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 th...
Luigi Mangione & The History of Bourgeois Terrorism
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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46:55
The Dissidents Who Defeated Russia
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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43:52
Why We Can't Escape JFK Conspiracy Theories
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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49:59
Paradise Burning
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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47:02
Trump’s Populism Isn’t a Sideshow. It’s as American as Apple Pie.
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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