YouSaid · the spoken record

Van Jones

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67
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2016-11-10
most recent
2016-11-10
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1
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  1. “He was in the Air Force. He was in Korea, and then briefly in Vietnam. and came back, went to a small black college called Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee.”

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

  2. “Well, my dad was Willie Anthony Jones, my mother Loretta Jean Kirkendal Jones. My father was born in segregation and poverty in nineteen forty four in Memphis, Tennessee. He grew up in Orange Mound, Memphis, which was at the time one of the biggest black ghettos in the country, and he joined the military to get out of poverty. Everybody else was running out the military. My dad ran in. put himself through college.”

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

  3. “Yeah, but for me, I think you could if you wanted to be provocative worry about a collapse of moral leadership within the white community now. Where are the Jack Kemps? Where are the Bobby Kennedys? Where are those white leaders that are able to reach? And I think often communities of color are very scrutinized, well, what's going on and why aren't you succeeding and where are your leaders and that kind of thing? And if one of our leaders does something bad, man, it's just like horrible and we all feel terrible. And yet Velcro takes two sides to stick and trying to figure out how the right kind of folks can reach out to each other. That's partly why I went to Why I went to a Gettysburg. Yeah. And I found some of the most beautiful, amazing people, Trump voters, amazing people, and yet we're speaking almost completely different languages.”

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

  4. “President Obama did a great job. It's so funny that 40 years in the wilderness between 68 and 2008, it's sort of biblical in my mind. Kind of country trying to find its way back to hope, and that's really, I think, you know, I'm a hope and changer, hardcore. I'd never been involved in any electoral anything. Wait for him to get elected and then go protest him. That was my strategy. But Obama kind of brought me into a different relationship with the whole process. And as you know, I wound up in the White House for six months, which was his own kind of crazy experience.”

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

  5. “Yeah Young five-year-old kids are pretty smart, and I just felt like, oh, this guy was trying to make America better, and he got killed. Same year, I So, you know, this stuff matters, and I think that for me. You know, I know that we're going to go through a very difficult time, a very chaotic time. The Trump rebellion is a part of a bunch of rebellions, the Sanders Rebellion, the Black Lives Matter Rebellion, the Occupy Rebellion, the Tea Party Rebellion. The Obama Rebellion, there's something happening that's hard for us to understand. But I do know that you get the future that you fight for eventually. That's the story of my family.”

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

  6. “Yeah, and some say in the history of the world, like the biggest news year in the history of the world. Well, I was born into that, and when I was five years old, Miss Brown, my kindergarten teacher, shocked me by showing me that grown people could cry. I'd never seen an adult cry. I thought only children cried. And Patrick Carmedy in my class, who was a horrible little bully, but for some reason he raised his hand, he asked Miss Brown who was Bobby Kennedy. And she started to cry And it just shocked me. And some later, I don't know, I got a hold of like a little weekly reader and had a story about John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. And I'm a little guy that Bobby was killed in 68, the year I was born. And I somehow just transferred to me that I had to do something. Surprised I'm feeling so emotional. Emotional tired.”

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

  7. “The year they tried to kill hope in America. A lot of people the generation ahead of me say 68 was a year of so many disciplines.”

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

  8. “I think one of the things for the younger people, I think they feel, maybe I don't know, manipulated or talked down to sometimes when I go off on these little tangents about the civil rights movement. But I do think that history matters. And I also think that a lot of the stuff that they're suffering through, they're very concerned about criminal justice, they're very concerned about police reform. They're very concerned about immigration. They're very concerned about LGBT. They're very concerned about climate. All these very present tense issues are on the ballot all the time. I was born in 68. It was the year they killed Dr. King and the year they killed Bobby Kennedy. It was the year they beat up those young kids in Chicago who were trying to stop a war. And in some ways it was...”

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

  9. “So, you know, I get it and I love it, but it's not going to work. The consequences of such a large generation, I mean the millennial generation is bigger than the baby boomers. You have one bad primary outcome you don't like with Bernie Sanders and you drop out of the whole system. I mean, my dad was basic dogs on him. They put fire hoses on him. He didn't quit. His parents and their parents, I'm a ninth generation American. I'm the first one in my family born with all my rights. I'm a ninth generation American, first one, 1968 born with all my rights. None of my relatives gave up. They fought every day. So you like one guy and that person doesn't get, and now you're just going to walk away from America, walk away from any engagement. I just think, you know, I tell young people all the time, that's crap. That's just a bunch of crap. And you can't do that. And it's embarrassing. You're embarrassing yourselves if you're that weak a generation.”

