YouSaid · the spoken record

Van Jones

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67
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2016-11-10
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2016-11-10
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  1. “Exactly. So if somebody wants me to. If we can just reduce the inflammation, and it's tough because I am a strong liberal, and I think the key now is the new bipartisanship will be the bipartisan of the wings. I think that the left wing of our party is stronger than the moderates now, and I think the right wing of the Republican Party is stronger than the moderates. So the bipartisanship will be the bipartisanship of the wings. And I think I can play a role in that, at least I want to try.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Hawaii, I think she's great top notch Kamala Harris going to the Senate out of California. I mean, listen, if these folks can't get great stuff done, I got no shot because these people are just extraordinary human beings in every way and have done way more than I will ever do. And so I want to figure out some way, you know, Donald Trump talks about draining the swamp. I want to detox, you know, detoxify some of the surroundings for folks so people who really feel the call to serve an office can do a good job. You know, listen, if I'm 75 years old and however old Bernie is, you know what I mean? Somebody wants me to run for me or you're going.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, exactly. Well, there's a bigger honor in public life, but I don't know what it is, so I appreciate that. But look, honestly, I think that people who haven't served in public office should, it's an incredible experience. You learn so much. But I think that, you know, I'll put it this way, for the next 10 to 15 years, what I want to be able to do is to figure out a way to bridge some of these divides and to do it using media, using convenings, using all these different tools, and to make it possible for the people who are in office to do a good job. I don't think I disagree with a lot of people's view that we have dumb, mean, greedy people in office. I think we have a system that makes it impossible for good people to do good work. And I really listen, Tulsi Gabbard, that young veteran Hawaiian Beck.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “You know, I just don't think it's what I would be best in the world at. I think I'm a great communicator. I'm good at finding stories. I think I'm actually kind of.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “You go to protect and serve the president and go for the president to protect and serve you, and you go to fight for other people's job, not for your own. So once you become the issue, you should resign. So I resigned, as you well remember. And, you know, it was tough. It's probably the toughest thing I'd gone through. My dad had just died the year before. And then suddenly I'm in and out of the best job I could imagine for myself. And it was tough.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Exactly, yeah. But I mean, nobody of his stature even called Reagan a racist on national television. And so an organization I had helped start called Color of Change.org launch a petition to get them off the air, which ultimately succeeded. But along the way, Glenn Beck says, well, who does this color change stuff looks up, finds out that I used to be a part of it, and now I'm in the White House. So he says, oh, President O'Neill's conspiracy guy, President Obama is coordinating this attack on me through the sky and Jones. I'm going to go after Van Jones. So he does like 14 shows almost in a row going through my left-wing radical past, which I am loud and proud about, and anybody who knows me knows that's a big part of my past before I had my burnout and became a dad and calmed down. And it just became too much of an issue. And my view about it was,”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, exactly. So I would go right out on the patriotism stuff, the National Pride stuff, and I win them over. Like, people, well, you know, we haven't thought about that way. So all of a sudden, Glenn Beck goes on Fox and calls the president a racist. Not the highest moment in American civility.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I was doing that, and I would work with DOE to get on the radio and call into right-wing radio. I said, please let me talk to the right because I do very well with right-wingers. Please let me talk to the right, get on the phone with, you know, oh, we're going to have President Obama's environmental advisor is going to be on after this break. We'll see what he has to say. And then come back in. I would go right after him. I'm going to talk about bunnies and trees and polar bears. I would go right at him. The first thing I want to ask you, why do you want China to beat the United States? On the Clean Energy Revolution when American technology is solar, wind energy is American technology. Smart batteries are American. Why do you want China to beat up?”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Exactly. But there was nobody who could coordinate all that because it was a bunch of money fired through existing legislation, existing agencies. So my job was basically just to try to coordinate all that stuff and working with the vice president's office, et cetera.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, I was. Special advisor in their working, my main job was working on the green job stuff that we had at $787 billion stimulus package, as you remember, recovery package, we called it. And $80 billion of those bucks were for green and clean stuff, you know, $10 billion for smart batteries, $10 billion for solar. I mean, big numbers”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Now, Lily said, okay, look, I got to hang up the phone because my next clock figure out to beat you on the environmental side. And he laughs and I laughed. That's how it's supposed to be.