Nobody Is Beyond Redemption. Except Her.

Van Jones once famously said Trump’s heart can be touched. He won’t say the same about a DSA candidate’s years-old deleted tweet.

Opinion by: Friendo Media Editorial Board

Van Jones has a new Substack making waves. You’ve probably seen some clips circulating online: “insane, outlandish and nutty ideas.” “STOP pooping in the punch bowl, and telling us the turds are ice cubes.” He’s very clearly talking about democratic socialists, the ones who just won primaries in New York and Colorado and made the establishment feel, for the first time in a while, like it could lose its grip.

Some of what he says will land in the spaces they were meant to land. Yet, you don’t have to defend every position of every DSA candidate to see what’s happening here. So let’s not even try to go there. That’s a different piece. Instead, let’s do something more useful. Let’s investigate the one place Van Jones had to manufacture smoke in his piece, and ask why a man with real data felt the need to create more.

In his Substack video, he claims that Mamdani “picked a DSA candidate who wants to abolish the police, empty every prison, erase every border and discourage interracial dating.”

Three of those things are arguably taken in bad faith, but I’ll concede are fair game in a narrative battle, because they are arguments about her actual platform. The fourth is a blatant mistruth, and he knows it. “Discourage interracial dating” comes from a single tweet Darializa Avila Chevalier posted in 2019, deleted, and apologized for. She holds no policy position on the subject. Furthermore, there is no bill, no whitepaper, no platform on which to draw out further conclusions. Van Jones took one six-year-old comment a young woman disavowed and rewrote it in the present tense, as something she “wants,” and slid it in next to real policy fights so his readers would swallow it whole.

Now, watch how the same man handles other people’s pasts.

This is Van Jones, who in 2017 watched Donald Trump address Congress and announced, “He became President of the United States in that moment, period.” When his own side revolted, he didn’t retreat. He asked them for patience. Maybe Trump would change, he said. Maybe this was “a prettier wrapper on the same poison,” but give it a look. This is Van Jones who sat down with Jared Kushner, worked hand in hand with the Trump White House on the First Step Act, got called a sellout for it, and defended it as the grown-up thing to do. Who applauded Trump’s pardon picks. Who brags, correctly, about passing eighteen bipartisan bills, “including with the Trump administration.”

Grace is his entire brand. Redemption. Second chances. That’s all very much Van Jones. He built a career freeing people from prison on the principle that a human being is more than the worst thing they ever did.

And he is no Trump apologist. He called the man a dictator on air. He called the 2024 result a nightmare. Trump attacks him by name for it, regularly. The media circus he’s been an interconnected part of, continues on.

Which is what makes the next set of dates so strange. On February 20, 2025, Trump named Alice Marie Johnson his pardon czar. Four days later Van Jones called it a “very good” choice and told his audience: “Trump’s heart CAN be touched. He has been moved, many times, to help downtrodden individuals. So don’t assume that moral appeals can never work with Trump.”

Here is what else happened that week. On February 26, the Department of Homeland Security put out a press release bragging that ICE arrests had climbed 627 percent. That is their own number, lauded around in every piece of media they could get their hands on. Two days later ICE published a policy memo expanding expedited removal, letting the government deport people without ever putting them in front of a judge. Three weeks after that, the flights left for El Salvador, carrying men to a prison the administration would spend the next year insisting it could not get them out of. Among them was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, removed in direct violation of a standing court order protecting him, which the government later conceded was their own error.

So the heart that could be touched belonged to a man who, that same month, was running the largest interior enforcement surge in modern American history and advertising it as an accomplishment. Van Jones looked at that and found the generosity to say he was still reachable. Still capable of being moved. Still, in some fundamental way, not finished.

Sixteen months later he looks at a congressional candidate and treats a tweet she wrote at 25 and deleted as a permanent fact about who she is.

Ask yourself why that might be. Not because he believes she’s beyond redemption. He doesn’t believe anyone is beyond redemption, clearly. That’s the whole product, at least. Yet, he denies her grace because grace for Trump costs him nothing and grace for her costs him everything. Forgiving the powerful is what keeps his seat warm, his brand intact, his phone ringing from “both sides.” Forgiving her means blessing the movement that makes the entire Van Jones act, the translator, the broker, the reasonable man in the middle, completely unnecessary.

That’s the tell here IMHO. When he had real, questionable material and still reached for the deleted tweet, he told on himself. “Refused to denounce Hamas” is an argument about a candidate and a growingly complex and expanding geo-political war and genocide. “Wants to discourage interracial dating” is an argument that the whole movement is fringe and ugly and safe to dismiss. He needed the second one to make his argument sound more terrifying to the scores of working class voters who decided Chevalier was the right candidate. So he built a narrative, and hit publish.

And look at what he’s actually done here. He has worked himself into a lather over one candidate’s oldest, worst tweets. One single statement. He read a movement of hundreds of thousands of people and chose to litigate posts she deleted years ago.

Let’s even go past the candidate, shall we? Even further past the DSA platform, and yes, the platform has planks I’d argue with too, abolish-the-police maximalism among them (I want to see awful fascists in prison). But the platform was never the point, and Van Jones knows it. Nobody knocked ten thousand doors this summer for prison abolition. They knocked for rent that doesn’t eat half a paycheck. For a doctor they can afford to see. For childcare that doesn’t cost more than rent. For the radical idea that a person who works full time should be able to live.

That’s the army behind these candidates. And it looks like me. It looks like him. It looks like the people he claims to have spent twenty-five years speaking for, except now they’re speaking for themselves, and they didn’t ask him to translate.

He can nitpick a platform, that part is clear. He cannot argue with that, so he won’t try. He’ll keep pointing at the one tweet, hoping you don’t look past his finger to the crowd behind it.

Van Jones was on CNN the night Donald Trump first became president and called it a “whitelash.” A decade later the Democratic party has lost the House, the Senate, the White House, and the plot, and the same man is on the same network telling the people finally fighting back (and winning!) that their ideas are nutty. Make of that what you will.