Tears of a clown: glenn beck and the tea bagging of america by Dana Milbank

Author:Dana Milbank [Dana Milbank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographie, Politique
ISBN: 9780385533881
Published: 2010-10-05T00:13:22+00:00

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.

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