Attorney Jenin Younes has a long career defending free speech. This has brought her across both sides of the political aisle, with Democrats and Republicans trading places on civil liberty abuses. After four years of defending conservatives against Joe Biden, she’s now leading the fight against Donald Trump and his administration as they censor, kidnap, and deport foreign nationals who stand up to genocide.

Useful Idiots: Now must be a really crazy time to be a civil liberties lawyer. Tell us what you do and how you are trying to fight for civil liberties under this administration in particular.

Jenin Younes: I have a focus on First Amendment free speech rights. I was a public defender in New York, which is a very left-wing career. I ended up going into the civil liberties practice of law because I was really opposed to COVID restrictions. I thought it might hurt the poor and working class the most. I actually started defending what would largely be called conservative speech, people who questioned the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, the vaccines themselves, and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

For the last four or so years, I've worked mainly with conservatives, even though that's not really my political persuasion. Obviously, that's changed since October 7. A lot of the speech suppression that's been going on has been pro-Palestine speech. What is happening now under Trump is probably the most severe civil liberties and free speech violation of not just my lifetime, I would say modern history and possibly all of American history.

Useful Idiots: Why is the current censorship so historic?

Jenin Younes: Throwing people in ICE detention and putting them in deportation proceedings for writing op-eds is historically unprecedented. I don't think there's been anything like that ever. You had some during the Red Scare. There was some sort of echoes of that.

The fact that we are throwing people in ICE detention, tearing them away from their families, and deporting them out of the country for criticizing a foreign nation is so without precedent in this country that I really don't even have words for it. I don't know how many people they're going to eventually punish. I don't know if they're going to go after citizens next. I think they might because they've indicated they could. But what they're doing is chilling everybody's speech. That's a major concern in First Amendment law, that when people see others being punished for the same kind of speech they want to engage in, that they're going to say, ‘I can't risk that. I can't risk being deported. I can't risk going to prison. So I'm just going to shut up.’ And I would say that the ultimate aim is to entirely suppress any pro-Palestine advocacy.

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Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Tim Walz Says ‘Oops’ on Refusing to Break From Biden on Gaza

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MONDAY MAY 5 in NYC

Palestine: the Moral Issue of Our Time with Gabor Maté and Chris Hedges

Tickets here:

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In a week of market turmoil, we need a real expert to explain WTF is going on with Trump, tariffs, reversals, and crashes. So we’re talking to Useful Idiot-favorite, economist Richard Wolff, who sheds light on a tumultuous week and gives a fascinating lecture on what Trump should be doing to save the economy, and why he won’t.

Useful Idiots: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just gave a speech saying ‘yes, the market is tumbling, but too bad, Wall Street. It's not your turn. This is the era of Main Street.’ This is the Trump administration's message now: The stock market has taken a huge hit, but that's because we're focused on restoring Main Street. How do you respond to that?

Richard Wolff: This is all advertising noise. It has nothing to do with anything. The reason that Wall Street is yelling is that they don't want to be pinched. They're perfectly happy to have Mr. Trump do most of the things he wants to do. But they don't want to pay even this much of a fee for the benefits.

Let me give you an example. When Mr. Trump was president the first time, the only basic economic achievement was the tax cut of 2017, an enormous tax cut given to corporations and the rich. The thirty years before 2017 were an enormous and unprecedented redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom and the middle to the top. If ever you didn't need a tax cut for those people, it was then.

The only opposition to it that the Democrats could achieve was a sunset. It would expire this year, 2025. And so Mr. Trump has an urgent need, which all of Wall Street understands. He can't allow that to happen because they would all blame him.

So that's what he's about to do. And the major way he thinks he can do that is by savaging public employment through all the firings, and by income from tariffs. I want people to understand this means that the Republican Party, which for a hundred years has branded itself the anti-tax party, has overnight become the mammoth tax-imposing economy, because a tariff is just a tax. And so what they're achieving is huge increase in taxes and firing large numbers of public employees. That's what it's about. The Main Street/Wall Street nonsense is pure fluff and shouldn't detract anyone from the underlying realities.

Useful Idiots: Trump announced [on Wednesday] that he’s authorized a 90-day pause and a substantially lowered reciprocal tariff of 10% during that period. Help us make sense of what he’s doing here.

Richard Wolff: I'm mystified. In my wildest imagination. Since I've just explained about uncertainty – I'm blown away – it's just incredible what he's doing. It’s beyond anything I can give you a rational answer for because this is no longer a rational behavior pattern.

Useful Idiots: ‘Incredible’ like incredibly stupid?

Richard Wolff: Yeah incredibly self-defeating. It undercuts any calculation. Even Jamie Dimon said that the uncertainty is the issue. This is just revving up uncertainty by cutting it down, making it not effective for ninety days. Everybody has to wonder: what happens at the end of ninety days? Another thirty days? Another twelve? I mean, this is beyond words.

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Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Fox News Reluctantly Criticizes Trump’s Tariff "Capitulation"

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