Van Jones Returns

Anthony K. “Van” Jones has surfaced. The disgraced former White House special green jobs adviser is making an appearance at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire tonight, apparently at the request of Democratic State Senate Majority Leader Maggie Hassan. Exeter promotes the event saying: “globally recognized, Jones will lead an evening talk and discussion about ‘green jobs. ’” This is just the start of his comeback tour; on March 8, Jones will again appear at a Democratic “green jobs” event, in New York with U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. That otherwise respectable people would come to “green jobs” events with Van Jones suggests that his “green jobs” advocacy is somehow separable from his political extremism. It isn’t.

Van Jones is a self-professed communist. In 2005 he explained his radicalization following the Rodney King verdict to the alternative San Francisco newspaper the East Bay Express: “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist.” He went on to say that he had changed only his means, not his objectives: “I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”
In April of 2008 Jones explained to “Uprising Radio” that his push for green jobs was the kernel of a broader movement to destroy our capitalist economic system: “Inside that minimum demand was a very radical kernel that eventually meant that from 1964 to 1968 complete revolution was on the table for this country. And, I think that this green movement has to pursue those same steps and stages. Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we're not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won't be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether.”
Jones eventually resigned in disgrace from the White House, too radical even for the Obama administration that wants government control of health care, energy, and Wall Street.
Now Jones is back peddling that same kernel of the destruction of our free-market economy, starting tonight at Exeter, an elite boarding school.