The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 18 ｜ Daniel Flynn ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.000 So that's the voice of Jim Jones as 900 people

00:00:29.300 are committing suicide.

00:00:31.540 He seems pretty calm.

00:00:33.920 He's chastising people to relax.

00:00:39.000 You're just dying.

00:00:41.340 Who was this guy?

00:00:43.960 Yeah, there's a long road from Hoosierville, Indiana

00:00:48.140 to Jonestown, Guyana.

00:00:50.220 And that's where his story starts, in Indiana.

00:00:52.980 And I think one of the interesting things about Jim Jones,

00:00:55.360 he was not brought up in the Christian tradition

00:00:57.440 or in a church tradition.

00:00:58.400 And I spoke to a kid, I say a kid, he's close to 90 now,

00:01:03.860 but someone who grew up with Jim Jones,

00:01:05.600 knew him when he was 10 years old.

00:01:07.660 And Jim Jones started going to church at that time.

00:01:10.280 It was a sort of a Pentecostal, local, small church.

00:01:15.520 And at the end of the service, the priest would say,

00:01:18.000 okay, who needs to get saved?

00:01:20.560 And Jim Jones would say, I need to get saved.

00:01:22.720 And the next week he would do the same thing.

00:01:24.700 And Jim Jones would say, I need to get saved.

00:01:26.820 And you only get saved once.

00:01:28.500 But Jim Jones liked this whole pageantry

00:01:31.820 and loved sort of going up and the attention of everyone.

00:01:34.180 And he would get saved every week.

00:01:35.720 And this gentleman thought this was very peculiar about Jim Jones.

00:01:39.240 Jones would preach to the trees and to the animals and to the local kids.

00:01:42.880 And he got pretty good at it.

00:01:44.180 But he never really was a believer.

00:01:46.900 And when he went to Indiana University, he ran into some Marxists.

00:01:52.120 And he thought, and his mom, too, was very left-wing at the time.

00:01:57.340 She was someone who believed she lived as the rich and famous in past lives.

00:02:01.660 She changed her first name three different times.

00:02:03.660 People thought it was peculiar because she wore pants when everyone else was wearing a skirt. 1.00

00:02:06.600 You know, so back then.

00:02:08.600 And in Indiana, she really stuck out.

00:02:10.780 And she passed on, you know, the apple didn't fall too far from the tree.

00:02:13.480 And she sort of passed on some of her strange DNA to her son.

00:02:18.320 And it was at Indiana University that Jones ran into some Marxists.

00:02:22.180 And he said, you know, how can I demonstrate my Marxism is what he said years later.

00:02:27.260 And he said the thought was to infiltrate the church.

00:02:29.800 Now, Jim Jones is not always the best authority on Jim Jones.

00:02:32.000 But I think right there, you can sort of take him as an authority, that that was his intent all along,

00:02:37.060 to use the church as sort of a vehicle to popularize Marxism.

00:02:43.080 And that's what he did.

00:02:43.900 That's not a new idea back then.

00:02:46.820 It's not, I mean, Jeremiah Wright.

00:02:50.520 Sure.

00:02:51.300 I mean, isn't that the same kind of thing?

00:02:53.220 I mean, in looking at his, what do you call it, the People's Temple?

00:02:56.840 People's Temple.

00:02:58.100 And we'll get to this later.

00:02:59.340 But in looking at it, he is, he's, all he is is a community organizer using a church,

00:03:06.720 which, which is kind of the, the Jeremiah Wright thing.

00:03:11.460 I mean, without the Kool-Aid in the end.

00:03:13.720 In Indiana, this wears thin on people because in Indianapolis, it's not San Francisco.

00:03:21.480 It's very, particularly in the 1950s, the early 1960s.

00:03:24.500 And so he wears out his welcome, he goes to Brazil, and then he brings his flock to California. 0.90

00:03:31.380 He has a prophecy, and he says that, you know, basically there's going to be a nuclear holocaust,

00:03:36.520 and I know this place where we're going to be unaffected, and it's going to happen at a certain date in the late 60s,

00:03:42.480 and you should have heard this story before.

00:03:43.700 And we're all going to be safe because we're in this, we're in Northern California.

00:03:48.500 We're in Redwood Valley.

00:03:50.240 And they go there, and ultimately they go down to San Francisco.

00:03:56.260 And sort of that's where the Jonestown story begins because, you know, in Indianapolis, he tried to ingratiate himself with the locals.

00:04:04.260 He, you know, he had a show on WIBC and was on the Human Rights Commission.

00:04:09.200 But it really isn't until he gets to San Francisco that he gets really in with the in crowd.

00:04:14.900 And I think it's that certain time and place, San Francisco in the 1970s.

00:04:18.860 That's the hangover after the high.

00:04:21.100 He had the high of the Summer of Love and Haight-Ashbury and the human being in Golden Gate Park

00:04:27.580 and all that fun stuff that happened in the 1960s.

00:04:29.860 Always a price to pay, you know, for a party.

00:04:33.220 And in the 70s, you had that price to pay with the Zodiac killings, the zebra killings, the, you know,

00:04:41.820 Weather Underground hiding out in San Francisco, the 70s Liberation Army, kidnapping of Patty Hearst,

00:04:46.920 the assassination of Marcus Foster.

00:04:49.400 That's all in San Francisco.

00:04:50.680 It's all in the Bay Area.

00:04:52.580 The New World Liberation Front.

00:04:54.140 They put a bomb on Dianne Feinstein's, the windowsill of her daughter.

00:04:57.600 They shot up her vacation home, the windows out of her vacation home. 0.91

00:05:01.500 All these competing crazy groups.

00:05:03.780 It was very difficult for people to differentiate between political crazies and just plain crazies. 0.92

00:05:09.420 And in that environment, a guy like Jim Jones all of a sudden doesn't look that crazy. 0.54

00:05:15.520 He looks almost mainstream.

00:05:17.320 And so a lot of the mainstream figures in San Francisco, they were mainstream for San Francisco,

00:05:22.420 perhaps not for anywhere else in the country.

00:05:23.800 They start looking at Jim Jones as something more than a community organizer, as a civic leader, as a person of civic responsibility.

00:05:33.700 And so it's really in San Francisco that this guy gains power.

00:05:36.380 And I don't think he could have gained power in any other major American city at any other time.

00:05:41.220 It was the formula.

00:05:42.240 Everything was right.

00:05:42.900 It was a perfect storm.

00:05:43.680 So what's his church like at this point?

00:05:46.960 When he goes to California, he's having his church out of essentially a carport, almost like a garage,

00:05:54.820 but like an open-air kind of garage with spots for two cars.

00:05:59.020 This is at his house.

00:06:00.240 And there's maybe 100, 150 people coming to services.

00:06:03.720 They obtain a number of old Greyhound buses.

00:06:07.500 And they go from city to city.

00:06:08.800 And sometimes they go across country.

00:06:10.640 And mainly, you know, they're coming from Indiana.

00:06:13.320 So it's a mainly white church, a rural church.

00:06:16.660 It has sort of an Indiana twang.

00:06:18.900 They're in a rural area in California, in Redwood Valley.

00:06:21.900 But they start going to San Francisco.

00:06:23.760 They start going to Los Angeles.

00:06:25.200 And it becomes, very quickly, becomes more of a black church, more of an urban church, and more of an underclass church. 0.58

00:06:31.880 And so the dynamic of people's temple changes very quickly.

00:06:35.500 And because you have this new dynamic, a lot of, you know, I spoke to a woman, Yolanda Crawford, who was in the temple, a black woman.

00:06:43.100 And she made the point that a lot of African-Americans, they're really rooted in the Bible.

00:06:48.040 And Jim Jones, he wrote a tract called The Letter Killeth.

00:06:51.520 It was all to discredit the Bible and how the Bible was a bunch of lies.

00:06:55.120 It's very hard to pull that off when you're trying to recruit, you know, African-Americans into your group.

00:07:00.020 So he changes his tune a little, but ultimately, you know, people eventually come to find out, like a lot of cults, there's sort of layers.

00:07:08.700 And when they find out, you know, this guy is an atheist.

00:07:12.580 He's someone who is trying to undermine Christianity. 0.94

00:07:15.640 He's stomping on the Bible in front of people.

00:07:17.860 He's throwing the Bible down.

00:07:19.060 In fact, in Jonestown, I spoke to two survivors from Jonestown who noted that, you know, they had their Bibles confiscated.

00:07:28.740 Everyone had their Bibles confiscated who brought them to Jonestown. 0.78

00:07:31.400 Usually had a lot of personal possessions confiscated because it was a communist group after all.

00:07:35.980 The Bibles were redistributed only when they ran out of toilet paper in Jonestown. 0.79

00:07:42.060 And I'm not going to go into detail of what they were used for.

00:07:45.080 Well, obviously.

00:07:45.580 Yeah, and they were instructed how to use them.

00:07:48.480 And I asked, did people do that?

00:07:49.940 And the gentleman I spoke to said yes and indicated that, you know, sort of desperate times call for desperate measures.

00:07:56.960 So if you're going to—if you're someone who was initially a Christian, maybe a fundamentalist Christian, maybe evangelical,

00:08:04.760 and you had serious belief in Christianity, if you go from that point, point A, to the point where they're using Bibles as toilet paper,

00:08:14.460 if you're going to do that, you're pretty much going to do anything for this guy.

00:08:19.300 Okay, so it's what year when he lands in San Francisco?

00:08:24.260 68?

00:08:25.440 A little later than that.

00:08:28.300 But here's the thing is they have a presence in San Francisco.

00:08:32.400 They don't really move en masse to San Francisco until the early 70s.

00:08:37.060 But they're still present there in the late 60s.

00:08:40.220 Okay, so when—San Francisco's always been San Francisco, but California wasn't always nuts.

00:08:48.900 What was California like?

00:08:52.420 I mean, it was not Indiana, but what was it like when he was there?

00:09:00.260 Did the people stand out?

00:09:01.720 Was it his cultish feeling at that time when they first started?

00:09:06.640 One of the things that happens with Jim Jones in California is he starts wearing sunglasses 24-7,

00:09:12.040 which is a very California thing to do.

00:09:14.220 And one of the reasons why people wear sunglasses 24-7 as they start is a lot of people use drugs.

00:09:19.780 A lot of people in the music industry or comedians or people who are on drugs.

00:09:24.340 And at a certain point, Jim Jones develops a drug habit that later becomes sort of a raging drug habit down in Jonestown.

00:09:32.760 So you could say he kind of went native in California.

