Even your most optimistic Mar-a-Lago member didn’t see Donald Trump winning the popular vote and taking all seven swing states. He even came within five points of taking the Democratic stronghold of New Jersey!

So, what on earth does the Democratic Party do next? They can stay the course and resist. It’s what they did the last time Trump won.

In the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory, America was stunned. Every time he opened his mouth, Trump exploded political norms, and the Democratic Party responded in kind. Being a mere opposition party—at least at that moment for the Democrats—was not strong enough for this situation they believed. Instead they needed to become a resistance.

And while Democrats won in 2020, the resistance ultimately did not work. Democrats spent a decade telling Americans that Trump was an existential threat, yet Americans didn’t care. The Democrats’ goal was to scrub Trump from future history. Instead, he now controls it. 

Democrats need to look inward if they want to have a shot at winning in 2028. They need to act like an opposition, not a resistance. 

Eli tells the story of how a few centrist renegades saved the Democrats from oblivion 40 years ago. In 1984, after Ronald Reagan’s 525–13 Electoral College landslide over Walter Mondale, the Democrats were not just in disarray—they were on life support. And yet, eight years later, they found their savior: a young governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. And they remade their party.

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*This episode originally ran on November 2, 2024 on Honestly with Bari Weiss* 

Bullshit is an American tradition. Think the theatrics of P.T. Barnum, miracle products sold ad nauseam on television in the 1980s and, of course, politicians. Who can forget President Bill Clinton saying “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is” during his grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky scandal?

And then there’s Donald Trump. He presents as a man with no fact-checking filter, someone happily buying his own convenient bullshit. That’s not quite the same thing as lying.

That isn’t to say Trump doesn’t lie. He’s a politician, after all. But he exists outside the binary of truth and lies. It’s the netherworld of flimflam, hyperbole, sales pitches, and ad copy delivered with all the quiet dignity of a wet T-shirt contest. Donald Trump is a very modern artist, weaving a barrage of anecdotes, fake and real statistics, gossip, and memes into a nebulous and suggestive species of patter.

Democrats have tried to paint Trump as an American Hitler, a Russian agent, a man consumed with evil and hatred. But what they fail to understand is that Trump’s casual relationship to the truth is an echo of past politicians. He is hardly the first bullshitter to ascend to the White House; he’s just the best ever to do it. He paints a picture of a reality he would like us to see, not as it really is.

In this respect, Trump is the crack cocaine variant of many of his predecessors. Ronald Reagan was a folksy, sentimental bullshitter, a president as a Hallmark greeting card. Bill Clinton was a slick bullshitter, perfect for spinning stories at the dawn of the cable news era.

Eli Lake explores the soft spot that Americans have for bullshitters like Trump, and their disdain for liars like Richard Nixon. He argues that if you want to understand why Trump may be on the verge of winning the White House again, you have to reckon with our country’s relationship to the pungent brown stuff. It pervades everything from our economy to our culture. Bullshit is dangerous when it comes to science. But in politics, bullshit is sadly essential. 

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