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah. And Newton and I would think, too, are the first people to really get out there loud and proud banging the gong on that in the most recent period. People have been doing it for a long time, but the most recent period, kind of banging the gong on that, trying to make the water safe for everybody to get in. And to me, that's the whole point is that you should be willing to work with or against anybody on your idea. So if you have an idea about criminal justice reform and you can work with coke industries on that, We have and we do. At the same time, the environmental work I do, we work against coke industry. So I'm literally, sometimes I'm on the phone call with Mark”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Absolutely, absolutely. Newton, I have a different politics of the head, but we have a similar politics of the heart, in that he really cares about The underdog in his own conception of it, but he doesn't like those big government bureaucracies. I don't like those big corporations, but there's something in there that's kind of in harmony with my view, and he hates poverty. But he hates poverty, believes in opportunity. So that's an important thing. But my point is that even though we disagree on 99 things, the one thing we do agree on is that the criminal justice system has gotten completely out of control. According to Nudt, it's a big failed government bureaucracy”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “In that the whole point? I mean that's the whole point. I mean, one of the most remarkable things is, you know, after my book comes out, The Green Collar Economy, I become the first African-American environmentalist ever to have a bestseller. The book gets published in six languages. It's used in 100 U.S. universities. And I wind up in the White House. After I left, I taught at Princeton for a while, put out another book, went up on CNN, Newt Gingrich and I wind up on a TV show together called Crossfire for about a year. Well, Newt and I disagree on pretty much everything. There's almost nothing we agree on, but I have such tremendous respect for him and for his ability to living still in Newt's world when Republican Congress, all sorts of stuff, we've gotten it back a couple times, but the idea that you could ever have a Republican.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, yes, we code, you know, prints the rock star when I left the White House reached out to me and we wound up doing a bunch of great stuff together, including this coding initiative. So I worked on prisons for a long time, youth violence, criminal justice, juvenile justice, burned out on that, stayed attached to the organization, the Ella Baker Center, but started a new initiative on green jobs, which became green for all. And the long story short of that is that we got the Oakland City Council to create a green jobs core. 15, 20 kids get them trained to put up solar panels. Nancy Pelosi found out about that. And then she thought it was great and took me to Washington, DC. George W. Bush winds up signing a bill called the Green Jobs Act 2007, part of the 2007 Energy Bill, to spread that program around the country. Then I got a book contract, wrote a book about it, boom.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I'm like, what the heck is this? And so I just said, look, we need green jobs, not jails. In Oakland, I said, you know, we just passed all this solar stuff. I said there's going to be all these industries getting started. I saw the entire clean energy thing as just a big. Industry, a big money play, a big opportunity for jobs and contracts and entrepreneurship. As we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time if we just connect Marin County to Oakland. Similarly with Silicon Valley, if we can connect Oakland to Silicon Valley, you can do a lot. You can tap that genius of incredibly creative kids.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “One of these retreat centers over there in Marin County and just take a break. And the idea of taking a break just struck me as bizarre. I just worked all the time. And I started getting healthier just being focused on that, basically. But I also noticed at these different places I was going to, you know, they got organic food, they've got solar panels, they've got hybrid cars, they've got salads, they've got all this stuff you don't see in Oakland. You know what I mean?”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I burned out. If you do serious work in an urban environment with tough constituencies, you go to a lot of funerals. You got a lot of funerals. You go to a lot of coalition meetings that dissolve into bitterness and conflict and acrimony. You eat a lot of burritos and bad food. Not the burritos are always bad, but the way I eat them in their bed. And I just burned out. I mean, literally my hands would just shake. I couldn't sleep And I just need to try to get my health under control. And so I started going, look, I had a girlfriend at the time. Luckily, she broke up with me and went on. Now she's married and happy. But at the time, while I was making her miserable, she said, why don't you go?”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Not, you know, you hate black people or you hate women or whatever. You hate white people, but the subjective, the unconscious, the unknown, the innocent bias that can sometimes have very bad consequences. I think we should just call it innocent bias.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Not to jump to certain conclusions because the human mind is an infinite little glob of matter that's got to take some shortcuts, just how the brain works. And those shortcuts can sometimes be unfair. But if you can't even admit to having them, we'll never have an honest conversation. And that's where now I've been on TV. I've been on CNN for years. And every time a cop shoots an unarmed black person, literally you could just have what you call one of those virtual images of me. I'm going to say the same thing that people notice. We're just talking past each other on race, especially on this topic. And I wish that we could have a deeper conversation just about subjective bias. By the way, I think Hillary Clinton said something about implicit bias and the whole world on the right, all they heard was bias. But what she's saying, implicit, in other words, innocent bias.