It wasn’t his expertise in political science, political history, electoral trends, or journalism that got him the job. It was his social justice résumé. He rose to public prominence as a race-baiting agitator at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, funded by the George Soros–supported Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the liberal Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He became a public fixture in the Bay Area after crusading to free convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal for a Marxist organization and lambasting moderate civil-rights leaders for objecting to politicizing the classrooms.

In 2011, the late, great Andrew Breitbart pulled no punches in describing Jones as a “commie punk” and a “cop killer–supporting, racist, demagogic freak.” Jones had employed classic, radical Saul Alinsky–inspired campaign tactics to have Breitbart banned from a website he helped create — the left-wing Huffington Post — simply for writing articles providing alternative views of the Tea Party and for reporting on the Obama administration’s transparency-stifling measures.

Bending to the censorious mob, HuffPo assailed Breitbart’s “ad hominem” attack on Jones, which violated “the tenets of debate and civil discourse we have strived for since the day we launched.”

The progressives had nothing to say, of course, about Van Jones’s own ad hominem attacks, when he obscenely and publicly assailed Republicans as “a–holes” — and when he financed, produced, and participated in cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal’s rap album, which railed against “imperialist” America and white “mother——s” as the “true terrorists.”