The Van Jones Rule
The 2009 incident that cemented the Left's dominance over mainstream media, marginalized conservative narratives, and created our modern political ecosystems.
NOTE: This is a chapter originally written for my friend Michael Walsh’s collection of essays on the topic of the press, Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You (Bombardier Books, 2024). Also contributing worthy and brilliant writing are longtime friends and collaborators like Kyle Shideler, Mark Hemingway, Larry O’Connor, Liz Sheld, Sebastian Gorka, Monica Crowley, Kurt Schlichter, and Arthur Milikh.
I’ve been talking and tweeting about something I called “the Van Jones Rule” since about 2012, when the pattern could first really be seen in retrospect. Briefly, I argue that Obama’s early-2009 dismissal of Van Jones due to criticism from the Right was a teachable moment for the Left; that episode taught them that nothing good comes from acquiescing to the complaints of their domestic political opponents, and set in motion a basic pattern that persists until today. This has had profound effect on politics in America, and has contributed as much as technology to the disunion we find ourselves in. The essay goes on to critique the Right’s media as it addresses imbalances revealed by “the Van Jones Rule,” and finds it wanting.
The state of American disunion is well advanced. It feels like we are coming apart, because we are. The nation is, for the first time, less divided by the race, religion, or class distinctions that have consumed humanity for most of civilization than by political ideology and the partisan labels that are its rough shorthand.
Americans have increasingly segregated voluntarily into geographic regions, where we find ourselves in more like-minded political environments and prepare to push federalism to its limits. The small and large things we consume have been shot through with partisan meaning, as corporations take on the operational attitudes of political campaigns aimed not at rival products, but at their consumers themselves. And every four years, we struggle over the precarious and contentious balance of the presidency, as the old saw about “the most important election in our lifetime” is now always true—at least as long as the republic remains intact.
The tenor of our political and cultural discourse seems to be contempt, laced through with rhetoric that can only be described as pre-genocidal. It has laid waste to families, relationships, and jobs.
Even as the conflict rarely spills into real violence, the mainstream Left has begun to see the very existence of the Right as a potential kinetic threat, and has responded accordingly. Firmly in control of the government and media, it has turned the awesome post-9/11 powers that Americans have given to the national security and law enforcement bureaucracy to keep us safe from terrorists against its domestic political adversaries. The Right, feeling helpless in combating it, rages against its tormentors while retreating into conspiracy theories and rewarding opportunistic grifters who articulate their frustration and anger.
Of course, all this hasn’t come out of nowhere. The Right and Left aren’t merely separated by personality and temperament, lifestyle preferences, and visions of the Good Life; they hold different, entirely incompatible worldviews. The old, inherited labels emerge from very real differences about how Americans understand the most consequential things—most especially culture and justice—and now even reality itself.
Our ways of life are an affront to one another, and we find the world that our opposites have created to be monstrous. These are legitimate sources of acrimony that the ancients would have recognized as causes of war or pitiless, apocalyptic conflict. As it all comes to a boil, a growing number of Americans now see this period as a kind of Late Republic, and realize that an uneasy coexistence within the confines of the same political project cannot last forever.
The Corporate Media serves as an amplifier for this struggle, and a constant instigator of its everyday battles and skirmishes. The press has always been able to change attitudes through clever narrative framing, constant repetition, and social pressure. But since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, its world view has bent hard toward the Left; the subsequent decades have seen Baby Boomer politics transform broadcast and print journalism into a ceaseless, didactic celebration of that generation’s ethos and real or imagined virtues. Both news and entertainment have been packaged as a commercial for “social justice,” the never-ending quest for individual- and group-identity fulfillment and grievance, and the destruction of the American Founding and its common culture. The mainstream media has been self-congratulatory about the many victories for “progress” it has affected—but, naturally, it is triumphalist only in retrospect.
Twenty years ago, technology exploded the monopolistic grip that the Corporate Media once had on the dissemination of information. While channels such as Fox News and talk radio had allowed the Right to bypass the major newspapers, magazines, and television networks that comprise the mainstream media and get their message to millions of Americans, these mediums were a one-way broadcast for passive reception.
Securing the means of communication in a conflict is essential to affect change from above, but it is no longer sufficient to create a mass movement for long-term political success in a democracy; successful outlets need to make constructive use of their supporters’ enthusiasm. On the Right, the internet and the explosion of social media created armies of activists that encouraged involvement and energy, including, crucially, an ecosystem of reputational and financial incentives.
