Useful Idiots

In what looked like the beginning of a new recession last week, the markets plummeted in response to Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs across the globe. Even Trump’s richest friends, who have been proven in the past to control Trump’s policy (see his first-term tax cut), couldn’t change Trump’s mind.

But then the market kept tanking, and tanking, and tanking, all while billionaires like Musk and Bill Ackman and Mark Cuban bad-mouthed Trump on Twitter. And when Trump is faced with the decision to choose either his “genius” plan to save working-class Americans or make billionaires like him, we always know which is the priority.

“I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday, “and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.”

And the result:

The market rose halfway back to what it was before Trump’s disastrous plan, the volatile uncertainty is pushed back a little, and billionaires love Trump again. Which means all is right in the world once more.

Subscribe now

Also in this Thursday Throwdown: Fox Business correspondent Charlie Gasparino flounders when forced to criticize Trump’s “capitulation,” Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt blames the market collapse on the media for not reading The Art of the Deal, the Democrat counterargument to Trump’s tariffs shows how ridiculous the opposition party is, and a look into a topic that corporate media just loves to forget: Trump announces a new “Peace Force” to take over Gaza. Katie and Aaron ask the question: when it comes to Gaza, is Trump possibly worse than Biden?

It’s a terrible week of media and market madness. 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 interview here:

Useful Idiots is an audience-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here:

Activists and former Members of the European Parliament Clare Daly and Mick Wallace return to the show a day after returning from a momentous trip to Yemen where they attended (and Mick spoke at) a Palestine Solidarity rally of over a million people. We discuss the US bombing campaign they witnessed first-hand in Yemen, the resilience of the Yemeni people, the history of terror against their people, and their attempt to block Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, which continues to be enabled by the West.

Katie Halper: Tell us what you were just doing in Yemen, what brought you there and what you observed.

Clare Daly: We're a bit overwhelmed still. We only came back yesterday. We were there on invitation at the National Conference on Solidarity with Palestine, the theme being You Are Not Alone. And this was the first time that they had international visitors in Yemen, in the midst of a US blitz. We were not disappointed, it was just from start to finish an absolutely incredible experience in terms of both the solidarity with Palestine but also the absolute resilience of the Yemeni people.

Mick Wallace: You'd struggle to find a people so determined and so united. It's hard to imagine that any state has opposed Western imperialism in quite the same way as Yemen has.

KH: Much like the situation in Gaza ‘starts on October 7’ for lots of people, what's happening in Yemen just ‘starts with the Houthis blocking ships’ and being ‘bad men’ and ‘terrorists.’ But why does Saudi Arabia, with U.S. support, want to destroy Yemen? And why did the U.N. give them permission to do so?

Mick: The Yemenis had done nothing to anybody other than the fact that [in 2011 the president] had been pushed aside and the assistant Hadi had been put in power with a program of introducing neoliberalism and facilitating Western investment and plunder. They wanted to raze the place blind and get control of yemeni assets and resources.

Yemen was one of the most self-sufficient food countries on the planet. And Hadi manufactured loans from the likes of the IMF and the World Bank with a view to changing how they did agriculture so that they would produce food for export instead of for themselves. And it was a disaster. Before long, people actually found themselves short of food. And they said no to this.

There was an insurrection and of course the insurrection wasn't to the pleasing of the West and so in March 2015 [the West] said ‘we have found it impossible to subdue these people so we'll do it the other way.’ That was with military might. It's what's normal for settler colonials, be it America, Europeans or Israel. And that's what happened. Sanctions and blockades still continue to this day. And it's an enormously difficult situation for people living there now.

KH: What do you think of the way that the Houthis [Ansar Allah] are portrayed as terrorists, given that, as you pointed out, they're actually the ones following the law when it comes to genocide?

Clare: Isn't it amazing? It's deliberately portrayed as marginal and as terrorist. But in actual fact, this government is one of very few internationally which is fulfilling its responsibility under the Geneva Convention, which says that the obligation on all signatories is not just to not commit genocide yourself, but to actively prevent and punish those who do. And the Houthi-led government in Yemen is one of the few doing that. Their actions are directly targeted at interfering with international shipping, which is on its way to enable genocide.

Meanwhile, the Israelis are targeting civilians and deliberately killing ordinary people and they're the ones enabled by the West but the Houthis are the ones who are demonized as terrorists. They've been incredibly restrained, they did not attack the ships when the ceasefire was in place and they only resumed the action when the ceasefire was broken with the implementation of the mass starvation again and targeted killing of civilians by the Israelis.

The Houthis clearly have the support of their people. We were on a march of over a million people. It happens every Friday. People come out, and bear in mind that these are now the victims of American bombings. every night, to say ‘we stand with Palestine.’

We had a meeting with the former prime minister. And he said, ‘look, it's very simple for us. We are not going to stand by. When children are being murdered and starved, we have an obligation to do something and we are going to do it.’ For us, that's heroism. That's not terrorism.