00:09:36.620 That's part of the reason they sort of go off the rails.

00:09:40.720 In California, some of the local people, regardless of their political affiliation,

00:09:46.300 might like this group because they clean after themselves.

00:09:49.840 They have, you know, they help people out in the community.

00:09:55.000 You know, Jim Jones, to the snap of a finger, can get people to help people.

00:09:58.300 And they give donations.

00:10:00.500 The group gives donations.

00:10:02.120 And so they sort of engendered goodwill.

00:10:05.460 But when people come in and sort of examine what's really going on with the church,

00:10:10.040 that's when things start to go a little haywire.

00:10:13.500 So what's he preaching when he first starts and how long before he's way out of Bible country?

00:10:21.880 You know, he always was railing against the Bible and trying to undermine the Bible.

00:10:29.100 It's just he's being selective.

00:10:33.200 And so when he's in San Francisco, I'm sorry, when he started having a predominantly black church,

00:10:39.300 he changes his message.

00:10:41.280 He knows his audience.

00:10:43.200 But once he has those people hooked, particularly in Jonestown, there's no sermons in Jonestown.

00:10:49.440 There's no celebration of Christmas in Jonestown.

00:10:53.680 There, you know, they acknowledge that they are an atheist group.

00:10:58.540 There's no even, you know, there's no even attempt to sort of feign that they're Christian any longer, 0.85

00:11:04.720 maybe to the public authorities.

00:11:06.160 But not everyone in Jonestown knows what's up.

00:11:09.200 People are changing their name to Stalin and Lenin and Che and Jim Jones.

00:11:15.060 One guy changes his name to Ken Norton because they have these temple boxing matches.

00:11:19.580 He's pretty good at it.

00:11:20.740 And so they give him the name Ken Norton, who, of course, was a great heavyweight back in the 70s.

00:11:25.500 So most of the names they're changing to are names of very prominent communists.

00:11:29.580 And so there's, you know, the security force in Jonestown is called the Red Brigade,

00:11:34.700 the force that killed Leo Ryan, the congressman.

00:11:37.180 You see people wearing red handkerchiefs or wearing red shirts.

00:11:42.460 They're singing the international.

00:11:43.960 There's no pretense about what they're doing there.

00:11:46.400 In San Francisco, there's a pretense that there's, you know, if you are new to the church,

00:11:50.820 you might think this is a Christian group.

00:11:55.280 And Jim Jones sort of pays homage to that to an extent.

00:12:00.040 But when the media and when people, outsiders are not there,

00:12:04.700 he is making the point that socialism is God.

00:12:08.160 And since he is the most perfect human embodiment of socialism, that makes him God.

00:12:14.840 And some people...

00:12:15.720 He's saying that.

00:12:16.100 He is saying that explicitly.

00:12:17.500 So who's sitting in the pew?

00:12:21.880 I mean, because you would think any rational person hear that, you know,

00:12:27.040 because I'm the pure embodiment of socialism, therefore I'm God.

00:12:31.540 You'd think they'd get up, leave.

00:12:33.800 Well, what's that song?

00:12:34.680 There's a load of compromising on the road to my horizons.

00:12:37.540 You know, these people had made deals with themselves.

00:12:39.580 They made compromises in smaller things.

00:12:43.320 And it get bigger and bigger and bigger.

00:12:45.180 I'll give you an example, a little bit off topic.

00:12:48.840 But, you know, the main reason we're talking here is revolutionary suicide.

00:12:53.540 These people all kill themselves.

00:12:55.260 This starts in 1975.

00:12:57.760 And I think the way it starts is sort of instructive to the question that you have there,

00:13:02.120 which is that they have this thing called the wine test.

00:13:04.800 And I interviewed a couple of people for the book who were at this test.

00:13:07.980 And they give out wine.

00:13:09.340 Everyone have some wine.

00:13:10.340 And this is a luxury in people's temple.

00:13:11.860 They're usually not drinking alcohol.

00:13:13.260 So after they drink the wine, Jim Jones informs them, this is the planning commission, the

00:13:17.320 leadership council, essentially, you're all going to die in 45 minutes. 0.54

00:13:21.460 A woman starts freaking out, an overweight white woman from Indiana starts freaking out 0.99

00:13:26.040 and going crazy. 0.95

00:13:26.880 Someone comes out with a gun and shoots her three times.

00:13:29.600 Now, these were blanks.

00:13:30.920 And this was all staged.

00:13:32.700 Someone that I interviewed to this day believed that she was legitimately freaking out and not

00:13:37.280 acting as sort of an agent of Jim Jones doing his bidding.

00:13:40.700 Nobody dies.

00:13:42.840 This woman is shamed and scorned for speaking out against the suicide. 1.00

00:13:48.560 And this drill is repeated.

00:13:51.600 And the lesson there is pretty clear.

00:13:53.960 Drink the wine.

00:13:54.900 Drink the Kool-Aid.

00:13:55.740 You're not going to die.

00:13:57.380 And if you do raise any objections, you're going to be, you know, an outcast.

00:14:03.340 You're going to be a pariah.

00:14:04.600 And so just go along.

00:14:05.760 And I'm sure at that point, some people just thought this was sort of a perverse loyalty

00:14:09.580 drill, that it was, you know, they felt squeamish about it.

00:14:14.700 But you boil that frog.

00:14:16.620 And as you go along, it's what's really out there starts to become normal.

00:14:21.240 And in Jonestown, this starts to become something called White Nights, where Jim Jones acts as

00:14:26.720 though that there's sort of a siege mentality where there's people outside of the perimeter

00:14:31.360 ready to attack, and he's speechifying for sometimes, you know, hours and hours at a

00:14:37.220 time.

00:14:38.360 And he lets them know that at some point it may get to the point where they all have to

00:14:42.500 kill themselves to save themselves from these people torturing their babies and all that

00:14:46.700 kind of thing. 0.78

00:14:47.920 And so you go, you're talking about a seed that's laid in 1975 when they first have,

00:14:54.240 and one of the, Jim Jones's lieutenant, Tim Stone, who I interviewed, he said, Jim came up

00:14:59.120 to me and said, Tim, because Tim surprised him, he didn't usually go to these meetings,

00:15:02.660 he said, Tim, I want you to know, whatever I say tonight, I don't believe in suicide.

00:15:08.420 And Stone said, okay.

00:15:10.240 And he sees what happened.

00:15:11.460 He thought this was really weird.

00:15:12.480 But Jones had told him, well, I don't believe in suicide.

00:15:14.640 So even a level-headed person like that, a lawyer, you know, a guy who is wealthy in

00:15:19.380 the temple, you know, went along, at least to a certain point.

00:15:22.820 Um, and I think that for the people that left after some of these loyalty tests or the people

00:15:30.180 that found Jones to be so out there and so strange that they left, even that was serving

00:15:34.060 his ends because you weed out the independent minds.

00:15:36.380 And what's left behind are people that are just followers, joiners.

00:15:38.940 Okay, so let's, um, takes back, he, he moves to San Francisco, he starts the church, he's,

00:15:53.000 he's got it going.

00:15:54.240 How does he become, how does he become involved in politics?

00:15:58.500 How does he become involved with another guy who you say, and I've read enough to know as

00:16:05.440 well, not the guy everyone thinks he is, Harvey Milk?

00:16:10.020 Sure.

00:16:10.860 He, um, had been involved in politics for a long time, but really where he makes his mark

00:16:15.800 is in 1975, the mayoral race in San Francisco.

00:16:20.300 Willie Brown brokers a meeting with Jim Jones.

00:16:24.020 So we need people because there's a very close election between, uh, George Moscone, who's the

00:16:29.380 liberal Democrat running and John Barbagelotta, who is a conservative Republican at a time when

00:16:34.840 you could almost have that winning in San Francisco, particularly conservative.

00:16:39.020 Well, they, they had a police, they had a police strike that year.

00:16:41.460 And so people were fed up.

00:16:42.600 They were angry with the public employees.

00:16:44.320 And that's why Barbara Gelata was so close.

00:16:46.780 I mean, sort of the last gasp of, of Republicans in, um, I don't know how conservative, I mean,

00:16:51.020 he was, he was somewhat conservative.

00:16:52.700 Anyhow, Moscone wins by about 3000 votes.

00:16:55.340 And most people believe that Jim Jones is the difference maker in that election because he

00:16:59.580 has thousands, you know, thousand people where he can send them out, uh, volunteer, uh, for

00:17:05.240 a candidate leaflet, do all the things that volunteers do.

00:17:07.940 So he becomes popular with anybody who wants to run or is in office.

00:17:11.800 Correct.

00:17:12.320 Now there's a second dynamic about that, which is that not only a lot of people believe that

00:17:17.120 he not only gets Moscone elected because of these above board activities, but he also

00:17:22.160 bust in people from outside of San Francisco to cast ballots.

00:17:25.720 It's people that many suspect were improper electors in the city of San Francisco.

00:17:30.280 Oh, it doesn't happen.

00:17:31.620 That's what you think this is, Chicago?

00:17:33.260 Well, here it gets better.

00:17:34.400 It gets more Chicago.

00:17:35.500 Um, so there's an outcry that this was a fix and the pressure is so great that the

00:17:41.500 Moscone administration is sort of forced to investigate its own election.

00:17:45.680 And they have the district, the district attorney looks in to see if there was voter fraud and

00:17:50.620 the district attorney gets his deputy to investigate.

00:17:53.500 His deputy also happens to be Jim Jones's deputy.

00:17:57.300 Oh my gosh.

00:17:57.900 That's how in with the in crowd people's temple was in San Francisco, that they are investigating

00:18:02.100 accusations of fraud against themselves.

00:18:04.780 And lo and behold, they found that they did not commit any fraud.

00:18:08.880 So is there any, is there any inkling at this point other than just being a community organizer

00:18:17.300 in with the in crowd, dirty politics? 0.97

00:18:20.600 Is there any inkling that this guy is a madman or something else is going on? 0.89

00:18:26.000 There were there were different reports that came out, for instance, in San Francisco in

00:18:32.660 1972, Lester Consolving, a somewhat famous reporter, wrote an eight part series for the

00:18:39.200 San Francisco Examiner, basically exposing all of the things about Jim Jones that we know

00:18:43.900 about him now, that he was engaged in fake faith healings, that they were stockpiling arms.

00:18:49.780 Let's stop for a second.

00:18:51.560 Fake faith healings.

