On Friday, Bill Maher accused Matt Drudge of hyping race because of this headline: "Poll Hell:? Obama Negs Rise." Maher discerned a resonance between Drudge's abbreviation for "negatives" and a certain other word that tea partiers use when they pray to God to strike down Obama, and used it to launch a comedy bit featuring other transparently race-baiting headlines. We found that somewhat silly—"negs" is a common enough bit of insider jargon, and though it appears to have been the only time Drudge used it in a headline, it's certainly not enough to hang an accusation of racial tomfoolery on.

But we were wrong. Drudge seems to have taken pride in Maher picking up on his little joke, because he linked to the bit and has spent the last two days trying to prove him right. Yesterday, as Daily Intel noted, there was the interesting juxtaposition of a photo of an enraged Serena WIlliams telling a judge she was going to "take this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat" with a photo of an angry-looking Barack Obama warning that "they can't stop us" on healthcare.

And today, we get a routine high-school beating cast as a newsworthy racial assault. We feel awful for the poor kid who got attacked in the video Drudge links to, partly because we got threatened and punched by a veritable racial rainbow of bullies when we were his age and partly because now it's on Drudge so a whole nation can see him looking hurt and defenseless. But kids get beat up by other kids literally every hour, and the newsworthiness of this case seems to rest solely in the fact that the victim was white and the attackers were not. And that it was caught on video. A local police officer makes the absurd claim that the attack appeared from the video to be racially motivated because "many of the students, most of whom were black, yelled their support for the beating"—which is the same thing as saying "because the students were black." Shouting out support for a beating is as common to high schools as acne.

But the important thing to remember is that Barack Obama is black, and there are angry black people, and they will beat you and steal your health care and shove this fucking tennis ball down your fucking throat and the negs are rising.

UPDATE: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has updated its story. The police official who initially described the attack as "racially motivated" is backtracking:

"After having reviewed the video, it doesn't strike me nearly as racially motivated," Sax said.

The about-face came this morning as the story made national headlines. Although, Sax said it was purely his review of the video that changed his mind.

Here's the biography of Van Jones: he was a bookish black kid from Tennessee who went to Yale Law and moved to San Francisco and became a radical. Then he decided to use his law degree and smarts to clean up and make things better from inside the establishment.

He was, he openly acknowledges, a "full-on Marxist" in early '90s California. He joined a revolutionary Marxist group and protested police brutality. Then he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which combats over-incarceration, police brutality, and urban poverty and violence.

Running a civil rights group dedicated to producing real and immediate improvements in urban life will make a revolutionary Marxist a bit more pragmatic. Jones began focusing on job creation, and, with a bit of prognostic intuition that ought to put Thomas Friedman to shame, he decided, in the late-'90s, to focus on "Green Jobs." This is, you know, capitalism—he wants to create wealth, and use market forces to make the world and black communities better places!

And in 2008 he wrote a book called The Green Collar Economy, and it made the Times best-seller list, making him as much of a figure of the mainstream as Sean Hannity or Malcolm Gladwell.

So here we have a radical youth turned respectable liberal. Respectable enough to be on Time magazine listicles and win World Economic Forum prizes and everything. Respectable enough for Tom Friedman to profile him. And The New Yorker. Respectable enough for Meg Whitman, as in former eBay CEO and wealthy Republican California gubernatorial candidate and John McCain advisor Meg Whitman, to proclaim herself "a huge fan of Van Jones."

And for both his activism and his charm he was rewarded with a White House job with the Council on Environmental Quality. He was tasked with making sure stimulus money for green jobs actually went to green jobs. And he's a great person to have in this administration—he is a genuine environmentalist and the only special interest he's beholden to is poor people. He is the sort of person we were all praying Obama would bring with him to DC, instead of Larry Summers.

And that is one of the reasons he is now being ritually and savagely demonized.

To understand why and how he's being demonized, we have to look at the way information and misinformation makes it way from crazy blogs to crazy pundits to crazy citizens to, suddenly, the non-crazy regular media.

The "why" is simple: he is a genuine left-wing liberal with a White House job. He is black. He used to be radical, and probably still has radical sympathies (you know, caring about poor black people and all that). He is, in other words, fucking terrifying, if you frame his story right.

World Net Daily is an old and hugely popular far-right conspiracy "news" website. We've discussed their promotion and popularization of the birther conspiracy but both their influence and insanity cannot be understated. They have a huge email list. The people on that list click on ads and spend money. WND is almost as profitable as Gawker Media. The RNC needs access to that list. So they humor them. And they sponsor them.

And these are the people who insist that there will be FEMA concentration camps and a NAFTA superhighway and a single North American currency and, yes, it is birther central.

WND discovered Jones in April. They took publicly available information about Jones' civil rights past, his arrest at a Rodney King protest (he was not charged with anything because it was one of those illegal but common mass arrests) and his own statements about his youthful radicalism and made a scary, scary story called "Will a 'red' help blacks go green?" Wow, right? And, yes, these were not secrets—remember the Friedman and New Yorker profiles?

Dave Weigel explains how this all snowballed in The Washington Independent: On July 23, Glenn Beck talked about this "self-avowed communist" he discovered in the Obama administration. He brought him up again and again and again over the next month, until his amazing late-August week-long series almost entirely about how Van Jones and Van Jones alone is proof that Obama has a goon squad of violent leftists looking to remake the country as some sort of collectivist Soviet Republic.

Here is the message machine in its platonic form: Glenn Beck introduces his audience to a group Jones once belonged to called "The Apollo Alliance" on August 24th. 72 hours later a constituent is asking his (Republican) representative if this Apollo Alliance wrote the health care bill. The Rep has no idea what the guy is talking about, but the rest of the audience certainly does ("Van Jones!" they shout).

And now, here we are. His name on an old 9/11 truther petition is dredged up. An amusing clip in which he calls Republicans assholes (but explains that he, too, is an asshole) is on CBS News. Jake Tapper and Politico are on the case.

That is how a smear becomes a meme. Schoolhouse Rock, 2009 style.

It's true, according to the vice president of Colombia!

"Santos said many middle-class Britons who used cocaine were unaware of its environmental impact. 'For somebody who drives a hybrid, who recycles, who is worried about global warming - to tell him that that night of partying will destroy 4m square of rainforest might lead him to make another decision.'"

So stop it, all of Hollywood! [Guardian]

[via AAA]

[via Agenda Inc.]