Van Jones

The Structural Racism Racket: Using Anti-Racist Rhetoric To Fight Left-Wing Battles

By W. James Antle III, Foundation Watch, March 2013 (PDF here)

Summary: The Applied Research Center has a benign-sounding name, but this community organizing group is a scrappy leader among new groups that use anti-racist rhetoric to advance the Left’s agenda.

A battle raged during the last election cycle that was bigger than any of the individual races for public office, even the presidential contest. Multiple state legislatures took up bills designed to verify the identity of voters and eliminate election fraud. Seemingly uncontroversial, these laws sparked an extensive debate likely to reverberate over the next several years.

On one side were people who believe measures like voter ID laws are essential to preserve the integrity of our electoral system. On the other side were groups dedicated to the proposition that voter fraud is a fairy tale. The real motive behind voter ID laws, these organizations insisted, is voter suppression: a racist, discriminatory attempt to keep elderly, minority, and young voters—especially those likely to cast ballots for Democrats—from the polls.

The more extreme version of this narrative likened voter ID proposals to the racist caste system of the Jim Crow era, when poll taxes, discriminatory laws, and lynch mobs kept black Americans from exercising their right to vote. In this telling, private groups that monitor polling stations, no matter how peacefully, are at best engaged in acts of intimidation. At worst, they’re lynch mobs.

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CRC President Terrence Scanlon has an op-ed in today’s Washington Times.

Here it is:

President Obama has his second term and will never face voters again. On one of his highest priorities — energy and the environment — he’s free to be the “transformational” figure he always wanted to be.

Since the beginning, Mr. Obama’s main goal on energy and the environment has been clear to anyone listening to him and his advisers: to make energy — at least, the carbon-based energy on which contemporary civilization was built — more expensive, forcing us to use other forms of energy or do without.

During the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that under his “cap-and-trade” plan, “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.” He added, “Under my plan electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

After being elected, he brought in allies to support his misguided schemes. In September 2008, Steven Chu talked about the dilemma of finding out “how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” The European price of gas was roughly $8 a gallon. Soon afterward, Mr. Chu became U.S. secretary of energy.

Van Jones, the administration’s first “green jobs czar,” saw the energy agenda as a means for radical societal transformation. He declared in February 2009, “We want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism [sic] 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 . [T]he green economy will start off as a small subset, and we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.”

The administration can drag us into an energy utopia using creative means. It can continue to funnel grant money to questionable enterprises in the name of “green” energy, to subsidize those projects with special-interest tax breaks and to guarantee business for those companies with “renewable energy” mandates. A president has a thousand tools, from national-monument designations (which can be used to block oil drilling), to building-efficiency standards (which can put “global warming” rules into effect), to fuel-economy standards for cars (which, incidentally, make cars less safe, causing people to die).

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Southern Poverty Law Center: Wellspring of Manufactured Hate

By James Simpson, Organization Trends, October 2012 (PDF here)

Summary: The Southern Poverty Law Center began with an admirable purpose but long ago transformed into a machine for raising money and launching left-wing political attacks. Lately it’s become more of a threat to free speech and civil debate than a defender of the weak or a foe of violent extremism. It has also taken in millions from the Picower Foundation, whose own funds came largely from founder Jeffry Picower’s “investing” in his old friend Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

On August 15, 2012, an angry gay rights activist named Floyd Corkins stormed the Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and began shooting. Corkins shot a brave security guard in the arm, but the guard still managed to wrestle him to the ground before he could kill or injure others.

Corkins was carrying 50 bullets and two loaded magazines for his 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol; 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches; and the address of another potential target, the Traditional Values Coalition. Before initiating his shooting spree, Corkins reportedly said, “I don’t like your politics.”

Reacting to the shooting, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins stated: “Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that have been reckless in labeling organizations as hate groups because they disagree with them on public policy.”

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What do self-described “communist” Van Jones, his good friend Arianna Huffington, radical philanthropist George Soros, the Threshold Foundation, and the Tides Foundation all have in common?

They all are connected in some way to convicted “Speedway Bomber” Brett C. Kimberlin, a man described by Michelle Malkin as “a radical, violent, lying, dangerous felon.”

Kimberlin, as blogger Liberty Chick previously reported,

spent nearly 17 years in prison after being convicted of launching a week-long bombing spree that terrorized the residents of Speedway, Indiana in the late 1970’s. One of the blasts horribly maimed a man so badly that it directly led to that man’s suicide a few years later, which was proven when the widow of that bombing victim successfully sued and won a civil judgment against Kimberlin for $1.6 million.

Kimberlin is a political trailblazer of sorts. He is a tactical innovator whose tried and true methods would have impressed the father of modern community organizing, Saul Alinsky. The late conservative Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart recognized Kimberlin’s unique talents last fall, tweeting that the convicted terrorist and his confederates needed “exposure.”

