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Transcript:
Recently, I’ve seen a few major mainstream media outlets promote an absolute lunatic to their audience while hiding what an absolute lunatic she is, and so it is my duty today to inform you that Jenin Younes is a lunatic and please do not fall for this whitewashing that makes her seem sane and rational.
I will admit that these platforms have done a very good job at hiding the lunacy. In January, Younes appeared on The Daily Show, where Jon Stewart glazed her for her commitment as a lawyer focused on defending Americans’ civil liberties during a particularly illiberal fascist crackdown. And now last week, David Remnick featured her on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast where they chatted about Americans’ seeming declining interest in protecting free speech, particularly when it comes to topics like criticism of Israel.
In both interviews, Younes comes across as measured and intelligent, making several points that I wholeheartedly agree with. And boy, is that a problem. Because you know what other interview she did where she comes across quite well? This one from 2021, where she spends half an hour agreeing with Naomi Wolf that COVID lockdowns are a form of kidnapping and that people should sue because there’s no evidence to suggest that activities like indoor dining could exacerbate the pandemic. Yeah.
Jenin Younes used to be a public defender in New York, but she found great success at the start of the pandemic by not just spreading wild misinformation, but by actually suing to stop public health officials from trying to control the pandemic AND to stop social media companies from cracking down on misinformation. As Walker Bragman detailed on his newsletter earlier this year, Younes was “litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a right-wing lawfare group known for challenging federal regulatory authority. There, she fought COVID mitigation policies, including a vaccine mandate at Michigan State University and testing and mask requirements for unvaccinated employees at George Mason University.”
And her greatest accomplishment, which made it into her two new mainstream media interviews, was suing the Biden administration over that garbage that was in the Twitter files. Remember the Twitter files? Where Elon Musk dramatically revealed that people in the Biden administration helped social media companies flag dangerous misinformation by sending them links to it on their platforms? Which was spun by the far right as some kind of mass government censorship? Yeah, she took that shit to the Supreme Court, who looked at the case and said “Where is your evidence that the government pressured these companies to remove this misinformation?” And when the plaintiffs, who included noted COVID denier and current director of the National Institutes of Health Jay Bhattacharya, couldn’t provide any evidence, they dismissed the case.
I was aware of that disaster of a case but Bragman points out that she tried again in 2023, suing the Biden administration on behalf of people who claimed they were injured by COVID vaccines. That failed, too, luckily. She also worked with famous pedophile protector Representative Jim Jordan to interrogate academics and publish a report titled “??The Censorship-Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Administration.”
All of that is glossed over in her interviews as “she’s so committed to civil liberties that she criticizes BOTH sides,” without ever going into any of the details that make it clear she is a litigious conspiracy theorist who was so committed to spreading misinformation about a pandemic that was killing millions of people that she took it to the Supreme Court.
And why wouldn’t someone like Jon Stewart spin things that way? I know that he’s a beloved liberal comedian, but fuck Jon Stewart. Remember the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in 2010, when he and Stephen Colbert invited the majority of Americans to come together? You know, the “the 70–80 percenters,” who don’t hold extreme political views? The people who say “I may disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler”?
How’d that work out? Did special guests Kid Rock and Cat Stevens convince everyone to “tone it down”? No! Look, I remember thinking that that rally was fun and clever back then, but I was wrong and I realized it as soon as one of my friends pointed out that Cat Stevens literally called for Salman Rushdie to be executed for blasphemy and never apologized for it. That was enough to make me think, oh, maybe it isn’t so easy to just hold hands with “the other side” because they are smiling and singing songs I like.
The interview with Younes is genuinely wild to me, because they both sit there and make it very clear that their “both sides bad” viewpoint actually sucks. Stewart literally opens the interview by saying that Younes is “a civil rights attorney who has been canceled by both the right and the left, which means you must be doing something right.” And Younes has to admit that yes, she went to bat for the “civil liberties” of liars like the people who are currently in the Trump regime and are now cracking down on free speech blatantly and publicly and violently, with one poor attempt to excuse herself by claiming that the current crackdown wouldn’t be possible had she won her lawsuits. Sure, Jan.
And then by the end of the interview, while Younes is pretending that the Biden administration was ALSO bad and the next Democratic president COULD be just as bad as this one, Stewart has this sudden realization, speaking about the video of Renee Good being murdered by an ICE agent: “when I look at that video, I don’t see both sides in a dogmatic stance. I see a woman, maybe naive, sitting in a car thinking she has to do something and she’s gonna block something and a wildly extreme overreaction to that small act of defiance and then when they say she was radicalized I think well there are masked gunmen in her neighborhood who she’s read about taking 17 year old kids and pulling them off the street. That wasn’t, it didn’t feel like, I know what a terrorist attack looks like.”
Correct, Jon. Those are the two “sides:” a violent extremist with body armor, a gun, and the authority to kill, and an unarmed mother who wants the secret police to stop disappearing her neighbors. Those are the extremes.
Younes’ response to that? Working class Americans think immigrants are making their lives worse and that’s the fault of Democrats.
Which…yes, it is. Because the Democrats are conservatives. Leftists have begged the Democratic Party to stop accepting the framing of immigration as a problem to be solved, but the Democrats have consistently pushed rightward on that issue and many others.
Yet, that’s the way that Younes tries to pretend “both sides are bad.” She wants you to believe that the way that Jon Stewart had me believing it back in 2010, that the “sides” were right and left and the middle is where the normal sane people are. But that’s just not true. Both “sides” she’s criticizing here are on the right.
And obviously she is correct to criticize them, just as she’s correct to worry about what future administrations will do with the powers that the Trump administration is seizing. And just as she was correct on the New Yorker podcast where she criticized vague legislation that attempts to criminalize the speech of students who support Palestine.
But agreeing with someone is not a good reason to platform them. Just like Republicans should worry about what a different president may do with the powers Trump is claiming, we should worry about what people like Younes will do with the attention she gets for her good takes. Because someone who took “Twitter can’t delete my post about how vaccines cause turbocancer” to the SUPREME COURT is bound to have future bad takes.
