“The third lesson, and tip,” says Dunn, “actually come from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse Tung and Mother Theresa. Not often coupled with each other!”

The audience laughs: It’s a joke to everyone but the grim-faced Beck.

“But the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is: You’re going to make choices. You’re going to challenge. You’re going to say why not.”

From there, Dunn tells a story centered on a quote from Mao: “You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.” Beck, in a flourish, gets up and attaches a communist hammer and sickle to a blackboard.

“The most important political philosopher for her is Mao Tse Tung,” he says. “Oh, and Mother Theresa.”

How stupid is this? How desperate an attempt at red-baiting? Well, if Beck is going to argue that quoting Mao Tse Tung is proof of communist sympathies, he should talk to this well-known communist.

T. Boone Pickens and Van Jones at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas. (Getty Images)

The descent of Van Jones from a powerful job in Barack Obama’s administration to career-sinking political controversy happened at a stunning pace. On Aug. 10, the White House’s ousted special adviser for green jobs appeared at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas, sharing a stage with Republican billionaire-turned wind power evangelist T. Boone Pickens. The next day, The Washington Post ran a warm, brief profile on Jones, calling him “a leader in a growing movement that aims to hit two major social and policy challenges — the struggling economy and environmental quality — with one boulder.” That was how the mainstream media and the business-friendly side of the environmental movement handled Jones, as a preternaturally gifted advocate for an everyone-wins green campaign.

After midnight on Sept. 6, 2009, on one of the slowest news days of the year, Jones buckled under a multi-pronged assault on his record and associations, the most damaging being his 2002 and 2004 flirtations with the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement. He resigned from his post. “Opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones said in a statement. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide … [but] I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past.”

What Jones might have said, but did not, was that his downfall represented a crucial and possibly educational victory for the wing of the conservative and libertarian movement that has tried, without much success, to paint environmental activists like Jones as anti-capitalist radicals less interested in the health of the planet than in a well-disguised radical agenda.

For years, Jones had been viewed by the conservative movement as a scam artist, a purveyor of what the libertarian economist and occasional Rush Limbaugh radio show guest-host Walter E. Williams once called “watermelon environmentalism.” The green movement, Williams argued, was socialism in disguise: green on the outside, red on the inside. (Williams, like Jones, is African American.) That critique has been repeated by conservative and libertarians for more than a decade, and it has found powerful advocates. In 2007, Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus claimed that “the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants,” but “the threat of ambitious environmentalism.” Later that year, Klaus’s arguments were translated and published in a book by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank funded, in part, by the energy industry. And Klaus gave the keynote address at the think tank’s 2008 gala dinner. But in recent months, the “watermelon” attack had made it onto Glenn Beck’s Fox News show.

“Do you like watermelon?” Beck asked sarcastically on the June 26 episode of his program.

“I love watermelon,” responded Phil Kerpen, the director of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

“I think this is a watermelon bill,” said Beck.

“I think you’re exactly right,” said Kerpen. “This bill is green on the outside, the thinnest green on the outside. And inside, it’s deep communist red.”

Still, before the Jones controversy, the “watermelon environmentalism” attack had been a relatively hard sell. In March, the conservative-libertarian City Journal ran a piece labeling Jones a “green hustler” and “[Jesse] Jackson version 2.0, eco-upgraded for the Great Warming.” In April, the popular right-wing Website WorldNetDaily ran the first in a series of Jones exposes asking whether a “red” would “help blacks go green.” Attacks on Jones remained obscure enough in May that Meg Whitman, a policy adviser to both Mitt Romney’s and John McCain’s presidential campaigns, gushed to reporters about how she “loved” what Jones was doing.

