The despicable Van Jones

When news of Van Jones’s Communist background came to light in 2009 – shortly after he’d been named the Obama White House’s “green czar” – Kyle Smith of the New York Post called out the New York Times for ignoring the story. (Note: weirdly enough, the 2009 New York Post story linked to above is misdated at the Post‘s own website as being from 1999.) “The Times purposely ignored” Jones’s Communist history, wrote Smith, “because it was hoping that the story would go away, because it likes people like Comrade Jones and was hoping he wouldn’t be forced out.”

Kyle Smith

What was the Times‘s excuse for not reporting on the story? It claimed that Jones himself wasn’t important enough to merit such coverage. This was transparent hogwash. The New Yorker had profiled Jones at length only a few months earlier, and the Times’s own Thomas Friedman had devoted “four breathless fanzine pages” to him in a recent book. As Smith put it: “The Times continues to treat communism as a cute campus peccadillo like pot smoking or nude streaking.”

Also in 2009, it emerged that Jones had signed a letter suggesting that 9/11 was an inside job by top U.S. government officials. He had also engaged in race-war rhetoric, accusing “the white polluters and the white environmentalists” of “essentially steering pollution into people of color because they don’t have a social-justice framework.”

Jones felt obliged by the media pressure to leave his White House job in order to keep the heat off of President Obama and his environmentalist colleagues. At the time, however, he did not renounce Communism. Not until 2011, when he was working at both the Center for American Progress and Princeton, did he have a lawyer, Joseph E. Sandler, send a “cease and desist” letter to Fox News demanding that Fox hosts Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck stop referring to him as a Communist. Sandler insisted that Jones had long since ceased being a Communist and was now “firmly pro-market.”

The Fox hosts had also called Jones a 9/11 Truther; Sandler denied this. Finally, the Fox hosts had aired a video of the Oakland event on September 12, 2001, and had noted the vile sentiments expressed by Jones and his fellow participants. How did Sandler respond to this? “Mr. Jones,” he wrote, “was one of many speakers at a small gathering in Oakland on Sept. 12^th 2001 convened to express shock and horror at the atrocities committed on 9/11.” To watch the video is to recognize this as a flagrant misrepresentation of the emotions expressed at that event.

“Mr. Jones,” Sandler went on, “does not agree with the hateful, misguided sentiments of some of the attendees featured in this clip and has never endorsed or adopted any such sentiments. His comments at the rally were for all people to eschew violence and pursue change through peaceful means.” Again, this is a lie: Jones had spoken explicitly of revolution.

“As with any political figure,” wrote Sandler, “he is often forced to share the stage with people with whom he strongly disagrees.” But nobody was forcing Jones to be on that stage. He spoke last. Any decent American would either have walked away from that event after hearing the other speakers – or would have explicitly denounced their disgusting remarks on the spot. Van Jones did neither.

The conclusion is simple: whether or not he is still a Communist in his heart, Jones was, as recently as 9/11, an avowed revolutionary who on the day after that monstrous attack on his country willingly consorted with the worst kinds of America-haters; and as of 2011, when his lawyer wrote that letter, he was still prepared to lie about it.

Posted on April 7, 2017March 31, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

Ben Norton, baby-faced Bolshevik

Is there a far-left media institution with which he doesn’t have a connection? Although only three years into his career as a pundit, baby-faced Ben Norton, a young American dude based in New York City, has already written hundreds, if not thousands, of articles for such noxious websites as the anti-Zionist Mondoweiss, The Intercept (run by the notorious Glenn Greenwald and pro-Castro scribe Jeremy Scahill), Eric Alterman‘s AlterNet, Middle East Monitor (pro-Hamas), Electronic Intifada (pro-Palestinian), FAIR (Marxists pretending to be objective media critics), Muftah (a Muslim hangout), and the Center for American Progress’s ThinkProgress (where he worked as an intern in 2014). Most prominently, Norton is a regular contributor to Salon. In addition, he blogs frequently at his own website and tweets constantly. As a result, there’s already a massive amount of material out there that proves definitively that Ben Norton is one of the top useful stooges of his generation.

Where to begin? For one thing, Norton is no fan of America, which he’s called a “rogue state.” (“[T]he real American exceptionalism,” read one of his headlines, “is selling the most weapons in the world by far.”) He wrote approvingly about a UN official’s charge that America is an “apartheid state.” (“The US is indeed horribly repressive,” Norton commented, “and its police force is incredibly racist.”) When Obama went to Hiroshima, Norton wrote that America “should apologize for its criminal atomic bombing” of Japan and “stop its nuclear escalation.”

