You probably won't be surprised when I tell you that Glenn Beck
wasn't the mastermind behind the campaign to remove Van Jones from his
position as the head of the White House Council on Environmental
Quality. That would be giving Beck way too much credit.
Turns out that the attack was orchestrated by a fringe group of
free-marketeers called the Americans for Prosperity (AFP), who describe
themselves as "grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of
limited government and free markets on the local, state and federal
levels." You can read a complete backgrounder on AFP here. It suffices to say they get a lot of money from some of the biggest players in the right-wing attack machine.
It will also come as no surprise that AFP is also behind much of the health care reform town hall shenanigans
On Fox News Forum AFP's director of policy, Phil Kerpen, brags about how his organization brought down Van Jones:
"I spent the next two weeks researching everything I could find
about Jones and the Apollo Alliance (much of which is still to be
published, including a forthcoming paper from the Capital Research
Center next month), the national umbrella organization for coordinating
between the environmentalists, the labor unions, and the social justice
street organizers that Jones has served as a board member and a primary
national spokesman for."
This was all then fed to Glenn Beck, who gleefully took it to town
and hammered away on Van Jones. No kidding, Beck is bent on bringing
this administration to its knees and rallying the right-wing fringe
players to follow suit. And it won't stop here> The likes of Kerpen and
AFP have found their rallying cry: "Don't argue clean energy, but
instead paint Obama's policies as a socialist/communist plot to control
America."
To quote Kerpen's Fox Forum article:
"There was so much material there, but what really stood out is what I used the next day on F&F:
the "green jobs" concept was merely a new face on the old ideology of
central economic planning and control, an alternative and a threat to
free market capitalism."
And,
"Please share with Glenn this article about green jobs czar Van
Jones, a self-described communist who was radicalized in jail. Confirms
"watermelon" hypothesis." (I was referring to an explanation we had offered on his show of the cap-and-trade bill as a "watermelon," green on the outside but Communist red to the core.)"
I hate to echo Kerpen's overheated rhetoric but he's showed us his
hand and we now know where the attack is coming from. We also know that
their strategy moving forward will be to frame green jobs and the clean
energy bill as a radical socialist plot. So the question is, what do we
do about it?
I have my ideas, but I would love to hear yours.