Van Jones on "so-called Libertarians": "They say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings"
Obama's former Green Jobs czar Van Jones lit into "so-called libertarians" at an Occupy rally in Los Angeles last weekend:
Jones began his speech by citing his six months of work in the White House before launching into a tirade against the "so-called Libertarians."
In citing the Libertarian principle of economic liberty, Jones stated "They've taken their despicable ideology and used it a wrecking ball, that they have painted red, white and blue, to smash down every good thing in America."
Jones continued, "They say they're Patriots but they hate everybody in America who looks like us. They say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings, ya know ya'll."
"They love going to New York City! [sarcastically] I just had to take my child to see America's beauty." Jones then referenced the Statue of Liberty and fumed "You can't be an anti-immigrant bigot and a Patriot at the same time."
I'm going to have to mic check you there, Mr. Jones. You're not talking about so-called libertarians, but your former boss and current president. See, it's Barack Obama who supports "traditional marriage"; Barack Obama who supports a drug war that sends an alarming number of black men to prison and destroys their employment prospects; Barack Obama who supports a foreign policy that kills children; Barack Obama who supports regulatory barriers that require the poorest of the poor to borrow their way into the workforce; Barack Obama who supports an immigration strategy that rips apart families and sees the children of undocumented workers put up for adoption.
Whether Obama's support for those policies means he hates gays or brown folk is not for me to say. As the scriptures tell us, "For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?"
Libertarians, on the other hand, love brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings, and immigrants. Many of us, after all, fit rather neatly into those categories, and we show our affection for ourselves and our neighbors by supporting the right of all peoples to live free of state-sponsored violence, discrimination, undue imprisonment, and theft; as well as the entirely predictable consequences of both left-wing and right-wing social engineering.
But—and really this should go without saying—libertarians are not the only non-liberals who don't hate (to cite just one example) immigrants. Last year
[a] coalition of Tea Partiers and conservatives, including Take Back Washington's Kathryn Serkes, Downsize DC's Jim Babka, Tea Party Nation's Judson Phillips, and Washington D.C. Tea Party founder Thomas Whitmore, sent a letter to congressional Republicans warning them not to pass the Legal Workforce Act, which would mandate that all U.S. employers use E-Verify.
I don't know where Van Jones stands on E-Verify—it would not surprise me if a man who knows next to nothing about a political philosophy that has existed since the creation of the Icelandic Free State in 930 AD does not know that mandatory E-Verify would hurt small businesses and hard-working immigrants alike—but his former boss supports it.
To Jones's credit, he was not the most clueless speaker at "All In for the 99%." That honor goes to Edward Norton, host of National Geographic's Strange Days on Planet Earth. "When I was on a panel once with [Jones] and the Dali Lama," Norton said, "it was a toss up as to who was wiser, Van or the Lama."
More Reason coverage of Jones, including his "nuttiest belief," his economic fabulism, and his green jobs snake oil salesmanship.
