Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (11 page)

But for those who really don’t have time, there’s always the chalkboard. “Chalkboard, Tree of Revolution,” Beck reminded viewers, turning to his arboreal diagram. “Look here, above Woodrow Wilson! SDS—this is where Bill Ayers came from, Van Jones, Dale Rathke, Wade Rathke. This was—this was, ‘Let’s blow things up,’ and then Cloward and Piven said, ‘No, no, no, let’s try to just collapse the system …’ ”

In the Tree of Revolution, Beck was again out on a limb.

CHAPTER 10
SCALPS

To those who doubt the power of Beck, two words provide ample refutation: Van Jones.

When forty-year-old Anthony “Van” Jones was named an adviser in the White House Council on Environmental Quality, few took notice. His appointment to the midlevel position was announced in a written statement by the CEQ director and kissed off in a 101-word brief by the Associated Press. The dispatch said Jones founded an “organization that promises environmentally friendly jobs to help lift people out of poverty” and was author of “the New York Times bestseller
The Green Collar Economy
.”

That was true. But what it didn’t mention—and what Obama White House officials didn’t know—was that Jones had once been a communist. It wasn’t a secret; Jones had been quite outspoken about it before changing his ways several years earlier. Obama aides figured the position was too junior to merit screening and vetting.

That was a big mistake.

Four months after Jones started work at the White House, he was discovered by Beck. Jones’s ordeal began on July 23, 2009, as Beck was making the dubious proposition that everything Obama does is part of an effort to exact reparations for slavery. Beck then took viewers on a circuitous path that arrived at the door of Jones.

“Obama’s new green czar, Van Jones, this is a guy who is a self-avowed communist, and he is in the Obama administration,” Beck explained. “He spent six months in jail, came out a communist. Then he was a communist-anarchist radical. And then he decided—he found the eco-movement—and decided green is the new red. He then went on to become a green expert.”

Some things Beck said were true, and some were complete fiction, but there was no way to know at the moment, because nobody had ever heard of Van Jones. Beck quickly moved on to a denunciation of green jobs, but the fun with Jones had only just begun.

Just five days after this first bite at Jones, Beck made his infamous claim that Obama has a “deep-seated hatred” for white people. As previously detailed, this led a group called Color of Change, cofounded by none other than Van Jones, to call for an advertiser boycott. The fact that Jones had left the group long before didn’t seem to matter to Beck, who, a couple of weeks after the boycott began, went after Jones with new fervor.

Since then, Beck has rarely gone a week without mentioning Jones, and on average mentions him at least daily. In just over nine months (into the spring of 2010) Beck and his TV interlocutors invoked the name Van Jones an incredible 435 times. Long after Jones quit the White House in September 2009—driven out by Beck—he remained in Beck’s view of the world as a central player in Obama conspiracies. Jones was a perfect villain for Beck: a man—a black man!—with proven ties to Obama and a long paper trail in radical politics. Best of all, he was unknown to the public, so—unlike Obama—Beck could define him any way he chose.

On August 24, a month after Beck introduced his viewers to the “communist” Jones, he essentially turned
The Glenn Beck Show
into
The Van Jones Show
. “Here is czar number one. The first stop is Van Jones,” Beck began. He showed a video clip of poor quality featuring a profane Jones blasting oil companies. Another clip had him describing his job at the White House as “a community organizer inside the federal family.”

Over piano music, Beck narrated. “Let’s start at law school. Van Jones showed up wearing combat boots and holding a Black Panther book bag. He said of that period, ‘If I had been in another country, I probably would have joined some underground guerrilla sect.’ ”

More Jones images followed.

A major turning point came in 1993 when he was arrested during the Rodney King riots. In jail he, quote, “met all of these young radical people of color, I mean, really radical—communists and anarchists. And it was, like, this is what I need to be a part of,” end quote … Jones says, “By August, I was a communist.” He spent the next ten years as a full-fledged radical, among other things founding a group called STORM, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, which held study groups in the Marxist and Lenin teachings.

For about seven minutes, Beck went on.

All of STORM’s members developed a basic understanding of and a commitment to revolutionary Marxist policies … The group particularly revered Mao Tse-tung … In 1999, Jones was arrested again while protesting the World Trade Organization. STORM dissolved three years later. He has since renounced black nationalism to focus on environmentalist issues …

“And why is it that such a committed revolutionary has made it so high into the Obama administration as one of his chief advisers?” Beck wanted to know, then bestowed a slogan on his prey: “Van Jones: Yes, still a revolutionary. Now, just a more effective, and, dare I say, powerful one.” Beck said he asked the White House if it was “aware that Van Jones has this background in radical politics.”

The White House, he said, responded that “Jones is entirely focused on one policy goal, building clean energy incentives.” As Beck correctly observed, “That doesn’t seem like an answer.”

In truth, the White House had no idea about Jones, and Obama officials were in the worst possible place: at the mercy of Glenn Beck.

The drumbeat became daily. On August 25, Beck spoke of Jones as “a self-proclaimed radical, revolutionary communist—his words, not mine.” He compared him to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. “He’s a communist, focused on what? Job creation.”

The next night, Beck said the White House had “emailed several times and said ‘stop calling Van Jones a czar.’ They say he’s a ‘special adviser.’ ” Beck said nobody was refuting his claim that Jones was “a radical communist.”

Actually, some were. Jones had given up his communism and turned into an avowed capitalist. “We cannot realistically proceed without a strong alliance between the best of the business world—and everyone else,” he wrote in
The Green Collar Economy
. But the fact that he was once a communist was, for Beck’s purposes, close enough.