00:18:53.300 You talk about in your book that it almost became like the Holy of Holies, where he has,

00:19:00.540 is it a bag of meat?

00:19:02.180 Yeah, they have a chicken.

00:19:03.780 They have chicken where he claims he's pulling cancer out of people.

00:19:07.740 And it's just sort of some smelly uncooked chicken, chicken gizzards, chicken this, chicken

00:19:12.280 that.

00:19:12.500 And the people around him know that this is fake.

00:19:16.460 And some of those people go to the press about it at a certain point.

00:19:21.620 But at that time, he's also claiming to have raised dozens of people, very specific boasts,

00:19:26.500 raising dozens of people from the dead, telling people, don't whatever you do, don't use embalming

00:19:31.800 fluid because I can't help you at that point.

00:19:33.940 If you use, you know, that where the people did he produce these people and they were in

00:19:40.560 on a scam or correct?

00:19:43.040 There were other instances where people were drugged and they would claim to have healed

00:19:47.740 them.

00:19:48.040 And the people thought that they were healed because they were, you know, someone had put

00:19:51.420 drugs in them.

00:19:52.620 There were all sorts of scams that they were involved in.

00:19:56.600 But Tim Stone, who's his deputy and his lawyer, when I talked to him, when this consoling piece

00:20:01.540 comes out and exposes them, he said, well, I talked to Jim and said, well, we really need

00:20:06.020 to get affidavits from people attesting that they have been healed just in case there's

00:20:10.320 any sort of legal repercussions.

00:20:12.340 And so they start documenting all the people that he's been healed.

00:20:16.160 And so it's not like these are these sort of vague claims.

00:20:19.180 There are very specific claims about how many people he raised and what year from the dead

00:20:24.180 and who was cured of brain cancer and who was cured of this and that.

00:20:29.460 And so that in writing the book, that was the fact that they were able to document all

00:20:34.460 this.

00:20:34.680 It was pretty easy to sort of to put that all together.

00:20:37.860 So what's his motivation to be this faith healer?

00:20:44.060 Does he just want to be a powerful political guy?

00:20:47.800 Does he why is he doing the fake faith healing?

00:20:52.120 The faith healing is the biggest means by which they're able to get members into people's

00:20:56.580 temple.

00:20:57.080 A lot of people who were old and sick wanted to believe that this guy could help them.

00:21:03.600 OK, and so he increased his numbers, he increased his numbers more by faith healing than any

00:21:08.540 other thing.

00:21:09.140 And people would sit through these Fidel Castro like harangues about socialism in order to

00:21:14.580 get healed.

00:21:15.320 And so there was a large contingent, primarily old, a lot of them black, who were in it for 0.97

00:21:22.040 the faith healings.

00:21:23.000 There was a smaller contingent, primarily white and young and socialist and maybe influenced

00:21:28.020 by the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War, who were in it because of the socialism,

00:21:33.680 because of the politics.

00:21:34.900 And they sort of stomached the Charlottesville Act.

00:21:39.080 So did they because I mean, I know Marxists and justify the means.

00:21:45.400 Yeah.

00:21:45.600 But they I guess maybe that's what it is.

00:21:47.520 OK, because I'm trying to think if if, you know, you're a 25 year old, 30 year old Marxist

00:21:53.000 and you hate Christianity and everything else, how you're sitting there watching a guy claim

00:22:00.660 to raise the dead and everything else they knew.

00:22:04.020 And I mean, did they know Michael Prokes?

00:22:07.360 Did they know it was that he knew that it was fake?

00:22:10.320 Some of them did.

00:22:11.300 Some of them believed.

00:22:12.300 I spoke to a guy who hates Jim Jones and defected long before Jonestown.

00:22:18.020 And I asked him, when did you realize that this was just a magic act?

00:22:22.040 He said, what are you talking about?

00:22:23.420 I said, when did you realize that this was all abracadabra?

00:22:25.920 This was fake.

00:22:26.700 He said, I don't understand the question.

00:22:28.200 So when did you realize that that this guy was a phony?

00:22:31.460 He said, oh, no, Jim Jones had power.

00:22:34.780 And I still still to this day.

00:22:36.860 And I said, what do you mean?

00:22:38.260 And he said, no, Jim Jones had extrasensory perception.

00:22:42.300 He had the ability to cure people of not just psychological ailments, but physical maladies.

00:22:48.540 Did you tell him the chicken gizzard thing?

00:22:50.660 Well, he sort of conceded that, well, maybe some of it was fake.

00:22:54.440 But to this day, a guy who hates Jim Jones, and this is an intelligent man, was insisting

00:23:00.320 that this was not fake.

00:23:02.080 And I spoke to other people who believed that Jones had these powers.

00:23:05.720 None of them as insistent as this man was, but saying carefully worded statements that

00:23:14.120 would indicate, that would not preclude the idea that he had power.

00:23:17.100 Now, this guy was coming out and saying it.

00:23:18.920 So it tells you something about his power.

00:23:21.240 Even if we both realize that this guy didn't, this guy was a scam, that he didn't have this

00:23:25.300 kind of power.

00:23:25.840 He had power of some sort that 40 years later, someone still believes that he was able to,

00:23:30.720 you know, read minds and cure people of cancer.

00:23:33.860 That's a power.

00:23:34.680 It may not be a supernatural power, but it's a power of some sort.

00:23:38.260 So it's a power of persuasion, at least, and manipulation. 0.92

00:23:41.860 In thinking back on those interviews, did you consider that, I don't want to be a fool?

00:23:53.940 That these people who left, they left, but they didn't, they couldn't bring themselves 1.00

00:24:00.460 to say, I was this stupid? 0.99

00:24:03.560 I think that's part of it, that there was an element of being all in. 0.99

00:24:06.400 And that's one of the reasons why you have Jonestown happening, because the people were all

00:24:11.240 in at that point.

00:24:12.400 And it's hard to sort of invest and invest and invest in someone.

00:24:16.300 And once you say, you know, the emperor has no clothes, or you see that guy, you know,

00:24:20.700 pay no attention to that guy behind the curtain or any of that kind of thing, you're really

00:24:24.380 saying something about yourself.

00:24:26.080 Yes.

00:24:26.540 And not the scam artist.

00:24:27.600 And that's very hard.

00:24:28.500 That's a very hard thing to do.

00:24:29.700 Very hard.

00:24:30.020 That's a very hard thing to do.

00:24:31.340 All right.

00:24:31.620 So let's stop here for a second and get into Harvey Milk, because I remember, I remember

00:24:42.600 this.

00:24:43.080 I remember seeing the bodies on television.

00:24:45.340 It was the first time I'd ever seen anything like that on television.

00:24:47.960 I was a young kid.

00:24:49.960 And I remember how horrible that was.

00:24:52.680 And I remember how it just stopped everything.

00:24:54.900 But I swear to you, I thought, and maybe I just, this is the way I processed it, but

00:24:59.960 I thought that was a religious cult, which I guess in kind of it is that he was God.

00:25:06.480 Sure.

00:25:07.140 I don't remember anything about Marxism.

00:25:09.860 Harvey Milk, as well, is being made into this wonderful human being.

00:25:15.700 Tell me about Harvey Milk.

00:25:17.740 Harvey Milk is a transplant from New York who, prior to coming to San Francisco, was sort of

00:25:23.980 a jack of all trades, was a teacher, was in the Navy, later claimed he had a dishonorable

00:25:28.160 discharge from the Navy in San Francisco to get kind of street cred.

00:25:31.060 I mean, who does that?

00:25:32.440 I mean, that's how crazy and upside down it is.

00:25:34.580 Usually people say, no, I had honors.

00:25:37.440 They're like that guy in Connecticut.

00:25:38.660 They fake.

00:25:39.240 They say that they did all sorts of great things in the military.

00:25:41.920 He said he was dishonorable to discharge.

00:25:43.400 He wasn't.

00:25:43.960 I have his copy of his honorable discharge.

00:25:46.020 So he served honorably in the military.

00:25:48.000 He was a teacher.

00:25:49.280 He was sort of an analyst on Wall Street.

00:25:51.880 He worked on Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, Broadway productions.

00:25:56.940 And when he gets to San Francisco, and he lives out there a few different times, he decides

00:26:02.560 he's going to remake himself once again, like a lot of people do when they go to California.

00:26:06.420 You know, go west, young man, go west.

00:26:08.020 Grow up with your country.

00:26:08.920 And that's what he did.

00:26:09.800 He goes out there, and he decides, you know, wouldn't it be great to be mayor or supervisor

00:26:15.260 or whatever?

00:26:15.960 And so he runs for office in 1973.

00:26:18.580 He loses.

00:26:19.160 He runs again in 75.

00:26:20.340 He loses.

00:26:20.740 It's really not.

00:26:22.400 He runs again in 76.

00:26:23.340 He loses again.

00:26:23.920 It's really not until he gets in touch with Jim Jones that he goes from being a novelty

00:26:28.320 candidate to being a really serious force in the city.

00:26:31.980 And why was he a novelty candidate?

00:26:33.820 Because even at that point, being a homosexual running for office, even in a place like San 0.99

00:26:38.480 Francisco, was a little bit different.

00:26:40.260 And people thought, even gays thought, let's just put our support behind straight candidates 0.89

00:26:46.380 who believe in our cause, and let's not sort of be out in front because it's going to alienate

00:26:52.020 too many people.

00:26:53.180 San Francisco was, we think of San Francisco as this really left-wing town, but like at

00:26:56.760 that time, Joe Alioto's the mayor, who's a very conservative Democrat, friends with Eric

00:27:01.460 Hoffer, you know, he's not the kind of San Francisco Democrat that we think of now.

00:27:06.420 He's not a guy that would be welcome in San Francisco today.

00:27:09.820 Correct.

00:27:10.580 And so it was a city in flux.

00:27:12.260 And I don't think it was apparent to everyone that a gay could be a political force in San

00:27:17.980 Francisco.

00:27:18.400 It was apparent to Harvey Milk.

00:27:20.000 It took an outsider to see that.

00:27:22.040 He really doesn't get his thing going on until he links up with Jones.

00:27:26.680 Jones is able to give him hundreds of volunteers, a printing press, a pulpit to speak to a thousand

00:27:34.320 people.

00:27:35.860 He's able to give him publicity in the People's Temple's newspaper, which is widely distributed.

00:27:40.320 And of course, a lot of the People's Temple members are African-Americans, so he has African-Americans

00:27:43.680 in his district. 0.90

00:27:44.540 You know, rather than having this gay white guy show up at their house, he has those. 0.93

00:27:47.640 So very helpful to Harvey Milk.

