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.”

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President Barack Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones quit late last night after pressure mounted over his extremist history first exposed in WND … in April, Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for WND.com, broke the first major story on Jones who was identified as a self-described radical communist and “rowdy black nationalist” who said his environmental activism was actually a means to fight for racial and class “justice.”

At the end of the article, the site recommends the purchase of Glenn Beck’s new book through its online store.

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Saturday. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”

He continued: “I have been inundated with calls — from across the political spectrum — urging me to ’stay and fight.’ But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.”

Jones was targeted by Fox News’ Glenn Beck, who described Jones as a “former black nationalist” and a “self-avowed communist.” Jones faced increasing pressure to step down after conservative blogger Gateway Pundit found Jones among the signatories of a petition calling for an investigation into whether the Bush administration deliberately failed to act to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

An April 12 WorldNetDaily headline; Glenn Beck on Fox News (YouTube)

On April 12, the conservative Website WorldNetDaily published an expose on newly appointed White House “green czar” Van Jones that labeled the environmental activists a “an admitted radical communist and black nationalist leader.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Based on readily available online sources, including an alternative weekly paper in Oakland, California, Aaron Klein’s piece had a sensational title–”Will a ‘red’ help blacks go green?”–and a sensational spin. In the 2005 profile of Jones that Klein cited, reporter Eliza Strickland recalled Jones’s first year out of Yale Law School, working for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in the Bay Area, and how when he was “observing the first large rally since the lifting of the city’s state of emergency, he got swept up in mass arrests,” then came to sympathize with the black radicals and communists who’d been arrested with him, before leaving them behind to become an environmental activist. In Klein’s hands, the story took on a different, more sinister tone: “Jones said he first became radicalized in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots, during which time he was arrested.”

Klein’s story made some small waves online, but it wasn’t picked up by the mainstream media until July 23. That was when Glenn Beck first told his Fox News audience about Jones. “This is a guy who is a self-avowed communist,” said Beck, “and he is in the Obama administration … this guy wasn’t a radical, and then was arrested. He spent six months in jail, came out a communist.”

Beck took a shot at the “avowed communist” Jones again on July 28, again on Aug. 4, again on Aug. 11 (”this is a convicted felon, a guy who spent, I think, six months in prison after the Rodney King beating”), again on Aug. 13, and again on Aug. 21. During that period, a civil rights group called Color of Change launched a campaign to get advertisers to drop Beck. The host responded on August 25 with a week-long special series, “The New Republic: America’s Future,” in which Jones became exhibit A of the “radical leftists currently advising the president of the United States.” Back at WorldNetDaily, Klein wrote matter-of-factly that “Beck’s segments about Jones were based in part on WND’s reporting that Jones was as an admitted radical communist and black nationalist leader.”

The growing campaign against Jones — to date, Beck has warned his viewers about him on 14 episodes of his Fox News show — is a powerful example of the influence of a Website that’s very infrequently cited by name, even on the right. (Neither Klein nor Beck’s staff responded to TWI’s questions about the Jones stories.) But where other, more mainstream conservative sites cover partisan political battles and run dry op-eds by think tank experts, WND is all muckraking and rumor-chasing, all the time.

The 12-year-old Website, with 17 full-time editorial staffers, has a White House correspondent, Les Kinsolving, who is most often used by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs as a punchline. One staff reporter, Jerome Corsi, co-wrote the bestselling Swift Boat Veterans for Truth book “Unfit for Command,” but has been derided by other conservatives for what Politico called “outrageous assertions and fringe theories” about a plan to merge the United States with Mexico and Canada and a shadowy relationship between President Barack Obama and Kenyan Prime Minister Rail Odinga. And the site has relentlessly covered the conspiracy theories about Obama’s citizenship, with hundreds of articles, several petitions, a billboard campaign, and a $17.99 in-house documentary on the issue.

Rush Limbaugh (left) celebrates the release of his book "See, I Told You So," with collaborator Joseph Farah (right). (WNDBooks)

But WorldNetDaily’s Web traffic, revenue, and influence are impressive. It frequently leads the pack in conservative online media. According to James R. Whelan, the Florida-based marketer who runs WorldNetDaily’s ad operations, the site has already surpassed $1 million in ad revenue for 2009. It has a mailing list of more than 355,000 e-mail addresses, which has been built up through tools like daily polls on the site, and has been rented (through third-party vendors) by the Republican National Committee.