A corollary of his contempt for America is his disdain for “neoliberalism” and affection for socialism. He pays tribute on a regular basis to the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Noam Chomsky. This spring, he was a passionate tub-thumper for the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders; in May, when Sanders made public his ridiculous list of picks for the Democratic Party platform committee – race hustler Cornel West (who’s also one of Norton’s icons), enviro-hustler Bill McKibben, Israel-hater James Zogby, Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison (who’s cozy with such Islamist front groups as CAIR, the Muslim American Society, and the Islamic Society of North America), and Native American activist Deborah Parker – Norton gave it a standing ovation.

CdDjfBCWAAIIbBg — An image of Palestinian women tweeted by Norton on International Women’s Day 2016

There’s more. On International Women’s Day this year, Norton celebrated the holiday as “an important symbol in communist, socialist, anti-imperialist, and other liberation movements” (although he lamented that a day of commemoration founded by socialists had been “co-opted by large corporations like Microsoft in order to celebrate the increasing diversity of the ruling class”). “U.S. politics today,” he suggested in April, “demonstrates just how correct early-20th-century socialist economist and revolutionary heroine Rosa Luxemburg was when she famously declared that society faces two options: socialism or barbarism.” This statement would seem to reflect a remarkable ignorance of – or indifference to? – the history of the twentieth century, in which socialism proved, in one nation after another, to be the very gateway to barbarism.

More tomorrow.

Posted on July 18, 2016July 6, 2016 by usefulstooges 5

David Sirota’s Venezuelan “miracle”

In a recent series of posts, we explored the puzzlement that is Mark Weisbrot, an American economist who – for reasons either ideological or pecuniary, or both – has persisted in lauding the socialist economic policies of Venezuela and Argentina, even as those policies have dragged those countries’ economies into the mire.

Another commentator who’s taken the same line on the same topics is David Sirota. Who? Born in 1975, Sirota has worked as a left-wing radio host, a contributor to Salon and The Nation, and a political operative for a long list of Democratic politicians, centers, foundations, and the like. Among his career highlights are stints as a spokesman for Bernie Sanders and as a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-wing spin machine. In 2003, Newsweek described him as “well schooled in the art of Washington warfare.” A New York Times review of his 2006 book Hostile Takeover said Sirota possessed “a take-no-prisoners mind-set” toward Republicans and centrists. Election handicapper Nate Silver has accused Sirota of “playing fast and loose with the truth.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, Sirota gained plenty of media attention with a Salon article headlined “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” Why should we have such hopes? Because of “the dynamics of privilege.” Sirota explained: when members of unprivileged religious or ethnic groups commit mass shootings, the groups they belong to are “collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse).” Not so “white dudes,” who, when they commit mass shootings, are treated as “lone wolf” types. The word jihad, of course, did not appear anywhere in Sirota’s article; to recognize that religious identity tends to be a highly relevant detail in acts of terror committed by Muslims is to violate the kind of reality-challenged political correctness for which Sirota (like Salon) stands. Islam expert Robert Spencer called Sirota’s piece “appallingly stupid”; Greg Gutfeld of Fox News wondered aloud if, in hoping that the terrorist attack in Boston had been committed by a white American, Sirota had meant white Americans “like the Occupy Wall Streeters on trial in Cincinnati? Or Bill Ayers, the nutty professor?”

Sirota is, then, a creep and a clown on a number of fronts. But for now, we’re concerned about his views on Latin American economies. In March 2013, he actually published a piece – once again in Salon – entitled “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle.” Sirota began with a sneer: for a long time, Americans of certain political persuasions had treated Hugo Chávez as “a boogeyman synonymous with extremism,” made him the subject of “over-the-top political rhetoric,” acted as if he was a “radical.” While making the pro forma acknowledgment that “Chavez was no saint,” for example on “human rights and basic democratic freedoms,” Sirota was quick to make the leap into moral equivalency (America, he proposed, had recently been guilty of “drone assaults, civil liberties abuses, and [a] war on voting”) and to accuse Chávez’s critics of hypocrisy (“it is not as if [America’s] political establishment sees an assault on democratic freedoms as deplorable”).

No, Sirota insisted: what made Chávez “the bugaboo of American politics” was not the bad aspects of his record, but the good ones – namely, the “indisputably positive results” of his economic policies, which, for the American establishment, raised uncomfortable questions about, say, the wisdom of nationalization and of aggressive income redistribution. But now that Venezuela’s economic success was so utterly undeniable, America had to stop demonizing “everyone from Martin Luther King to Michael Moore to Oliver Stone to anyone else who dares question neoliberalism and economic imperialism.”