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And so that's going to be part of this problem that We don't just acknowledge that we all have these biases. I think Dr. King has done such a good job. He's almost overdone the job. Now nobody wants to be seen as biased in any way, even though it's impossible for the human mind.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “More promising, if more shocking things. But then what you realize is you can show somebody the same picture and they see something totally different. And so it's been, I think, more frustrating for African Americans, at least the ones who care about these issues, that same with Rodney King all over again, 1992, you show African Americans a certain image of white officers interacting with a black person. You show all too often a white person the same image. And everybody's filters jump in. And if you automatically assume that African Americans are probably more of a threat, if you go, a black guy is knocking down my door. Does that seem scarier than a white guy's knocking on my door? That's your kind of basic default. Then, well, whatever the cop does seems a little bit more understandable. If a black guy is knocking on your door means it's my son's come home, then the same scene looks very different.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Starts live streaming his peril and her fear and basically pulls the entire planet into her car. She didn't have to ask Walter Kronkite's permission or get a publisher to help her publish her memoir about it or get someone to believe it. She literally just starts live streaming and the entire world's in her car. That is one of the”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “One of the most remarkable things I ever saw was when that young woman, having seen her boyfriend shot in the car with her”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Was a part of that Human Rights Award Committee she took me under the wing. I meet Arianna Huffington, and my whole life changed. And I was able to then raise enough money to grow a whole human rights center, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, where we ultimately went on to stop Oakland from building a super jail for kids. We helped California close five youth prisons when a very successful run as a criminal justice reformer back long before those issues were considered kind of in vogue.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “More. In fact, I'm the only person in the United States, I believe, and I don't believe I know I'm just being falsely modest. I'm the only person in the United States ever to get an international human rights award for dealing with police abuse in the U.S. In 1998, Reebok gave me the International Human Rights Award for a case I did getting a very abusive police officer off the SFPD. a guy who had beaten and stomped and pepper sprayed to death one black guy and then prior to that had shot to death another unarmed black guy in the shooting case and Aaron Williams in the beating case And so I basically mobilized every young person and then preachers and then finally the whole city to get this cop fired. Suddenly I wind up with this International Human Rights Award, Carrie Kennedy, one of Bobby Kennedy's daughters.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I can catch up, and I will know everything that they know, but they will never know the things I know. And so I just said, you know what, let's go. And by the time I graduated, you can ask anybody who went to school with, you know, I was right there with the best of them. But I got that kind of confidence from my dad. My dad had to bust through so many barriers and barricades that when I would call him and complain about stuff, he said, hmm, they putting dogs on you.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Good point, sir. So that was my first kind of experience. Like, wow, like, okay, but here's what I knew. And I figured out pretty quickly. I said, I'm behind. I'm behind. I went to public schools all the way, church every other Sunday. These kids have, you know, Andover, Oxford. I'm behind myself. But I'm only behind because they've read more books than I have. If I work twice as hard as them.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I learned just ask a ton of questions and be stupid on the front end and get it out of the way. Just get out of the way. Just ask every dumb question you can. You learn that as a reporter, of course. Because when you're a reporter and you try to fake it, your editor is going to ask you three questions, you're going to look like an idiot. But I use those reporting skills. I just listen, I sat down first day at Yale. I go down to the go to the black table because that happens a lot of these schools. I'm like, okay, at least I can fit in here. I sit down. And somebody uses in the same sentence the word paradigmatic and egalitarian. Two words I had never heard of. I didn't know what the heck they were talking about. And I said, well, what does that mean, Galatearian? And the whole table looks at me like I'm complete lunatic.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Exactly that they're all stupid and that the people on the coast are smart. And that is almost baked into the DNA that they're smart and we're dumb. And it doesn't work.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Doesn't know anything, doesn't understand the references, doesn't get the joke. Country and somewhat obnoxious. And it was a massive culture clash. And suddenly I understood my father, like that class divide that he had encountered in the black community going from Orange Mound to being an educator and married to a college president's daughter. Suddenly, here I am his son going from middle class in the South, which means $50,000 a year or something like that, to Yale. Sense of the snob And how the coastal elite looks at the rest of the country is something. If you grew up in the country, you can smell it at a thousand yards. And that's a big part of the liberals' problem is that the NPR crowd, they reflexively just look down on red state voters, that they're all dope.