Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America

by Dana Milbank

  On August 24, a month after Beck introduced his viewers to the “communist” Jones, he essentially turned The Glenn Beck Show into The Van Jones Show. “Here is czar number one. The first stop is Van Jones,” Beck began. He showed a video clip of poor quality featuring a profane Jones blasting oil companies. Another clip had him describing his job at the White House as “a community organizer inside the federal family.”

  Over piano music, Beck narrated. “Let’s start at law school. Van Jones showed up wearing combat boots and holding a Black Panther book bag. He said of that period, ‘If I had been in another country, I probably would have joined some underground guerrilla sect.’ ”

  More Jones images followed.

  A major turning point came in 1993 when he was arrested during the Rodney King riots. In jail he, quote, “met all of these young radical people of color, I mean, really radical—communists and anarchists. And it was, like, this is what I need to be a part of,” end quote … Jones says, “By August, I was a communist.” He spent the next ten years as a full-fledged radical, among other things founding a group called STORM, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, which held study groups in the Marxist and Lenin teachings.

  For about seven minutes, Beck went on.

  All of STORM’s members developed a basic understanding of and a commitment to revolutionary Marxist policies … The group particularly revered Mao Tse-tung … In 1999, Jones was arrested again while protesting the World Trade Organization. STORM dissolved three years later. He has since renounced black nationalism to focus on environmentalist issues …

  “And why is it that such a committed revolutionary has made it so high into the Obama administration as one of his chief advisers?” Beck wanted to know, then bestowed a slogan on his prey: “Van Jones: Yes, still a revolutionary. Now, just a more effective, and, dare I say, powerful one.” Beck said he asked the White House if it was “aware that Van Jones has this background in radical politics.”

  The White House, he said, responded that “Jones is entirely focused on one policy goal, building clean energy incentives.” As Beck correctly observed, “That doesn’t seem like an answer.”

  In truth, the White House had no idea about Jones, and Obama officials were in the worst possible place: at the mercy of Glenn Beck.

  The drumbeat became daily. On August 25, Beck spoke of Jones as “a self-proclaimed radical, revolutionary communist—his words, not mine.” He compared him to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. “He’s a communist, focused on what? Job creation.”

  The next night, Beck said the White House had “emailed several times and said ‘stop calling Van Jones a czar.’ They say he’s a ‘special adviser.’ ” Beck said nobody was refuting his claim that Jones was “a radical communist.”

  Actually, some were. Jones had given up his communism and turned into an avowed capitalist. “We cannot realistically proceed without a strong alliance between the best of the business world—and everyone else,” he wrote in The Green Collar Economy. But the fact that he was once a communist was, for Beck’s purposes, close enough.

  Beck spoke in the present tense as he recited Jones’s offenses to Bill O’Reilly: “Radical, radical. Believes Mao Tse-tung was a great guy. Wants an overthrow of the American system.” He also said Jones “named his four-year-old son after a Marxist guerrilla out of Africa.”

  A few days later, Beck had “newly discovered audio and video” of Jones. The White House adviser, identified on-screen as “Self-Avowed Communist,” could be heard saying, “This movement is deeper than a solar panel … We’re going to change the whole system.”

  Then came video that Beck found of Jones saying “the white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people of color communities.” He also played a clip of Jones mocking “clean coal” technology. “Or we could have unicorns pull our cars for us, you know,” Jones said. “We could have the tooth fairy bring us our energy at night.”

  “Or we could have a self-proclaimed communist create jobs,” Beck retorted. “Speaking of unicorns and fairies, what do they have in mind to replace 48 percent of our national energy source once they bankrupt it? Will Van Jones sprinkle pixie dust on giant windmills to make up the difference? … Will progressive pigs fly right out of Van Jones’s butt and pedal bicycles to power the turbines attached to our power grid?”

  The forces of Beck had been unleashed. A Beck fan site, DefendGlenn.com, posted a grainy video of Jones recorded in February 2009, a month before he started at the White House. It had Jones saying “nobody belongs here but the Native American peoples” and, most damaging, Jones calling Republicans “assholes” for blocking Obama’s agenda. “That’s a technical, political science term.” Added Jones: “I can be an asshole, and some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama are going to have to get uppity.”

  The White House was losing its appetite for defending Jones. Trying to keep his job, Jones released a statement: “I apologize for the offensive words I chose to use during that speech. They do not reflect the views of this administration, which has made every effort to work in a bipartisan fashion, and they do not reflect the experience I have had since I joined the administration.”

  Beck’s reply: Apology not accepted. The night after Jones’s apology, Beck was back on the air with more on Jones. After thirty minutes of buildup and teasing, he unveiled his latest discovery. “He is also a 9/11 truther … After the 9/11 attacks, they demanded on their Web site, quote, ‘a call for immediate inquiry into the evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur.’ ”

  Jones’s signature was on the truthers’ petition. “So, on top of all of the radical progressive and communist nonsense coming from Obama’s green jobs czar, Van Jones, you can now add, thinks the Bush administration blew up the World Trade Centers and covered it up … 9/11 truther, a guy believes that Bush intentionally killed 3,000 American citizens.”

