Black men will unite to protect Vice President Kamala Harris from race or identity-based attacks in her freshly launched presidential campaign, Van Jones said on CNN Tuesday.
“You start insulting Black women, you’re going to see something you haven’t seen before,” he explained. “Black men are not going to put up with that.”
“I was on a phone call with 20,000 Black men. The word ‘protect’ came up about a thousand times. Protect this sister, protect this sister. We’re going to protect her,” he continued.
Jones added that Black men “sat out” 2016 attacks against former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, something that won’t be repeated this year. “I don’t think that the Republican Party understands that all the work that they did trying to get us [Black men] over there … two more days of this, it’s going to be a problem,” he added.
Watch a segment of the panel discussion in the video below:
Racist attacks against Harris began within hours of President Joe Biden’s historic resignation and subsequent endorsement of his VP on Sunday; those attacks only intensified in the days that followed.
GOP party leaders countered by warning their colleagues against labeling Harris a “DEI hire,” a line parroted by both Rep. Tim Burchett and Rep. Glenn Grothman in interviews with local news. On Monday, Grothman told CBS58 in Milwaukee many Democrats “apparently” feel “they have to stick with [Harris] because of her ethnic background.”
Seemingly in response, Speaker Mike Johnson said at a press conference on Tuesday that the 2024 election “is going to be about policies, not personalities. This isn’t personal with regard to Kamala Harris. Her ethnicity, her gender, has nothing to do with this whatsoever.”
Similarly, Whitley Yates, director of diversity and engagement for the Indiana Republican Party, told The Hill, “These terrible detrimental things, it will drive people away … I think we need to get completely off of race and gender, and they need to focus on what policies are [they] going to have.”
Elsewhere in the segment with Wolf Blitzer, Jones praised Harris’ ability to amass both volunteers and significant donations 24-48 hours following her announcement. He added that we are collectively witnessing “the birth of a cultural phenomenon and you need a cultural phenomenon to stop a cultural phenomenon.”
“Donald Trump is a cultural phenomenon. So now you’ve got two superpowers colliding, but this one just came out of nowhere,” Jones said.
The political analyst later shared some of his comments on CNN to his personal social media page, posting on X, “I said what I said.”
I said what I said. pic.twitter.com/67ZeRTPeJJ
— Van Jones (@VanJones68) July 23, 2024
