Jenin Younes on Threats to Free Speech from the Left and the Right

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The issue of free speech, the struggle over separating fact from conspiracy theory, all of this is at the heart of the Trump era. Donald Trump's opponents contend that violence against protesters by federal agents is just one manifestation of that struggle, and so is the arrest of a journalist like Don Lemon, whom government officials have accused of being a co conspirator in a Minneapolis protest.

And you can say the same for the myriad lawsuits that Trump has filed against so many newspapers and networks. Janine Eunice Is a lawyer specializing in First Amendment cases. She serves as the legal director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. And once an ally of conservatives fighting the Biden administration, Eunice has become a bitter opponent of the Trump administration.

Let's begin, not at the very, very beginning, but take me back to 2023. You spent several months working with the House Select Committee on the weaponization of the federal government, where you helped lead an investigation in it what in what was then called, and I quote, the censorship industrial complex. What specifically were you investigating and how did that issue get on your radar? Well, so we were investigating government involvement, especially federal government involvement in social media censorship.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (26 minutes, 4,516 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.