Beck spoke in the present tense as he recited Jones’s offenses to Bill O’Reilly: “Radical, radical. Believes Mao Tse-tung was a great guy. Wants an overthrow of the American system.” He also said Jones “named his four-year-old son after a Marxist guerrilla out of Africa.”

A few days later, Beck had “newly discovered audio and video” of Jones. The White House adviser, identified on-screen as “Self-Avowed Communist,” could be heard saying, “This movement is deeper than a solar panel … We’re going to change the whole system.”

Then came video that Beck found of Jones saying “the white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people of color communities.” He also played a clip of Jones mocking “clean coal” technology. “Or we could have unicorns pull our cars for us, you know,” Jones said. “We could have the tooth fairy bring us our energy at night.”

“Or we could have a self-proclaimed communist create jobs,” Beck retorted. “Speaking of unicorns and fairies, what do they have in mind to replace 48 percent of our national energy source once they bankrupt it? Will Van Jones sprinkle pixie dust on giant windmills to make up the difference? … Will progressive pigs fly right out of Van Jones’s butt and pedal bicycles to power the turbines attached to our power grid?”

The forces of Beck had been unleashed. A Beck fan site,
DefendGlenn.com
, posted a grainy video of Jones recorded in February 2009, a month before he started at the White House. It had Jones saying “nobody belongs here but the Native American peoples” and, most damaging, Jones calling Republicans “assholes” for blocking Obama’s agenda. “That’s a technical, political science term.” Added Jones: “I can be an asshole, and some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama are going to have to get uppity.”

The White House was losing its appetite for defending Jones. Trying to keep his job, Jones released a statement: “I apologize for the offensive words I chose to use during that speech. They do not reflect the views of this administration, which has made every effort to work in a bipartisan fashion, and they do not reflect the experience I have had since I joined the administration.”

Beck’s reply: Apology not accepted. The night after Jones’s apology, Beck was back on the air with more on Jones. After thirty minutes of buildup and teasing, he unveiled his latest discovery. “He is also a 9/11 truther … After the 9/11 attacks, they demanded on their Web site, quote, ‘a call for immediate inquiry into the evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur.’ ”

Jones’s signature was on the truthers’ petition. “So, on top of all of the radical progressive and communist nonsense coming from Obama’s green jobs czar, Van Jones, you can now add, thinks the Bush administration blew up the World Trade Centers and covered it up … 9/11 truther, a guy believes that Bush intentionally killed 3,000 American citizens.”

Jones didn’t know it yet, but he was finished. The White House put out the weak defense that he “didn’t carefully review” the petition before signing it. Jones asked that his name be removed from the petition. “I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever,” he said in a statement, his second apology of the week.

His apology did nothing. The day after Beck’s “truther” broadcast, Republican leaders demanded Jones’s resignation. The next day, he resigned—angrily. “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide,” he complained. “I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.”

The White House washed its hands of Jones with a tepid thank-you-for-your-service statement.

Beck, for his part, began a victory lap that lasted the better part of a year.

Every couple of nights he would play a clip from a Jones video as part of a larger point about the Obama administration’s communist tendencies. For example:

“We can’t seem to shake the radical influence of former green jobs czar Van Jones, because it ain’t just Van Jones.”

“Once again, there’s a budding scandal that is completely invisible to the people who do not watch Fox News. This joins the parade of such scandals as Van Jones.”

“The 9/11 truther, Van Jones: Who got him into the White House?”

“The first chink in the armor was when Van Jones was forced to resign because of this program.”

“We cannot let them disappear like Obama allowed Van Jones to disappear in the middle of the night, because Van Jones—I’ve got news for you, gang—is still in the system.”

“This is Marx. This is Che. This is Van Jones.”

Jones, for his part, landed a teaching job at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School—named for the only person living or dead whom Beck seems to loathe more than Jones. “It’s kind of a Glenn Beck Program five o’clock smart joke,” Beck commented. “Woodrow Wilson and Van Jones—who would have seen that coming?” Of Jones’s other position, with the Center for American Progress, Beck likened it to Tiger Woods “caught in bed with an exotic dancer and in response install[ing] a stripper pole right there in his guesthouse.”

The NAACP awarded the fallen Jones its President’s Award, calling him an “American treasure” and arguing that “a defining trait of our country is our collective capacity to practice forgiveness and celebrate redemption.”

At the awards ceremony, Jones had a reply to the man who brought him down. “To my fellow countryman, Mr. Glenn Beck: I see you and I love you, brother. I love you and you cannot do anything about it … Let’s be one country.”

“Implication here is that I don’t love him,” Beck replied on his show.

Now, where would somebody get that idea?

Months later, Jones delivered a surprisingly generous assessment of Beck:

Glenn Beck, seriously, recovering alcoholic. My father’s an alcoholic. It’s incredibly difficult to do what he’s done, to be able to actually get sober. He is a father of a special-needs daughter about whom he speaks with great tenderness and great care. You don’t see that very often. He’s a heterosexual man who is willing to weep in public. That doesn’t happen very often … I don’t agree with him and I think he’s using his genius and his talents in ways that are destructive to the country, but I love him as a person.

Beck’s response was not quite so generous:

So the guy who was calling for a revolution, a communist revolution, a guy who has said that the United States not only … blew up the World Trade Center but also [that] the white people in America are poisoning communities of color, he’s now loving me and calling me a genius and saying that, you know, he just disagrees? The problem with Van Jones is that statement that he made, “I am more than willing to drop the radical pose for the radical ends.” That makes it hard to trust anyone when he talks about posing.