The Ambush of Van Jones

Until Labor Day weekend, Van Jones wasn't exactly a household name. Readers of this magazine knew him for the piece he published in these pages almost a year ago laying out his vision for a "Green New Deal" and for his work as an activist, organizer, visionary and charismatic leader of the environmental justice movement. So it is bizarre and more than a little infuriating to watch Jones, a caring and eloquent champion of social justice, be run out of his job as a midlevel staffer in the president's Council on Environmental Quality by vile, clownish demagogue Glenn Beck.

Beck, of course, is the Fox News host who said that President Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people," a statement that earned him an effective advertiser boycott from the online civil rights group Color of Change.

Jones, as it happens, was a co-founder of Color of Change, so Beck's animus was likely born of vendetta. But Beck surely also saw an opportunity to make Van Jones the latest right-wing bogeyman--a living, breathing death panel. And in fact, Beck's crusade against Jones was abetted by some of the same people who fanned the town-hall healthcare hysteria this summer: the astroturf group Americans for Prosperity, whose director, Phil Kerpen, recently boasted that when he first went on TV on July 10 to redbait Jones, "I was glad to do it, because exposing the green jobs scam is critical to fight cap-and-trade, my top legislative priority for the year." Kerpen described his glee in finding confirmation, in Jones's past associations, of the crudely racist "hypothesis" formed by Beck and himself: that the cap-and-trade bill is a "'watermelon,' green on the outside but communist red to the core." Of course, the idea that Van Jones, in his current incarnation, was some kind of crypto-radical bent on subverting American capitalist democracy from the inside has as much relationship to the truth as the notion that Obama is hatching a plan for mandatory euthanasia of America's seniors. Jones's brand of green progressivism has been explicitly business-friendly, emphasizing public-private partnerships as key to confronting the climate crisis.

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