Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [88]
Jones had been radical in his youth, though not quite the way Beck described. He showed up at Yale Law School with a Black Panther book bag, hence the “black nationalist” charge. During a 1992 job internship, his boss sent him to monitor a San Francisco protest of the Rodney King verdict. He was arrested along with the protesters and released the next day when the charges were dropped; hence the “convicted felon” misrepresentation. The experience did lead Jones to embrace communism for a time, but by the year 2000 he had soured on the whole idea and embraced eco-capitalism, which is like capitalism but with less pollution.29
But that was more than enough for Glenn Beck, who assured his viewers, “He was a radical communist. He hasn’t shed that. He’s still a radical. He is still a black nationalist.”30 To prove the point, Beck played a brief audio clip from one of Van Jones’s speeches, ostensibly about ecocapitalism, in which Jones said, “This movement is deeper than a solar panel . . . We’re going to change the whole system.”31 Obviously, he wasn’t talking about environmental policy. He was talking about the whole system.
“When will America wake up?” Beck then asked rhetorically with a dramatic pause. “The left has started a revolution. No different than Hugo Chavez. When Hugo Chavez was elected, he was elected by Democratic process. But he did not tell the people when he was running that he was a communist. Can we stop claiming that this man, Van Jones, is an average everyday capitalist America, an American? Is that I mean, did that sound like you, Iowa? Did that sound like you, Nebraska? Did it sound like you, Texas? Did it sound like you, Florida, Georgia, Maryland? Did it sound like you, New Hampshire? It sure sounds like Berkeley, California, San Francisco, California, and now Washington, D.C.”bw
And it wasn’t just Van Jones who didn’t sound like an American to Iowa, Nebraska, and so on. Next, Beck played a clip from a campaign speech that Barack Obama delivered the week before the election in which Obama said, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He wasn’t talking about solar panels either.
“You know,” said Glenn Beck, “I don’t want to believe these things about our president . . . If our founding principles are somehow or another no longer relevant, if the system in which this country was founded is somehow unjust or unworkable now and communism, Marxism, socialism is the right and relevant path, then that is the discussion in a republic we have. But to subversively bring in a new system through the back door in the middle of the night and build it piece by piece by overwhelming the system, that is not acceptable.”
But why, why does Obama want a revolution? To answer this question, Beck played yet another audio clip of Jones saying, “And our Native American sisters and brothers who were pushed and bullied and mistreated and shoved into all the land we didn’t want, where it was all hot and windy, well, guess what, renewable energy . . . They now own and control 80 percent of the renewable energy resources . . . We owe them a debt.”
Then Beck added a third black orator to the medley, playing an excerpt from a sermon in which Rev. Jeremiah Wright railed, “We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. We believe God ordained African slavery.” Then Beck played yet another clip from Van Jones’ speech—“What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about