“I don’t listen to what idiots like Katie Couric say, about how this is a bad economy and how you can’t do business right now,” said Whelan. “We’re having a great year. We have a great, loyal audience, made up of politically active people who are more or less after the truth.”

The driving force beyond the site’s financial success is its traffic. Whelan tells potential advertisers that the site reaches “6 million unique viewers every month.” That number is difficult to confirm with public information, but it’s not far off. According to siteanalytics.compete.com, WorldNetDaily had more than 1.9 million visitors in July, the month when the “birther” story peaked. That was the slowest month for the site in more than a year. In June, a more average month, it drew in more than 3.9 million visitors. For comparison, that month Free Republic had around 3.2 million visitors, The Washington Times had roughly 2.9 million, Townhall.com had 2.5 million, HotAir.com had 2.4 million, National Review had roughly 2.2 million, Human Events had 1.4 million, LewRockwell.com had 1.1 million, CNSNews.com had around 532,000, and The American Spectator had around 358,000. Among conservative news sites, only Fox News, with roughly 50 million monthly visitors, and Newsmax, with around 6.2 million in June, regularly beats out WND. It’s tougher sledding for Websites that attempt to carve out a more refined audience of conservatives: in June, David Frum’s New Majority had only 42,000 visitors. (According to Google Analytics, it fared quite a bit better at 72,000 unique visitors.) WND, unlike New Majority, has a permanent link at the Drudge Report; according to Alexa.com, Drudge accounts for 13 percent of WND’s traffic.

“The problem is that the mainstream conservative world is not impermeable to this stuff,” Frum told TWI. He cited a persistent rumor that President Obama’s administration was setting up special camps to imprison its political foes. “The idea that the administration is setting up concentration camps has actually bled through to Fox News.”

This week, the libertarian conservative blogger Jon Henke, a consultant who worked for Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) in 2006, challenged fellow conservatives not to buy ads or otherwise do business with the site. “No respectable organization,” wrote Henke, “should support the kind of fringe idiocy that WND peddles.” That inspired Joseph Farah, the founder and editor of the site, to attack Henke. And it didn’t inspire much fear in Whalen. “The heck with that guy,” Whalen told TWI.

“On the Internet, the right is still divided into Web 1.0 and Web 2.0,” Henke told TWI. “There are news sites that arose in the 1990s and became popular with cultural conservatives, but never moved beyond. WorldNetDaily is one of those. And there needs to be a bright line in between the type of people or rhetoric or movements that traffic in conspiracy theories and the decent right.”

While some Washington conservative distance themselves from WorldNetDaily (”I don’t know anyone who reads it,” said Henke), its associations with the rest of the movement run deep. Farah founded the site after a stint as a “newspaper doctor” led to hiring Rush Limbaugh as a columnist for the Sacramento Union, and after that led to a job co-writing Limbaugh’s book “See, I Told You So.”

“Rush Limbaugh is generous, funny, encouraging, kind, and insightful,” Farah wrote in his 2007 memoir “Stop the Presses!: The Inside Story of the New Media Revolution.” “[W]orking closely with Rush Limbaugh on his bestselling book was a treat for me and a memory I will always cherish.”

Farah founded WorldNetDaily two years after that, and has seldom had trouble bringing prominent conservatives into his orbit. In “Stop the Presses!” Farah recalled how Bill O’Reilly came to him in 2000 to launch an opinion column anchored at the site. “I want my show to be the number one cable show,” said O’Reilly, according to Farah. “I want to write a bestselling book. And I want to launch a nationally-syndicated newspaper column.” That year, political pollster Scott Rasmussen wrote a column for the site, too. In 2002, WorldNetDaily launched a publishing arm, WNDBooks, that would release political tracts and memoirs by Tom Tancredo, NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre, and most impactfully, radio host Michael Savage. His first WNDBooks release, a collection of WND columns titled The Savage Nation, became their first New York Times #1 bestseller. Savage’s relationship with WND continues to provide them traffic — 6 percent of their readers arrive from his Website, according to Alexa.com — and his success would be matched in 2008 with the release of Corsi’s The Obama Nation.