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “But they both believed that I could go to a top school. And I had great grades. I was involved in everything. And I crushed the LSH and suddenly I'm accepted to Yale and Harvard and all these places. And I'll tell you when I get there. I was just considered garbage like who let this guy in here? This is by the black students. They were like, you know, these kids had gone to Stanford and Brown and all these schools. And here comes this guy from rural West Tennessee.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Be a journalist, but then in summer of'89 I went to Shreveport, Louisiana and was doing the oil bust down there and I worked for the Shreveport Louisiana newspaper as a graphic artist intern. And I just, when you grow up in a small town in the south, your parents steer you. So you don't see certain things. You're only going to safe places pretty much. But I didn't know where I was supposed to be or not be in Shreveport, and I saw a lot of poverty and a lot of racism. When I came back to my campus, I said, you know what? I want to go to law school. I think being a part of the media is just going to make things worse because I have to cover stories in a way that I don't believe in. And so luckily, just completely randomly, there was a professor on the campus named Ted Mosh. I had another professor named Gerald Ogg, and they both white professors, conservative professors.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “And so, and I was just a complete nerd, and my sister was this massive star. And, you know, she actually was the one who filled out my paperwork to get me into college and all this sort of stuff. But I loved reading. I loved comic books. I loved action figures. My dip. What's that boy doing there playing with them dolls? Daddy, they're action figures. You're like, oh my God. So if I love reading, I love writing. I love words. And so I went to the University of Tennessee at Martin. I was a communications major. I worked on the student newspaper there, but also published an independent newspaper underground paper on my own campus. And then another one on my girlfriend's campus, at Vanderbilt, and then a statewide African-American publication that was, I think, on 17 campuses. This is all by the time I was 20. So I was very much wanting to...”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “She's a social worker in my home county It's got two grown kids now. But when we were kids, I mean, I think probably first 15 years of my life, if a relative heard me talk, I'm not sure they heard me talk twice. Huh?”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Absolutely. Because frankly, everybody who knows me from when I was a kid is just stunned that I have anything to say at all. Because I have a twin sister who is much smarter than I am, much bigger personality than I have, and talks all the time. So for probably the first fifteen years of my life.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Absolutely. And frankly, nobody goes there playing to be a corporate attorney and come out civil rights. If you go to law school, If you come out public interest, it's because you win in public interest because most even the public interest kids wind up going corporate. But no, I mean, I went only because I didn't know what else to do. I wanted to do something for civil rights. I've been working as a journalist. I was an independent publisher before the internet. I probably would have had a website or something, but I published a statewide African-American newspaper that I'd started.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Exactly. African American motorists that was beaten by cops and then an all white jury said, no problem with that beating, even though it had been videotaped. And so April 29th, 1992, LA goes up in flames, and I'm saying, look, this is Liberty and Justice for All? Like, this is what my dad told me. So I went to the left side of Pluto. I mean, I was as far left as you could possibly be for a good 10 years after that. Did you?”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “In New Haven, Connecticut, which is kind of down on your luck town, they went to prison. And nobody thought that was weird. Now, I've never done any drugs to this day. So to me, it's all the same stuff. You know, Jesus sees all you guys. You're all going AL. From my point of view, at that time of my life. So that was heartbreaking. And then we had Rodney King. I was in law school from 90 to 93, Rodney King was April 1992.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. If a kid got caught doing drugs at Yale, they went to rehab. If a kid got caught doing drugs three blocks away, same age kid.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “And don't know where to turn. And but you never see the NAACP or the National Organization of Women or Sierra Club or anybody go and check on those guys. It would be almost laughable. And yet somebody should have checked on those guys over the past 10, 20, 30 years. And nobody did but a guy named Donald Trump. And now we're mad that people who, I mean, even in a moral level, I don't mean at a practical level, maybe you can't go organize everybody, but even in a moral level, when you're talking about your vision for the country when you're talking about what it is you're trying to achieve. If you can't tell a story that includes uplifting white guys in Indiana and coal miners in Appalachia, that's not even a part of the poetry. That gets noticed.