Van Jones Unloads on Libertarians

[George H. Smith]

Van Jones Unloads on Libertarians: They ‘Hate’ the ‘Brown Folk, the Gays, the Lesbians’…They‘re ’Anti-Immigrant Bigots’

As if this were not enough, the actor Edward Norton compares Van Jones to the Dali Lama!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWj8AKKFHlk

Ghs

[Jerry Biggers]

Exactly what one would expect from Van Jones, a complete misrepresentation of libertarian positions. It's so much easier knocking down strawmen.

I didn't realize that the actor, Edward Norton, shared the ideological views of Van Jones, but in the excerpt, Norton is the one introducing him, and relates that he was at another conference once, where both Van Jones and the Dalai Lama were on a panel, and flattering comparisons had been made about their brilliance. Norton adds that Van Jones was the wiser, in his opinion.

Not surprising, since the Dalai Lama has repeatedly said that communism holds the correct ethical position and that capitalism fosters "greed" (And no, the reference to greed was not an endorsement of Rand's interpretation of that concept).

[merjet]

As if this were not enough, the actor Edward Norton compares Van Jones to the Dali Lama!

"I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle." - Alfred Hitchcock

[studiodekadent]

Jones is either totally stupid or deliberately lying.

If I were to be extremely charitable, I'd suggest that he's taking a bunch of the very worst of the Paleocon wing of the Mises Institute types (Hoppe/Rockwell/etc.) and claiming it to be representative of all libertarians.

But that is a shocking case of bad sampling.

Rand's article on racism says precisely what the vast majority of libertarians believe about racism. Of course, Van Jones and his progressive buddies believe that individualism is a Straight White Male idea (because, apparently, real non-straight non-white non-males can't possibly want to be thought of as individuals rather than as mere instances of a collective identity!) designed to Institutionalize Heteronormative Cisgenderist Eurocentric Oppression.

[Actually, that's more of a satire of postmodernism rather than progressivism, but what the hell]

Still, point is that Jones doesn't have a leg to stand on. As a countercultural type myself, I've never had any problem in libertarian circles, and I've only met with a small amount of shallow judgmentalism in certain Objectivish circles.

That said, the proof that Van Jones is an idiot (or liar) is Gary Johnson. Pro-civil marriage equality, pro-counterculture, pro-immigration.

[George H. Smith]

Jones is either totally stupid or deliberately lying.

Or both. :

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I am about 2/3 the way through Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky and this presentation by Van Jones looks like it was made as a classroom exercise.

I will be writing about that book when I finish it. There's a hell of a lot of truth in it--more than people on our side generally admit--but Alinsky was one evil fuck.

Pardon my French, but he's far worse than a recipe-maker for smearing public personalities and rousing the rabble.

This dude understands power and he understands what makes human beings tick way down in their core. Ironically, part of his motivation is love--love for the hopeless. He wakes them up. That is what rings his ding-a-ling. That is his sacred mission on earth. And that is where the compelling nature of his message lies.

I believe we should think about that some. Learn it. That part is not evil, either. On the contrary, it is good and noble and actually does show great love. I'm all for kindling the human spirit in distress. If you can do it in a wasteland of long-suffering and apathy, I'm with ya'. The evil part comes in how he wakes the hopeless up--rallying them around an urge and plans to destroy the "haves" and just take their stuff.

He even teaches "community organizers" how to manipulate the hopeless and the resigned into hungering after that in the first place without them realizing their very desire is being manipulated.

Van Jones is the quintessential Alinsky product. Obama once was, but according to doctrine, he sold out. I expect to see Van Jones around for a long time and I expect Obama to fade after he leaves office.

Van Jones finally realized there is something deeper that classic class manipulation cannot vanquish--one that the kooky fringe libertarians get. Except, hellooooo! They're not so kooky and not so fringe anymore, are they? The small government argument has gone mainstream. He knows that libertarians are on to something he (and Alinsky) missed.

He's floundering and attacking from different angles right now. He hasn't got a handle on it yet. He's mostly taking Glenn Beck's stuff and spinning it (like working the Statue of Liberty poem into an emotional appeal during his talk, for example, or going on about what the American Dream means). I guess he figures it worked on one side, so it will work for his message. It won't. But I expect him, over time, to stop imitating and start figuring this stuff out enough to put up a very seductive (and successful--to what extent God knows) intellectual challenge with pure venom at the core.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here is Van Jones basically saying he lied (er... "made a statement that was "overly broad" in VJ-Speak ) in order to "mix things up."

This stuff speaks for itself.