00:27:50.360 In exchange, Harvey Milk gives Jim Jones something I think far more valuable, which is credibility.

00:27:56.680 Now, Jones already had credibility in San Francisco at this time.

00:28:00.020 But when things start going south for him, some of the politicians, you know, go east

00:28:04.900 and west.

00:28:05.560 They're running from him because it starts coming out that they're beating people and they're

00:28:10.200 taking advantage of people financially.

00:28:13.860 Harvey Milk acts as one of the most loyal supporters of Jim Jones.

00:28:18.420 So one of the things Jones does is he kidnaps a little boy, John Victor Stone, when he goes

00:28:23.740 down to South America, his parents in the United States.

00:28:26.680 And there's thought that they're going to intervene.

00:28:29.720 The government's going to intervene and get that boy back.

00:28:31.900 And this becomes sort of like an existential crisis for some reason for People's Temple. 0.57

00:28:36.280 Harvey Milk writes Jimmy Carter a letter saying Jim Jones is a man of the highest character

00:28:41.940 that he's thought of like that in San Francisco, that this boy's mother is a blackmailer. 0.99

00:28:47.400 And his dad, the guy who says he's his dad, is a bald-faced liar. 0.99

00:28:52.840 Jim Jones is the real dad. 0.98

00:28:55.300 You have that copy of that letter.

00:28:56.480 I do.

00:28:56.920 Yeah.

00:28:57.360 And the Carter administration, I want to say they didn't intervene.

00:29:00.920 But really, they did intervene on behalf of Jones.

00:29:03.940 Because Rosalyn actually met with Jim Jones.

00:29:07.940 Walter Mondale did as well.

00:29:09.160 Yeah.

00:29:09.280 Rosalyn Carter meets with Jim Jones, has dinner with him.

00:29:13.180 They have private conversations on the phone.

00:29:15.820 We know this because Jones surreptitiously recorded the conversations that he had with

00:29:19.880 the—at that point, she's not the first lady.

00:29:21.700 But she's—you know, when she comes to San Francisco to campaign for Jimmy Carter for 0.74

00:29:26.600 president in 1976, Jim Jones introduces her.

00:29:29.160 The guy that she has introduce, you know, the future first lady of the United States,

00:29:32.760 is this cult leader who kills over 900 people two years later.

00:29:38.080 Walter Mondale, when he comes to San Francisco, steps on the tarmac.

00:29:41.480 One of the first persons he meets is Jim Jones.

00:29:43.720 Are either of them on record at the time in any—in handwriting, in personal conversations

00:29:51.820 saying, I don't know, there's something wrong with that guy.

00:29:54.380 I mean, great, we're going to use him for those.

00:29:56.520 But they all just think he's fine.

00:29:58.500 Correct.

00:30:00.320 Jerry Brown speaks at People's Temple.

00:30:02.460 Ed Bradley, the mayor of San Francisco—the mayor of Los Angeles.

00:30:07.080 You know, I found a letter from Jane Fonda to Jim Jones, written after she'd attended

00:30:14.200 People's Temple service in San Francisco, saying that she wanted to be an active and full

00:30:18.420 participant in People's Temple and that she wanted to do this for the sake of her kids.

00:30:23.180 Oh, my God.

00:30:24.020 So, Jim Jones said publicly that Jane Fonda was a member of his temple.

00:30:29.480 I don't think he was wrong.

00:30:31.160 I mean, if you read that letter, it's very hard to read that letter and not come to the

00:30:35.580 conclusion that Jane Fonda was saying, I want to be a member of People's Temple.

00:30:39.860 I want to be an active and full participant were her words.

00:30:42.000 I don't know how else you interpret that.

00:30:44.800 When things start going south, Fonda joins with Milk and Tom Hayden and some others.

00:30:50.120 They put out a public letter in defense of People's Temple in 1977.

00:30:53.260 She really aggressively supports Jones.

00:30:57.720 So Milk's not alone.

00:30:58.640 He has a whole cast of characters, some of them very famous, like Jane Fonda.

00:31:01.380 The interesting thing about her—I mean, you've seen some of the interviews, the interview

00:31:04.140 he did with Megyn Kelly.

00:31:06.140 You ask her about her facelift.

00:31:07.840 People ask her about her trip to North Vietnam.

00:31:09.980 They ask her all sorts of indelicate questions.

00:31:12.280 Nobody says, hey, why did you join People's Temple that time?

00:31:15.260 Why did you do that?

00:31:16.340 That never comes up.

00:31:17.480 And I just find that very odd that that would get dumped down the memory hole.

00:31:21.180 That's part of the reason I wrote the book.

00:31:23.500 People like Harvey Milk, who have become heroes, who, you know, has his name, Terminal 1.

00:31:29.200 You're flying to San Francisco.

00:31:30.260 It's now Harvey Milk Terminal.

00:31:32.120 They have a Navy ship named after Harvey Milk.

00:31:34.920 Barack Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

00:31:37.440 Jeez.

00:31:37.860 And it's hard to—you know, on the one hand, there's a lot of the sex stuff that some people

00:31:44.400 bring up, and it's brought up in my book about Milk, that he was not—you know, the stuff

00:31:48.640 is sort of brushed under the rug, you know, the type of guy he was, involved with a lot

00:31:52.580 of young guys.

00:31:54.200 But the other part of it is that—

00:31:56.820 Define young guys. 0.99

00:31:57.700 Um, okay, so he goes to New York in 1964—I'm sorry, he's in New York in 1964, and he picks

00:32:04.480 up a 16-year-old runaway off the street.

00:32:06.560 He moves him into his house.

00:32:08.180 He tries to get legal guardianship over the kid.

00:32:10.960 He, big into photography at the time, takes a number of pictures of the kid's rear end

00:32:14.900 and decorates the house with the pictures of the 16-year-old's rear end.

00:32:19.340 Um, at the same time, they're handing out Goldwater leaflets in the subways, because

00:32:25.440 at that point, Harvey Milk is a Goldwater conservative.

00:32:29.060 What?

00:32:30.080 Yes.

00:32:30.560 What?

00:32:31.060 Yes.

00:32:31.620 So, um, and it, you know, it makes a little bit of sense, because back—this is before

00:32:35.480 the cultural wars and the cultural—you know, so those issues aren't really defining Republican,

00:32:40.440 Democrat, that kind of thing.

00:32:41.580 And if you're a stock analyst on Wall Street, you might be attracted to a guy like Goldwater,

00:32:47.600 and it might have—you know, sex has nothing to do with any of this.

00:32:50.640 So he was living a double life.

00:32:53.880 Um, you know, it's interesting, Milk told people to come out—he never came out to his

00:32:57.640 own parents, and his own parents were on Long Island, and he had this 16-year-old living

00:33:01.360 with him in, um, in Manhattan, in San Francisco.

00:33:06.340 I heard a much more disturbing story, and I was called 10 or 11 years ago by a rather

00:33:13.580 prominent gay man in San Francisco.

00:33:15.780 He heard me on the radio in San Francisco and says, I need to tell you something.

00:33:19.080 And, um, this guy knew Harvey Milk, you know, some—well-known to other gays in San Francisco,

00:33:24.960 but for obvious reason, wants to remain anonymous.

00:33:27.700 And he told me this story in, um, the early 1970s.

00:33:31.020 He went out on the town with Milk and some friends.

00:33:32.840 Milk was with a young kid that he thought was 16, 17, maybe 18 years old, um, and there

00:33:38.620 were some other friends.

00:33:39.880 The—Milk's friend could not get into the bar, and so Milk and that boy went their way.

00:33:45.060 Everyone else went the other way.

00:33:47.460 And the next morning, the man who I talked to, um, stumbles upon this boy in Harvey Milk's

00:33:55.140 doorway, and he's balled up, he's bruised, he's bloodied.

00:33:58.120 And the boy's not really coherently getting out what exactly happened, and so the guy

00:34:03.240 says, let's go to breakfast.

00:34:04.860 At that point, the boy gets it together and says, he beat me up. 0.99

00:34:09.000 He raped me. 0.95

00:34:10.220 And he described what had happened, and as my source says, you know, you didn't need 0.98

00:34:13.640 to be a male gynecologist to figure out what happened.

00:34:15.900 He was—he had cuts about the ear and about the face and all that kind of thing.

00:34:19.480 And something obviously happened.

00:34:21.300 Now, he didn't witness what happened.

00:34:23.200 I didn't witness what happened.

00:34:24.260 This happened 45 years ago or so.

00:34:26.080 Now, oftentimes, there's people in these kind of relationships where it's he said,

00:34:30.120 she said, he said, he said.

00:34:31.620 And, you know, maybe they got in a fight, and the bigger guy, Harvey Milk, was kind of

00:34:34.540 a big guy.

00:34:34.860 Maybe he won.

00:34:36.580 You know, maybe it was an unpleasant sexual experience that, in hindsight, he labeled 0.97

00:34:39.440 a rape.

00:34:39.660 I don't know.

00:34:40.640 But the bottom line is that, you know, this guy—the guy was beat up, and there was an

00:34:48.440 unwanted sexual encounter.

00:34:49.800 It's amazing to me that, you know, we're in this old Me Too era.

00:34:52.520 That you're the bad guy if you sort of report on that story, and no one is touching it with

00:34:58.700 a 10-foot pole.

00:34:59.560 No one is saying, hey, maybe we should think about naming this terminal in San Francisco

00:35:04.620 after this guy.

00:35:05.560 Or maybe we shouldn't—you know, maybe we should rethink having a holiday in the schools

00:35:09.620 in California on Harvey Milk's birthday because, you know, he was going after kids who were

00:35:15.080 supposed to be in school.

00:35:15.840 Um, so that part of it is totally excised from the story.

00:35:21.920 It's totally omitted.

00:35:23.900 I can see someone, a Milk defender, saying that this story that this man came forward

00:35:27.960 with years later, well, it's something that maybe wouldn't hold up in a court of law.

00:35:32.680 Sure.

00:35:33.420 But this is the court of public opinion we're talking about.

00:35:35.980 And when you—

00:35:36.300 Yeah, it didn't stop anybody on Kavanaugh.

00:35:37.700 No, it didn't stop anyone on Kavanaugh, but beyond that, um, the fact that there's

00:35:42.000 a history there, that there is—no one is debating whether he picked up the 16-year-old

00:35:47.180 runaway off the street.