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I think so. And I hope that that's not seen in any way as a put down to the moms and the aunties and the grandmas. Who are doing Valiant work and in producing, you know, often world class kids. But if you talk to those kids, there is that hole. And it's important, I think, for us to find some way to honor everybody. One of the big problems that I believe that we ran into, the bus saw we just ran into this week with the election of Donald Trump, is that the liberal imagination now, as it has become fashionable. It doesn't have a place of honor for heterosexual white guys who are middle aged and vote Republican. They are somehow all the oppressor. They are all the enemy. They're all the other. And they don't feel that.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Who are trying to find a way forward, and I do say that had I not seen in my house every day. A strong black man get up every morning, make the phone calls that he had to make, put on a suit and a tie, go to work, you know, come back, sometimes frustrated. But taking responsibility for that household and for all the kids at his school, I mean, our phone would ring, you know, late at night. Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones. And he took those calls and he could call the judge. He could call the mayor. He could make things happen. Had I not seen that? I don't know who I would be. And I had a grandfather who was a college president at 35 years old. Those things matter. And I think about them every day.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “There's something that I don't know how to talk about that my father was able to give me that my mother would not have been able to, and there's some relationship I have with my sons, and my wife sees it, and she celebrates it. And we've got to be able to have a sane conversation about both patriarchy and the horrific oppression of women, which is so omnipresent that we don't even notice it all too often without creating the situation where men are just in a confused state where if they try to step forward with some sense of chivalry, that's considered obnoxious. If they step back too far, then their deadbeat dads. I mean, this transition to a more egalitarian gender system, which we're going through, is not without some rugburn and heartburn among good guys.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “One of the tougher conversations that I think we're struggling with is this conversation about fatherhood. I think it's the big hidden topic. A lot of liberal feminists recoil at even the idea that there might be some special role for a father because it seems to be such an insult to what mothers do, such a reification of these gender binaries that they're trying to fight against. And it just sits poorly in the mouth.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “My dad had the best political mind of anybody I've ever met to this day. First of all, the black community is politically, as you know, very sophisticated. Financially, not so much, politically, very sophisticated. And my dad has a sharp, I mean, I'd sit there. We'd be watching CNN. I wish he'd lived to see me on CNN. And he would rip the liberals and the conservatives apart. He had just nose for BS and nonsense. And then it's just a contempt for the elites because he had to deal with his whole life. And so I really am my father's son in that regard.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Inside of communities. And so he hated any kind of elitism. So before I went to law school, he saw my head getting bigger and bigger. He took me outside, sit there on a carport, and he said, let me tell you something, son. There's only two kinds of smart people in this world. They're smart people who take very simple things and make them sound very complicated to try to impress everybody, and they're smart people who take very complicated things and make them sound very simple to try to help everybody. You come back in my house, you better be that second kind of smart guy.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “The picture that we put on the funeral program was a picture of me graduating from Yale Law School. No, a picture of him the day I graduated from Yale Law School with his hands in the air, just triumphant. And he told me before I went to Yale, he said, you know, they wouldn't have even let me be a yard worker at a school like that, but you're going to go be with those big families kids. And it was a huge source of pride for him. My dad was also, though, very concerned about egotism and snobbery and elitism because he was born very poor. And then he winds up marrying a college president's daughter and suddenly he's caught in that class divide in the black community where it's like, well, you know, you're two generations. I'm one generation from poverty. You're two, so you're better than me or I'm worshiping you. That whole kind of class stuff that happens.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “He had been a cop in the military, that was a big part of his personality, kind of seemed like a cop. But then he became an educator, became a middle school president. The NAACP had to sue my home county for my father to be able to become a middle school principal. It was this kind of like unwritten rule that you could be assistant principal, but you couldn't be principal of these, you know, because we just integrated. And when you integrated, you had two schools. Well, who's going to be the principal now? You got one school. You had a bunch of black assistant principals and a bunch of white principals. So the NAACP sued my dad wound up getting the worst school in our county, which he turned around to be one of the best schools in the state. And to his great pride. And when he died in 2008, lung cancer and emphysema, hard drinker, hard smoker, hard worker.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Exactly on GI Bill, married the college president's daughter, my mom, which because my dad had it like that. and then had me and my twin sister, my mom and dad, and then my dad put my uncle, his little brother through college, and then he put a cousin through college. And then he and my mom put me and my sister through college.”

    2016-11-10 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 95 - Van Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source