Van Jones Somewhat Retracts Libertarian ‘Bigots’ Statement After Confronted by…Russia Today

Benny Johnson

April 10, 2012

The Blaze

From the article:

... Monday night, Alyona Minkovski of Russia Today’s Alyona Show confronted Jones about his controversial comments. He quickly walked them back.

“Well hey, listen, I think we have to start punching back an start fighting back. Here’s the deal, if you can’t take it, don’t dish it out,” he told Minkovski. He then hedged: “Now that statement I made was overly broad.” But Minkovski didn’t let Jones posture away so easily.

“But is that extremist? Because you call people extremists who go after you for your political views,” she sniped.

Jones, the Yale-educated attorney responded, “Well, well listen– but that’s, that’s American politics. Ya know, I mean, you guys should know that. American politics people– we mix it up. ...

Here's the video that's in the article:

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/N0Qz3-LkV-A?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This guy is going to be a major headache for freedom.

In Rules for Radicals, Allinsky said:

Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's "conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action"; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual's personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of "personal salvation"; he doesn't care enough for people to be "corrupted" for them.

Van Jones is right on board with this thinking. Like I said, he is an Allinsky product.

The interview with Alyona Minkovski on Russia Today is a clear example of him using his own personal corruption as a weapon. Truth is not a value for him. It is nothing more than a tactic to use or not depending on the outcome he desires.

So let people look and absorb and understand what they are dealing with when they listen to this man.

Credibility counts for a lot with thinking people and Van Jones knows it. He is certainly smart enough to grok that. So why does he discredit himself so easily?

I say he doesn't give a damn. The audience Van Jones targets is not made up of critical thinkers. His thing is to get angry hordes with torches and pitchforks to storm the castle--and critical thinkers don't usually carry pitchforks.

So he seeks out and speaks to people who let others think for them. And if a lie will piss them off in the way he likes, he lies.

Michael

[Mikee]

In Rules for Radicals, Allinsky said:

Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's "conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action"; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual's personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of "personal salvation"; he doesn't care enough for people to be "corrupted" for them.

This quote is particularly chilling given the close ties reportedly between Allinsky and Obama. Forget Van Jones. This quote describes a mindset so far removed from my own or anyone I've ever known or admired I can't believe I share the same species with Allinsky. Truly alien. There is no reasoning with such minds other than brute force.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Mike,

Close ties reportedly between Alinsky and Obama?

Heh.

I doubt the qualification is needed, but let's see some reporting anyway.

Here is a recent article by John Fund in National Review:

Still the Alinsky Playbook

By John Fund

March 19, 2012, issue of NR

From the article:

(Liberals have also largely ignored the fact that the subtitle of Hillary Clinton’s honors thesis at Wellesley was “An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”)

. . .

What exactly are the connections between Obama and Saul Alinsky’s thought? In 1985, the 24-year-old Obama answered a want ad from the Calumet Community Religious Conference, run by Alinsky’s Chicago disciples. Obama was profoundly influenced by his years as a community organizer in Chicago, even if he ultimately rejected Alinsky’s disdain for electoral politics and, like Hillary Clinton, chose to work within the system.

. . .

In 1992, after Obama returned to Chicago from Harvard Law School, he ran a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an ACORN affiliate set up by Alinsky acolytes. The purportedly non-partisan effort registered 135,000 new voters and was integral to the election of Carol Moseley Braun to the Senate. Obama then moonlighted as a top trainer for ACORN.

Obama even became ACORN’s attorney in 1995, when he sued on its behalf to implement the “Motor Voter” law — a loose system of postcard voter registration that has proven to be a bonanza for vote fraudsters — in Illinois.

. . .

Obama’s 2008 campaign showcased many Alinsky methods. “Obama learned his lesson well,” David Alinsky, the son of Saul Alinsky, wrote in the Boston Globe in 2008. “The Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board.”

In her new book on Obama, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor lifted a bit of the curtain on his past. She told the Texas Book Festival: “The Obamas often don’t mingle freely — they often just stand behind the rope and reach out to shake hands — but he sees Jerry Kellman, his old community-organizing boss, and he is so happy to see him he reaches across and pulls him in. And Obama says, ‘I’m still organizing.’ It was a stunning moment and when [Kellman] told me the story, it had echoes of what Valerie Jarrett had told me once: ‘The senator still thinks of himself as a community organizer.’ . . . I think that plays into what will happen in the 2012 race.”

You can expect that the Obama 2012 campaign and allied groups will be filled with people deeply steeped in Rules for Radicals. That is good reason for conservatives to spend time studying Saul Alinsky. It also explains why liberals are so anxious to sugarcoat Alinsky and soft-pedal his influence on Team Obama.

