Melanie Phillips Credits New Zeal With Van Jones' "Scalp"

Melanie Phillips (author of "Londonistan") has given New Zeal credit in a great column on her UK Spectator Blog.

Thankyou Melanie!



The prize for Van Jones’s scalp should go not to the US talk show hosts but to the sleuth who first dug out the facts about Van Jones and his radical circles. Last April Trevor Loudon – the New Zealand blogger who has been indefatigably mapping the web of ultra-left radicalism that brought Obama to power -- revealed:

A few short years ago Anthony (Van) Jones was a Bay Area radical agitator-a committed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, waging war on the police and capitalist system. Today Van Jones holds a key position in the US government and has the ear of President Barack Obama.

Two days later, Loudon disclosed that not only had Van Jones been the leading light of a revolutionary organization called STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) but he had been linked to the Weather Underground terrorist organisation (erstwhile stamping-ground of Obama’s disavowed ex-comrade, Bill Ayers) and to a network of other revolutionaries who in turn gave rise to the campaigning group Progressives for Obama. Loudon also discovered that Van Jones had been a fellow at the no less radical George Soros-funded Centre for American Progress.

On August 17, Loudon further revealed that in September 2008, several weeks before Obama was even elected, two staffers at the radical Institute for Policy Studies, Phyllis Bennis and Chuck Collins, posted on its website 22 names they thought would make suitable appointments for an Obama administration – of whom one was Van Jones,

‘to direct the Commerce Department’s new “green jobs initiative”’.

Loudon revealed that Barack Obama, Van Jones and Chuck Collins were all united by Demos, a Fifth Avenue New York based think tank:

A little known, but highly influential organization, Demos is a key component of the ‘progressive’ machine that brought Obama and the Democrats to power in 2008. Besides being Director, Program on Inequality and the Common Good, at the Institute for Policy Studies, Chuck Collins works for Demos as Director of the Tax Program -Business for Shared Prosperity. Incidentally in the mid 1990s, Collins was one of several IPS people who helped organise the New Party-which Obama joined in 1995 in Chicago. Van Jones serves on the Demos Board of Trustees.

According to the Demos website, Obama was cherry-picked to join the group that originally developed Demos as an institution ‘challenging the status quo’. Loudon suggested that he was selected because of his strong connections in the 1990s to the radical community group ACORN – the one with a history of voter fraud and intimidation -- with which Demos worked closely. Loudon observed:

Seven years ago Van Jones was a San Francisco hardcore Alinskyite street communist. After hooking up with the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, Democratic Socialists of America, former '60s Maoists, Weather Underground supporters and Demos he managed to land a job in the White House.

Twenty two years ago Barack Obama was a Chicago Alinskyite ‘community organiser’. After hooking up with the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, Democratic Socialists of America, former ‘60s Maoists, Weather Underground supporters and Demos he managed to land a job in the White House.

Could there be a connection?

Read the whole column here