Glenn Beck is coming under attack. Various lefties, cheerled by The Huffington Post, have been leading a campaign to yank Beck's advertisers, and they have achieved some success. Fortunately, some big names in the conservative movement are fighting back. So it's a Cable Game Royale.
OK, so who are these anti-Beck lefties? Here's a look: Writing for The American Spectator, Matthew Vadum zeroes in on the group leading the anti-Beck effort, called Color of Change:
The particularly unsavory left-wing pressure group Color of Change has an axe to grind with Glenn Beck -- and it's personal.
The extremist racial grievance group isn't happy that Beck did several news packages on Van Jones, President Obama's controversial green jobs czar who describes himself as a communist. (Green really is the new red.)
Jones is a founding board member of Color of Change, but Color of Change doesn't want you to know that. Maybe having an avowed America-hating radical on the group's board is bad public relations.
Another excellent piece, by Aaron Klein, appears in WorldNetDaily, reminding us about the lefty reality of Van Jones, a former leader of Color of Change, who amazingly has gone on to a big job as "Green Jobs Czar" in the White House:
Van Jones is a co-founder of Colors of Change. The group's executive director is James Rucker, who previously served as director of Grassroots Mobilization for the radical MoveOn.org.
Immediately following NewsBusters report, Colors of Change scrubbed its site of any mention of Jones. However, a Google cache of the site lists Jones as a founder.
After News Busters pointed out the deletion, Colors of Change added Jones back to its site but now claims "Van hasn't been active in the work of ColorOfChange in recent years."
"After helping ColorOfChange get started in 2005, Van moved on to other pursuits," the website now claims.
Previously, the site simply listed Jones as a co-founder but did not claim any distance from the radical activist.
Most major media reports on the Colors of Change campaign fail to note Jones is a founder of the group or that Beck has been reporting critically on Jones.
Beck's program, meanwhile, has been taking major hits from the Colors of Change campaign.
Geico and Lawyers.com have pulled their ads from the Fox News show, and Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance
and SC Johnson have all claimed their ads were run in error and vowed to correct the mistake.
According to the White House blog, Jones' duties include helping to craft job-generating climate policy and to ensure equal opportunity in the administration's energy proposals.
Jones, formerly a self-described "rowdy black nationalist," boasted in a 2005 interview with the left-leaning East Bay Express that his environmental activism was a means to fight for racial and class "justice."
Jones was president and founder of Green For All, a nonprofit organization that advocates building a so-called inclusive green economy.
Until recently, Jones was a longtime member of the board of Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, business
, environmental and community leaders that claims on its website to be "working to catalyze a clean energy revolution that will put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of high-quality, green-collar jobs."
He was a founder and leader of the communist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM. The organization had its roots in a grouping of black people organizing to protest the first Gulf War. STORM was formally founded in 1994, becoming one of the most influential and active radical groups in the San Francisco Bay area.
STORM worked with known communist leaders. It led the charge in black protests against various issues, including a local attempt to pass Proposition 21, a ballot initiative that sought to increase the penalties for violent crimes and require more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults.
The leftist blog Machete 48 identifies STORM's influences as "third-worldist Marxism (and an often vulgar Maoism)."
Speaking to the East Bay Express, Van Jones said he first became radicalized in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots, during which time he was arrested.
"I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist."
"I met all 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.' I spent the next 10 years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary," he said.
Trevor Loudon, a communist researcher and administrator of the New Zeal blog, identified several Bay Area communists who worked with STORM, including Elizabeth Martinez, who helped advise Jones' Ella Baker Human Rights Center, which Jones founded to advocate civil justice. Jones and Martinez also attended a "Challenging White Supremacy" workshop together.
Martinez was a long time Maoist who went on to join the Communist Party USA breakaway organization Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, or CCDS, in the early 1990s, according to Loudon. Martinez still serves on the CCDS council and is also a board member of the Movement for a Democratic Society, where she sits alongside former Weathermen radicals Ayers and Dorhn.
One of STORM's newsletters featured a tribute to Amilcar Cabral, the late Marxist revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands.
The tribute is noteworthy because Jones reportedly named his son after Cabral and reportedly concludes every e-mail with a quote from the communist leader.
STORM eventually fell apart amid bickering among its leaders.
Van Jones then moved on to environmentalism. He used his Ella Baker Center to advocate "inclusive" environmentalism and launch a Green-Collar Jobs Campaign, which led to the nation's first Green Jobs Corps in Oakland, Calif.
At the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007, Jones announced the establishment of Green For All, an activist organization which in 2008 held a national green conference in which most attendees were black. Jones also released a book, "The Green Collar Economy," which debuted at No.12 on the New York Times' bestseller list – the first environmental book written by an African American to make the list.
And in this toughly worded call to arms, "When Communists Attack: Obama Brownshirts Try To Silence Glenn Beck," by the always hardcore Erick Erickson declares:
Barack Obama’s brownshirts are after Glenn Beck.
We can’t let them win. If they win with Beck, they’ll be emboldened to go after even more people.
A while back, Glenn Beck called Barack Obama a “racist.” Given all the terrorists, thugs, and racists Barack Obama has chosen as close personal friends (see e.g. Rev. Wright), it’s not a stretch to say it.
In fact, Obama’s Green Jobs Czar, the convicted felon and self-declared communist Van Jones, has direct ties to the organization that’s trying to shut down Glenn Beck. Jones’s group has hired a big Hollywood PR firm and they are pressuring Glenn’s advertisers to stop advertising. If not, they’ll lead a boycott.
We need to strike back and boycott these groups for ditching Beck. If they are going to fold so easily in the face of Obama brownshirts, we must push back. If not, who’ll be next?