Here's the part of that article I didn't know, and, in my view, it explains a lot:

Where did Alinsky get this amorality? Clues can be found in a Playboy magazine interview he gave in 1972, just before his death. In the closest thing to a memoir Alinsky left, he told how he decided to do his (never-completed) doctoral dissertation in the 1930s on the Al Capone mob, and to do it as “an inside job.” He caught the eye of Big Ed Stash, the mob’s top executioner, and convinced him he could be trusted as a sort of mob mascot who would interpret its methods to the outside world. “He introduced me to Frank Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone’s number-two man,” Alinsky told Playboy. “Nitti took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti’s boys took me everywhere.”

Alinsky recalled that he “learned a hell of a lot about the uses and abuses of power from the mob,” and that he applied that knowledge “later on, when I was organizing.” The Playboy interviewer asked, “Didn’t you have any compunction about consorting with — if not actually assisting — murderers?” Alinsky replied: “None at all, since there was nothing I could do to stop them from murdering. . . . I was a nonparticipating observer in their professional activities, although I joined their social life of food, drink, and women. Boy, I sure participated in that side of things — it was heaven.”

Unlike the mob members he hung out with, Alinsky never coveted great wealth. “He was essentially a thrill-seeker who admitted he was easily bored and always had to stir things up,” says Lee Stranahan, who was a blogger for the Huffington Post until last year, when his research into Alinsky-inspired groups soured him on the Left. “His followers are even more ideological and relentless than he was.”

Incidentally, I started the first quote with that comment about Hillary Clinton's college thesis on Alinsky. Here it is if you are interested.

THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT...An Analysis of the Alinsky Model

This link gives some discussion, but also provides other links to Hillary's full paper, including a scan of it. She actually interviewed Alinsky (twice) to write that paper. She disagreed with him on some issues like his disdain for elective politics, but she favorably compared him to Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King. Now she is Obama's Secretary of State.

Cute.

Incidentally, here's a short but good relevant article by a colleague of David Horowitz from 2008: Hillary, Obama And The Cult Of Alinsky. (Rense is a weird site for that article to be at, but there it is.)

But speaking of Horowitz, here is a pdf file of an excellent analysis called: Barack Obama's Rules for Revolution, The Alinsky Model. There are many things worth quoting from that essay, but I think the following is the best, even though it is a bit outside the topic. Still, it explains (to me at least) one the motivations behind Obama's actions. The context is the discussion of Alinsky's praise for Lucifer at the beginning of Rules for Radicals as an indication of the radical mindset.

... Alinsky begins his text by telling readers exactly what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. In his own mind the radical is building his own kingdom, which to him is a kingdom of heaven on earth. Since a kingdom of heaven built by human beings is a fantasy - an impossible dream - the radical’s only real world efforts are those which are aimed at subverting the society he lives in. He is a nihilist.

This is something that conservatives generally have a hard time understanding. As a former radical, I am constantly asked how radicals could hate America and why they would want to destroy a society that compared to others is tolerant, inclusive and open, and treats all people with a dignity and respect that is the envy of the world. The answer to this question is that radicals are not comparing America to other real world societies. They are comparing America to the heaven on earth - the kingdom of social justice and freedom - they think they are building. And compared to this heaven even America is hell.

I could say this same observation applies to many anarcho-capitalists I have read.

But getting back to Alinsky, how about a picture? I looked for the following one from reading Horowitz's paper since it comes from Obama's previous campaign site. I only found it on a blog or two, so I copied it and put it on the OL site. It is Obama back in the day teaching Alinsky's model of analyzing power.

You can see the headings, "Power Analysis" and "Relationships Built on Self Interest." Pure Alinsky way of doing it. Basically, this means backroom deals when getting power.

And the self-interest here is not the same as Ayn Rand's concept. Alinsky's self-interest falls more in the acquiring goodies by hook or crook realm, not so much producing them. Note how Obama's administration has conducted itself since taking power. It's ALL backroom deals playing off of "Relationships Built on Self Interest."

Ya' gotta' admit it. Barack Obama was an excellent student. And teacher, for that matter.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

Ya' gotta' admit it. Barack Obama was an excellent student. And teacher, for that matter.

Michael

Barak Obama was the love-child (so to speak) of Saul Alinsky, Old Mayor Daley and Frank Nitti. It was manage a troi that produced the Obamanation. Obama plays according to Chicago Rules.

Ba'al Chatzaf