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

  10. “They matter a lot, and I love young people. I was a young activist and radical of the First Order. I was on the left side of Pluto when I was a young guy. I was considered a leftist in the Bay Area.”

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

  11. “Instead of inform their views. And you know, the worst thing is, I am so guilty of that. And I try not to be. I used to pride myself, oh, listen to Rush Limbaugh. I watch Fox, but actually now you can kind of track what you're doing. And, you know, I look at the cable and when you hit last and you kind of see it's CNN, PBS, MSNBC, way down the line, Fox, because I myself am participating in that whole thing.”

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

  12. “Wind up not with opposition parties but with obstruction parties. And where gridlock is actually the goal, that disserves everybody and then can open the door to all kinds of bad stuff as people begin to lose faith in institutions and sometimes in democracy itself. And so I agree with you. I am a big radical Democrat small D. I believe in participation and my big concern now is that You have not just two Americas economically, but you have two Americas increasingly culturally. And then that can curdle into a kind of tribalism. And once you have tribalisms in your country and you're not all striving toward that one goal, it can become real.”

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

  13. “Because we have been talking about each other, not talking to each other. And it turns out that when we talk to each other, there are tremendous differences. But it doesn't have to be as inflamed. I mean, look, I love democracy for one reason. I don't have to agree with you. Dictatorship, I have to agree. You have to agree. We all have to agree. Democracy, nobody has to agree. That's the whole point. I love that. But the question is, you can get to a level where you go from constructive disagreement, where you're working to try to come up with the best answer. And maybe you're more market-oriented. I might be more government-oriented, and we come up with some public-private partnership. And because of that disagreement, we came up with a better answer, constructive disagreement, as opposed to destructive disagreement, where there's no point ever, nobody's even trying to find the right answer. They're just trying to bludgeon the other side.”

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

  14. “There's a lot of pain out there, and right at the end of the campaign, I started to get very worried about the day after, about, you know, everybody talks about Wednesday, Tuesday, the day of the vote. I started worrying about Wednesday, what was going to happen. My assumption being that Hillary Clinton would be elected president, and then you would have 50, 60 million voters overwhelmingly white voters who would feel badly about that outcome and what would happen. So I literally went to Pennsylvania, went to Gettysburg the day after Trump was there, and met with Trump voters in their homes, not just at a rally where we were yelling each other, sitting in the home, listening, talking. We shot a couple episodes, three episodes called The Messy Truth, the Messy Truth. It's on my Facebook page. Got 2 million views over the course of a weekend with no promotion.”

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

  15. “Camps. I said, no, no, we have a constitution, we have courts. Well, you had that before and you interned the Japanese. I think that we should prepare to leave now. I mean, it's real, real fear.”

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

  16. “But also some cultural anxieties, and that has shown itself throughout the West, Brexit in some ways was an expression of that. You see the rise of these sort of populist, xenophobic, nativist parties throughout the West. And now we have this. And then people sometimes get frustrated when they hear that because, oh, well, you're just saying we're all racist. No, that's not what I'm saying. There's legitimate anti-elitism. There's some economic populism. But it's marbled often with this other stuff that is very, very frightening, I think, for a lot of folks. And, you know, it's painful. I mean, I've got staff members in California who were breaking down crying on the staff call. I have Muslim friends who literally said, you know, should we leave the country? Will there be internment?”

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

  17. “Well, um I think that across the Western democracies we are expecting people to absorb an awful lot of change, especially white working and middle classes. Demographically, we're expecting them to absorb a lot of change as, you know, frankly, they have fewer kids and they're bringing in people from other parts of the world, Africa, Asia, Latin America. A lot of change economically, technologically, geopolitically. And change is hard. And everybody doesn't do change well. Some people in your family, your workplace, something changes. Oh, great. Other people, they hang on. Like, hey, wait, you know, the two-year plan said this thing. What are you doing? And so we have what I sometimes call a white lash, a backlash from white workers from struggling communities of white people who feel both the economic pinch.”

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