Not until late July, when Fox’s Glenn Beck started warning his viewers about Jones with some of the same evidence produced by WorldNetDaily, did the long-term campaign against “watermelon environmentalism” go viral. Beck’s reports on Jones leaned heavily on a sympathetic 2005 profile from the East Bay Express, an Oakland, Calif. alternative weekly paper, in which Jones said he became a “communist” after the Rodney King verdict, and detailed his days at the head of a radical chic organization called STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement). This was a history Jones had been open about for years. But in July, and especially after Color of Change — a civil rights group co-founded by Jones — began pressuring advertisers to drop Beck’s show, Beck and other Fox News personalities ran story after story on how communism was at the root of Jones’s environmentalism. One moment on the Sept. 3 episode of Sean Hannity’s prime time news show, with a small panel, including Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle and conservative pundit S.E. Cupp, digging into the story, was typical of the coverage:

SEAN HANNITY: He’s a communist. I mean avowed.

KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE: Yes.

S.E. CUPP: Self-avowed. Yes.

KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE: Self-avowed communist.

Reached on Sunday by TWI, some of the people who’d been in the trenches making the case against “watermelon environmentalism” were not yet sure if the Jones story was a one-time incident, a self-inflicted injury on the green movement, or the kick-off of a wave of new attention on the environmental movement.

“I think the Jones case is a great example of the green outside-red inside phenomenon,” said Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at the conservative Capital Research Center who has appeared on Beck’s Fox News show and wrote more than a dozen items about Jones for the American Spectator. “With the exception of the 9/11 trutherism, I don’t think Van Jones’s views are much different from those in the environmentalist movement as a whole. Environmentalism isn’t about saving the planet: It’s about controlling the behavior of people.”

Vadum was not sure about the long-term impact of Jones’s downfall, as some early media coverage of the controversy has honed in on an early 2009 video of Jones calling Republicans who didn’t support climate change legislation “assholes,” which came to light hours before the 9/11 papers. “The mainstream media ignored this throughout and even now is characterizing his departure as based on calling Republicans nasty names, which is but a smidgeon of the whole story.”

Kerpen, who appeared on Beck’s show many times to provide more analysis of the socialism-environmentalism connection, was happy to see Jones go. But he worried that the “watermelon” issue was gaining less traction than the generic issue of “czars,” policy advisers given executive branch jobs without Senate approval.

“It’s more important to follow through on the politics of ‘green jobs’ and use the Van Jones affair to fight that concept and cap-and-trade than to pursue other czars,” said Kerpen. “My primary interest has always been using this to win policy fights.”

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

When you start working here at FreedomWorks, the first book you read is Saul Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals.” We’re avid students of the political left.

FreedomWorks isn’t exactly shy about this. Here’s what Brendan Steinhauser, another spokesman, said to me two months ago:

We’re applying Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” here. We’re using methods that the Left has used, and that other movements have used, all the way back to the Civil Rights movement. First of all there has to be a real grievance, and that’s what Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King  had. That’s what we have.

You can’t overstate the degree to which conservatives read Alinksy to understand Obama and liberalism in power. Jim Geraghty has a primer.

Nevertheless, I officially move that May 1 be forever known as Dre Day.

Let me tell you something, we heard Lenin. There was a little snippet last week that was, ‘Now is not the time for profits.’ Look – in Lenin’s book, ‘What Is to Be Done?’ is simple text of what I always though was for the communists, it was remarkable to hear very similar language from ‘What Is to Be Done?’ which is we have no place for profits.

Of course, that isn’t what the president said.

This is what he said:

We’re going to be having conversations as this process moves forward directly with these folks on Wall Street to underscore that they have to start acting in a more responsible fashion if we are to together get this economy rolling again. There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses—now is not that time.

Now, it’s clear that the president was saying something that Wall Street doesn’t think is fair. As Cramer’s CNBC colleague Erin Burnett argued on Meet the Press yesterday, employees of bailout money recipients who are getting bonuses believe they earned that money, because they worked hard for it. The president thinks that they should be happy that taxpayers bailed them out, and consider that they wouldn’t be making any money without the bailout funds. Cramer doubtlessly agrees with those employees, and with Burnett, but does he really think the president is practicing 1920s-vintage communism by telling companies to cut off their bonuses as long as the money is coming out of the pockets of taxpayers?

Maybe we’re expecting too much from Jim Cramer.

