Glenn Beck played up the Thursday night “Crossfire” showdown between Sen. Ted Cruz and former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones to tout Cruz as a “brilliant” carrier of the conservative banner – and slam Jones as a “communist revolutionary” hiding behind a shield of respectability.
“You’re a communist revolutionary, Van Jones,” Beck said on his show Friday after playing a clip of the Cruz-Jones confrontation. “This is one of the most dangerous men in America.”
In the “Crossfire” segment, Jones demanded Cruz, R-Texas, apologize to the Republican Party for the government shutdown in Washington, but Cruz turned the tables with an attack on Obamacare — and the havoc its wreaking on the country’s economy.
After applauding Cruz, Beck and producer Steve “Stu” Burguiere on Friday ran down part of Jones’ history. After his forced resignation from the White House feather-bed job of “green jobs czar” – the job was so meaningless the title seems to have left when Jones did – he moved to stints with the liberal-to-leftist Center for American Progress, an adjunct professor post at Princeton and now a gig as a regular on CNN’s “Crossfire.”
Each step in Jones’ post White House career was a laundering process, Beck said, meant to distract the public from remembering who Jones really is. While Jones was once an avowed communist revolutionary, he’s no longer open about it — pursuing the same goals through more deceptive means.
And Jones admitted as much about his tactics as recently as 2005, during an interview with the alternative Oakland paper the East Bay Express, headlined “The New Face of Environmentalism”:
“I’ll work with anybody, I’ll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward. … I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”
(He’s also not above a cheap rhyme, but put that aside.)
It’s the next paragraph of the story that’s telling:.
His new philosophy emphasizes effectiveness, which he believes is inextricably tied to unity. He still considers himself a revolutionary, just a more effective one, who has realized that the progressive left’s insistence on remaining a counterculture destroys its potential as a political movement. “One of my big heroes is Malcolm X, not because I agree with Malcolm, but because he wasn’t afraid to change in public,” he said.
The left will try to make fun of Beck — “communist revolutionary” sounds so dated, so McCarthy-esque — but he’s only repeating the points that Jones has made about himself, in a rare moment of honesty with a decidedly sympathetic interviewer.
Jones is willing to drop the cheap satisfaction off the radical pose for the deep satisfaction tailored suits and healthy bank accounts – all paid for by the very society he’s actually committed to destroying for everyone else.
He’s living the high life, he’s on TV every night, he’s forgoing “the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”
“Van Jones is a communist revolutionary,” Beck said. “He’s a brilliant man, extraordinarily dangerous.”
He’s also a fraud.