On Wednesday night, the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs welcomed CNN host Van Jones for a conversation on the state of American politics. In his talk, Jones explained increasingly strained ties between Jewish and Black activist communities, unpacked what he called the “Silicon Valley takeover” of Washington and examined Democratic Party failures in the 2024 election cycle.
Jones opened the lecture — moderated by Wendy Schiller, interim director of the Watson Institute — sharing details of his upbringing in rural Tennessee, detailing the unexpected journey that led him to American politics. Raised by his parents in the South while it was undergoing desegregation, Jones was taught the importance of hard work and education as means of upward mobility, he said.
“I didn’t feel any pressure to be successful, but I felt the freedom to,” Jones said.
Before attending Yale Law School, Jones had never driven north of Kentucky and felt “out of place” when he first arrived in New Haven, he said.
But Jones explained that his father’s advice drove him to succeed at Yale despite these initial uncertainties. “Everything they know they learned out of a book,” Jones recalled his father telling him. “You can learn that. What you know — they’re never going to know.”
In the lecture, Jones traced the origins of the alliance between Black and Jewish communities to shared experiences of oppression via anti-Black racism and antisemitism. He highlighted that the two communities have long been on the frontlines of defending democracy.
“Why are these two groups continuing to show up and do this hard work of deeply defending democracy?” he asked attendees. The answer, Jones said, is a set of common values passed down for generations in each group: “Tikkun Olam” for Jewish people, and “Justice for All” for the Black community, he noted.
“You take a cultural DNA of ‘Justice for All’ and a cultural DNA of ‘repairing the world,’ and you put them together, you get a double helix of hope for humanity,” Jones said.
But Jones asserted that there is a growing divide between these two communities, and he faulted the progressive left for sidelining concerns over antisemitism while prioritizing campaigns against racism and other identity-based discrimination.
Jones said that responses to the Israel-Hamas war have highlighted this fragmenting alliance. He argued that the Black community has historically been “anti-war” and this growing divide poses a threat to democracy by splitting two communities that have long sought to defend it.
“If you can split the Blacks and the Jews, who’s gonna defend democracy now?” Jones said.
“We can and should love and support the Palestinians, the Muslims, the Arabs and the Persians, who are often the victims of anti-Muslim hate,” he said. “We have to love and defend and support the Jews and the Israelis, who are often the victims of anti-Jewish hatred and double standards.”
The conversation then shifted to Jones’s perspective on the Department of Government Efficiency’s impact in Washington, D.C.
“It’s a scam,” Jones said. “To reduce government inefficiency, you fire all the good people and throw them out the door? It’s going to make everything more inefficient and crazy.”
In his criticism of DOGE, Jones identified “four corners” of American power: Washington, D.C. for democracy, Wall Street for finance, Silicon Valley for technology and Hollywood for media.
Silicon Valley “ate up streaming services with social media … then they start trying to eat up Wall Street with cryptocurrency,” he explained. “Now, this is Silicon Valley eating up D.C. with DOGE,” Jones said, adding that courts need to play a critical role in holding President Trump accountable and checking the organization’s power.
In looking back on the 2024 election, he pinpointed the roots of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat. Jones said the party defended a “broken” status quo, offended “half of the country” by labeling them as “racists” and lost in places they never attempted to reach.
Nya Muir ’27 said she felt “enlightened” after attending Jones’s lecture.
“When he talks, it makes a difference,” Muir said. “I knew that I had to be here and really just take advantage of seeing him in person and observing his knowledge.”
In a separate interview with The Herald, Jones advised young people to take on different roles and experiences to refine their beliefs.
“I was a radical, grassroots outsider for a while, and then I was a White House insider for a while,” he said. “I was a target of the right-wing media, I’ve been a target of left-wing media, I'm a part of the establishment media. Over the course of your life, you should play different roles, but I would say whatever role you're playing, try and do it with real excellence.”
Amber Marcus-Blank is a senior staff writer covering undergraduate student life. She is a sophomore from outside of Boston studying Political Science and Public Health on the pre-law track. She is interested in working in politics and journalism in the future and enjoys playing soccer and making playlists in her free time.