Conservatives envisioned something like media parity, with the Left reacting to its media the way the Right had reacted to the mainstream media for decades: with a lot of yelling, argumentative fact checking, but ultimately, a kind of contentious dialogue. This was the case during what was arguably the high point of conservative media, at least in terms of what it was able to accomplish on a shared political battlefield.
Conservatives celebrated, cheering the democratizing force of social media just as they’d celebrated the power of blogs, cable news, and talk radio years before. It seemed for a while that the mainstream media’s monopoly on the flow of information and its ability to dominate political and cultural narratives had ended. Consequently, over the past three decades, the Right’s alternative media infrastructure has ballooned from a handful of monthly magazines (so modest, most were run as non-profits) into a billion-dollar industry of shareable, politically driven entertainment to be consumed on our ubiquitous smartphones.
The mere existence and continued proliferation of these right-leaning voices led many on the Right to believe that they had the wind at their backs: As more Americans became active online, millions would soon leave the cocoon of the leftwing mainstream media forever. Conservative media would expose the worst excesses and failures of the Left’s worldview and serve as a voice for that half of the country alienated from the dominant leftwing culture. By reaching enough people to win elections, the people-powered movement the Right was building on the fly could finally allow it to do battle with the institutions in the Left’s control, like entertainment, education, Big Business, and journalism.
Conservatives envisioned something like media parity, with the Left reacting to its media the way the Right had reacted to the mainstream media for decades: with a lot of yelling, argumentative fact checking, but ultimately, a kind of contentious dialogue. This was the case during what was arguably the high point of conservative media, at least in terms of what it was able to accomplish on a shared political battlefield.
In January 1998, when the internet was in its early days, Matt Drudge had made his reputation as an adversary—and competitor—of the mainstream media by publishing a giant newsworthy scoop about President Bill Clinton that Beltway reporters and editors had spiked merely for partisan reasons. Drudge’s story suddenly flashed on newspapers and television screens across America and the world: The sitting president’s affair with a young White House intern consumed headlines for the next year and a half. Even as the leftwing mainstream media tried to protect a Democratic president, making the scandal disappear was impossible. It was a morality tale, a detective story, and a courtroom drama, and it ended, finally, in a cliffhanger of an impeachment vote that nearly brought Clinton down.
A decade later, in early 2009, recently inaugurated President Barack Obama had appointed little-known leftwing radical activist Van Jones as his “Green Jobs Czar.” Even as most Republican politicians feared opposing the new president and exposing themselves to accusations of racism, the reaction from the conservative press was swift and impassioned. On his nightly Fox News show, Glenn Beck railed against Jones’s appointment, pointing to a disqualifying 9/11 conspiracy petition he’d signed several years before. It began to look like a feeding frenzy, as the mainstream media began reporting on the growing backlash on the Right.
And then Obama blinked. Under pressure from other cable news and talk radio voices on the Right, the White House felt the heat from the hostile media coverage and hastily withdrew Jones’s name. Obama instinctively did what nearly every politician had done before: When heat came down on one of his people, he looked to stop the bleeding and move on by cutting him loose.
Almost immediately, though, the White House realized that it had made a tactical mistake by caving—or even reacting—to its critics in conservative media. The people fuming about Van Jones in rightwing media, it had realized, were already sworn enemies. Tossing one of its own to the wolves wouldn’t halt or slow down the enemy’s advance; it would do the opposite and encourage more. From then on, not only would the Obama administration refuse to bend to pressure on appointments, nominations, or criticism from adversarial media, it treated right-leaning media itself—and, by extension, its audience of millions—as illegitimate.
Even as the White House clung to the “Van Jones Rule” and refused to give the Right an inch, conservative media remained potent. While Drudge had put the media on notice as gatekeepers of information, he was less a reporter than an editor; together with his then-unknown sidekick, Andrew Breitbart, The Drudge Report took the raw materials provided by the traditional media and presented the news in a provocative way by collating links to existing reporting—and, crucially, re-contextualizing it based on catching essential details buried deep in the middle paragraphs. And, as websites proliferated, the internet allowed everyone with a blog to become an instant media critic, fact-checking, debunking, and commenting on the media’s daily reporting.
It didn’t take long, then, for the Left and Right to divert into disparate realities as they retreated into media ecosystems that would seldom overlap. The effects of this dynamic took its toll on our discourse: a near-infinite swelling of partisanship, the disappearance of a culture common to all Americans, and the dissolution of social cohesion that comes with it.