“I don’t think life is long enough to go around debunking the various ideas that have occurred to Jerome Corsi,” Frum told TWI.

Corsi’s reporting is responsible for much of WND’s current notoriety. But the Van Jones model — relentlessly covering Obama appointees until the rest of the media notices–has gotten the best recent results. WND cited a 1977 book co-written by White House science czar John Holdren to report that he “called for forced abortions.” The site has run multiple articles about Cass Sunstein, the president’s nominee to run the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, alleging that he wanted to censor the Internet and that he favored “gun grabs” and “animal rights.” Not only have those allegations made it into the wider conservative media, they’ve fueled Republican holds on Sunstein’s nomination. WND’s coverage of the Obama birth certificate conspiracy, often written by Corsi, has been packaged as an ongoing, dogged investigation. Last month the site published an image of a forged “Kenyan birth certificate” appended with a column by Farah dealing with their editorial decision. “No one here has made a judgment that it is real,” Farah wrote. “What we did was report a fact – that California attorney Orly Taitz has filed a motion in federal court to determine its authenticity.”

Asked by TWI about WND’s critics, and whether his reports could reach as wide an audience at WND as they could reach on the TV shows that have cooled to inviting him on, Corsi told TWI that the question answered itself.

“If you didn’t consider WND effective,” said Corsi, “you wouldn’t be writing about us.”

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There’s a guy over in Oakland, I think his name is Van Jones. And he and I were on a cruise last summer in the Arctic, on climate change. And I got to know him very well. And a lot of the work he’s doing to enfranchise broader communities I’m a big fan of. He’s doing a marvelous job… I’m a huge fan of his. He is very bright, very articulate, very passionate. I think he is exactly right.

The political problem here? Whitman is a wealthy Republican trying to win the GOP gubernatorial nomination from conservative candidates Steve Poizner and Tom Campbell, both with stronger ties to the party’s base. And here she is, on video, proclaiming her friendship for the current Emmanuel Goldstein of the conservative movement.

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Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) opened the hearing with a shot at her colleagues across the aisle. “Today, I expect you will hear fierce words of doubt and fear and worse from the other side of the aisle regarding our legislative efforts to move forward with clean energy jobs legislation,” she said. “This is consistent with a pattern of ‘No, we can’t.’”

Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) countered, “You can be sure of this: once the American public realizes what this legislation will do to their wallets, they will resoundingly reject it.”

None of the so-called swing senators on this legislation — with the possible but unlikely exception of Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) — are present at the hearing right now, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing much common ground between the two sides in this debate.

But on the plus side, in keeping with the GOP’s newfound love of inscrutable charts, Sen. Kit Bond’s (R-Mo.) staff just pulled out the hearing’s first inscrutable chart. It’s a huge blue webbed number with the title “Waxman-Markey: A Bureaucratic Nightmare.”

More updates to come.

Update (as promised): Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), reading from his opening remarks, just stumbled over the GOP’s word of choice to describe the administration’s global warming fears. “A-pa-ca… A-pa … A-pa-ca…” he attempted, emphasizing the first syllable, confusing himself in the process and reddening visibly. A chorus of senators and audience members came to his aid.  “Apocalyptic,” they said in unison.

The Detroit News reports that Global Wind Systems will open the facility in Novi, Mich., about thirty miles outside of Detroit, and will begin hiring as early as May. Because it requires skilled assembly-line workers, the plant will likely hire its employees from the growing ranks of laid-off auto workers.

Not surprisingly, Global Wind Systems’ plan has grabbed the attention of the region’s unemployed. According to Chief Executive Chris Long, the company has already received thousands of applications, 90 percent of which list auto industry experience.

Of course, 250 jobs are a drop in the bucket compared to the massive layoffs Detroit has suffered. But Long expects to have hired more than 400 employees within two years, and a successful launch in Novi will be likely to attract other wind manufacturers to the region.

Another sign of good things to come: Global Wind Systems’ investment in the new facility was made possible by a $7.3 million tax credit from the Michigan Economic Growth Authority. One expects that the $6 billion in alternative energy investments procured by the stimulus package will allow for many more projects of this type.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) (WDCpix)

As a member of the two Senate committees on energy and the environment issues, and the chairman of the new Green Jobs and the New Economy Subcommittee, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is in a strong position to weigh in on the country’s green future. At a breakfast this morning with environmental reporters, he waxed optimistic about the prospects for a national energy transformation.

