Say what you will about the president, but from the very beginning he told us he wanted to completely revamp America. Apparently, most Americans didn’t really believe him. Now that he is changing the country, the stunned masses are professing varying degrees of shock and awe. Americans are getting exactly what they voted for—and a whole lot more.

But America should have seen it coming. A man is known by his friends.

As the president told America before he was elected: “If you want to really know what my policies are, look to the people around me” (emphasis mine throughout). So let’s take a look.

Meet Van Jones. Mr. Jones was a “special adviser” to the president. As the president’s “green jobs” czar, he was officially charged with helping stimulate the economy with environmentally friendly job creation. That was his official agenda.

But Jones had a very different unofficial agenda (I say “had” because he resigned Sunday). Jones is a confirmed communist. He often speaks on such ideas as social justice, eco-apartheid, and redistribution of wealth.

Speaking at the Power Shift conference in March, Van Jones told the audience that the whole human drama had been leading up to this point of time in America. He said America needed to completely revamp the whole economy to create justice for all and to avoid discriminating against various groups. He said we must pay women higher salaries. He said Native Americans had been locked out of the pollution-based economy and pushed down by the pollution-based economy, and needed to be lifted up in the new green economy. “No more broken treaties, no more broken treaties, give them the wealth, give them the wealth, give them the dignity, give them the respect that they deserve,” he said. “No justice on stolen land. We owe them a debt.”

At that same conference Jones said America is purposefully spraying chemicals on and poisoning our immigrant brothers and sisters to get the food we want to eat.

“What about our sisters and brothers that are in prison right now?” he asked. “We can’t have an economy that passionate about reclaiming throw-away stuff, but is indifferent to reclaiming throw-away lives.” We need to bring the people in the jails into the new economy, he said.

“This movement is deeper than a solar panel. It’s deeper than a solar panel! Don’t stop there. Don’t stop there!” he shouted. “No, we are going to change the whole system. We are going to change the whole thing. We are not going to put a new battery in a broken system. We want a new system. … We are going to change the whole thing.”

For the new policy makers in Washington, creating a green economy is so much more than just creating environmentally clean jobs. Green jobs is the red herring. The real agenda is for something far more sinister.

The agenda is partially revealed in Jones’s resume. He is a founding member of storm, a radical Marxist organization committed to creating a revolution in America. In a publication produced by storm, the group claimed it looked “towards the revolutionary traditions of Third World communism and found valuable and inspiring models for revolutionary change.”

Van Jones is also co-founder of the radical black empowerment group Color of Change. According to the Color of Change website, the government left black people and minorities to die in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina because they were poor, and because of their race.

Jones is also a “9/11 truther.” This is a group that claims the U.S. government was involved with causing the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He signed a petition calling for an investigation into the Bush administration’s knowledge of an impending attack. He has since claimed that although he signed it, he never read the petition. Van Jones has also stated that the real reason America invaded Iraq was to gain control of the oil.

Other views of Jones include the statement that George Bush sounded like a “crackhead” and that he looked like a “crackhead trying to lick a crack pipe for a fix.”

How is it possible that such a radical was allowed to become an adviser to the president?

President Obama’s other friends and advisers reveal the answer.

Meet Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett. Ms. Jarrett is a senior adviser, assistant, and close personal family friend to the president. Jarrett has said that Obama is like a brother to her. Newsweek said she was like a mentor to Michelle Obama. When Van Jones was appointed to the Obama advisory circle, Jarrett said that the Obama team “was so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House” and that they had been watching Jones for all the years since he had been active in Oakland. Now “we have captured” all his “creative ideas,” she said.

Van Jones’s appointment was very calculated. The placement of other Obama power-players confirms it.

Consider Mark Lloyd, the administration’s chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission (fcc). He too reads like a page out of a Marxist playbook. He is pushing for the government to regulate how much radio time talk show hosts of different political philosophies get. Specifically, he wants to tax radio stations and use that money to fund “public” broadcasting. The tax rate he has proposed? 100 percent of current operating budget! “It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press,” he infamously stated. His goal is state control.

More worrying may be the fact that Lloyd has publicly praised Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s socialist takeover as an “incredible and dramatic revolution” for the people. He then criticized the Venezuelan private media and property owners that opposed Chávez’s program of state nationalization. In this video, Lloyd implies that U.S. radio usage needs to be more fairly rebalanced by the government, or something could happen in America similar to how the Hutus used their dominance of radio to stir up mass genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda.

Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s regulatory adviser, has an extreme agenda too. He has advocated bans on hunting and eating meat. He has also proposed a fairness doctrine for the Internet. Under a fairness doctrine, the government would regulate the Internet to make sure that political voices from both parties receive “equal” coverage.

Carol Browner has big plans as well. She is Obama’s lead on global warming. She is also known for her membership in Socialist International—a group for “global governance.” The group wants America to subordinate itself to an international world-governing body. It also calls for rich countries to shrink their economies to combat global warming.

Then there is John Holdren, Obama’s science adviser. Holdren has advocated forced abortions as a population control method. He opined that government has the prerogative and social duty to enforce a two-baby limit. In that context, he said that “neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce.”

Yes, you can tell a lot about a person by the friends he keeps. In Van Jones’s own words: “Personnel is policy.”

There is a massive transformation coming to America. And it is going to be radical. Social, economic, geopolitical—it is all on the auction block—and we will all pay the price.

But it is not as if America wasn’t warned. Just before he was elected, President Obama cheered: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America!” There has always been a clear and present agenda. It’s just that few were really listening.

But God warned America that change was coming too. President Obama’s agenda is just the first sip of a very bitter cup that will totally transfigure the country. Curses are coming; you can read them in Deuteronomy 32. In the words of the president’s friend Jeremiah Wright: “The chickens are coming home to roost!” To find out what must be done to avoid those curses, read No Freedom Without Law.