Striking out on his own several years later, Breitbart masterfully recruited the mainstream media as an unwitting accomplice in providing exposure for his campaigns. This time, he and his team did their own investigative journalism and, like the Left, his muckraking always had a precise policy goal in mind. An expert student of the incentives and workings of the mainstream media, Breitbart sought to replicate what it was able to do: Create pointed and dramatic events that unfolded episodically into information campaigns. Defining the energy of the Tea Party movement, his efforts would focus on pressuring Republican officeholders to take action against the administrative state: proposing legislation, defunding corrupt organizations on the government dole, or opposing Democrats’ nominations.
This was possible because the media, then, took a kind of debate-oriented approach; like malevolent and pedantic fact checkers, it attempted to undermine Breitbart’s journalism by making increasingly strident and convoluted excuses for a story’s leftwing villains. Anticipating their moves, he allowed the Left and its media to walk out confidently on rhetorical limb after limb just before he sawed them off. Breitbart realized that convincing the media (or even the entirety of the American people) was a fool’s errand. He would focus, rather, on hijacking the power of the mainstream media to reach an audience that was predisposed to be supportive of his efforts—or, at least, those open to giving them a fair hearing. In such a politically polarized environment, the media’s fevered attempts to debunk his reporting and destroy him would only amplify the story; the exposure would make him enemies, but he’d win enthusiastic converts, too. It worked for a while, as Breitbart’s own sense of humor, energy, and outsized personality made him the perfect face of the Right’s alternative media world.
These halcyon days wouldn’t last long. It took a few years for the Van Jones Rule toward the conservative press to bleed over, whether by design or not, to the media. Editors slowly realized that the newspapers and broadcast networks of the mainstream media themselves played the decisive role in the Van Jones firestorm by legitimizing the Right’s criticism, and they wouldn’t allow these narratives, controversies, and stories emerging from conservative media to penetrate their news cycles again. No longer would it be possible for the Right’s media to push a story into national news as Andrew Breitbart or Matt Drudge had done. In the subsequent years and decades, facts emerging from conservative media would be ignored and embargoed, not only by Democratic politicians, but by the mainstream press, as well. The Van Jones Rule has been in effect since; and, because it works so well for the Left, it is unlikely to change.
Of course, the Left’s delegitimization of opposing views in a free society isn’t new. Frankfurt School Marxist Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance”—in which he repudiated the classical liberal ideal free expression, arguing for limiting the Right’s speech in accord with the aims of social justice—had been influential on the New Left and its academic descendants since it was first published in 1966. But the Van Jones Rule was a significant milestone in bringing this radical position out of the universities, coming at a time when the old-school liberals who occupied newsrooms were being replaced by younger, more ideologically committed reporters and editors.
Over the next decade, Marcuse’s position went mainstream, with massive downstream repercussions. Its logic is the foundation of the Left’s current fixation with de-platforming and crackdowns on what it considers “disinformation” or “misinformation.” If, as it believes, the reporting of facts—true or not—has the ability to destabilize and imperil society, the tight grip on the flow of information encouraged by the Van Jones Rule becomes something like a national security imperative.
It didn’t take long, then, for the Left and Right to divert into disparate realities as they retreated into media ecosystems that would seldom overlap. The effects of this dynamic took its toll on our discourse: a near-infinite swelling of partisanship, the disappearance of a culture common to all Americans, and the dissolution of social cohesion that comes with it.
Looking back, though, even as the mainstream media’s monopolistic grip on the flow of information has been shattered, there hasn’t been anything resembling parity. The power imbalance between the Left’s and Right’s media infrastructures remains stark. Though it’s often been pronounced dead or debilitated, the leftwing Corporate Media remains the most powerful political and cultural force in America, capable of steamrolling the Right and quickly moving public opinion into spasms of hysteria, fear, self-righteousness, or near-ubiquitous virtue signaling. Its ability to create and solidify narratives across the population was in evidence throughout the presidency of Donald Trump.
Perhaps nothing in modern American history caused a greater erosion of social cohesion than the years-long false narrative about the elected president being an agent of a foreign enemy power. “Russiagate” was an epic tale, with a cast of hundreds or even thousands of players; it was a bona fide information campaign, unfolding and rising with daily intensity, like the most potent scripted drama.
From the start, the Left and its media allies were in control. Democrats were able to employ institutional assets that were—and will likely remain—unavailable to the Right: Both serving and retired agents in the national security bureaucracy generated leaks, leads, and stories to be reported breathlessly in the press, while members of Congress used the media coverage to justify their own investigations, which then became fodder for yet more Russiagate content.
