With only a colorful graphic as evidence, Dana Bash and Jonathan Greenblatt announced on CNN that antisemitic incidents have increased by ten times since 2015. This, they admit with gleeful importance, is the stat they will use to justify the silencing of Palestinian voices in America.

Since Bash won’t tell us what those antisemitic incidents actually were, we go straight to the ADL’s audit and dissect what they found: according to the Anti Defamation League, the definition of antisemitism includes “activity at or surrounding anti-Israel protests” and any use of the phrase “from the river to the sea.” They report that 58% of the 9,354 incidents were “related to Israel or Zionism.”

Antisemitism is a real and dangerous thing, and when people like Bash and Greenblatt conflate it with anti-genocide protests, it waters down the severity of real anti-Jewish speech and gives the Trump Administration free course to arrest and deport nonviolent student protesters like Mahmoud Khalil.

When Bash brings up Khalil and the other students kidnapped by the State Department, Greenblatt answers that he supports the Trump Administrations actions. Bash has no further questions.

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Also in this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Secretary Pete Hegseth’s embarrassing second text leak, Republicans use the ‘states rights’ argument to justify cutting Medicaid, Jordan Peterson tells Joe Rogan that he no longer supports free speech, and Elizabeth Warren can barely keep a straight face while saying she didn’t notice Biden’s cognitive decline.

It’s a jam-packed week of media madness, which means it’s a jam-packed Thursday Throwdown. Watch with Katie and Aaron so you can laugh instead of cry at it all. Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here:

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.

Subscribe to hear the full interview with Jenin Younes on JD Vance’s “playbook of tyrants,” the age of Trial by Twitter, the turn of RFK Jr, a dangerous new legal definition of antisemitism, unmasking the doxxers at Betar, and so much more.

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

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