Conspiracy Czar
By: Ben Johnson
frontpagemagazine.com %P% Friday, September 04, 2009

IT MUST MARK A NEW LOW IN PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY when the fact that someone is a self-described Communist is not the most damning thing that can be said of a presidential adviser entrusted with federal power. Not only is Green Jobs Czar Van Jones a 9/11 Truther, but his organization believes Hurricane Katrina was a Bush conspiracy, as well. His unique combination of radicalism and irresponsibility provides a remarkable window into Barack Obama’s own radicalism.

After a string of embarrassing revelations, yesterday the press reported that Jones had joined such notable leftists as Cynthia McKinney, Ralph Nader, and Howard Zinn in signing the 9/11 Truth Statement (signature #46), which called for a federal investigation whether President Bush knew about – or perhaps colluded in – the destruction of the World Trade Center. This is somewhat ironic, since on the evening after 9/11, Jones stood in the streets with the Maoist-communist organization he founded – Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) – to denounce the United States for having brought the disaster on itself.

To this author’s knowledge, it has not yet been reported that Van Jones also popularized the belief that Hurricane Katrina was a conspiracy. The organization Color of Change, which he co-founded after Katrina, waged a campaign to censure President George W. Bush, claiming: “He knew about the levees, and he knew about the Superdome. But he did nothing.”(Emphasis in original.) In 2006, Color of Change worked with moveon.org Civic Action to screen Spike Lee’s film When the Levees Broke, which features allegations the federal government dynamited the levees. As one report puts it, “Lee took no side on the issue” – originally popularized by Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan – but Lee made it clear in other media that he believes in the theory.

The conspiracy would be consistent with Jones’ statement last January, that “white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities, because they don’t have a racial justice frame.”

In a 2005 blog on the Huffington Post, Jones wrote the hurricane had been exacerbated by Bush’s environmental policies and “deep contempt for poor African-Americans.”

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