Van Jones: An Untruthful Truther

Former green czar Van Jones has been quite active in the media lately promoting his new book, Rebuilding the Dream. But he truly outdid himself yesterday on UStream:

 “You always have some Americans that, they don’t want to go forward. ‘We like slavery,’ or ‘we like segregation,’ or ‘we like women not voting,’ or ‘we like the environment being destroyed, we like workers having no rights, we like children in factories…’And they want to conserve, ahem, conserve, ahem, conserve the old ways.

“And then you have people who say ‘no, we can be a better country than this,’ let’s progress, ahem, let’s progress beyond those old hateful ways. And so that’s always been a debate and a divide, but you know the people who are trying to make America progress always win in the end.”

“You have these people out there like Glenn Beck and we have the late Andrew Breitbart, who will take a half of a fact and a half of a fact, and half of a lie and mix it up together and sell it to you. And you know a lot of these haters actually think I’m like a 9/11 truther and a felon and all this type of stuff. And you can go and see it’s not true, but in their little information bubble the facts haven’t…they’re still tricked. It’s like they live in Ashton Kutcher world. You know what I mean? They’ve just been ‘punked’ and they don’t know it.”

There’s only one problem with Van Jones’s criticism of Andrew and Beck: he’s actually a 9/11 Truther. Jones signed a statement posted at 911Truth.org in 2004 that asked for an investigation into whether Bush might have “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” The spokesman for 911Truth.org confirmed that all signatures on the website had been screened and verified.

And Jones is indeed a radical. On September 12, 2001, Jones appeared at a rally at which he stated, “It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders….We’ve got something stronger than bombs, we have solidarity. That dream of revolutionary change is stronger than bombs.”

Lately, Van Jones has been trying to assert a greater presence within the Occupy Wall Street movement, calling for a “99% Spring” of protest and upheaval. His organization, Rebuild the Dream, claims to have conducted over 900 activist training workshops in the past few days, reaching 100,000 volunteers. 

It turns out, however, that Jones’s involvement in Occupy is resented by some Occupiers, who see it as a hostile takeover. Perhaps they know they have enough extremism in their movement without another 9/11 Truther–and an untruthful one, at that.