This week, we’re dropping a bonus episode of Breaking History—a follow-up to last week’s installment about how I see Socrates as the first punk rocker. What follows is an excerpt from my conversation with Reason’s editor-at-large and resident punk obsessive Nick Gillespie, who dives even deeper into the idea. Punk isn’t just a genre or a fashion or the sound of three chords played very, very fast. It’s an instinct—one that’s been shaping America long before CBGB reeked of cigarette smoke and cheap beer.

Together, we trace that instinct across centuries: from the political pamphlets of Thomas Paine to the free-speech battles at Berkeley, from Bob Dylan going electric to Steve Jobs designing a computer that flipped the world upside down. Punk, in other words, didn’t die when the Lower East Side cleaned up. It mutated. It went corporate. It went digital. And it never stopped being a thorn in the side of power.

If you want to listen to more exclusive Breaking History, be sure to subscribe to The Free Press at TheFP.com.

Today, the American right is in a moment of profound chaos and dysfunction. Many conservatives are alarmed by the antisemitic rhetoric coming from Gen Z commentator Nick Fuentes and his nihilistic Groyper movement. At the same time, Candace Owens is floating conspiracy theories suggesting Israeli involvement in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And Tucker Carlson—perhaps the most influential right-wing broadcaster—has taken a dark and conspiratorial turn. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene has broken publicly with President Trump over the Epstein files, attacking him on X and across cable news. There is infighting, division, mudslinging, and a general sense of disorientation.

To help make sense of all of this, I was joined on the most recent Free Press livestream by journalist and historian Sam Tanenhaus. His work traces the origins and evolution of the modern conservative movement, including in his recent biography of William F. Buckley, titled Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.

The following transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Will Rahn: I want to start with your broad thoughts on the uproar on the right that has broken out since Charlie Kirk’s murder. Tucker and Candace on one side, Ben Shapiro on the other, Megyn Kelly and J.D. Vance somewhere in the middle. These fights have been bubbling for a long time. What do you make of it?

Sam Tanenhaus: The Trump era is coming to a close, so now there’s a kind of soul-searching over what comes next. So much of the past decade has been the result of Trump’s personal conquest of the Republican Party that it’s hard to imagine what the right looks like without Trump at the center.

I’ve been writing, as you know, for a long time about the rise of the right and the conservative movement and its intersection of great figures: intellectuals like Buckley or Fordham, Whittaker Chambers. Their ideology and worldview fit itself into a more traditional Republican Party.

Well, that Republican Party feels so empty at this point that it’s these outside media figures who seem to dominate it more than the elected officials do.

The House voted Tuesday 427 to 1 to release any emails, interview transcripts, and recordings the federal government still has pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein. The Senate passed the bill a few hours later.

Even though Epstein died six years ago, the billionaire sex offender has ignited a populist inferno. The rage over Epstein is so powerful it forced President Donald Trump into a rare retreat. On Sunday evening, he reversed his initial opposition to releasing the files, writing on Truth Social that “we have nothing to hide.”

There are many reasons why Epstein remains an obsession for the country.

First, the Epstein affair is a prime example of a two-tiered justice system. In 2008, he pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor—but served only 13 months at a minimum security prison, where he was allowed work release at one of his foundations six days a week.

Ever since Tucker Carlson interviewed white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes on his show three weeks ago, the American right has spiraled into chaos and infighting. Now, Fuentes says he is leading an initiative to steer the direction of the Republican Party.

Fuentes, whose racist and antisemitic livestream rants rack up millions of views on Rumble, said this week that a nonprofit group he founded in 2020 is revamping ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. The goal? To “infiltrate politics” and “guide people and help them understand who to vote for,” Fuentes told listeners on Monday.

“We’re going to be looking at every candidate that’s running in 2026, and we’re going to evaluate them and help people make their decision,” he said. The America First Foundation will “map out” what Fuentes called the “patronage networks” of the “Israel First lobby” in the United States. Fuentes, 27, predicted that the organization will “have all the intellectual firepower, the production quality, of all the other big names of the conservative movement.”

Fuentes, who has long peddled antisemitic and racist rhetoric, has compared Holocaust victims to “cookies in an oven,” said that black people “need to be imprisoned for the most part,” and called for prominent American Jewish conservatives such as Mark Levin to be deported.

North Carolina has not used the death penalty since 2006. But that might change because of DeCarlos Brown Jr. He is the man who pulled a knife from his pocket on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August, and stabbed Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in the neck three times.

It was all captured in a chilling video. She was pronounced dead within minutes. He was denounced as an example of our failed criminal justice system: two violent felonies, including one for which Brown spent five years in prison, plus at least 12 other arrests.

He “should be given a ‘Quick’ (there is no doubt!) Trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY. There can be no other option!!!” President Donald Trump thundered on social media in September. In early October, North Carolina governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, signed “Iryna’s Law,” which removes legal hurdles on the use of capital punishment.

“Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life,” wrote Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, summarizing his formative years as a resident of the capital city of the fading Austro-Hungarian Empire. Professional historians disagree with the man’s report about his own experiences. “Hitler’s career cannot be derived, let alone understood, from his situation in Vienna,” wrote Brigitte Hamann in her book Hitler’s Vienna. “This Austrian had a career only in the Weimar Republic.”

Perhaps, in this case, we should trust the man himself. The Vienna of Hitler’s youth was a place of legendary ferment in ideas, politics, and the arts. Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, and Ludwig Wittgenstein frequented the same café. The designers and painters of the Vienna Secession, including Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele, created works of such psychological force and originality that it is doubtful whether anything more “modern” has been created in the century since. Zionism was born in Vienna, as was our modern obsession with gender-bending, the costuming of Ziggy Stardust, the aesthetics of punk rock, enough glass housewares to fill a floor at MOMA, and countless other marvelous inventions and explorations.

Hitler’s Vienna, though, included none of these wonders. For the future German dictator, the imperial capital was a place of personal isolation, social exclusion, homelessness, and starvation. We know very little else about it. Mein Kampf is less an autobiography in any true sense than an instrumental, mythmaking construction intended to speed its author’s rise to power.

Fourteen years before Broadway banished Laura Osnes because she didn’t get the Covid-19 vaccine, a lot of people in the theater world resented her for the way she’d arrived there. She had dropped out of college and was performing at a dinner theater in Chanhassen, Minnesota, when her aunt told her about a television audition in Los Angeles. It was called Grease: You’re The One That I Want!, a reality show to cast a Broadway revival.

In March of 2007, Osnes won the lead role. She was 21 years old when she and her husband of three weeks, Nathan Johnson, arrived in New York City with a U-Haul.

Even before the show opened, it was an object of derision among the Broadway elite. “It seemed tacky and down-market,” remembered Adam Feldman, the longtime theater critic for Time Out New York and the president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. New York magazine referred to Osnes and her co-star as “test-tube babies,” adding that “not everyone on the Great White Way would be devastated if they fell on their bright young faces.”

When the show opened in August, Ben Brantley, the New York Times theater critic, wrote: “The message of this latest Grease is that anyone, famous or not, can star in a Broadway musical.”

Much of the criticism of the show had a subtext: The theater world is a guild. You need to put in your time going to auditions and waiting tables. You don’t show up with a moving van and a reality show trophy, and slide into a starring role.

Grease ran for 554 performances. Osnes never missed a show. After it closed, she landed the lead in South Pacific in 2009. “That was the thing that legitimized me in the Broadway community,” Osnes told me. “From there, I felt like I was one of them.”

By the time the pandemic arrived, she was a star. The once-skeptical critics loved her. “Laura Osnes brings a crystalline grace to the role of debutante Hope Harcourt,” wrote Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly of Osnes’s performance in the revival of Anything Goes.

“Laura Osnes as a performer has more spine than you expect,” Feldman told me. “Although she looks and sounds the part of a perfect Disney princess ingénue, there’s a spark in her. There’s this inner core of strength and inventiveness that she finds.”

It was an inner core she’d need later.

You probably know Jonathan Haidt as the guy trying to save your kids from smartphones and social media apps. Likely you’ve read The Anxious Generation, which has been translated into 44 languages and sold nearly 2 million copies. One might say that Jon is Elvis for 21st-century moms who don’t understand Discord.

But when Haidt gets written about decades from now, it will be for much more than this book and the powerful movement that came from it. I think he will be regarded as one of the most important writers of this epoch.

Because he has the remarkable ability to understand—and explain—our social condition. He holds up a mirror to us.

He did it with his book The Righteous Mind, which explained why people are so passionately divided over politics and religion. He did it again with The Coddling of the American Mind, co-written with Greg Lukianoff, which explored why young people—especially on college campuses—can become totally intolerant of opposing views. And in his latest book, The Anxious Generation, he asked the obvious question: Why are teens suddenly so unhappy? Why are they losing attention, self-confidence, and the ability to socialize? Perhaps it has something to do with the mesmerizing device in their hands.

In a world gone mad, Haidt has turned common sense into a radical mission. I sat down with him in front of a live audience in New York City to talk about how we got to this point—and where we go from here.

On the fatal dangers of social media:

Bari Weiss: There are two major calls to action in your book and in the movement around it: One is banning phones in schools; the second is making sure kids aren’t on social media before the age of 16. I want to allow you to talk about two stories that I think bring the necessity of those two policies to life. I’ve heard you speak to a mom named Kirsten, whose daughter developed a pretty serious eating disorder after she was bombarded with content on her TikTok’s “For You” page. Can you tell me a little bit about her and her daughter, and why that story is so emblematic to you?

It’s Tuesday, November 18. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Former Democratic fundraiser Evan Barker tells all, one year after voting for Trump. Apple’s openly gay CEO becomes an awkward enabler of China’s anti-gay crackdown. Suzy Weiss says body positivity is dead—but will anyone miss it?