Calling this “our moment” to fix the country’s economic problems, Sanders shot down concerns about the feasibility of creating a green economy in a matter of years. “I would remind everybody, when sometimes we are a little depressed about the situation and how slow government works, I want you go back to 1941, go back to December 1941, when this country was attacked at Pearl Harbor and America had to respond and fight wars on two fronts, in Asia and Europe, had to completely retool its economy to a war economy. We did this in two years. Two years. So anybody who tells you we can’t retool this economy to combat the danger of global warming and move to sustainable energy, move to a new transportation system, I think they are missing the boat. It can be done.”

The opportunity to transform the economy, he explained, comes not only from the economic crisis, but also from the election of President Obama. “For many years now, we have been very slow to react,” he said. “And certainly under Bush, we had a president who was working hand-in-glove with big energy, was part of big energy, certainly did not understand the problem. But now that we have a new president who does understand the problem, that does not for one moment, not for one second suggest that we do not need a strong grassroots movement all over this country to support the president and to push the president to move in a right direction.”

He was less optimistic, however, about the prospects for bringing Republican senators on board. When asked by a reporter what he would do get “the Inhofes” [referring to Senate Environment Committee ranking member and climate change skeptic James Inhofe (R-Okla.)] of the Senate to join Democrats on climate legislation, he responded, “Well, that’s asking a lot. I don’t know whether we’re gonna bring Mr. Inhofe along.”

Another reporter asked about resistance from Sanders’ “fellow Democrats,” but the senator cut her off: “They’re not my fellow Democrats. I’m an independent.”

Sanders spoke as part of a release ceremony for a new report (PDF) from the German Aerospace Center (”the German equivalent of NASA”) on how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 23 percent by 2020 and 85 percent by 2050 using existing technology (I’ll have more on the report later). These targets are much more ambitious than the goals set forth by Obama, who has called for a 14 percent reduction by 2020. But Sanders dismissed the notion that Obama’s plans were too timid.

“He has put tens of billions of dollars into efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Sanders said. “Pretty serious stuff.  And I think — follow the money on this one.”

UPDATE: Here’s a video of Sanders’ speech, courtesy of Grist. In case you were wondering, I’m the young guy whose head occasionally pops onto the right side of your screen to snag a bite of scrambled eggs:

Sound like President Obama’s green jobs plan? Try crude-oil black. Heritage was making the case for expanded offshore drilling:

[President Bush's decision to allow drilling restrictions to expire] sets out a sensible plan for moving expeditiously but not recklessly toward leasing new areas, including some in the Pacific, Atlantic, offshore Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico. … Unfortunately, some in Congress have suggested that they may re-impose all or part of the moratorium, and past statements suggest that President Obama may want to do the same. Further, even without a change in the law, new Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has the discretion to issue just a relative handful of new leases or simply drag out the leasing process indefinitely.

Speak of the devil. Just as this piece came out, Salazar announced that he was putting offshore drilling on hold for 180 days, to allow his department to review its energy policy.

Although he called Bush’s plan “a headlong rush of the worst kind,” Salazar did not say definitively whether the Obama administration planned to renew the three-decade-old moratorium on drilling along most of the country’s coastline.

During the campaign, Obama at first opposed offshore drilling but then embraced it as part of a broader energy solution when the public overwhelmingly supported it amid record-high gas prices. Now, with the price of oil at less than a third of its peak and green energy at the forefront of his economic plan, it remains to be seen whether he resumes his initial stance on drilling.

“This moment of peril must be turned into one of progress,” he pledged. Noting today’s announcements of huge job cuts at Caterpillar, Sprint and Home Depot, he emphasized the need to rebuild the economy with an eye toward sustainability and green jobs.

On energy independence: “Embedded in the American soil, wind and sun … we have the capacity to change. … America will not be held hostage by dwindling resources.”

On fuel efficiency: “We must ensure that the fuel efficient cars of tomorrow are built right here.” He will implement stricter fuel efficiency standards beginning in 2011.

On emissions: Washington will no longer “stand in the way” of the efforts by California and other states to enact stricter emissions standards than those in place nationally.