It\’s Getting Hot In Here

In the week before Van Jones’ departure from the White House, the White House was ominously silent in its support for Jones.  Additionally, most of the major environmental organizations, who had supported Jones’ work and appointment to the White House seemed uncertain on to how to respond to attacks, so didn’t.  It was only this morning, over a day after Jones resigned that Green For All, the organization he founded and lead just prior to working for the Obama Administration, sent an announcement to their supporters with the news.  Other organizations have been slower to respond.

While I believe this was a strategic mistake on the part of the White House (allowing the right-wing media to smear members of the Administration one-by-one), the Obama Administration should not waste precious time and political capital debunking Glenn Beck’s lies.  Instead, their role in this is to instill confidence in Administration officials’ competence (which they certainly did not do).

As a result, the responsibility to tackle smear campaigns like this rests with the media (to debunk lies), other members of the Democratic Party (to provide support for the Obama Administration) and civic organizations (to articulate the vision of Van’s work).  But there was no coordinated progressive response to dismantling the smear tactics coming from the extreme right and magnified through the media. Given the vast silence on the Left is it any surprise that the attacks worked in turning public opinion against Van Jones?

Yesterday Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, wrote a response to Jones’ departure titled “We Blew It”, in which he explains the lack of vocal support for Jones.

When I saw the first Glenn Beck piece on Van Jones and the Apollo Alliance as the new vast left-wing conspiracy, I could not take it seriously. Silence enabled Fox to keep pushing…I assumed it would blow over.

Well, that was a mistake. So was the decision by the White House to treat the initial attacks not as part of an assault on the president but, instead, to allow them to be viewed as being about Van Jones…

It was organized by the Republicans as part of a conscious strategy, and it is only the first. We should be critical of ourselves for having blown this one. But we shouldn’t forgive either ourselves or the Administration if the next time we sense this happening we don’t fight back harder, faster, and in a way that calls a mob a mob, racism racism, and an attack on the president an attack on America.

I appreciate Carl Pope’s sentiment, and hopefully he and the rest of our movement has learned that silence doesn’t make a problem go away.  Just because the Left won an election does not mean making progress will be easy.  The extreme Right is committed to preventing the Obama Administration from making changes this country desperately needs and will to resort to hateful and dishonest tactics to see that happen.

And now that they have tasted victory, Beck and others have turned to his new targets: Cass Sunstein, Mark Lloyd and Carol Browner. Problems don’t disappear by covering our eyes; diseases don’t go away by ignoring them.  As David Robert’s of Grist writes, “Our civic immune system has grown weak. There are no filters, no longer shared standards of evidence, truth, or decency.  The poison courses unhindered through the body. Nothing, no matter how factually insane or morally repugnant, can be repelled.”

What we need now is for the people of this country (media, organizational leaders, and most importantly individuals) to refuse to accept false and hateful speech to masquerade as reporting.  We need all those people to make it unacceptable to profit from such statements.

Speak up.