Jon Stewart Praises Attorney Behind Years of Anti-Vaccine, Anti-Public Health Lawfare
“You’re a civil rights attorney who has been canceled by both the right and the left, which means you must be doing something right.”
This week, Daily Show host Jon Stewart heaped praise on an attorney who spent years opposing COVID-19 mitigation efforts and promoting vaccine skepticism.
“Jenin, I wanted to talk to you because we are in a moment where consistent courage seems in short supply,” Stewart told guest Jenin Younes, the national director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “You’re a civil rights attorney who has been canceled by both the right and the left, which means you must be doing something right.”
Younes was on the program to discuss the state of civil liberties in Donald Trump’s America, and Stewart thanked her for her principles and for trying to protect vulnerable people.
What he did not mention was her long record of working with right-wing groups and close associates of Donald Trump, challenging public health measures, promoting unproven scientific claims, and pursuing legal action against Democratic officials.
Younes has been at her current job since September. Her previous title 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.
Her highest-profile cases, however, challenged government efforts to combat pandemic misinformation.
In Missouri v. Biden (later Murthy v. Missouri), Younes represented a group of private plaintiffs alleging that Biden administration officials had unconstitutionally coerced social media companies into suppressing content that challenged government narratives on COVID and other issues.
Younes’ clients included two future Trump HHS officials: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, now the chief science officer in the department’s planning and evaluation office, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the current National Institutes of Health director.
The case reached the Supreme Court, concerning legal experts. The Brennan Center for Justice filed an amicus brief urging the justices “not to adopt a rule that prevents or chills communications between social media companies and local, state, and federal government officials.” The court found that the plaintiffs lacked standing to pursue their claims.
Younes tried again in 2023, bringing a similar suit on behalf of people allegedly injured by COVID vaccines. The complaint named Biden officials as well as a former Stanford disinformation researcher, Renee DiResta, alleging that she participated in the administration’s censorship conspiracy. A magistrate judge in that case has recommended that defendants’ motions to dismiss be granted.
That year, Younes briefly worked for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and his congressional subcommittee on the “weaponization of government,” which later released 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.”
Younes built her audience and right-wing alliances through the pandemic, posting as @leftylockdowns1 on Twitter. She presented herself as a disillusioned liberal who agreed with Republican calls to reopen the country. In a September 2020 article for the libertarian think tank American Institute for Economic Research, Younes wrote that lockdowns “cause more death than the coronavirus itself.”
The virus has killed over 1.2 million Americans.
Younes has also suggested that COVID emerged from a Chinese laboratory—a narrative favored by Trump but disputed by many experts. She claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and frequent right-wing target, worked to cover up the leak because of his “culpability in gain-of-function research.” In January 2022, she tweeted that if she lived to see “St. Fauci…held accountable for what he’s done to Americans, that will be enough for me.”
Available evidence points to natural origins as a World Health Organization scientific advisory group noted last June.
Amid the Biden administration’s vaccine rollout, Younes promoted doubt. She called mRNA shots “experimental” and claimed boosters offered “no benefit” to young adults while implying a blood clot risk. In a piece for the right-wing Brownstone Institute, she suggested they could damage the immune system long-term.
She later supported Robert Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services Secretary, rejecting the notion he was “anti-vaccine.”
During her Daily Show appearance, which largely focused on ICE, Younes again said the Biden administration violated American freedoms.
“I’m not actually super hopeful because whoever wins, we continue to see a denigration of our civil liberties,” she said about the midterms. “This administration is very blatant, but the one that came before was kinda bad too that’s why I was suing them all the time.”
The Daily Show segment sparked pushback. “I wonder if Jenin Younes had told Stewart about how she did interrogations for Jim Jordan’s Weaponization committee of academics accused of being part of a ‘censorship industrial complex’ that never existed,” DiResta wrote on BlueSky.
Stewart is no stranger to public health controversy. In 2005, he interviewed Kennedy, praising him for raising awareness about vaccines and autism. The paper behind the supposed connection had already been discredited. Stewart has since done segments criticizing anti-vaxxers, but he endorsed the COVID lab leak narrative and recently joked about people masking in public for their health.