  Jones didn’t know it yet, but he was finished. The White House put out the weak defense that he “didn’t carefully review” the petition before signing it. Jones asked that his name be removed from the petition. “I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever,” he said in a statement, his second apology of the week.

  His apology did nothing. The day after Beck’s “truther” broadcast, Republican leaders demanded Jones’s resignation. The next day, he resigned—angrily. “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,” he complained. “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 the future.”

  The White House washed its hands of Jones with a tepid thank-you-for-your-service statement.

  Beck, for his part, began a victory lap that lasted the better part of a year.

  Every couple of nights he would play a clip from a Jones video as part of a larger point about the Obama administration’s communist tendencies. For example:

  “We can’t seem to shake the radical influence of former green jobs czar Van Jones, because it ain’t just Van Jones.”

  “Once again, there’s a budding scandal that is completely invisible to the people who do not watch Fox News. This joins the parade of such scandals as Van Jones.”

  “The 9/11 truther, Van Jones: Who got him into the White House?”

  “The first chink in the armor was when Van Jones was forced to resign because of this program.”

  “We cannot let them disappear like Obama allowed Van Jones to disappear in the middle of the night, because Van Jones—I’ve got news for you, gang—is still in the system.”

  “This is Marx. This is Che. This is Van Jones.”

  Jones, for his part, landed a teaching job at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School
—named for the only person living or dead whom Beck seems to loathe more than Jones. “It’s kind of a Glenn Beck Program five o’clock smart joke,” Beck commented. “Woodrow Wilson and Van Jones—who would have seen that coming?” Of Jones’s other position, with the Center for American Progress, Beck likened it to Tiger Woods “caught in bed with an exotic dancer and in response install[ing] a stripper pole right there in his guesthouse.”

  The NAACP awarded the fallen Jones its President’s Award, calling him an “American treasure” and arguing that “a defining trait of our country is our collective capacity to practice forgiveness and celebrate redemption.”

  At the awards ceremony, Jones had a reply to the man who brought him down. “To my fellow countryman, Mr. Glenn Beck: I see you and I love you, brother. I love you and you cannot do anything about it … Let’s be one country.”

  “Implication here is that I don’t love him,” Beck replied on his show.

  Now, where would somebody get that idea?

  Months later, Jones delivered a surprisingly generous assessment of Beck:

  Glenn Beck, seriously, recovering alcoholic. My father’s an alcoholic. It’s incredibly difficult to do what he’s done, to be able to actually get sober. He is a father of a special-needs daughter about whom he speaks with great tenderness and great care. You don’t see that very often. He’s a heterosexual man who is willing to weep in public. That doesn’t happen very often … I don’t agree with him and I think he’s using his genius and his talents in ways that are destructive to the country, but I love him as a person.

  Beck’s response was not quite so generous:

  So the guy who was calling for a revolution, a communist revolution, a guy who has said that the United States not only … blew up the World Trade Center but also [that] the white people in America are poisoning communities of color, he’s now loving me and calling me a genius and saying that, you know, he just disagrees? The problem with Van Jones is that statement that he made, “I am more than willing to drop the radical pose for the radical ends.” That makes it hard to trust anyone when he talks about posing.

  The acquisition of Van Jones’s scalp filled Beck with bloodlust. He was convinced the entire Obama administration was chock-full of Marxists, Maoists, and communists of every stripe. All that he was lacking was evidence.

  He set his “watch dogs”—his followers who search the Internet for clues to fill out Beck’s theories—to work on more administration targets. “Van Jones was the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote in one message on Twitter. “Watch Dogs: FIND EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON CASS SUNSTEIN, MARK LLOYD AND CAROL BROWNER,” he Tweeted. “Do not link before burning to disc.” The names were those of three other Obama advisers on Beck’s long hit list.

  “This wasn’t about Van Jones,” he told his viewers after Jones had been forced out. “This is to try to figure out who the president of the United States is, by looking at the people he surrounded himself with.” And the people he surrounded himself with, curiously, all seem to hate America.

  Beck moved himself to tears as he spoke of the various and sundry Obama communists. “What I am telling you now is that there are Marxist revolutionaries who have dedicated themselves to principles that will destroy our nation as we know it!” he shouted. After his tears subsided, he went on: “I’m asking you to consider things that sound insane. But they’re true.”

  Variations of that cry would go out every few days. “They are exposing themselves as the radical, revolutionary country-destroyers that they are,” he said months later. “Because only one is going to be standing in the end—our country, or the progressives.”

  This was, of course, the very lowest form of political argument: describing your political opponents not just as opponents but as enemies of the nation. It’s impossible to have a rational debate with a traitor who seeks to destroy the country. But, then again, rational debate wasn’t exactly what Beck was going for.

