Van Jones Comes To Substack-Just To Push the Same Mainstream Media Garbage

Mainstream media pundits are coming to sub stack just to push the same braindead fact less punditry they pushed on cable news shows.

In a recent video Indie and Collin Radix-Carter from IndieNewsNetwork discussed an interesting development here on Substack: the trend of legacy media personalities rebranding as “independent” and starting outlets on Substack.

I personally have mixed feelings about this development, on the one hand, I am happy that the outlet where I write is becoming bigger and expanding. However on the other hand I worry that mainstream media pundits will begin to infest this website with the same mainstream media garbage just rebranded under an “independent” brand.

The best example of this would be former CNN pundit Van Jones, who started a substack claiming that on mainstream media he was “keeping his mouth shut” and “scared to say what's true for me fully and deeply”, and that the reason for starting his substack was because he was “afraid to share information and insight” that he was “hoarding for himself”.

What this information is, we have yet to see because so far all he has done on his substack is write the same fact-free punditry that he would have been spewing on mainstream media. The perfect example of this is his latest article titled “Just like Muslim voters, Jewish voters in Pennsylvania are also MUST-WIN!” where he attempted to make the case for Kamala Harris to American Jewish voters.

To summarize the article Jones, argued that American Jews should vote for Kamala because she supports Israel’s genocide in Gaza and they should not vote for Trump because he will not be as supportive despite his rhetoric.

Aside from the fact that it was a clear propaganda piece for the democratic party (he refers to the Democrats as “we” an odd thing for a supposedly objective journalist to do) it was full of factual errors, and analysis that is far detached from reality. Van Jones did not cite a single source in his entire piece for a good reason, the facts do back up what he is saying all, in this article, I will fact-check his lies and respond to his analysis with facts over mindless punditry.

Van Jones’ anti-semetism.

Van Jones's entire premise, that American Jews vote based on what candidate is more subservient to Israel is false and gives into the genocidal Israeli government’s propaganda. Not only does it give into Israel’s false conflation of the genocidal zionist ideology and the religion of Judaism, but erases anti-zionist American Jews and paints an anti-Semitic stereotype of American Jews as people that care about the genocidal Israeli government above all else.

What Van Jones misses in his analysis is that a growing number of young Jewish Americans in the 18 to 34 age range are actively anti-zionist and oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Pew Research polls show that of American Jews in this age group, 33 percent think that the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza is “unacceptable”, 17 percent think Israel’s reason for fighting in Gaza is “not valid”, 58 percent have a positive view on the Palestinian people while only 45 percent have a positive view of the Israeli government, 26 percent oppose military aid to Israel, and 26 percent think Joe Biden and the Democrats have been “favoring Israel too much”.

By pretending that American Jews all vote based on who supports Israel, Van Jones is erasing this growing number of young American Jews who are leaving the democratic party not because they don’t think they are pro-Israel enough but because they are backing Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Furthermore, Jones is assuming that American Jews prioritize Israel when voting but the polls show this is not true either. Polls show that only 9 percent of American Jews say Israel is their top issue when voting, while 44 percent say it’s democracy and 28 percent say it’s abortion. In fact “the economy, climate change, national security, antisemitism, immigration and healthcare” all poll higher than Israel as top issues for American Jewish voters.

Instead of actually reading the polls about regular American Jewish voters, Van Jones is listening to groups like AIPAC which claim to represent the Jewish people but in reality function as a lobby group for the interests of Israel’s genocidal government. If Jones did five minutes of research he would learn that the majority of Jewish American voters vote based on the same issues that other Americans vote on such as the economy or abortion and not based on Israel. He would also learn about the significant amount of Jewish voters aged 18-34 who are actively opposed to Zionism and the genocide in Gaza and in fact, will not vote Democrat because they are pro-Israel.

Van Jones Does Giant Commercial for Donald Trump

By trying to make Kamala Harris seem more supportive of Israel’s genocide in Gaza than Donald Trump, Van Jones is just making Trump look good.

In his section making the case for Kamala Harris, he only outlines why she and the democratic establishment are complete monsters by bragging that “The Biden and Harris administrations sent about $18 billion in weapons to Israel.”

