Czar: Education to make students 'revolutionaries'

New Princeton lecturer Van Jones slammed non-activist students as 'worthless people'

Posted: March 01, 2010
9:17 pm Eastern


By Aaron Klein
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

Van Jones, President Obama's former "green jobs" czar and a newly appointed Princeton lecturer, has a history of sparking protests against universities and previously slammed non-activist students as "worthless people" obtaining "worthless degrees," WND has learned.

Jones also implied a university education must help students become "revolutionaries."

Jones resigned in September from his post as adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Quality after it was exposed he founded a communist revolutionary organization and signed a statement that accused the Bush administration of possible involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Jones also called for "resistance" against the U.S. Jones previously stated his advocacy for green jobs was part of a broader movement to destroy the U.S. capitalist system.

Princeton last week announced Jones has been appointed a visiting fellow in the Center for African American Studies and the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the university's Wilson School.

Noliwe Rooks, associate director of the Center for African American Studies, told the Daily Princetonian Jones will also conduct research and host discussions on such subjects such as "the next phase of green jobs, environmental policy [and] environmental justice."

Jones explained in an official university statement he looks forward to "exploring solutions to our nation's toughest challenges with the students and scholars of Princeton."

"America is at a crossroads, facing economic and ecological crises," he said in the statement. "The next generation of job-creating, green solutions will be even more challenging to conceive. And they will be even more difficult to implement."

Jones, however, has previously led university protests and has made controversial remarks about college students.

Jones campus activism traces back to at least 1993, when he was a Yale law student. WND found a Boston Globe picture of Jones standing on the steps of a Harvard library with a caption reading he was on the seventh day of a hunger strike, urging Harvard students to protest against the Clinton administration's detention of 264 Haitian refugees with HIV at Guantanamo.

As the founder in 1999 of Bay Area Police Watch, which was accused of anti-police activities, Jones led multiple protests on California college campuses.

In April 1999, Jones helped lead more than 300 University of California-Berkeley students and community members in a protest vigil and hunger strike in support of the university's ethnic studies department, which was facing major budget cuts and the scaling back of courses.

Jones told the university's newspaper the vigil and attendant hunger strike was a critical point in the movement to defend what has been called the "systematic dismantling" of UC Berkeley's ethnic studies department.

"There are thousands of worthless people here signing off checks to the administration to get their worthless degrees," he said. "You have the sense to know that you've got to fight for what you (really want)."

"History has to be made by young people fighting for a new future," Jones continued. "You're living your history right here tonight."

Jones said budget and faculty cuts in the ethnic studies department signaled that the UC Berkeley administration is willing to do anything to "prevent you from becoming revolutionaries."

"What's at stake isn't a curriculum any more – it's a vision for a new generation," he said.

Jones in the 1990s was the leader and founder of a radical group, the communist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM. The group's official manifesto, entitled "Reclaiming Revolution," boasted "we also saw our brand of Marxism as, in some ways, a reclamation."

STORM was founded in 1994 and disbanded in 2003.

"We agreed with Lenin's analysis of the state and the party," read STORM's manifesto. "And we found inspiration in the revolutionary strategies developed by Third World revolutionaries like Mao Zedong and Amilcar Cabral."

Cabral is the late Marxist revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands.

WND previously reported Jones named his son after Cabral and reportedly concludes every e-mail with a quote from the communist leader.

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.

Speaking to the East Bay Express in 2005, 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.

Jones in the early 1990s also founded and led Bay Area Cop Watch, which has been accused of anti-police activities. WND previously reported Jones signed a petition calling for nationwide "resistance" against police.

Jones went on to found the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, named after a little-known civil rights firebrand and socialist activist.

In a 2005 Uprising Radio interview, Jones talked about using "green" jobs to bring down the capitalist system.

"Inside that minimum demand was a very radical kernel that eventually meant that from 1964 to 1968 complete revolution was on the table for this country," he said. "And, I think that this green movement has to pursue those same steps and stages. Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we're not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won't be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether."

Succeeding revelations about Jones by WND included:

Jones previously served on the board of an environmental activist group at which a founder of the Weather Underground terrorist organization is a top director.

Jones was co-founder of a black activist organization that has led a campaign prompting major advertisers to withdraw from Glenn Beck's top-rated Fox News Channel program.
The revelation followed Beck's reports on WND's story about Jones' communist background.

Jones and other White House appointees may have been screened by an ACORN associate.

One day after the 9/11 attacks, Jones led a vigil that expressed solidarity with Arab and Muslim Americans as well as what he called the victims of "U.S. imperialism" around the world.

Just days before his White House appointment, Jones used a forum at a major youth convention to push for a radical agenda that included spreading the wealth and "changing the whole system."

Jones' Maoist manifesto while leading the group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, was scrubbed from the Internet after being revealed by WND.

Jones was the main speaker at an anti-war rally that urged "resistance" against the U.S. government – a demonstration sponsored by an organization associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In a 2005 conference, Jones characterized the U.S. as an "apartheid regime" that civil rights workers helped turn into a "struggling, fledgling democracy."

Jones signed a petition calling for nationwide "resistance" against police, accusing them of using the 9/11 attacks to carry out policies of torture.

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