Avsnitt
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Journalist Jay Solomon is back on the show this week to discuss his latest explosive investigation into Trita Parsi, the Iranian-born, Swedish-raised lobbyist who spent 20 years at the center of Washington’s foreign policy debate over Iran. Parsi built two influential organizations, cultivated powerful allies on both left and right, and consistently pushed a line on Iran that looked remarkably like the one coming out of Tehran’s foreign ministry.
Now the Marco Rubio State Department is taking a serious look at his immigration status, and the organization Parsi co-founded, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is mobilizing lawyers and foundation money to fight back. Jay and Eli trace the full arc of the story, from Iran’s post-9/11 influence operation to the leaked Iranian emails that blew the lid off the Iran Experts Initiative, which counted Parsi’s brother among its members.
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As America approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, a quiet war is being waged over what the Declaration of Independence really means — with some on the new right dismissing it as globalist fantasy and some on the left reducing it to a document written by slaveholders. Writer and former national security official Michael Anton joins Eli Lake to examine the ideas of Harry Jaffa, a Brooklyn-born philosopher who spent his career insisting that the Declaration's truths are not relics of the 18th century but eternal facts about human nature. Jaffa's argument was unfashionable when he made it and it's contested now, but Anton thinks it's never been more urgent. Along the way, Michael and Eli take on the new right's growing rejection of the ideas that made the founding possible, the left's long abandonment of the Declaration, and how both sides have managed, in their own way, to get America's origin story completely wrong.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Hi Breaking History listeners! My colleague Joe Nocera has launched a six part series about the Lindbergh kidnapping. Enjoy episode one here and then head on over to The Lindbergh Conspiracies feed for the rest of the season.
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EP01 | The Broken Window
One night in March 1932, the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh is taken from his nursery. A warped window, a ladder, and a ransom note mark the beginning of a case that will grip the world and launch a hundred conspiracy theories. Ninety-four years later, we return to the scene of the crime to ask: What really happened that night?
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Robert Parkinson is a historian at SUNY Binghamton who has spent 25 years studying the American Revolutionary period. His new book, Tyrants and Rogues, arrives just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — and it argues that we’ve been reading that document wrong for most of those 250 years. In this episode, Parkinson explains why the 27 grievances that follow the famous preamble are the real heart of the Declaration, what Congress actually debated and deleted from Thomas Jefferson’s original draft, and why someone in that room made sure race would be the last and most explosive grievance on the list. He also explains why those grievances, written in panic and desperation in the summer of 1776, feel newly urgent today.
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For tickets to our live recording with Jon Meacham in Philadelphia, click here and register. Use code TFP for a 20 percent discount.
Roald Dahl gave the world Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He was also a vicious antisemite.
A Broadway play about Dahl’s legacy; the new Michael Jackson biopic; Kanye West’s attempted redemption arc; all of these have the culture asking again: How do we approach brilliant art produced by morally compromised artists?
Throughout history, some of the world’s preeminent literary geniuses have also been deeply bigoted, even monstrous people. In this episode, Shilo is joined by Eli Lake, host of Breaking History, for a conversation about these geniuses, from Voltaire to Norman Mailer, and why we should read their work despite their odious prejudices.
Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org.
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David Rose is the director of policy and research at the Free Speech Union (FSU), a UK-based nonpartisan organization that campaigns for freedom of speech. The FSU will publish a new report examining allegations tied to Labour Together, the political network linked to Keir Starmer.
David joins Eli Lake to explain how his investigation describes a murky ecosystem involving claims of journalists labeled as Russian assets, the circulation of private intelligence-style dossiers, and the growing overlap between political advocacy and “disinformation” or “digital hate” laws in the UK.
Our special episode on the UK being a “censor’s paradise” is here.
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Eli Lake joins Robert Wright over at his podcast NonZero, which offers “conversations with a series of people who have nothing in common except that program host Robert Wright is curious about what they’re thinking” . Robert views the U.S-Israel military campaign against Iran as a serious mistake and a clear violation of international law. Eli sees it as a necessary—if legally awkward—response to decades of Iranian aggression and destabilization. Who wins? You’ll have to listen to decide for yourself.
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Arash Azizi lived through the democracy movement in Iran before he wrote about it. Now a historian at Yale, he joins Eli Lake to trace the arc from former president Mohammad Khatami’s unlikely rise to the crushed hopes of the Green Movement—and what it tells us about whether reform from within the Islamic Republic was ever really possible.
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What does it actually take to break a regime built on martyrdom?
Eli Lake sits down with Haviv Rettig Gur — host of Ask Haviv Anything and one of the deepest thinkers on the Middle East — to assess week five of the Iran war. They trace the ideological DNA of Iran’'s Islamic Republic from the Algerian National Liberation Front to Frantz Fanon to Ali Shariati, and explain why this is a regime designed to treat its own destruction as a form of victory. Plus: what a color revolution in Tehran could mean for Sunni Islamism, Hamas, and the future of the Palestinian question.
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What drives someone from an ordinary background into extremism?
In this Breaking History special, journalist Jay Solomon joins Eli Lake to discuss his investigation into American extremist Calla Walsh.
But this isn’t an isolated story. It echoes a pattern we’ve seen before.
Following the interview, we revisit our episode on “middle-class kids breaking bad,” exploring how individuals from stable, even privileged backgrounds have repeatedly been drawn into violent or extremist movements. We explore the tale of the Red Army Faction and how Ulrike Meinhof went from reporter to terrorist.