By touting this, Jones is bragging that Kamala Harris sent billions of dollars in weapons to a country that kills civilians 90 percent of the time and disproportionately targets women, children, and the elderly. He is bragging about her sending billions in weapons to a country that has killed a conservative estimate of over 186,000 people. A word of advice for Van Jones, when trying to make a case for your candidate, maybe bragging about the fact that they have mass murdered civilians is not a good strategy.

Van Jones also brags that the Biden administration has “sent 100 US troops to Israel because of all the threats coming in from Iran in addition to the world anti-ballistic missile system to shoot down more missiles from Iran”.

This again makes Kamala Harris look awful. The entire escalation in the Middle East could end if the Biden administration put a stop to the genocide in Gaza. The widening of the conflict began when Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, but they could have stopped the conflict entirely had they ended their genocide in Gaza. As one Israeli official admitted to NBC News the reason they killed Nashrallah was because “He declined messages to stop connecting himself to Gaza.”

Had the U.S. forced Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza, Hezbollah would have stopped the fighting with Israel and the current escalation could have been avoided. The reason Iran struck Israel was in retaliation for Israel killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, and their killing of Nasrallah who was a close Iranian ally.

Had the Biden administration chosen to end the genocide in Gaza this entire escalation could have been avoided, but they are instead escalating with Iran which could easily lead to a global confrontation. Again, bragging about the fact that your candidate would rather start World War Three than end a genocide is not exactly a good strategy.

In contrast, by attacking Donald Trump Van Jones just makes him look like a reasonable alternative. Jones claims that Trump “opposed aid to Israel this year” and “says we should never give money without imposing a lot of conditions. He said this about Ukraine and Israel”. Jones also says “He picked JD Vance, who voted against aid to Israel.”

Why Van Jones thinks opposing genocide is a bad thing, I do not know, but I do know that this analysis is completely false, the reality is Trump is a genocidal zionist just like Kamala Harris.

In his first term, Trump was one of the most pro-Israel presedents of all time, he recognized ilegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank ,recognized the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights as Isreali territory, and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Trump also allowed Israel to massacre peaceful protests in Gaza in 2018 and implemented the Abraham Accords, which allowed Israel to normalize with multiple Arab States in order to sideline Palestinians.

There is no indication that Trump will be any different if he is elected for a second term. Pro-Israel mega-donor Miriam Adelson has given 100 million dollars to the Trump 2024 campaign and he has actively called to give Israel more weapons so they can “finish the job” of the genocide in Gaza.

Van Jones also claimed that Trump is soft on Iran saying “And don't forget: Donald Trump is in bed with Putin, who's in bed with Iran, an enemy of Israel.”

Jones here is of course referring to the Russiagate conspiracy theory that was debunked long ago. Van Jones is so stuck in his mainstream media bubble that he still does not know that the entire conspiracy theory was cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign who hired private firms such as Fusion GPS to feed false stories of a Trump-Russia connection to the FBI and media.

Furthermore, the idea that Trump was or will be less hawkish on Iran is absurd. In his first term, he pulled out of the Iran deal and placed crushing sanctions on the country with the explicit goal of keeping the Iranian people in misery in the hopes that it would cause them to do regime change. As his secretary Mike Pompeo admitted the sanctions made it “much worse for the Iranian people” and that this was done intentionally with the hopes that it “will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime.” He also almost started a full scale war with the country by killing Qasem Soleimani, one of Iran’s top generals.

Finally, when Jones touts Trump's wanting to “condition aid” to Ukraine as a bad thing he is again making him look like the reasonable one. Because he is stuck in his mainstream media bubble he thinks the proxy war in Ukraine is a great thing, clearly not aware of the fact that the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine was triggered by years of NATO expansion eastward, and the U.S. backing of a coup against Ukraine's democratically elected president in 2014 that led to an 8-year proxy war in Ukraine's eastern provinces.

He is also not aware that the war could have ended two months had it not been for Boris Jhonson blocking a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia at the behest of the Biden administration.

He also has clearly not seen the polls showing that a majority (57 percent) of Ukrainians want peace talks to end the war, that many Ukrainians are being forcibly drafted into the war, or that the U.S. wants Ukraine to lower the draft age so that they can use drafted young Ukrainians to “see Russia weakened”.