A chaplain holds services for soldiers in an operating base in Ramadi, Iraq. (army.mil)

So there are atheists in foxholes after all.

Last week, on the eve of Veterans Day, the Secular Coalition for America and the Military Assn. of Atheists and Freethinkers held a news conference in Washington to present an open letter to President-elect Barack Obama. Citing a report that found 21 percent of those in the armed forces identifying themselves as atheists or having “no religion,” the groups called on the new administration to pursue a military policy more open to nonbelievers.

The action follows on the heels of a much-publicized legal case involving atheism and the military. Jeremy Hall, 23, a U.S. Army specialist, grew up a Bible-reading Baptist in rural North Carolina. But his faith in God did not survive the battlefields of Iraq. Since disclosing his atheism, Hall claims he has become a target of insult and scorn — labeled “immoral,” “devil worshiper” and, curiously enough, gay — by fellow GIs and superior officers. But the pith of his complaint runs deeper than personal insult.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

In his lawsuit, filed in Kansas last year, Hall and his co-plaintiff, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, accuse the military establishment not only of prejudice against nonbelievers but of blatant favoritism toward Christianity. As the suit challenging the place of religion in the armed forces lumbers toward a constitutional showdown, Hall and the Secular Coalition for America have sparked a national conversation about one of the military’s least discussed shibboleths.

The battle lines are already drawn. Critics depict Hall’s complaint as a campaign to destroy the spiritual foundation that the nation’s military has depended on for centuries. (“His right to spew his lying hot air cannot be allowed to decrease the morale of soldiers in combat,” writes one Christian blogger.) Meanwhile, the latest crop of best-selling atheists grant Hall some form of secular sainthood.

U.S. martial leaders have long prayed before and after battle: George Washington at the close of the Revolutionary War; George Dewey after his victory against the Spanish fleet at Manila; and Dwight D. Eisenhower on the eve of D-Day. Chaplains have also been key components of U.S. fighting forces, from the ragtag colonial militias to the highly professional units of today.

So when Americans learn that soldiers are being evangelized on military bases, that religious materials are often circulated among troops and that depictions of Washington kneeling in prayer are ubiquitous in military circles, they might likely see all this as an organic part of a venerable tradition.

But these incidents are anything but organic — and not nearly as deeply rooted as one might imagine. In fact, they are largely the residue of a forgotten footnote to U.S. military history during the late 1940s and 1950s — a time when civilian and military leaders attempted to imbue the armed forces with religious zeal and purpose.

At issue today, however, is not the place of religion in the military. Rather, it is the official sanction that government gives it. While this matter is given special weight by those who see America in the midst of a modern holy war against terrorism, it has precedent in the nation’s last great quasi-religious crusade — the battle against atheistic communism.

More than 60 years ago, when the Cold War was menacing but still unnamed, U.S. leaders faced the luckless dilemma of picking their own poison. If they demobilized the military after World War II, as their predecessors had done after previous wars, the Soviet threat might become unmanageable. But maintaining a large standing military would betray a national principle. It was considered profoundly un-American to maintain a powerful armed force in a time of peace. According to a long line of patriots, from Samuel Adams on down, standing armies threatened liberty and smothered virtue.

Added to this dilemma was a spiritual wild card. While Americans today would probably define communism as a political or economic philosophy, decision-makers in the 1940s and 1950s viewed it as a quasi-religion. It had prophets and prophecy, missionaries and martyrs, and a belief in the ultimate perfectibility of mankind through inevitable historical process.

National-security analysts fretted over the almost “messianic” devotion of Soviet citizens. Military leaders worried that physical force alone might be insufficient in the emerging Cold War. “Over and over again, gigantic concentrations of physical power have gone down in defeat before a lesser strength propelled by conviction,” warned one brigadier general in 1949. “The Goliaths have perished at the hands of the Davids.”

President Harry S. Truman decided to run the risk of America maintaining a sizable standing military. But to many, his cure looked worse than the disease. In 1938, only one in five servicemen was younger than 21. Ten years later, soldiers under 21 made up more than half the military and accounted for 70 percent of all enlistments. America’s new standing army was regarded as puerile, impressionable and naïve.

