White House Environmental Adviser Van Jones Resigns Citing “Vicious Smear Campaign Against Me”

The Obama administration’s special adviser for environmental jobs, Van Jones, has resigned citing what he described as a “vicious smear campaign” against him. For the past month, Fox News has run a series of reports on Jones’s alleged association with communists and his decision to sign a petition calling for a congressional probe of the 9/11 attacks. Jones is the founding president of Green for All and author of the book The Green Collar Economy. We speak with James Rucker, who co-founded the group Color of Change with Van Jones, and with Malkia Cyril, founder of the Center for Media Justice. We also talk to Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP.

Jones was a longtime community organizer in the Bay Area. He is the founding president of Green for All, the co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and the co-founder of the group Color of Change. His book The Green Collar Economy was a national bestseller. Time Magazine recently named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

In March, President Obama tapped Jones to be a special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. But for the past month Fox News has run a series of reports on Jones’s alleged association with communists and for signing a petition calling for a congressional probe into the actions of the Bush administration around the 9/11 attacks. Jones issued a statement last week, saying, quote, “I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever.” Jones also drew fire for calling Republicans “BLANK-holes” during a speech in February. Even though Jones apologized, the controversy gained steam Friday when conservative legislators, like Missouri Senator Kit Bond, called for an inquiry into his comments.

The campaign against Van Jones began back in July, when conservative Fox News host Glenn Beck began criticizing him, calling him a “communist-anarchist radical.” Beck also called President Obama a racist in an interview on Fox & Friends.

       GLENN BECK: This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don’t know what it is, but you can’t sit in a pew with Jeremiah Wright for twenty years and not hear some of that stuff and not have it wash over.


BRIAN KILMEADE: But listen, you can’t say he doesn’t like white people. David Axelrod’s white. Rahm Emanuel’s his chief of staff, a white. I think 70 percent of the people that we see every day are white. Robert Gibbs is white.


GLENN BECK: I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people. I’m saying he has a problem. He has a—this guy is, I believe, a racist. Look at the way—look at the things that he has been surrounded by. His—some of his—


BRIAN KILMEADE: Give us an example, aside from this.


GLENN BECK: Let’s give—let’s give his new—his new green jobs czar. The guy is, again, black liberation theology, a black nationalist, who is also an avowed communist. He comes in, and he puts that guy in. Well, wait a minute. How many people with this kind of philosophy do you need to have in your life before we start to say, “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your feet—your future.”

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Glenn Beck on Fox in the morning. Those comments calling President Obama a racist prompted Color of Change, the group Van Jones helped to found four years ago, to call on advertisers to stop sponsoring Beck’s TV program. Over fifty-five companies, including Wal-Mart and Sprint, responded by pulling their ads. Nevertheless, Beck continued his attacks on Van Jones, and the conservative voices against his White House appointment reached a crescendo this weekend.

Jones submitted his resignation letter to the White House just after midnight on Saturday. He wrote, quote, “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.” Jones said he had received numerous calls and notes from supporters urging him to stay and fight. But he wrote, quote, “I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for our future.”

The White House, which had done little to defend Van Jones, accepted his resignation. On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, anchor David Gregory asked President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod about Van Jones’s resignation.

       DAVID GREGORY: Van Jones, who’s been an adviser to the White House on environmental policy, resigned overnight because of some inflammatory comments he’s made over time, including a petition he signed that blamed the government for the 9/11 attacks. Was this an issue that got to the President? Did he personally order that he be fired?


DAVID AXELROD: Absolutely not. This was an—this was Van Jones’s own decision. You know, he is internationally known as an advocate for green jobs. And that’s the basis on which he was hired. He said in his statement that he didn’t want his comments to become a distraction from the issue, which is so important to the future of our economy and communities around the country. And I commend him for making that decision.


DAVID GREGORY: Was he the victim of a smear campaign, as he alleges?


DAVID AXELROD: Well, look, this is a—you know, the political environment is rough, and so, you know, these things get magnified. But the bottom line is that he’s showed his commitment to the cause of creating green jobs in this country by removing himself as a — as an issue, and I think that took—that took a great deal of commitment on his part.

AMY GOODMAN: Senior adviser to President Obama, David Axelrod.

For more, we go to San Francisco, and we’re joined by James Rucker, the executive director of ColorOfChange.org, which he helped found with Van Jones four years ago. And we’re joined on the telephone from Oakland—she couldn’t make it over the bridge into the San Francisco studio, because it’s closed—by Malkia Cyril. She is the founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice in Oakland.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! James Rucker, explain exactly what you understand has happened. What led to the resignation of Van Jones?