But first: Niall Ferguson vs. Tyler Cowen on whether AI is a bubble.

Yesterday in our pages, economic historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson issued a warning: The AI boom, he wrote, “is a house of cards.”

That’s an alarming conclusion to reach, given that the promise of AI is now the principal driver of the stock market and the U.S. economy. And if the reader wasn’t already worried enough, Niall then draws an ominous comparison between today’s AI gold rush and the frenzy that preceded the great crash of 1929. (He also finds a way to get Dr. Seuss into his argument, but I won’t try to explain that here.)

It’s a sobering argument, but is he right? Another Free Press columnist, economist Tyler Cowen, isn’t so gloomy. He writes that it is “premature to write off current AI valuations as a ‘bubble.’ ” Tyler reaches for a more recent historical analogy—the dot-com bubble—and draws encouragement from Amazon. Its stock crashed along with the likes of Pets.com and Webvan, then soared to heights beyond anyone’s expectations.

“The lesson is clear: If you see an investment that looks steady, sometimes the best thing to do is to jump on it,” Tyler writes. “No one can know when the market bottom is going to come, and either way, it’ll probably spike again fairly soon.”

He goes further: Perhaps all this talk of a bubble is really a security blanket, because the alternative—that the AI hype is real—is even more unsettling. Read two of the sharpest thinkers taking either side of perhaps the biggest economic question in the world right now.

—Rick Brooks

The conservative movement is at a fork in the road. Fringe figures like Nick Fuentes are being mainstreamed, Tucker Carlson has taken a conspiratorial turn, and the MAGA coalition is at war with itself over Jeffrey Epstein. Few people know the history of this moment better than Sam Tanenhaus, whose long-awaited biography of conservative impresario William F. Buckley was published earlier this year. Sam joins Free Press senior writer Will Rahn for a livestream conversation today on the state of the right—from the Groypers to MTG—and how we got here. They’ll map the movement’s new fault lines and what conservatism might look like after Trump. Don’t miss the livestream conversation at 5 p.m. ET, available to paid subscribers only. Click here to tune in.

You probably know Jonathan Haidt as the guy trying to save your kids from smartphones and social media apps. Bari sat down with the Anxious Generation author in front of a live audience in New York City to talk about how we got to this point—and where we go from here.

• President Trump said he will not rule out putting troops “on the ground” in Venezuela as a part of his anti-narcotics military campaign in the region. So far, the U.S. Navy has deployed about a dozen warships off the coast of Venezuela and in the Caribbean Sea.

• Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia is visiting the White House today for the first time since he ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Salman is expected to discuss normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel. Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May for his first major international trip of his second term.

• David Richardson, the acting chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), resigned yesterday following months of criticism surrounding his handling of July’s Guadalupe River flood in Texas. During the flood, which killed more than 130 people, Richardson was unreachable for “hours and hours,” one official told The Washington Post.

• Robert P. George resigned from the board of the Heritage Foundation Monday. The public intellectual said he could no longer remain part of the organization without a “full retraction” of Heritage president Kevin Roberts’ video statement defending Tucker Carlson for interviewing Nick Fuentes.

• France will send 100 warplanes to Ukraine over the next 10 years, according to a deal signed by the two European allies on Monday. The deal will also include anti-aircraft defenses, munitions, and drones.

• Bangladesh’s ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to death for using lethal force to quell student protests last year. Over 1,400 protesters were killed. Hasina called the verdict “biased and politically motivated,” while families of the victims cheered and other people knelt and prayed.

• President Trump said he will provide $2,000 “tariff dividend” checks to “individuals of moderate income, middle income” by mid-2026. But the checks would require congressional approval, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and their total cost could exceed this year’s tariff revenue.

• Chile’s presidential election is heading to a runoff between its two leading candidates: communist and former labor minister Jeannette Jara and pro-Trump conservative José Antonio Kast. Some voters criticized Jara for calling Cuba a democracy, while others have compared Kast’s hard-right stances on immigration and crime to those of former dictator Augusto Pinochet.

• The United Nations Security Council approved a resolution to deploy an “international stabilization force” to disarm Hamas and facilitate the withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces from Gaza, a key tenet of President Trump’s Gaza peace plan. “This will go down as one of the biggest approvals in the History of the United Nations,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

• Rapper Nicki Minaj will speak about the persecution of Nigerian Christians at the UN’s headquarters in New York City today. “The Barbz & I will never stand down in the face of injustice,” Minaj wrote on X, referring to her fans. “We’ve been given our influence by God. There must be a bigger purpose.”

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My close friends blame me for everything that Donald Trump does.

One year ago I, a lifelong Democrat, wrote in The Free Press that I had just voted for Trump. I realized that my party had turned its back on working-class families like my own—in favor of identity politics, free trade, and open borders.

Many people warned me about publishing the essay. They told me the reaction would be brutal, and they were right. Strangers on the internet relentlessly harassed me. Death threats flooded my inboxes. People accused me of being a Russian asset.