Military leaders wondered if they stood on the verge of creating a potential Frankenstein’s monster. Their plan needed a fail-safe. So they decided not to pull the plug on their monster — but to give it a soul instead. To this end, religion became indispensable.

Military leaders vigorously blended the martial with the sacred to foster virtue and create spiritual warriors immune to the siren songs of communism. In the Fort Knox Experiment of 1947, the army toyed with the idea of simultaneously running new recruits through a physical and religious boot camp. Though this proved too blatantly unconstitutional for Army-wide adoption, the “Fort Knox methods” lived on in the Army’s commitment to develop the spiritual side of its troops.

Truman thought so highly of this mission that, one year later, he created the President’s Committee on Religion and Welfare in the Armed Forces, the first presidential commission devoted to religion. Its members designed campaigns to encourage soldiers to attend church; to urge local religious groups to invite servicemen to their congregations; and to revitalize the military chaplaincy.

While the military brass had no stomach for mandatory religious services, it did authorize, beginning in the late 1940s, various “character guidance” programs run by the reorganized chaplaincy. New recruits attended a minimum of six hours of chaplain lectures on such topics as the sacredness of marriage, the relationship between democracy and religion, and the dangerous faith of communism. All other personnel had to attend similar lectures once a month.

Among other things, soldiers learned that in the Cold War, the United States, a “covenant nation” due to its reliance on God, confronted the “demonic nation” of the Soviet Union. In a contest between God and Satan, military leaders bet on the home team.

This was tame compared to the religious programs of the newly independent Air Force. Under Maj. Gen. Charles I. Carpenter, the Air Force project consisted of lay retreats, on-base preaching missions by religious groups and the confiscation of obscene materials.

Carpenter also believed in the power of religion to solve the personal problems of Air Force personnel. Consider one case cited by a U.S. Air Force report. A military surgeon reported treating an airman suffering from a nervous breakdown. The diagnosis: neurosis stemming from religious confusion. The prescription: a session with the base chaplain, who set up a “systematic plan” of religious treatment.

Nor did Carpenter stop there. In late 1948, he struck a deal with the Moody Bible Institute of Science, an evangelical organization devoted to repairing the damage done to religion by Darwinism. Soon, airmen across America and throughout the world were watching films like “God of Creation” and “Duty or Destiny.” The Air Force even provided the representatives of the Moody Institute with a fully crewed B-25. By 1951, nearly 200,000 Air Force personnel were watching Moody films each year.

Nonbelievers like Hall must have existed in the 1950s, or, at the very least, troops uncomfortable with the idea of religious training. But few spoke up. It took a 1962 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to end the 15-year period of officially sanctioned military sacralization.

In the wake of Engel vs. Vitale, the Supreme Court ruling that deemed prayer in public schools unconstitutional, the Washington director of the American Civil Liberties Union brought grievances of “religious indoctrination” directly to Army Sec. Cyrus R. Vance. Vance responded quickly. In March 1963, he ordered Army chaplains to create a new, secular version of character guidance — outside chapels and without sermonizing. The other services did the same.

As long as the United States remains a religious country, there will be religion in the military. And while the outcome of Hall’s lawsuit is uncertain, it has sparked a worthwhile conversation about faith and the uniform.

Understanding why the military was allowed to craft its own religious imprimatur 60 years ago takes no large stretch of the imagination. During an era when the truly religious could not be communists, the truly irreligious could not be Americans. This axiom rang particularly true for those on the front lines of the Cold War.

Those lamenting Hall’s lawsuit today should consider this slice of military history. From Puritan dreams to evangelical rallies, religion has remained a constant force in our national journey — the military’s in particular.

But the official sanctions afforded it have been anything but constant. Few today realize just how much of the military’s current positions toward religion, far from being longtime American attitudes, are merely vestiges from the Cold War era.