JAMES RUCKER: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Glenn Beck has used the last month or so to wage this war against not only Van Jones but the Obama administration. We, of course, started moving on Beck when he called the President a racist and asserted that he had a deep-seated hatred for white people. When we started our campaign, and our members and others became enraged by what they saw as a narrative that painted Obama, that painted the administration, that painted black people as this subversive force that was really going to be the undoing of this country, we started our campaign—at that point, Glenn Beck went from having mentioned Van Jones to Van becoming essentially public enemy number one in his mind, and he absolutely went about a smear campaign, pulling out, cherry-picking things that Van had said, affiliations that he had had, you know, ten, fifteen years ago, and building the case that Van was this boogeyman, essentially.

It’s very disappointing that the administration has basically allowed Van to leave, whether he was pushed out or not. And the reason is, Van is simply—and Beck has said this—Van is simply the first, and if the administration is not able to stand up and fight, when you have someone who’s using a news platform to lie about your personnel, to undermine the agenda that you have, it’s going to be a problem for the administration, it’s going to be a problem for the American people.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, James Rucker, let’s talk about what your organization, that Van Jones co-founded, Color of Change, did around Glenn Beck, which made him so irate.

JAMES RUCKER: Yeah, absolutely. What we did was we let our members know, here’s, first, what Beck had said about the President. Then we said, look at this overall narrative that he’s been spinning. He has talked about Obama-style reparations, that in fact the climate change policy that Obama’s been championing, healthcare reform that he’s been championing, is really about reallocation of resources to black people and that others are going to suffer and fail. He’s talked about the government being remade in the image of ACORN and that it won’t resemble anything that our founding fathers had in mind when they created this country. It’s a bunch of rhetoric that is poisonous to public debate. And we essentially let our members see what it was.

And then we went to advertisers. And as our members signed a petition calling on advertisers to pull back, advertisers started to do that. And as of last week, fifty-seven—basically all national advertisers have abandoned his show.

Glenn Beck hasn’t mentioned Color of Change by name. He hasn’t mentioned the association with Van Jones by name. But what he’s done is basically try to make an example not only of Van Jones, but I think really, you know, send a chill down the spine of not only activists, people who are now in the administration, but the administration officials themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, companies like Wal-Mart, how did you get them to stop running ads during Glenn Beck’s show?

JAMES RUCKER: Yeah, absolutely. You know, our message to them was pretty straightforward. It’s, does Wal-Mart want to be associated with and want to be seen as supporting the kind of hate that Beck is spouting? So we—Media Matters was very helpful. They had produced videos of what Glenn Beck had been doing. We showed them those videos. We entered in one-on-one conversations with staff at Wal-Mart and other places and said, “This is why our members are upset. This is not—it’s not about left-right. It’s not about some alternative view. It’s about using a new platform to push as fact things that are known to be false, and that he had done that repeatedly.” And I think, for the advertisers, it was pretty straightforward. It’s, no, we don’t want our brands associated with this. This is not good for—the public is not good for policy.

AMY GOODMAN: This was clearly very threatening to Glenn Beck at Fox. Did Van Jones work with you? He co-founded the organization Color of Change four years ago. But did he work with you on the boycott now?

JAMES RUCKER: Yeah, not at all. In fact, the irony was that when we launched the campaign, we had no idea that he had even attacked Van. It was the comments that he had made about Obama, and it was this narrative that we saw he was spinning. I’m not even sure if, before that point, he had mentioned Van by name. So that was really not a factor.

And Van, I didn’t talk to Van until after we had actually launched the campaign. And, you know, we had no coordination throughout it. I talked to Van after he lost his job, effectively, as a friend. And it’s definitely sad, and it’s unfortunate. It’s a loss for all of us. But yeah, no, Van had nothing—you know, he’s been pretty busy, both in the White House, with Green for All before that. He hasn’t been an operational part of Color of Change for over a year and a half.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you critical of the White House for not standing up for him or not accepting his resignation?

JAMES RUCKER: Yeah, I am. And the reason is, Beck himself has said, and Fox has made clear, that they will go on such witch hunts if they can keep doing it. And when you have—when you respond to what Beck has done by essentially trying to be silent, it doesn’t work. And when you respond by allowing your folks to leave, it’s basically not only rewarding bad behavior, it also sends a message that, hmmm, maybe something was wrong with Van Jones, which I know that the administration doesn’t think. I think everyone who knows Van who understands the situation doesn’t think that.

But it actually, I think, is problematic. There’s no way, if you look at what we’ve seen with the healthcare debates, and you have folks who are armed with misinformation—they show up as if they’re really participants in a discussion—is destructive. It scares politicians. It undermines the political process. And I think the only way you can deal with folks like Glenn Beck and what Fox is doing is by coming head on with it. And the administration, in this case, failed to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: James Rucker, I want to thank you for being with us, co-founder and executive director of ColorOfChange.org, that led a boycott, advertisers to boycott Glenn Beck’s show on Fox.