00:35:48.740 Uh, Milk tried to alter the boy's birth date in a notebook that he had, but we know when

00:35:54.340 the kid was born, and we know when he met Harvey Milk and he was 16, and that was illegal

00:35:57.760 at the time.

00:35:58.200 And even if it wasn't illegal, it's kind of creepy that you have a 30-something-year-old

00:36:01.720 guy having a relationship with a 16-year-old runaway.

00:36:03.560 And that was sort of the pattern with him, that he would pick up vulnerable guys that

00:36:07.260 were either on drugs, had big psychological problems, had a history of suicide attempts,

00:36:11.680 or, you know, several of them did commit suicide after or during the relationship with Milk.

00:36:16.400 So he was really slumming it.

00:36:18.260 He may have been working Wall Street, but he was slumming it on Skid Row with some of his

00:36:22.940 relationships.

00:36:23.660 So why was he protected by so many people?

00:36:26.220 Why is he—

00:36:27.280 Well, I think in death, he's become the gay Martin Luther King figure. 0.90

00:36:30.320 And part of that, I'm sure we'll get into that, has to do with this narrative that's

00:36:34.160 been constructed about why he was killed.

00:36:36.820 We know Martin Luther King was killed by a racist, and so the parallel to that was that 0.95

00:36:40.860 this guy would be killed by a bigot and a homophobe. 0.95

00:36:43.180 But he wasn't. 0.99

00:36:43.720 But he wasn't.

00:36:44.480 And I'm sure we'll have time to get into that.

00:36:47.360 Why don't we do that now, and then we'll come back to Jim.

00:36:50.260 So with Jones's help, Milk gets elected in 1977 to the Board of Supervisors.

00:37:00.300 And at this point, Jones has skedaddled down to South America.

00:37:03.820 But there's sort of a remnant of People's Temple still in San Francisco.

00:37:07.580 And Milk is getting help from them and help from other people.

00:37:10.980 And he's established himself after three runs.

00:37:13.120 He gets elected.

00:37:13.760 Another guy gets elected, Dan White, who is in probably the most conservative, if you

00:37:20.640 want to put it like that, district in the most working-class conservative district in

00:37:25.540 San Francisco.

00:37:26.620 Sort of more of a law and order guy.

00:37:28.620 But he's really Dianne Feinstein's protege.

00:37:31.660 I mean, that's who he's closest to politically.

00:37:33.640 That's who he looks up to the most.

00:37:35.360 And Dianne Feinstein looks upon Dan White as kind of an Eagle Scout character.

00:37:38.760 She really looks at him as like a little goody two-shoes. 0.96

00:37:41.460 So they get on the board.

00:37:44.240 And on the first day on the Board of Supervisors, Dan White helps engineer a coup of sorts.

00:37:50.860 Usually the person getting the most votes in the previous election becomes the board president.

00:37:55.140 But they're able to finagle it so that Dianne Feinstein becomes the board president.

00:38:00.200 That's really the only impact Dan White has in his whole time on the Board of Supervisors.

00:38:05.380 He was outwitted, outmatched, outplayed by Harvey Milk quite often.

00:38:10.120 And it's not until his last day in City Hall that he has a very similar impact on Dianne

00:38:15.420 Feinstein's career.

00:38:16.640 And at this point, Dianne Feinstein had lost two runs for mayor of San Francisco.

00:38:20.640 Her husband had recently died.

00:38:22.260 She had about a sickness.

00:38:24.660 She was about done with politics.

00:38:27.040 Until Dan White comes in and murders George Moscone and murders Harvey Milk. 0.95

00:38:33.360 Now, the narrative is that Dan White did this because he was a homophobe and a bigot and he hated 0.99

00:38:37.840 gays. The reality is, is that Dan White had resigned his seat on the Board of Supervisors. 0.97

00:38:43.340 He was very frustrated.

00:38:45.140 You know, he was outmatched, like I said, and he was having a tough time financially.

00:38:49.860 And so he resigned.

00:38:52.180 The people who got him elected were generally the police and the firemen, the public employees

00:38:56.140 unions. And that's who he kind of represented on the board.

00:38:59.320 They came to him and said, why didn't you tell us?

00:39:01.740 Why did you resign? You've got to get your seat back.

00:39:04.480 If we, you know, we have all these important votes before the Board of Supervisors and they

00:39:09.400 were going to be 6-5 and you were the linchpin of those votes and now we're going to lose.

00:39:13.440 So he begs his first job back.

00:39:15.440 And Mayor Moscone publicly initially says he's back on the Board of Supervisors.

00:39:20.780 And so White thinks he has his job back.

00:39:24.420 Milk gets in Moscone's ear, the mayor, and says, look, we're losing too many 6-5 votes.

00:39:32.160 This is insane.

00:39:33.440 You know, don't put this guy back on the board.

00:39:36.260 And Moscone thinks about it and says, yeah, that's pretty wise political advice.

00:39:39.760 And he changes his mind.

00:39:41.320 This sets Dan White off.

00:39:43.000 And Dan White was a guy who was uber competitive, one of those people that never can be wrong,

00:39:47.900 never could admit fault.

00:39:50.640 And he is extremely angry and upset and out for blood for this.

00:39:56.700 Now, the narrative that he did this because of, you know, gay issues or something like

00:40:01.700 that, the reality is I interviewed Dan White's chief of staff, his campaign manager, his business

00:40:07.400 partner, a guy by the name of Ray Sloan. 0.93

00:40:09.820 Ray Sloan's a gay man and was gay then and is gay now.

00:40:13.520 And openly then, at least with Dan.

00:40:15.440 What he said to me is that Dan, at first it just wasn't brought up, but eventually Dan

00:40:20.840 White knew and it wasn't really talked about, but it made no difference to Dan White.

00:40:25.540 Dan White had a very mixed record on gay rights.

00:40:29.040 Some of his votes, I think, rather petulantly were to punish Harvey Milk because there was

00:40:33.520 an issue that White wanted Milk's vote on.

00:40:36.180 Milk initially said yes and then reversed his vote.

00:40:38.360 It was about setting up sort of a home for youth offenders in White's district, which

00:40:43.020 he, you know, not in my backyard kind of thing.

00:40:45.260 Right, right.

00:40:45.620 And it went against White and he freaked out about that.

00:40:48.600 And that sort of harms the relationship between him and Milk.

00:40:51.020 But, you know, they're friends.

00:40:52.360 They're going out for coffee.

00:40:53.500 They're going out for breakfast.

00:40:55.220 Their, Milk is coming, not like the other supervised, Milk's coming to the baptism of

00:40:59.800 White's kid. 0.96

00:41:01.900 And, and, and he knew, I mean, there's no way.

00:41:05.500 I mean, everybody knew he was gay.

00:41:08.360 That Harvey Milk was gay?

00:41:09.280 Yes.

00:41:09.720 Yeah.

00:41:10.240 I mean, everyone knew Harvey Milk was gay.

00:41:11.780 Right.

00:41:12.020 I mean, he, I mean, he was quite clear he was gay. 0.99

00:41:14.640 He made everyone know it.

00:41:15.360 Right.

00:41:15.840 Yeah.

00:41:15.940 So if you're coming to the baptism of your child, of White's child, was that by invitation? 0.89

00:41:24.180 Yes.

00:41:24.700 Yeah.

00:41:25.100 Yeah.

00:41:25.620 So they were, they were, and politically they sometimes voted the same way.

00:41:30.240 I mean, White very aggressively voted for affirmative action.

00:41:33.340 You know, very aggressive affirmative action policies on the Board of Supervisors.

00:41:37.180 He gave the keynote address for a California gun control group, ironically enough, is what

00:41:42.820 happens when Proposition 13 passes in California.

00:41:47.700 There's all these scare stories about this tax limitation measure, Jarvis Gann, that all the

00:41:53.920 cities and towns are going to run out of money.

00:41:55.360 And so Dan White initially votes for all these tax increases in San Francisco.

00:41:59.180 And then when things become, it becomes clear that those were just scare stories, he votes

00:42:03.880 against, he votes to rescind those tax increases.

00:42:06.180 And that kind of, in a little snapshot, is who Dan White was.

00:42:09.020 He's a sort of mercurial politician, not very ideological, you know, would vote liberal

00:42:14.460 on some things, conservative on, he certainly wasn't the most conservative member of the

00:42:17.160 board or the second most conservative member of the board.

00:42:18.920 And the person he most identified with was Dianne Feinstein.

00:42:22.400 When Proposition 6 in 1978, which is the Briggs Initiative, that was, I think, a rather

00:42:27.560 unwise initiative that would have empowered local school boards to just fire a teacher

00:42:32.480 because they were gay or because they supported gay rights. 0.55

00:42:35.180 Wow.

00:42:36.380 That initially was going to win.

00:42:38.740 And Ronald Reagan came out against it.

00:42:40.300 And then the poll numbers sort of reversed.

00:42:43.060 Dan White was pretty vocal in opposition to that.

00:42:46.540 You read some of the histories that say Dan White was a supporter of it.

00:42:48.620 He was not.

00:42:49.180 He attended the largest gay rights fundraiser in the history of the United States up until

00:42:53.400 that time to defeat the Briggs Initiative.

00:42:56.500 So this narrative that Dan White was some sort of seething, angry homophobe who killed

00:43:02.840 Harvey Milk for the same reasons that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King, it just doesn't

00:43:08.180 hold up water.

00:43:09.480 So when did that narrative begin then?

00:43:12.280 Immediately.

00:43:13.880 In the Bay Area Reporter, immediately.

00:43:15.960 Didn't people know?

00:43:17.320 I mean, weren't there people around that said, no, that, I knew him.

00:43:21.140 He didn't. 0.91

00:43:21.840 Well, Dianne Feinstein has come out and said, this is ridiculous. 0.84

00:43:24.840 This is, wasn't about anyone's sexual orientation. 0.85

00:43:27.220 She said this 10 years ago in a press event.

00:43:29.880 And she went into detail what it was about.

00:43:32.700 Quentin Kopp, who was also on the board, who I interviewed, another Democrat, said this

00:43:36.780 had nothing to do with anyone's sexual orientation.

00:43:39.040 It's just a myth.

00:43:40.780 Other people have come out and said the same thing who were there at the time.

00:43:43.820 But, you know, never let facts get in the way of a good story.

00:43:47.560 Good story.

00:43:47.760 Yeah.

00:43:48.240 It's a great story.

00:43:50.040 And I think for a lot of people who were very hurt by Milk's death, who maybe have looked

00:43:53.980 up to him, you want to find some meaning in something.

