Two weeks ago Van Jones appeared on CNN’s “Inside Politics with John King” and “Anderson Cooper 360” to enthusiastically commend President Trump’s executive order regarding police reform. This, of course, is high treason to the Democratic Party/”resistance”/ Mainstream media collective, to which Jones has triple membership. Nothing this President does, according to the Axis of Unethical Conduct’s by-laws, is ever anything better than stupid, dangerous, or impeachable. The executive order was criticized as cynical and unproductive by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and “delusional” by the Color of Change, a racial spoils organization that Jones co-founded in 2005.
I might have given Jones some integrity points, had I not made up my mind about him long ago. Check the Ethics Alarms dossier on Jones: my 2014 description of his agenda as “fear-mongering, racial distrust and division” was and usually is fair. Then ” a knowledgeable White House source” revealed that Van Jones and California human rights attorney Jessica Jackson, who runs #cut50, a prison-reform group Jones also founded, worked with law enforcement officials and White House staffers (like the hated Jerod Kushner) to develop the policy measure. Jones was praising an action that he had been directly involved in, without informing the CNN audience of his conflict of interest. When he was accused of working on the order, Jones vehemently denied it.
His conduct and denials were dishonest and unethical, but it’s now apparent why Jones kept the secret he is now being attacked for. He knows his team. It’s not the conflict of interest; politicians and journalists don’t care about conflicts of interest unless they can be used to get rid of other politicians and journalists that they don’t like (“Emoluments!!!!”), and the average member of the public literally has no comprehension of what conflicts are and why they are unethical.
No, Van Jones knew he would be crucified—-and now is facing cultural cancellation and shunning because he assisted the President of the United States! The Horror!
Here are some typical tweets:
- “Van Jones should never be allowed in black spaces, black discussions or anything else black.”
- “You can’t help but think that the controversy surrounding CNN pundit, Van Jones today brings into question ALL his “opinions” over the last several years.”
- So was Van Jones pushing Bernie Sanders in order to help Republicans have a chance in November? Seems he’s been helping them the whole time?
- “Van Jones is a sellout, a fraud and a clout chaser. He is using Criminal Justice/Police Reform to gain access and clout via Trump administration that he never got with the Obama administration.”
- BOYCOTT CNN if they do not fire van jones
- “Van Jones is a good case study in how chosen Black Americans are weaponized against ALL Black Americans.”
- “Van jones you just another uncle tom”
…and so on. And on. And on. When David Gergen, a Reagan acolyte, agreed to join the Clinton White House to help the struggling Democratic President bring his choatic administration into some condition approaching functional, there was some complaining by the hard right but the move was overwhelmingly seen as patriotic and responsible. Reaching across ideological and partisan divides in the interest of the nation, responding when called upon to set aside political differences, working together to solve problems—this was once recognized and honored as the right way for a citizen of any party to behave. Fox News commentator Adriana Cohen tweeted, “I commend Van Jones for reaching across the aisle to champion issues he cares about. We need more bipartisanship not less. Extreme divisiveness won’t solve our nations problems. Being able to find common ground will.”
Typical right wing fanatic.
Jones recognized this phenomenon quickly. On his CNN show two years ago, he said to Oprah Winfrey:
“I go out there and I try to tell people, let’s not become what we are fighting. Let’s not be what we’re fighting. They tell me, shut up, Van, because we got bigots out here, we got Nazis out here, we’re getting bullied, we are tired of going high. We want to go low and kick them in the private parts!”
Observe where “the resistance” has brought the country. The Trump Deranged will try to blame it on, naturally, the President, but this was the fateful and poisonous direction the Democratic Party deliberately led the nation in the wake of its much-deserved loss in 2016. While accusing, the President of “defying norms,” the “resistance,” Democrats and the news media set out to destroy one of the most essential democratic norms of all: that all Americans are committed to try to make every President succeed. And it worked. That norm is gone.
How this will be repaired, or if it can be repaired, I do not know. If it is not repaired, our democracy cannot survive.
The very first thing I wrote here among my observations the day after the election was “Give him a chance.” President Trump was never given that chance, and now no President will get a chance either, unless Van Jones’ understanding of a citizen’s duty again becomes the respected one.
***
Addendum: I almost forgot…Lloyd Grove, who has spent most of his career in the slime of gossip column-writing, authored a truly revolting attack on Jones’ bipartisanship in the Daily Beast. For me, the line that reaffirmed that Grove is a hack among hacks: “Trump was flanked by uniformed officers and police union officials as he signed the executive order in response to the pandemic of unjustified killings of unarmed Black Americans by white cops.”
