Monday, June 29, 2020

Oh Dear, Two Blogger Ethics Panels In One Day?

One thing I'm pretty good at (not perfect) is spotting the grifters in public life, and my grifter alarm has gone off with Jones from the beginning. During the Obama years certain organizations treated him like some combination of saint and oracle and muse, and those groups didn't get a lot accomplished. Elevating brand Jones should not have been an important priority.
Jones went on CNN’s Inside Politics with John King and Anderson Cooper 360 to enthusiastically commend Trump’s executive order—even as it was being criticized as cynical and unproductive by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and “delusional” by the Color of Change, an influential racial justice organization that Jones himself co-founded in 2005.

CNN viewers weren’t informed that he had actually attended secret White House meetings with his new friend Jared Kushner, discussing ways to frame the presidential project.

According to a knowledgeable White House source, who expressed satisfaction that there were zero leaks, Jones and California human rights attorney Jessica Jackson, who runs #cut50, a prison-reform group that Jones also founded, actively participated with law enforcement officials and White House staffers to help fashion the order and guide the politics of the discussion to what they considered “the sweet spot” between law enforcement and “the reasonable middle” and “the reasonable left.”