00:43:56.640 I mean, we think about like when Lady Di dies or any big figure, Malcolm X, there's always

00:44:01.780 some real theory about why they died.

00:44:04.120 And maybe the people that we know killed them with someone else, you know, and so a little

00:44:08.880 bit of that, we know who killed Harvey Milk and Mermis Coney, but the why of it has been

00:44:13.500 obscured for political reasons.

00:44:16.880 And I think that's, you know, it's just tremendously dishonest.

00:44:21.340 I mean, it's not as though Dan White was, you know, a left winger or was voting with Milk

00:44:27.820 on every gay rights initiative.

00:44:29.660 But, you know, he was going back and forth.

00:44:32.180 This had nothing to do with gay rights.

00:44:33.980 This had to do with a petty office desired by a petty man, the petty grievance.

00:44:39.420 And he goes and commits a petty act against these two, these two guys.

00:44:43.600 One guy is beloved, had family.

00:44:45.340 Another guy was also beloved in the Castro district and elsewhere in San Francisco.

00:44:49.900 And so it's bad enough what he did.

00:44:51.740 You don't have to create this, you know, phony baloney story to, you know, like a creation

00:44:58.500 story, campfire story.

00:45:03.980 How weird is it, you know, when you hear this, I remember being a kid and hearing about all

00:45:16.520 of this, that Dianne Feinstein was part of all this.

00:45:20.940 I mean, it's the same woman.

00:45:23.800 She's still...

00:45:26.220 To me, it's interesting that she, you think a few months back when this whole Kavanaugh thing

00:45:32.520 went down.

00:45:32.980 She's public enemy number one for conservatives in this country. 0.94

00:45:36.220 For a long time, she was hated by the left.

00:45:39.680 They never really accept her.

00:45:40.820 And you can see this guy that ran against her, De Leon or whatever his name was.

00:45:44.860 The fact that the extent that he got support against someone who's been there, I don't

00:45:48.880 know, six terms or whatever it is she's been there.

00:45:51.160 She was never really accepted.

00:45:53.620 Harvey Milk hated her, simply hated her.

00:45:57.680 And other people just, I think culturally, she came across in a certain way, almost like

00:46:01.680 a blue stocking or, you know, patrician.

00:46:05.440 And she's a very classy lady. 1.00

00:46:07.000 She holds herself with dignity.

00:46:08.240 And some people are sort of offended by that.

00:46:09.960 But we talked earlier, the New World Liberation Front, they shot up her vacation home.

00:46:15.340 They put a bomb on her windowsill.

00:46:18.840 You know, I have some great respect for her for what went on in San Francisco in the 70s.

00:46:25.940 And for the most part, she's not a part of that.

00:46:27.880 She's a target of it.

00:46:29.520 With People's Temple, she does sign on to a certificate of honor that's unanimously passed

00:46:35.580 in the Board of Supervisors for Jim Jones, saying what a great guy he was.

00:46:39.160 But less so than like a guy like Willie Brown.

00:46:42.580 Take a guy like Willie Brown.

00:46:43.620 Willie Brown, when Jim Jones wanted to go to Cuba, and he did go to Cuba, wrote Fidel Castro

00:46:49.420 and said, urged him to extend a state visit to Jim Jones as though Jim Jones were like

00:46:54.940 a world leader to sort of grant him the privileges of a world leader visiting Cuba.

00:46:58.680 And he said that Jim Jones is a highly trusted brother in the struggle for liberation.

00:47:02.800 He also said elsewhere that he compared Jim Jones to Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

00:47:09.340 Jim Jones won the Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award in San Francisco.

00:47:13.320 But the point about Brown is that years later, when Brown writes his memoirs about 10 years

00:47:18.140 ago, he writes in such a way that he was sort of a detached observer, that he didn't know

00:47:24.180 this Jim Jones guy.

00:47:25.440 He's perplexed about how he got so powerful and how he was able to dupe people in San Francisco.

00:47:29.560 He was one of the main people.

00:47:31.760 He was the main guy aiding and abetting Jim Jones, along with someone like Harvey Milk.

00:47:37.540 And so what happens when things go south for Jim Jones is that guys like Brown and Harvey

00:47:43.880 Milk come to his aid.

00:47:45.300 Mervyn Dimley, who's the lieutenant governor of California, he flies down to Jonestown with

00:47:49.340 Jim Jones.

00:47:50.060 And he says, I'm tremendously impressed.

00:47:52.160 He's looking at a concentration camp.

00:47:54.220 And he's telling everyone that what he's seeing is like the second coming of Eden.

00:47:58.940 And that's that's where Harvey Milk comes into the story, running interference for Jim

00:48:04.060 Jones, aiding and abetting him.

00:48:05.940 And that's something that really outweighs anything that he did in his very short time

00:48:09.980 on the board of supervisors.

00:48:10.960 So give me the peak of Jim Jones power in the city of San Francisco and then how it begins

00:48:19.200 to fall apart.

00:48:20.900 In 1976, when George Moscone takes office as mayor, he's talking about putting Jim Jones

00:48:28.160 on the housing.

00:48:28.980 I'm sorry, the Human Rights Commission.

00:48:30.540 And Jones says, I was on that commission back in Indianapolis.

00:48:33.920 You better do better than that.

00:48:34.960 I got you elected.

00:48:36.420 And Moscone says, well, Jim Jones examines his conscience more thoroughly than any man I

00:48:41.200 know.

00:48:41.660 So if he's saying he doesn't want it because he's too busy, that's the real reason.

00:48:44.880 Not he's not playing hard to get.

00:48:46.080 But Moscone comes back with a better offer and he makes him the Commission, the Housing

00:48:51.400 Commission Authority, one of the members.

00:48:53.420 And then very quickly, Jim Jones becomes elevated.

00:48:55.400 He's the chairman of the Housing Commission Authority, effectively the largest landlord in

00:49:00.100 the city of San Francisco in charge of 35,000 housing units, public housing units.

00:49:04.920 And, you know, when we think about Jim Jones, we usually think about guys like John Wayne

00:49:09.040 Gacy or Charlie Manson or Ted Bundy.

00:49:11.800 We don't think about those guys holding positions of power in major American cities.

00:49:17.440 We don't think of them holding positions of civic responsibility.

00:49:21.380 Jim Jones did that.

00:49:22.260 So when you ask about his peak of his power, certainly 76 and 77, when he's chairman of

00:49:28.000 the Housing Commission Authority in San Francisco, when they're giving them the human rights,

00:49:32.720 the Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award, when one of the Los Angeles papers names him the

00:49:37.920 man of the year, when he is named one of the hundred most important clergymen by religion

00:49:43.360 in American life and meets in New York with a hundred other clergymen and the vice president

00:49:47.640 of the United States, Nelson Rockefeller.

00:49:48.860 How?

00:49:49.520 He's not preaching God.

00:49:52.500 Well, you know, how?

00:49:53.580 How did he convince all those people he was healing them of cancer when he wasn't?

00:49:58.080 And so he, he had the, the, and the point of all that is before the poor drank the Kool-Aid

00:50:03.960 in South America, the powerful did in San Francisco.

00:50:07.340 In other words, so many people act as though, how do these people get duped? 1.00

00:50:11.660 And how are they so stupid? 1.00

00:50:13.200 And they don't look at the fact that. 1.00

00:50:15.980 They gave him all these awards.

00:50:17.260 They endorsed him.

00:50:18.420 People with better educations, more money and more power than those people fell for him

00:50:22.520 too.

00:50:22.740 They just didn't, you know, they happened not to be in, in, in Guyana at the time.

00:50:26.160 Did they fall for him or do they just see his power, uh, to persuade and to help?

00:50:33.320 And they didn't care.

00:50:34.680 It's probably a little bit of both.

00:50:36.380 Um, with Harvey Milk, he had never been involved religiously.

00:50:41.760 I mean, really, I mean, he had been involved in Judaism to an extent, but he really was

00:50:46.000 just sort of a secular guy.

00:50:47.240 And, um, some people say he was an atheist.

00:50:49.320 Some people say, well, he just wasn't religious.

00:50:51.500 He, in, in people's temple, he kept coming back.

00:50:56.440 And he said, he found something there.

00:50:58.260 Um, he said, my name is written in stone for you and your people to Jim Jones.

00:51:02.300 He was very emphatic over the top letters to Jim Jones.

00:51:05.680 Who said this?

00:51:06.460 Harvey Milk said it to Jim Jones.

00:51:08.100 Wow.

00:51:08.480 Um, you know, so there's all these emphatic letters that he wrote to Jones.

00:51:12.240 And when things go south for Jones, Harvey Milk starts lobbying world leaders, saying

00:51:18.040 how much a great guy Jim Jones was.

00:51:19.840 He wrote Forbes Burnham, who was the prime minister of Guyana, that, uh, Jim Jones, such

00:51:24.660 greatness I have found in Jim Jones' people's temple.

00:51:27.040 He writes the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph Califano, that Jonestown

00:51:33.760 was, is a beautiful retirement community, the likes of which people of means would pay 0.99

00:51:38.000 thousands of dollars to, uh, attend, that it was helping to alleviate the world food

00:51:42.840 crisis.

00:51:43.200 This is a time when people were starving in Jonestown.

00:51:45.800 I talked to people who never ate meat there, um, or that ate, the only meat they ate was

00:51:50.760 fish heads or chicken feet.

00:51:52.900 And he's saying that that Jonestown was helping to alleviate the world food crisis.

00:51:56.440 He was saying they're solving the America's crime problem by taking criminals and turning

00:51:59.820 into productive citizens.

00:52:00.880 So he basically was lying on Jones's behalf to Jimmy Carter, to his cabinet officials,

00:52:07.580 to various world leaders down in Guyana.

00:52:10.120 And the result of that, I mean, if you're in Guyana and you're hearing reports, because

00:52:16.500 there were reports months and months before Jonestown happens, there were reports that

00:52:21.200 there was plans for mass suicide.

00:52:22.800 Well, wait, wait, before we get there.

00:52:24.680 Sure.

00:52:25.040 Tell me, why did he flee San Francisco?

00:52:29.980 Tell me about that, where he looks at these, he has to, he realized, I got to get out of here

00:52:35.000 and I got to convince these 900 people it's time to go.

00:52:39.700 Yeah, they didn't need much convincing.

00:52:41.400 He just said the word.

00:52:43.320 The reason he leaves is that there's, um, reports coming out similar to what happened

00:52:49.660 in 1972 with Lester Consolving, but Lester Consolving people could dismiss because he

00:52:53.480 was a conservative.