For our full interview with Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, where we discuss War in Ukraine and how the West is happy to use the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder, please subscribe to Useful Idiots. Your support keeps independent media strong.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: State Dept Blames Hamas For Israel Executing Rescue Workers

Thanks for supporting independent media. Subscribe for the full episode here:

The UN has reported that 15 medics and rescue workers from the Red Crescent were murdered “one by one” by the IDF and buried in a shallow grave. State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce was asked if this complies with international law.

“Well,” she answered, “I can tell you that for too long, Hamas has abused civilian infrastructure, cynically using it to shield themselves. Hamas’s actions have caused humanitarians to be caught in the crossfire.”

So instead of answering anything about the IDF’s actions, Bruce claims that the point blank murder (known here as ‘crossfire’) of 15 first responders is the fault of Hamas.

Interestingly, it’s also come out that Israel itself has been systematically using Palestinians as human shields. The Israeli outlet Haaretz reports it this way:

But when US outlet CBS News is forced to report the same story, they do it like this:

“Our CBS cameras in Gaza caught something rare: hundreds of Palestinian protesters calling not only for an end to the war with Israel, but an end to Hamas rule in Gaza as well. Throughout the war, Hamas has used Palestinian civilians as human shields. Now Debora Patta tells us there are accusations that some in the Israeli army have done it as well.”

Despite the fact that there has been zero shown evidence in a year and half of genocide that Hamas has used human shields, CBS uses this lie plus unrelated Hamas-protest news to bury the IDF story. Meanwhile, on non-corporate media, photos have surfaced of Palestinians chained to the front of IDF tanks to protect the militants inside. What could Israel do that US corporate media wouldn’t defend?

Also in this week’s Thursday Throwdown: former Disinformation Czar Nina Jankowicz shocks Katie and Aaron by actually saying something true, GOP Senator Bill Cassidy is the latest in a long line of Republicans to admit they plan to cut Medicare, and Trump’s trade war turns out to be a war against American workers.

It’s a week packed with madness, 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:

Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here:

There’s a lot going on in the world this week: Israel is increasing nuclear tensions with Iran, the Trump Administration leaked on Signal its plans to attack a civilian apartment building in Yemen, US federal officials kidnapped another college student for pro-Palestine speech, and the JFK files unveiled decades of new classified information.

This is high level stuff, which means we’ve got to go high up to get real answers.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who served in the CIA at the time of JFK’s assassination, has become one of the most important peace activists in the country, breaking important classified stories and fighting the military industrial complex. He also cofounded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity to “protest the use of faulty intelligence” to justify US wars.

Ray breaks down SignalGate, US terror in Yemen, the JFK files, the latest in the proxy war in Ukraine, and how the intelligence community uses the threat of Iranian nukes an excuse for Israeli aggression.

This week, the Tulsi Gabbard-controlled Office of National Intelligence put out a threat assessment that flies in the face of Israeli officials who are constantly fear-mongering about Iran’s nuclear program and encouraging the U.S. to bomb Iran accordingly.

“This is the front burner question right now,” Ray says. “It's worth reading because I think it will be a very great disincentive for the administration to claim that the reason they are with Israel attacking Iran is because Iran has a nuclear weapon.”

He reads the report: “The threat assessment dated two days ago says this, ‘We continue to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.’”

Share

Ray explains what all this means for the Middle East, analyzing all the players from the Houthis in Yemen and their effort against Israel to Marco Rubio’s State Department and its funding of the ongoing genocide.

Subscribe for the full interview with Ray McGovern where he breaks down the new information in the JFK files, if Trump actually has an anti-war agenda, and the unsolved mysteries surrounding the DNC email leaks.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Trump Bombed Yemen the Wrong Way

Thanks for supporting independent media. Subscribe for the full episode here:

In a major scandal for the Trump administration, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to a Signal group chat with JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and more top officials. In the chat, they were openly discussing US plans to bomb Yemen.

Goldberg watched as they privately laid out their plans to bomb a civilian apartment building. Then he watched on the news that the bombs dropped. And published screenshots of the group chat.

[In an act of terrorism, the United States bombed a civilian apartment building in Yemen and killed dozens of people.]

The scandal here, according to US corporate media, is that Trump officials were careless with national security and let slip their plans for the bombing. In the good old days of Obama and Bush, presidents were presidential. They had decorum when committing terror. Trump did not. For that (and only that!) he should be punished!

Share

In this week’s Thursday Throwdown, Katie and Aaron deep dive on SignalGate, watching the pathetic excuses given by Waltz and co, and laugh at the ridiculous embarrassment for the Trump team.

But we also turn our eyes to Jeffrey Goldberg, who had the chance to publish these screenshots before the act of terror was committed. He could have potentially stopped the attack. Why didn’t he? Well, would you be surprised if we told you that our heroic editor of the Atlantic is also a former IDF prison guard?

It’s a perfect example of the state of corporate media when we have journalists who cheer on bombs but criticize the leakers. Subscribe to watch our full takedown of everyone involved.

Plus, this week Aaron debated Matthew Stadlen on the Ukraine proxy war. When Stadlen began the debate by trying a gotcha to try to pin Aaron as a Russian agent, another takedown occurred. We watch the whole glorious thing.

Watch the two debates in full:

Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe for the full Throwdown here:

Useful Idiots is an audience-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.