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This week I joined The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan, who has generously agreed to let us share the conversation here. Andrew and I go way back, and few people are as willing as he is to really go toe-to-toe over our disagreements—especially on Israel and America’s role in the world.
In our discussion, we cover a broad range of history and politics: from the Iran-Contra affair to the Oslo Accords, and the Second Intifada to Iraq, Iran, Hamas, and the current war in Gaza—along with my bar mitzvah speech about nuclear proliferation and early Zionist influences. Of course we bring it to the present day, debating the political, strategic, and moral stakes shaping Washington’s arguments about the war in Iran today.
Take a listen, and you can find Andrew’s Substack here.
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Breaking History producer Poppy Damon sits down with Guardian security correspondent Jason Burke to unpack his new book, The Revolutionists, a sweeping history of the 1970s wave of extremism that transformed global politics. From plane hijackings to hostage crises, Burke traces the radical figures and world leaders who shaped the modern age of terror. What does the 1970s tell us about 2026?
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As Iran’s regime faces mounting internal pressure, one name keeps resurfacing: Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah. But is he a viable future leader, or simply the most recognizable symbol of a free Iran? In this conversation, host Eli Lake and producer Poppy Damon unpack the strange political moment Pahlavi finds himself in—popular with many Iranians, yet viewed skeptically by parts of the opposition and treated cautiously by Washington. Can he unite the stakeholders to bring about democracy? Or is he likely to get in the way of a future without monarchs?
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In our last episode, we traced the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty and the forces building toward Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. In Part 2, we turn to the man who brought that monarchy to an end: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. From exile in a quiet French chateau, Khomeini launched a revolution that shattered 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. But he didn’t do it alone. Liberals and leftists, both inside Iran and across the West, played a crucial role in legitimizing his cause, a dynamic that feels familiar today.
This is the story of the first Red-Green Alliance, a tactical partnership between Islamists and the progressive left, and the cost of that alliance once power changed hands.
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Breaking History dives into the paradox at the heart of modern Iran: How a nation born in revolt, from the tobacco protests of the 1890s to the 1979 Revolution, has time and again empowered autocrats in the name of democracy. This week we trace the cycles of reform and repression that still shape Iran today.
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After October 7, Jews around the world were reminded of an old, unsettling truth: Governments do not always protect minorities when mobs turn violent. From Bondi Beach to New York synagogues, the promise of public order has looked increasingly fragile.
In this episode of Breaking History, Eli Lake revisits the last time Jews in America confronted that reality head-on. In the 1930s, as Nazi sympathizers rallied openly and police often stood aside, Jewish gangsters led by Meyer Lansky took matters into their own hands, waging a quiet street war against the German American Bund.
What does Jewish self-defense look like when the state fails—and why are there no Meyer Lanskys today? A history of tough Jews, broken illusions, and what happens when people decide they will no longer be easy targets.
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Did you know the soundtrack of Americans’ Christmas was written largely by . . . Jews? Most of the composers behind the holiday canon were the children of immigrants who fled pogroms and conscription in Russia and Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920.
Sammy Cahn, Frank Sinatra’s go-to lyricist, gave us “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” Mel Tormé, son of a Belarusian refugee, wrote “The Christmas Song”) (a.k.a. “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”). Frank Loesser—whose family escaped the Kaiser’s draft—penned the mischievous “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” And Johnny Marks, responsible for “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” was also one of the chosen few.
Towering above them all is Irving Berlin, whose “White Christmas” remains one of the biggest-selling singles in American history. Berlin’s own childhood began with a pogrom and escape from Siberia before landing in New York in 1893.
In a replay of this classic Breaking History episode, Eli Lake digs into how a generation of Jewish immigrants ended up shaping the very sound of America’s most beloved holiday.
CREDITS
Producer Greg Collard
Executive Producer Alex Miller
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We revisit the scandal-soaked 1990s—Packwood, Thomas, Clinton—and explore how failing to enforce norms around abuse of power helped create the world in which the Epstein scandal could flourish. This episode traces the unraveling of political accountability from the Clinton impeachment to the Trump Access Hollywood moment, and finally the global Epstein reckoning. We show how feminists in the ’90s and evangelicals in the 2010s made parallel bargains—each excusing their champion’s abuses for political gain. The result is a culture that normalized impunity for the powerful, and primed America for a populist revolt against a ruling class that protects its own.
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CREDITS
Executive Producer: Poppy Damon
Associate Producer: Adam Feldman
Sound Designer and Composer: Tony Peer
Original theme songs by Eli Lake
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We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of punk, the genre that smashed the old rock gods and stripped down the music to its essence. In this episode of Breaking History, we examine the examined life of the original punk: the loudmouth philosopher who defied the authorities, refused to conform, and paid the ultimate price for speaking the truth. Yes—it can only be Socrates. Grab your leather jacket and your hemlock, we’re going hardcore philosophical.
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CREDITS
Executive Producer: Poppy Damon
Associate Producer: Adam Feldman
Sound Designer and Composer: Tony Peer
Original theme songs by Eli Lake
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For 124 years, the American socialist movement has been defined by defeat. From Eugene Debs’ doomed presidential runs to Michael Harrington’s quiet organizing, it’s been a story of almosts: almost mainstream, almost powerful, almost relevant. Until now. In this episode, we look at how Zohran Mamdani’s likely mayoral victory marks the first real crack in America’s century-long resistance to socialism—and why its impact will reach far beyond New York City.
CREDITS
Executive Producer: Poppy Damon
Associate Producer: Adam Feldman
Sound Designer and Composer: Tony Peer
Original theme songs by Eli Lake
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