All the while, the Left’s hired commentariat was increasingly apocalyptic and braying for blood and long prison sentences. By the conclusion of the Trump administration, this information campaign had been able to convince nearly half of Americans that they’d just endured four years of a hostile, foreign-occupied—and, for good measure, fascist—government.
For those who read or watched any type of media, the waves of Russiagate content were inescapable and unrelenting; for four years, conservative media was consumed by little else but refuting the intricate, daily micro-narratives from the mainstream media. The drama was rich and consistent enough for countless conspiracy theorists, amateur sleuths, and newly minted pundits to develop cult, fiercely partisan followings on both sides.
Of course, the Van Jones Rule had become second nature by then, and none of the fact-checking and evidence-assessing analysis from conservative media penetrated through the gatekeepers into the mainstream media and influenced the trajectory of the story. Americans were watching different movies about the same subject—but, as ever, that subject was chosen by the Left, and it remained relevant until the Left decided its usefulness had reached its end.
Once the drama had sufficiently saturated American politics—and the media frenzy had converted enough undecided voters into Democrats or poisoned them against Trump and the Republicans—Russiagate ceased to be useful and wound down with less than a whimper. Around the corner was an election year, and new dramas would be required for voter turnout in the media’s constant and unrelenting partisan blitzkrieg.
Over the next twelve months, the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests (and subsequent riots) monopolized the airwaves and attention of the Right and Left (BLM). Unlike Russiagate, though, both were moral crusades with intense peer-pressure enforcing behaviors and signaling virtuous, even visible (in the form of masks and T-shirts) ideological commitment from every citizen.
Months of compelled participation finally caused a backlash. On both issues, the Right was able, after a while, to claw back and offer its own narratives to combat the Left’s. The existence of conservative media enabled millions of Americans to stand defiantly against enforced virtue signaling. For many of them, these experiences irreparably shattered the credibility of the mainstream media, reinforcing their decision to seek alternative sources of news.
Whether by natural inclination or lack of imagination, those looking to break into media on the Left most often aspire to be muckrakers; on the Right, they aim to be public intellectuals or talking heads.
Unfortunately for conservatives, not only are the muckrakers more effective in creating their desired policy outcomes, but the economics of the media ecosystem can sustain far more of them than it can thousands of aspiring pundits, jockeying for views or sponsorships.
But these skirmishes over BLM or COVID-19 narratives took place exclusively in conservative media or on social media feeds; readers of The Washington Post only encountered the Right’s arguments as dangerous or ridiculous caricatures worthy of debunking or silencing. The Van Jones Rule assured that reporting from conservative media organs existed only to be mocked and discredited.
For the Left, the millions who abandoned their programming in favor of right-leaning news, commentary, and entertainment signaled nothing less than “the end of democracy” or the “rise of fascism in America.” The large audiences for conservative media have so terrified the Left in government, academia, and media, they have come to justify censorship and social and economic sanction against both creators and their audiences.
Unfortunately, the Right allowed itself to be persuaded—and certainly, for those of us in conservative media, flattered—by the Corporate Media’s hysteria about its loss of monopolistic control over the information that Americans received.
Even as it’s been beneficial, that success in drawing audiences has disfigured conservative media, as well. Owing to its history with talk radio—and because professionalizing and cadre-building institutions have long been controlled by the Left—conservative media is, as it has always been, reliant on personalities and a strong entertainment component. Even considering the Right’s often-contentious relationship with Fox News, the cable network remains the largest single communications node in the conservative media ecosystem. The Right’s younger cohort, however, is splintered across a constellation of social media personalities, podcasts, and websites.
Whether by natural inclination or lack of imagination, those looking to break into media on the Left most often aspire to be muckrakers; on the Right, they aim to be public intellectuals or talking heads. Unfortunately for conservatives, not only are the muckrakers more effective in creating their desired policy outcomes, but the economics of the media ecosystem can sustain far more of them than it can thousands of aspiring pundits, jockeying for views or sponsorships.
Coupled with the shortened attention spans that social media encourages, these incentives lend themselves to indulgence in a kind of nihilist sensationalism, less concerned with truth than with chasing the clicks and eyeballs by which advertising is both measured and rewarded. Those with large followings are enticed to monetize their social media accounts through shady and undisclosed back-door payments from political action committees or consulting firms, leaving their viewers or readers unaware of any transactional motivations.