Kimberlin is focusing on bullying conservatives into silence, which is the same thing that so much of progressivedom is concentrating on nowadays. But unlike Van Jones and the various Marxist agitators who have inflicted damage on conservative talk radio and innocuous groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) through innuendo and smears, Kimberlin gets in his enemies’ faces. While in prison he taught himself the law. Nowadays he sues conservatives who write about him and obtains restraining orders against them – the First Amendment be damned.

Amazingly, a leading Kimberlin detractor, conservative blogger Aaron Walker, was jailed by a Maryland judge yesterday after criticizing Kimberlin.

JTMP and another nonprofit Kimberlin founded, Velvet Revolution, receive money from left-wing funders. Of course it’s their privilege to do what they want with their money even if it means funding nonprofits operated by “a radical, violent, lying, dangerous felon.” Similarly, since 1984 it has been Capital Research Center’s mission to report on and analyze what charities do with their money.

The Threshold Foundation has been in the news in recent days because the San Francisco-based philanthropy gave $20,000 in 2008 to the Justice Through Music Project, a seven year old Bethesda, Maryland-based 501c3 nonprofit entity. JTMP was founded by Mr. Kimberlin a few short years after his release from prison. (See its latest IRS Form 990 [tax return] here.) Threshold has also given $60,000 to the related nonprofit, Velvet Revolution, since 2007. (For more information on Threshold, see Bonner Cohen’s July 2006 Foundation Watch article.)

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A spinoff of Americans for Limited Government called Free Market America has created a wonderful new video that sums up all the ways that the Left is sabotaging America.

This powerful video is called “If I wanted America to fail.” It shows how the Left has been pushing an “economic suicide pact” for decades.

Click on this link to view the video on YouTube:  If I wanted America to fail

Joel Griffith has an item in Red State this morning that’s worth looking at.

He writes that the Center for Media and Democracy is leading the charge against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization” dedicated to advancing limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty.”  The Center is funded by the taxpayer-supported radical money-laundering outfit known as the Tides Foundation.

Admitted communist Van Jones is working with various leftist groups “to train over 100,000 young people to engage in acts of massive civil disobedience throughout the country,” Ron Radosh writes in a great op-ed on PJM called The Organized Left’s Spring Surprise: Revealed on TV and in The Nation magazine.

These radicals swear up and down that their activities will be nonviolent but they’re lying.  With the Left there is no such thing as nonviolent protest.  The goal is chaos.  The Left wants to stir things up so violently that it leads to a radical transformation of America.  God help us if these subversives succeed.

This training is endorsed by three ACORN-related organizations:  the  Working Families Party, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment.

As I explain in my book, Subversion Inc: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers,  WFP is ACORN’s political party and ACCE and MORE are rebranded ACORN state organizations.

Well, what a surprise.

CNBC.com reports

Cathy Zoi, who was the Acting Under Secretary for Energy and Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, is going to work for a new cleantech private equity fund sponsored by George Soros and a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

The new fund will invest in…wait for it…”the energy and resource sectors.”

Zoi became a bit of a public relations headache for the Obama administration after it was revealed she held a stake in two rent-seeking businesses that were gearing up to benefit from energy efficiency programs sponsored by the government.

What’s next? Will Van Jones move to Fenton Communications? (That’s not a serious question, by the way.)

Steve Kest, who was executive director of the organized crime syndicate ACORN, has become a senior fellow at John Podesta’s Center for American Progress.

Kest joins self-described “communist” Van Jones who is also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Kest participated in the eight-year long coverup of a million-dollar embezzlement at ACORN perpetrated by Dale Rathke, brother of disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke.

Arianna Huffington was kind enough to allow her good friend and former campaign manager Van Jones to post his preliminary reflections on being unceremoniously booted from the Obama administration on the Huffington Post.

It’s the least she could do.

Jones is President Obama’s former green jobs czar. He believes the Bush administration caused the 9/11 terrorist attacks to happen. He also denounced the United States on Sept. 12, 2001 blaming America for the atrocities the day before. He also mourned the deaths of the people killed in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center but only the ones who were working class.

In what will no doubt find its way into the memoirs he might be contemplating writing, Jones compares himself to Winston Churchill, which is odd for many reasons but especially because of the apparent contempt that President Obama holds for the late great British prime minister.

With all the modesty one has come to expect from a community organizer, Jones writes

Of course, some supporters actually think I will be more effective on the “outside.” Maybe so. But those ideas always remind me of that old canard about Winston Churchill. After he lost a hard-fought election, a friend told him: “Winston, this really is just a blessing in disguise.” Churchill quipped: “Damned good disguise.” I can certainly relate to that sentiment right now.

He likens himself to the wrong Churchill. Van Jones is more like Ward Churchill.