  Beck’s first choice of an Obama administration target, even before Jones, had been a physicist by the name of John Holdren, who had taken a leave from Harvard’s Kennedy School to become director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

  Holdren first came to Beck’s attention after the Web site World Net Daily and other parts of the conservative blogosphere began to report that Holdren, more than three decades earlier, had written some very strange things. In a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Beck took the whispers from the dark corners of the Internet and splashed them in the mass media.

  “The science czar,” Beck told his viewers one night in July 2009, “once wrote with very little disapproval about using forced sterilization for population control.”

  “Just absolutely beyond the pale,” said Beck’s guest, from the conservative National Review. “As far as we know, he has never renounced.”

  “No, never,” Beck concurred. He then read from Holdren’s book: “The government might require only implantation of a contraceptive capsule to sterilize people,” Beck read. “It must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children and old people, and also pets or livestock.”

  Added Beck: “So, he doesn’t mind making men sterile, as long as, you know, Fluffy isn’t hurt.”

  “Sterilizing agents from drinking water,” the guest contributed. “I mean, it’s nuts.” He added that “the man has signed his name to all of this.”

  A week later, Beck was after Holdren again. “We got czars coming out our—they’re shooting out of our butts,” he said. “Czars like John Holdren who is—there is great evil happening in our country. Holdren has proposed forced abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”

  Proposing forced abortions and sterilizing agents in the drinking water? That would be evil—if it were true. But it wasn’t.

  Holdren did indeed coauthor a book in 1977 titled Ecoscience, a college textbook. And the book does indeed discuss “involuntary fertility control.” But the authors didn’t exactly endorse it. The book says that “some countries may ultimately have to resort to [such actions] unless current trends in birth rates are rapidly reversed by other means.” It contained the part that Beck quoted, but it also said that “the risk of serious unforeseen side effects would, in our opinion, militate against the use of any such agent [as sterilants].” The authors said “a far better choice” would be to use “milder methods.”

  As for “forced abortions,” they argued that, in a legal sense, “compulsory abortion could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society,” but “few today consider the situation in the United States serious enough to justify compulsion.”

  No proposal for forced abortion here—just a textbook legal analysis (albeit a dubious one) of this and every other possible population-control option.

  But what Beck lacked in actual facts, he made up for with repetition—each time taking Holdren’s argument further beyond what the textbook said. One night it was this: “He said that nowhere in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence can you find the right to have any number of children.” Two weeks later it was this: “He believes that we should have planetary control, you know, through the U.N.” Several weeks later it was: “He also said maybe forced abortions would be good—you know, the kind they have in China. Has he ever denounced these methods? No, no.”

  * * *

  However hard Beck swung at Holdren, he just couldn’t dislodge him from his White House job. The charges wouldn’t stick, and so, except for the occasional mention of Holdren, Beck moved on.

  He had only modestly more success with the next name on his hit list: Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, who, like Van Jones and Holdren, came to Beck’s attention after first becoming the subject of attacks on the far-right Web site World Net Daily.

  Sunstein had been nominated to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (Beck called the position the “regulato
ry czar,” though it was a Senate-confirmed position that existed long before the Obama presidency).

  Sunstein’s appointment was, if anything, a nod to conservatives on Obama’s part. Sunstein had backed John Roberts to be chief justice of the Supreme Court and supported the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, voiding Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban.

  But Beck had a different view. He determined that Sunstein was unfit to hold office because of his views on … pets? “Wait until you meet this guy,” Beck said on his Fox show. He “believes in giving legal rights to livestock, wildlife, and pets. So, your pet can have an attorney file a lawsuit against you. When my pet starts to talk, he can call an attorney. Human rights for livestock? This is not the America I grew up in or you grew up in.”

  As Sunstein’s confirmation vote in the Senate approached, Beck stepped up his attack. August 25, 2009: “Cass Sunstein … has also proposed that your dog be allowed to have an attorney in court.” September 2: “He wanted your pet to have an attorney … If they could find out if rats suffer, and you’re trying to trap rats or kick them out of your house, a rat could sue you.”

  This was, evidently, based on the introduction Sunstein and a coauthor wrote for a 2004 book on animal rights that they edited. In it, Sunstein and his coauthor actually argued something close to the opposite of what Beck charged: that states could enforce animal cruelty laws without declaring that animals could no longer be considered property.

  “A state could dramatically increase enforcement of existing bans on cruelty and neglect without turning animals into persons, or making them into something other than property,” they wrote. “A state could do a great deal to prevent animal suffering, indeed carry out the central goals of the animal welfare program, without saying that animals cannot be owned. We could even grant animals a right to bring suit without insisting that animals are persons, or that they are not property. A state could certainly confer rights on a pristine area, or a painting, and allow people to bring suit on its behalf, without therefore saying that that area and that painting may not be owned.”