For an audience that has pointedly—and reasonably—rejected the mainstream media as manipulative and deceitful, its reliance on these well-paid social media “influencers” merely trades one cynical source of news for another. On the Left and the Right, the bifurcated nature of the modern media environment ensures that those who’ve traded veracity for viral sloganeering will profit, regardless of political outcome.
Certainly, much of that cynicism and its sloganeering is baked into the virality of the social media medium. Even aside from the new ubiquity of video and audio content, addictive timeline scrolling devalues serious journalism—or, really, any complex idea or narrative that can’t be explained in a sentence or two. Throughout the history of the two most popular social media networks, Twitter (now X) and Facebook, impressions have rarely translated into clicks or page views; since so much content is simply shared without being read, the underlying piece might as well be no more than a provocative headline. It didn’t take long, then, for links to become merely credibility-establishing rather than edifying, like a mountain of unread footnotes in a book.
This dearth of clicks (and readers) led to a collapse in advertising revenue for websites, consolidating the conservative media ecosystem into fewer media outlets that often prioritize fodder for quick bursts of social media buzz rather than the complex investigative reporting that is essential to the kinds of robust and involving information campaigns that the Left is able to construct.
The evidence of failure is all around us. Relying so heavily on social media and infotainment, the media infrastructure that the Right has built cannot replicate the drama or involvement that the mainstream media can generate for campaigns such as Russiagate, BLM, or COVID-19.
And it’s not for lack of trying or lack of substantive material: The shocking contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, for example, revealed evidence of a mountain of personal vice and a sitting vice president’s clandestine influence-peddling to foreign nations. Even more, the 2020 pre-election attempt to throttle the story was a corruption of the national security bureaucracy and the mainstream media. And yet, despite some excellent and detailed investigative reporting—and attempts by members of Congress to generate media interest via televised hearings—the Right has been unable to capitalize on it politically.
While the tight gatekeeping of the “Van Jones Rule” prevents even the best, most professional efforts of conservative media from crossing into the mainstream, its insurgent, antagonistic posture toward the Corporate Media leaves it without the tools to offer a vision of a complete, aspirational lifestyle to compete with the Left’s.
Conservative media doesn’t aspire to build its own New York Times, which sets the bar for smaller outlets through its resources and reporting; its own taste-making cultural bible like Vogue; or its own home for profiles and feature writing, like The New Yorker. These outlets are essential communications nodes, and the Left understands that their influence is greater than its number of clicks, and treats them like the vital loss leaders they are.
Many of these outlets have been saved from the collapse of advertising revenue by massive corporations or by becoming the playthings of leftwing billionaires. Rather than transform them into non-profits, the Left’s financiers are content to lose tens of millions of dollars annually, as they understand that the value of these institutions are derived elsewhere.
Even as it has been responsive to its activists’ intensity online, the Left’s success in its information campaigns illustrated how it has been able to leverage social media largely as a megaphone for messages emanating from either its mainstream media or its political or professional institutions. Its forces in government and media are steering the ship, instituting policy with implications in the real world.
Because the Right’s media universe was created in order to demystify and delegitimize the Left, it has ignored the imperative of building institutions and communications nodes. Donors who bankroll the Right’s projects have thus far been uninterested in creating their own professional cadre of outlets, journalists, and editors; “what’s my return on investment?” they whine.
These credentialing mechanisms, like journalism schools or robust media networks, create the raw material from which these information campaigns—and the policy changes that result—are made. Perhaps even more important, these institutions provided viable career paths for professionals outside that of the cable news contributor or the social media influencer that currently circumscribe conservative intellectuals.
Sadly, it’s not just a media problem. The Right needs to stand up its own robust institutions and its own parallel economy: from corporations to small businesses, from universities to education centers, from guilds to professional associations. These efforts take work, seriousness of purpose, and money. If it continues neglecting these tasks, the future for the American Right looks bleak—even as its media grows in popularity, and the economics benefit the wallets of its biggest stars and social media influencers.
It would be simplistic to say that the media has brought us to this place, mostly as it would give us false hope: The roots of our current political situation can be found in the contradictions of modernity and are merely finding expression in all the ways we human beings communicate.
As a perfect outlet for rage and discontent, social media makes it easy to destroy institutions rather than to build them. Even with its potential to transcend location and create virtual communities based on ideology or interest, the hard work of making things—businesses, creative endeavors, organizations, schools, churches, neighborhoods, or retail politics—remains a real-word pursuit; it requires those who undertake the effort to unplug and focus on tangible things.