Those cheering Hall’s case should appreciate the extent to which the military has grown more secular over the past few decades. Where once the U.S. Air Force supplied airplanes to evangelists, it now officially insists that commanders “not take it upon themselves to change or coercively influence the religious views of subordinates.”

During the struggle against atheistic communism, comments like those of the Army’s Lt. Gen. William Boykin — who in 2004 called the war on terror a battle against “Satan” — were not only common but celebrated. Today, they are decried by the command structure, including President George W. Bush.

Throughout history, the Davids have sometimes slain the Goliaths. But more often, the stronger, better-equipped force prevailed — with or without the blessings of the Almighty.

Maybe this is what Hall means when he says that while he doesn’t believe in God, he does “believe in Plexiglas.” Whether he wanted to or not, Hall may have stumbled on the ultimate form of “coming out” in the military, and this may require the consideration of military leaders, an appreciation for the military’s religiously sanctioned past and perhaps even a decision from the next commander-in-chief.

If nothing else, it would give a new meaning to the policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Jonathan Patrick Herzog is an acting assistant professor of history at Stanford University and a national fellow in the Hoover Institution there. He is working on a book, “The Hammer and the Cross,” exploring how U.S. leaders used religion as a weapon in the early Cold War.

In the ad, the soldiers are replaced by Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and President George W. Bush (who has a bottle of liquor in his belt) all clad in military garb. The trio are hoisting an American flag — with the stars replaced by a Soviet-style hammer-and-sickle — in a cemetery near the graves of “Private Enterprise” and “Capitalism.” Above the scene is an insignia that reads, “The New Communist.” Subtle, right?

Underneath the artwork is a notification that the ad was paid for by Bill Perkins of Houston. My curiosity piqued, I decided to try to track him down. The address listed in the ad was for a mailbox service, so I ran a search on OpenSecrets.org to see if Perkins had made any campaign contributions lately. The results were surprising. I had expected that Perkins — clearly a strident anti-Communist — would probably be a conservative Republican or a Ron Paul supporter.

I actually found that while he donated $2,000 to President George W. Bush in 2004, Perkins also gave $10,000 to the Democratic National Committee that year. This election cycle, Perkins donated the maximum $2,300 to Sen. Barack Obama, as well as $1,000 to Sen. Christopher Dodd in May. I also learned that Perkins is the president of a company called Small Ventures USA. With that information, I was able to get in touch with Perkins for a short interview.

A little background: Perkins said he is a natural gas trader and an energy project developer. He describes himself as a libertarian and an Obama supporter. He donated to Dodd after the Connecticut senator endorsed Obama, to help relieve his campaign debt.

Perkins said he commissioned the ad from Otabenga Jones & Associates, an art collective he patronizes that produce artwork from an Afro-centric perspective. The ad cost him $130,000. I asked if it was worth the eye-popping sum. His answer was an unequivocal “Yes.”

“Sometimes freedom costs,” Perkins said. “I’m an American citizen, a patriot. I want to stick my two cents in there and stir up the pot. Maybe [the bailout] isn’t the right thing to do.”

Though it seems fairly obvious, I asked what the ad was trying to say.

“I felt the need to discuss the direction of the country, and the broader implications that are not being focused on,” Perkins said. “I’m trying to say that there’s a communist — or socialist revolution — going on in this country. Before we go down that path, there needs to be a discussion, if that’s the way we want to go…If it is socialism, OK. How far is this going to go? Completely? How is this going to work? ”

He described the Wall Street bailout as “trickle-down communism,” or “capitalism on the way up, communism on the way down.” The hurried atmosphere surrounding the Wall Street bailout reminds him of the Bush administration’s rush to war in Iraq, he said.

“This country’s been through a lot,” Perkins said. “We can handle it. We don’t need to totally change our economy, trample our Constitution and set up new powers for the executive branch, without having a full, in-depth analysis of whether this is the right path.”

Perkins said he was surprised that so many Republicans are embracing the bailouts.

“It’s amazing. It’s like finding out your best friend is gay,” Perkins said. “It’s like, ‘By the way, I’m a socialist. Didn’t you know that?’”