Again, Jones accidentally makes Trump look like a reasonable alternative to the democrats and ignores his actual policy record such as the fact that he approved lethal arms to Ukraine while he was president, and gave Republican speaker Mike Jhonson the green light to approve arms packages to Ukraine earlier this year.

The reality is that Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are warmongering tools of the neocon foreign policy establishment and both agree on most foreign policy issues just like the Clintons, Bushs, Obama, and Biden.

But in his piece propping up Kamala Harris, Van Jones accidentally makes Trump look like the more reasonable candidate. Jones is used to talking to mainstream media pundits who are foaming at the mouth for endless wars and assumes that regular American people feel the same way.

The reality is, by making Kamala look like the bigger war hawk Jones is making Trump look like the better candidate. Most regular Americans are sick of the establishment's endless wars and instead want the money to be spent on policies that would help Americans. As one commentator said in response to Jones’ price

I would never ever consider voting for Trump/Vance but you sure did list a bunch of good reasons to do so.

First and foremost for many who are sick to the bones of the eternal wars sponsored by the US and paid for with our taxes. Weapon aid should of course come with conditions.

Van Jones Spreads Genocide Propaganda

I saved the most disturbing falsehood in Jones’ piece for last: the fact that he spread the debunked “mass rape” hoax about Palestinians. In his section advocating for Kamala Harris, he wrote “She's personally spoken out against the sexual violence that happened on October 7th.”

What he fails to mention is that “mass rape” on October 7th did not happen and was a lie spread by the Isreali government to justify the genocide in Gaza.

In a recent documentary by journalist Max Blumenthal, he revealed that the mass rape claims began to be spread heavily by the Isreali government after Isreal hired pollster Frank Luntz to do focus groups that found people were more upset about “mass rape” claims than any other atrocity allegations on October 7th. Luntz was hired after polls came out showing that 70 percent of democrats support a ceasefire in Gaza.

Following this poll, the New York Times put out a fraudulent article titled “Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”, that tried to prove the claims of mass rape on October 7th but it was quickly debunked when the family of Gal Abdush-one of the supposed victims listed in the piece-came out to say that she was in fact not raped on October 7th. A spokesperson for the Kibbutz Be’eri also confirmed that two of the supposed victims listed in the article did not actually claim they were raped on October 7th.

A follow-up documentary by Sheryl Sandberg titled “Screams before Silence” and the U.S. government has used supposed “confessions” from Hamas members to prove that mass rape occurred, but the UN and multiple human rights groups confirmed that these videos were forced “confessions” extracted under torture from the Isreali government and therefore not reliable as evidence.

An article published in the “Times of London” newspaper investigated the mass rape claims and found that they originated from Zaka, an ultra-religious rescue group known for supplying “inaccurate and unreliable forensic interpretations”. They found that the claims from Zaka are often based on things they read in religious scripture and that the mass rape claims began because Zaka members “read a lot of Jewish texts that depict the raping of women”.

The investigation also found that not a single piece of video evidence depicting rape on October 7th exists saying:

In all the Hamas video footage Patten’s team had watched and all the photographs they had seen, there were no depictions of rape. We hired a leading Israeli dark web researcher to look for evidence of those images, including footage deleted from public sources.

By repeating these false claims Van Jones is not spreading an innocent lie and is spreading a lie that has been used to justify horrific atrocities. Not only is Van Jones spreading the Iraq WMD lie of our time, used to justify the genocide in Gaza but is repeating a claim that has been used to justify the real rape of Palestinians. Isreal has used this lie to justify the rape of Palestinian detainees where there is no question over if it happened as it is on video.

Welcome to independent media, Van

Van Jones’s piece is the kind of establishment drivel that he could say on CNN with no pushback but it is different on Substack. If Van Jones wants to spread the same pro-war propaganda here that is said regularly on CNN, he has to deal with some pushback and fact-checking. Hopefully, Van Jones will avoid spreading this kind of propaganda from here on, but I am doubtful. 

UPDATE:

At the end of the article, Van Jones claims he got his information on Israel from a website called zionessaction.org. After looking at the website it is the propaganda page of an Israel lobby group called Zioness that describes itself as “unabashedly progressive and unapologetically Zionist” and aims to allow for the “inclusion of Zionists in social justice spaces.” This shows that Van Jones is getting his talking points directly from pro-genocide Israel lobby groups.