00:52:54.680 Um, there was reports coming out from a publication called New West Magazine, which was a Murdoch

00:52:58.600 publication, um, and was a magazine, uh, at the time big in California.

00:53:03.680 Jones was able to jettison that piece.

00:53:08.000 Harvey Milk helped in that regard, telling them they should kill that piece. 0.97

00:53:11.980 And they did kill it.

00:53:13.060 The editor leaves, a new editor comes in and says, fire away, go with that.

00:53:16.920 Um, and the piece talks about Jones's ties with powerful California officials like Willie

00:53:22.940 Brown, uh, like Governor Brown.

00:53:25.820 Um, and it also talks about these fake faith healings.

00:53:29.900 And you have people coming on record saying that these were chicken gizzards, that these

00:53:33.460 can't, these weren't cancers he was pulling out of people, but he was pulling out chicken

00:53:36.560 gizzards and napkins, uh, that the, there were fake faith healings.

00:53:40.500 Other people saying that they were pressured to sign their homes over to Jim Jones, um,

00:53:44.720 a teenage lesbian girl beat up because she dared to give a woman a hug.

00:53:49.480 And, um, you know, there were sort of rules about celibacy.

00:53:52.160 There were rules about forced abortion in, in people's temple.

00:53:55.620 Stop.

00:53:55.880 Let's go for the, talk to me about the rules.

00:53:58.880 Sure.

00:53:59.280 Let's examine some of those.

00:54:01.200 Well, uh, this is in San Francisco.

00:54:03.300 This is in San Francisco that, uh, and some of these rules were followed and some of them

00:54:07.600 were not religiously followed.

00:54:09.180 I mean, people going to have sex, you know?

00:54:11.400 So, um, but people outside of Jim Jones were not supposed to, even within marriage to have

00:54:17.580 sex.

00:54:18.180 Unless he said, unless he gave the word.

00:54:20.820 Yeah.

00:54:21.400 And, um, beyond that, if a pregnancy would ensue that the rule was they were supposed to

00:54:27.120 get an abortion, the temple couldn't sort of feed too many more models, sort of a peculiar 0.98

00:54:32.260 church where the rule is you got to get an abortion. 1.00

00:54:34.380 You know?

00:54:35.180 So the, the idea, like we talked about the, you know, the New York Times.

00:54:39.180 The New York Times afterwards saying that the Jones preached fundamentalist Christianity.

00:54:42.620 I don't know too many fundamentalist Christians who say, you got to get an abortion and we're

00:54:46.620 going to use the Bible as toilet paper.

00:54:48.040 So there was this misinformation coming out about people's temple.

00:54:51.640 And still to this day, you'll hear when people say drinking the Kool-Aid, I mean, maybe they're

00:54:55.280 talking about you or me or someone like that.

00:54:56.780 I don't know.

00:54:57.160 Um, so, um, with regard to the rules in the temple, um, you know, a lot of it just had

00:55:05.480 to do with Jim Jones wanting to humiliate people.

00:55:08.500 So someone was a vegetarian.

00:55:10.300 He had forced them to eat chicken.

00:55:12.120 If, uh, there was one man who was condemned as a prude and as racist. 1.00

00:55:16.460 So he was forced to perform a sex act on a black woman who was menstruating in front 0.99

00:55:22.360 of, you know, a hundred or so people. 1.00

00:55:23.980 Oh my gosh.

00:55:24.940 Other people.

00:55:25.780 Who would go to this?

00:55:27.320 Who?

00:55:27.640 You'd think you'd leave at that point.

00:55:28.880 But again, if you're going to do that, um, you're going to do anything for this guy.

00:55:33.680 There was someone that Jim Jones would force.

00:55:36.660 It's funny.

00:55:37.240 I spoke to a number of gay men who were, uh, involved in people's temple and to a man, 0.90

00:55:41.980 they all said, well, Jim Jones never came on to me, never had to try to have sex with 0.97

00:55:45.060 me, but the straight guys, he would try to bed. 0.74

00:55:49.020 And it tells you something about him.

00:55:51.200 He, maybe he was sort of omnisexual.

00:55:53.360 Sure.

00:55:53.880 But really what he was out for was power.

00:55:55.880 He wanted to humiliate people. 0.98

00:55:57.800 He wanted to, I mean, he had no interest in guys who wanted to have sex with guys. 0.99

00:56:01.460 He only had interest in guys who didn't want to have sex with guys. 0.95

00:56:04.500 He wanted to force the vegetarian to eat chicken, that kind of thing. 0.99

00:56:07.960 Uh, guys, straight guys that he would have sex with, he'd call them out in front of everyone 0.99

00:56:12.160 and say, pull down your pants. 1.00

00:56:13.900 I think you gave me, you know, some social disease, spread your backside and everyone 0.98

00:56:18.720 would sort of examine and look and see if this had happened. 0.83

00:56:21.340 And, um, so it was real humiliation, hardcore humiliation.

00:56:25.300 People who had gone against the rules may have hung out with, um, people from outside

00:56:30.840 of the temple.

00:56:31.440 They've had a crush at school on some girl who was not in the temple.

00:56:36.040 Um, they were, you know, one guy told me he was shoved in a toilet, uh, because of having

00:56:41.780 a crush when he was 13 on a girl that was well endowed for that age.

00:56:45.740 He said, I couldn't help it.

00:56:46.640 She just looked so beautiful.

00:56:47.900 You know, um, others, um, were forced into these punitive temple boxing matches where they

00:56:54.120 had people who were pretty tough and they would pit them against weak people that had transgressed 1.00

00:57:00.200 some rule, um, and they'd get beaten up.

00:57:02.680 And this was for entertainment.

00:57:04.120 Boxing for Jesus.

00:57:05.400 Yeah.

00:57:05.940 If that isn't a fundamental Christian Saturday night, I don't know what is. 0.94

00:57:09.580 They had a, a, a board that they would use to beat people with.

00:57:13.860 It was called the board of education.

00:57:15.800 Wow.

00:57:16.120 So, um, they had in Jonestown, they had, um, or they, they had something called the blue,

00:57:23.300 um, they, they, they tell kids that there was a blue monster or something and they'd get

00:57:27.440 freaked out, throw people in ditches, put people in boxes with no light, um, all sorts

00:57:33.300 of, of punishments and all sorts of rules.

00:57:36.140 Um, was he a sadist or was this just for, just for manipulation?

00:57:44.040 Manipulation.

00:57:44.660 I think a little bit of both.

00:57:45.680 I think he was certainly sadistic and people did notice his face when things were going

00:57:51.860 on like that, that he was clearly getting off on this, that he clearly was liking the

00:57:55.980 fact that he was so powerful, um, and that he had power over these people and he could

00:57:59.820 make them do whatever he wanted.

00:58:00.680 Was he, was he betting people?

00:58:06.000 Yes. 0.83

00:58:06.800 Uh, some of it rape, certainly. 0.99

00:58:09.460 Uh, a lot of it would certainly be called rape today because he's sort of forcing himself

00:58:13.400 on it and they were under his control and that kind of thing.

00:58:16.560 Uh, men and women, um, in mostly for the women, he had a type.

00:58:22.420 It was very seventies type.

00:58:23.640 So you'd see like Farrah Foster, Foster, Foster in those posters, very skinny, um, small breasted 1.00

00:58:29.400 white women in their early twenties.

00:58:31.420 In Jonestown, he deviated that from that once.

00:58:35.180 There was a beautiful, beautiful teenage black girl who had dated one of his sons prior 0.99

00:58:39.960 and he wanted her to have sex with him. 0.98

00:58:43.760 Now at this point, he's sort of overweight. 0.95

00:58:45.800 He's like 47 years old or whatever he is.

00:58:47.840 And you know, if you're a 21 year old or a 19 year old girl or 17 year old girl, whatever

00:58:51.380 she was, you're not gonna be going for a guy like that.

00:58:53.700 And she says, thanks, but no thanks.

00:58:56.240 At which point he decides that she's insane and has to force drugs on her and, uh, she

00:59:03.920 becomes compliant, compliant, so-called.

00:59:09.320 Okay. 0.98

00:59:09.960 So this is rape. 1.00

00:59:10.780 So this is starting to come out in, in San Francisco.

00:59:15.640 That particular story?

00:59:16.780 No, no.

00:59:17.360 But the others are starting to, some of this stuff is starting to come forward.

00:59:20.680 So he knows he has to leave that he's facing potential legal problems, but also a lot of

00:59:27.280 people who were bullies like that.

00:59:28.380 They're very thin skinned, very sensitive, and he needed to get out of Dodge and he leaves. 0.99

00:59:33.940 And shortly thereafter, this is in the summer of 77, shortly thereafter, he has about a

00:59:38.480 thousand people follow him.

00:59:40.040 All of a sudden, one day, just go to San Francisco airport and go down to, uh, to Guyana.

00:59:45.420 Okay.

00:59:45.580 Why Guyana?

00:59:46.300 He, they buy a tract of land, about 3,000 acres, or I'm sorry, they lease it from the

00:59:52.420 Guyanese government in 1973.

00:59:55.580 Guyana itself was interesting in that it was a majority minority country that was ruled

01:00:02.860 by blacks, but blacks were not the dominant, they were a minority, you know, the sort of

01:00:06.760 a minority ruling the majority, um, beyond.

01:00:09.400 Opposite, South Africa in reverse.

01:00:11.260 Yes.

01:00:12.220 And beyond that, um, this is a Marxist government run by a guy named Forbes Burnham, who's a

01:00:17.940 communist.

01:00:18.520 And, um, at the time there were thousands and thousands of people fleeing Guyana.

01:00:23.920 It's right next to Venezuela.

01:00:24.740 We know, you know, we're 20 years from Venezuela, um, being taken over by Hugo Chavez and you've

01:00:30.840 had thousands and thousands of people leave there and thousands and thousands of people

01:00:33.880 were leaving.

01:00:34.380 Um, Jim Jones was going to, uh, to Guyana because that appealed to him.

01:00:40.060 Um, Jonestown was about a hundred miles away from the Capitol.

01:00:44.760 It was in the jungle.

01:00:46.360 Uh, there was a railroad nearby.

01:00:47.940 There was a river.

01:00:48.920 There was a small mining community that was nearby.

01:00:52.140 Um, there was an airstrip, but pretty much it was off on its own.

01:00:55.860 It was sort of seven miles from the nearest town, um, and a jungle surrounded.