Quick note: MLK has a national bank holiday; Moore and Stone have won Oscars. So much for “demonizing.” Anyway, that was Sirota in 2013. And since? We’ll get to that tomorrow.

Posted on June 13, 2016June 10, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Soros’s echo chamber

Last time around, we took a brief look at George Soros‘s youth and at his parents’ values – his father was an Esperanto idealist, his mother a self-hating Jew. As we’ll see, this mixture of influences helped shape a man who would, paradoxically, combine utopian ideology and philanthropy with a staggering egocentrism and personal moral expediency.

Let’s move on to his early career. Studying economics in London after the war, Soros came to embrace the concept of the “open society” – a society, that is, that shrinks from considering itself in any way superior to any other. In short, he became a moral relativist – a position consistent, perhaps, with his twisted youthful enthusiasm for the Nazis. He found work on Wall Street, but found the U.S. “commercial” and “crass.” In 1959 he settled in Greenwich Village, where he befriended New Left radicals who despised capitalism; meanwhile, his own mastery of capitalist enterprise caused his wealth to grow exorbitantly.

In the 1980s he began to spend his wealth on causes dear to his heart; in 1993, he established the New York-based Open Society Institute, which remains the centerpiece of his philanthropic work. His consiglieri during all these years has been Aryeh Neier, a Marxist who back in the 1960s founded the radical group Students for a Democratic Society. With Neier at his side, Soros has handed out princely sums to a wide range of “progressive” groups – ranging from ACORN to the Arab American Institute to the National Council of La Raza – that despise capitalism and the U.S. while supporting big government, the welfare state, and socialist-style wealth redistribution.

Soros has thrown money at radical environmentalists, radical feminists, and groups that agitate for the subordination of the U.S. government to the authority of the United Nations; he’s supported Occupy Wall Street and the effort to exploit the Ferguson, Missouri, unrest to inflame racial tensions and demonize cops; he’s poured truckfuls of cash into far-left news media such as Pacifica Broadcasting, The Nation Magazine, and Air America Radio, as well as into various journalism-related groups that pose as objective “media centers” and “media institutes” (notably Media Matters for America), but whose actual role is to protect and perpetuate the leftist media narrative and to demonize truth-tellers whose work disrupts that narrative. His Soros Documentary Fund, which subsidizes “social justice” films, has been part of the left-wing Sundance Institute since 2001.

Among the countless other beneficiaries of his largesse have been The Constitution Project, which has provided support to Islamic terrorists, and the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee, which has bankrolled lawyer Lynne Stewart, convicted of serving as a messenger between her client Omar Abdel Rahman and the terrorist group al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. Most recently, Soros money was critical in the successful bid by the left to subordinate the Internet to FCC regulation. As John Fund put it in National Review on February 26, the goal of the Soros-funded Internet grab is, quite plainly, “an Unfree Press — a media world that promotes their values.”

But to focus on these individual groups, grantees, causes, and collaborators is to miss the forest for the trees. And quite a forest it is. During the last decade or so, the groups has created or funded have been shaped into a veritable “Shadow Party,” as it’s been called – a network of key political actors that collaborate in pushing the Democratic agenda, all the while pretending to be apolitical and independent of one another. Key elements of the Shadow Party include the Center For American Progress, which poses as a think tank, and MoveOn, a PR and fundraising operation.

In January 2015, Washington Times reporter Kelly Riddell provided a picture of the way in which this Shadow Party operates. Describing Soros as the “man at the financial center of the Ferguson protest movement,” she explained that some of his grantees “helped mobilize protests in Ferguson, building grass-roots coalitions on the ground backed by a nationwide online and social media campaign,” while other Soros grantees “made it their job to remotely monitor and exploit anything related to the incident that they could portray as a conservative misstep, and to develop academic research and editorials to disseminate to the news media to keep the story alive.” These Soros-funded groups, Riddell recounted, “fed off each other, using content and buzzwords developed by one organization on another’s website, referencing each other’s news columns and by creating a social media echo chamber of Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter hashtags that dominated the mainstream media and personal online newsfeeds.”

If there’s a figure, then, in the carpet of U.S. politics today, it’s not the Koch brothers. It’s George Soros, enthusiast for “social justice” and foe of freedom.

Posted on May 9, 2015April 8, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

Useful Stooges

Useful Stooges

Tag: Center for American Progress

The despicable Van Jones

Ben Norton, baby-faced Bolshevik

David Sirota’s Venezuelan “miracle”