- You can’t have a pandemic of killings just in America, you illiterate boob.
- Police -related killings have gone down sharply, and most of them, including, perhaps, the recent Atlanta shooting, are not “unjustified.” That’s propaganda.
Ethics Alarms 
I read about this contretemps earlier today, and was initially gobsmacked. And then I recalled that one of the few things that brings me hope – and amuses me – these days is watching these idiots eat their own. I was reminded that even Robespierre met his own end on wrong side of the pulley at the top of a guillotine.
I must admit it’ll be a long time before I trust Van Jones half as far as I could throw the starboard anchor of an aircraft carrier. But this is a pretty good start. As a wise old Vermonter I used to know was fond of saying, “Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.”
Six weeks ago or so Jones was annihilated for suggesting people of color need to take better care of themselves health-wise, relative to the Covid thing. He’s definitely playing with fire. Good for him
Looks like Democrats in CA want John Wayne’s name removed from the airport near LA.
Do they really want to die on this hill?
A HA! You didn’t do your weekend Ethics Alarms assignment! Write 100 times, “Fill your hand, you sonofabitch!”
https://ethicsalarms.com/2020/06/28/sunday-ethics-reflections-6-28-2020-for-the-defense/
Doh! I’ve seen all the posts…but I constantly get distracted by kids, or the puppy…or in this case, driving across the country!
The idea that all Americans should want the president to succeed probably died soon after 9/11. The Democratic party hated George W. Bush, because he blocked them from a third term in the White House. They backed him after 9/11 and into the first war in Afghanistan because there really wasn’t a choice. They gave him the authority to go into Iraq because there still wasn’t a choice. Then, like most political enemies who see their nemesis about to put his foot in it, they just sat back and waited for things to go bad.
Once they did go bad, as Donald Rumsfeld’s plan or lack thereof fell apart, they were all over the president. They were also all over him after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, despite the fact of the local and state authorities’ abysmal performance. In two short years he went from grudgingly respected commander in chief to incompetent looking fool and lost both House and Senate, leaving him gravely weakened in the last two years of his presidency.
Good, that was that they thought. Obama was elected quite handily after the economy tanked, and they did their best for those first two years trying to push the Republican party into oblivion, or at least permanent minority status. Now His Hipness and Coolness would lead this country to the perfect place, and anyone who opposed him was a racist, a traitor, or both. Unfortunately, that journey didn’t end up in the perfect place. No problem they thought, we’ll just put up the first female president and blame Obama’s inability to lead this nation into the perfect place on those racist Republicans. He would have achieved a whole lot more, but they just wouldn’t let him.
Well, you know the rest. The day after the last election the left decided it was
going to stop Trump from taking office.
When that failed it decided it was going to do its best to make certain Trump accomplished absolutely nothing in his first and hopefully only term. Since then, we’ve had nothing but four years of political warfare between the parties. The left hasn’t tried to work with Trump even once, and has spent its every waking hour trying to obstruct and discredit him. At the very least, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could try to get stuff done. The left and Trump have gotten absolutely nothing done. The foolish attempt at impeachment failed, but, before the president could get things back on track, this pandemic hit, stealing his greatest strength, the economy. The left did not see this as a problem that this nation had to overcome together. The left saw it as a juicy political opportunity to make the president look bad, and they did at every opportunity. Now we have the George Floyd freak out, and the left, again, instead of trying to tamp down this problem and treated us something the nation needs to deal with as a whole, wants to put it all on the shoulders of the president. Anger and hatred are powerful energies if they can be channeled, and the left is channeling them pretty effectively. Not a single Democratic mayor or governor has stepped up to keep order, whereas in the past decades they would have, because the more disorder there is,the worse the president looks, and the more destruction of symbols of the past, the more it looks like a modern day Boston tea party with the left playing the part of the colonists defying an oppressive system.
The left is hoping to parlay this into a situation where Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden run this country, with no one to tell them no, because they will have destroyed or cowed everyone who would. They are banking on the right being so beaten and so tired from everything that has gone on this year that it will just step aside and tell them to do whatever they want. The only reason that the partisan warfare will end then, will be that there is only one party. Frankly I don’t see it going any other way. The lesson to be learned is that brutal partisan warfare will lead you to ultimate power eventually.