01:01:00.260 So if you wanted to escape, you probably didn't want to escape.

01:01:04.380 You know, you weren't going to try.

01:01:05.460 It was a little dangerous.

01:01:07.160 Um, is this, is this at all the people who go down, who pays for their tickets?

01:01:11.760 Does he pay or does church pay?

01:01:13.580 Yeah.

01:01:13.900 I mean, the people are basically giving over their checks to people's temples.

01:01:17.640 So who's paying?

01:01:18.320 I don't know.

01:01:19.060 In 70, you know, I talked to people who were down there in 74 and they compared it.

01:01:23.920 No joke to the American pioneers that they felt that they were building a better life,

01:01:28.920 that they were starting from scratch and they were turning into this jungle, into a place

01:01:33.040 habitable for man.

01:01:33.980 And they were very proud of what they did and they felt free.

01:01:36.360 It changes very dramatically once Jim Jones gets down there.

01:01:40.540 In 77.

01:01:41.220 In 77.

01:01:41.940 It changes dramatically.

01:01:43.220 So is, is this, um, this cult and this move, are there calls at the time from parents

01:01:51.980 or families who say this guy is basically kidnapped?

01:01:55.960 He's brainwashed and kidnapped.

01:01:57.460 Well, he kidnapped outright Tim Stone, John Victor Stone, who's a six year old boy who

01:02:03.800 is, whose parents formerly were high in the leadership in people's temple, two young,

01:02:09.480 attractive, intelligent people who Jim Jones really loved having them there because it

01:02:13.880 sort of legitimized what he was doing, that he was attracting sort of the best and the

01:02:17.220 brightest.

01:02:17.980 It wasn't just the urban underclass.

01:02:19.520 And in 1976 on July 4th, Grace Stone declares her independence.

01:02:24.740 I'm done with this guy.

01:02:25.800 And because kids are raised communally, she can't take her kid. 1.00

01:02:29.680 The following year, her husband, who's sort of estranged from her at this point, um, he

01:02:34.700 decides this is getting too crazy.

01:02:37.240 He gets out.

01:02:38.220 But again, he can't get his kid out because you don't, you're not raising your own kid

01:02:41.760 in people's temple.

01:02:42.940 Everyone's raising your kid.

01:02:44.460 The idea of parental, parental love, that's selfish.

01:02:46.920 That's goes against sort of the communist ideal.

01:02:49.180 Well, so everyone raised the kid so she could, they couldn't get their kid. 1.00

01:02:52.780 Jones leaves with that kid. 0.99

01:02:54.220 I mean, this is probably a stupid question because, you know, what kind of people are 0.99

01:02:57.800 involved in this in the first place? 0.99

01:02:58.860 But what kind of parent who's left behind by the other parent leaves that child there?

01:03:05.140 Do they think they're going to get their child out if they just get out?

01:03:08.720 Is it, is it an escape?

01:03:10.640 What is the situation for the adults?

01:03:12.860 I'm sure they thought that because it was, initially it was very hard to see the outcome

01:03:18.560 that happened.

01:03:20.280 As time went on, it became clearer.

01:03:23.240 There were news reports in the United States six months prior to Jonestown that, that people

01:03:27.320 were saying that they were going to kill themselves en masse.

01:03:30.060 They were writing the state department saying these people are going to kill themselves en masse,

01:03:34.000 writing, wrote every member of Congress warning them that this would happen.

01:03:39.300 And so the idea that this just sort of all happened in a vacuum, that it came out of the

01:03:44.780 blue, that's not what happened.

01:03:46.320 But how do you convince people of that?

01:03:49.260 Plain devil's advocate.

01:03:50.060 Yeah, sure.

01:03:50.640 When you know that he had people drink wine earlier and it was a test.

01:03:56.820 I mean, how do you?

01:03:58.760 It's very difficult because it's, the story is so unique.

01:04:02.060 And I mean, there are certainly, I mean, some people might compare it to Waco or some people

01:04:06.380 might compare it to, um, the, the Hale-Bopp comet.

01:04:09.740 I mean, so things like this happen every once in a while, but on this scale, um, and to say

01:04:15.640 it's so crazy that even if you, you warn people, you start sounding like the crazy person.

01:04:21.460 Like if you start describing a person's crazy behavior, someone's gonna look at you and

01:04:25.840 say, well, maybe he's crazy, you know, because it's so wild and it's so out there.

01:04:29.860 And I think a lot of the people who were warning various members of Congress, they were getting

01:04:34.320 those strange looks.

01:04:35.500 I spoke to a man.

01:04:36.960 I remember you're talking to the guy who warned about a caliphate. 0.93

01:04:40.580 So I understand how you, you're all of a sudden appearing to be the crazy one. 0.88

01:04:44.920 People have looked at you crazy before. 0.93

01:04:46.500 Yeah.

01:04:46.760 Yes, they have.

01:04:47.560 Yeah.

01:04:47.680 So, um, Charles Krause, who was a Washington Post reporter who got shot on the airstrip,

01:04:52.680 uh, outside of, of Jonestown.

01:04:54.980 Uh, he explained to me that when Tim Stone, who is this, this kid's father came to him

01:05:00.600 and said, look, you know, Jones is doing X, Y, and Z, and that this is a concentration 0.72

01:05:05.540 camp and he's crazy. 0.99

01:05:07.660 He's on drugs. 1.00

01:05:08.600 His initial thought was this guy is the madman. 0.96

01:05:11.280 And obviously when he gets bullets in him from Jones's henchmen, he realizes how wrong 0.82

01:05:18.480 he was, but I don't know.

01:05:20.960 I mean, think about it this way.

01:05:22.220 If you are in a position of power in Guyana and you are getting letters from Harvey Milk,

01:05:27.680 an elected official in San Francisco, if you're having the Lieutenant Governor of California

01:05:32.360 come down to Jonestown and proclaim what a great place it is.

01:05:35.420 If you have Willie Brown, um, and other leaders, Jane Fonda, famous person, um, vouching for

01:05:44.680 Jim Jones, who are you going to believe?

01:05:47.000 People that are respected, rich, powerful, wealthy, and in positions of responsibility.

01:05:51.600 Or these disgruntled people who are leaving.

01:05:53.680 Or these disgruntled people.

01:05:54.920 And oftentimes those disgruntled people had signed blank confessions prior to leaving,

01:06:00.720 saying that they had molested their kids, that they had stolen money from the church.

01:06:03.960 They would just fill in whatever they wanted to fill in. 0.99

01:06:06.080 Um, and so People's Temple put out this message that these people were sexual perverts, that 0.99

01:06:12.120 they were child molesters, that they were thieves, that they were involved in some sort of criminal 0.98

01:06:16.860 enterprise. 0.74

01:06:17.260 They would do whatever it took to discredit them.

01:06:19.680 And of course, usually within those press releases, they would say things like, well,

01:06:22.580 we've seen this before when people attacked Martin Luther King, or we've seen it before

01:06:26.840 when they've attacked progressive elements.

01:06:28.640 They are just, they just hate us because we want equality.

01:06:31.240 And that was a very seductive message for people both in Guyana and the United States.

01:06:37.220 Uh, and I think it's part of the reason why the Carter administration not only didn't

01:06:40.540 intervene, but they kind of did intervene to help People's Temple, to sort of rat on some

01:06:45.900 of the people that were coming to them with information about Jones and trying to get something

01:06:50.300 done.

01:06:51.080 Um, and I, that's something, if you read Jimmy Carter's autobiography, his memoirs, it doesn't

01:06:55.460 say anything about People's Temple.

01:06:56.880 It's one of the biggest events that happens in his presidency.

01:06:59.100 It's the largest loss of civilian life in American history up until 9-11.

01:07:02.920 And it doesn't even rate mention in his autobiography.

01:07:06.060 And I think this fits the pattern of people just getting amnesia rather conveniently when

01:07:11.280 the history involves them because it involves his wife and involves his running mate and

01:07:14.840 involves his own administrations in action.

01:07:16.560 So now take me to, um, when Jim is, is down there and the last few days before things, you

01:07:37.260 know, before the Kool-Aid is made.

01:07:38.940 Sure.

01:07:39.080 Um, what's happening?

01:07:42.180 Leo Ryan, congressman from San Mateo County in California, a guy with a history of really

01:07:48.500 taking his job seriously, um, you know, became a substitute teacher in Watts after the riots

01:07:53.740 in the 60s.

01:07:55.040 He, um, got himself imprisoned, uh, in California to see what the conditions were like.

01:07:59.720 And he really was over the top in his job.

01:08:02.460 Some people thought he was a grandstander and some people thought this guy is awesome.

01:08:06.540 He just, he just takes his job very seriously.

01:08:08.740 He had a friend whose son died under mysterious circumstances a day after leaving people's

01:08:14.060 temple.

01:08:15.060 And Jim Jones, I spoke to people in the temple.

01:08:17.720 They said he took credit for that. 0.96

01:08:18.940 Now he was a liar. 0.80

01:08:19.780 So we don't know if he killed that guy or not. 0.98

01:08:21.480 I mean, he might've just died.

01:08:23.040 Um, this sparks his investigation.

01:08:26.200 He is met with letters and visits from members of concerned relatives, people that have family

01:08:33.260 members down in Jonestown and believe that they're being held against their will.

01:08:37.340 And they convinced Leo Ryan to go down there.

01:08:39.440 Were they?

01:08:41.580 Leo Ryan leaves with about 15 people and there are over 900 people there.

01:08:46.300 So only 15 people took the opportunity to leave with him.

01:08:50.760 Um, and, uh, you know, so it's a very interesting question, a very difficult question to answer.

01:08:57.140 I mean, I think they were brainwashed.

01:08:59.740 Um, you could say the same thing about the suicides.

01:09:02.920 Were they suicides or were they murdered?

01:09:04.480 Well, they voluntarily did it, enthusiastically did it, but there was a long road to that,

01:09:10.720 including what we talked about earlier, the wine tests and the false siege mentality.

01:09:15.240 So Ryan goes down, he drew, I spoke to Dan Quayle and he tried to get Quayle to go down

01:09:19.940 there because Quayle was from Indiana.

01:09:20.880 He was trying to get any member to go down there and Quayle being from Indiana.

01:09:25.400 And a lot of the temple members being from Indiana and what saves Quayle's life is that

01:09:29.040 he has a daughter that's born right around Thanksgiving and 78.

01:09:32.620 And he says, I can't go with you, Leo.

01:09:33.980 And they were buddies back, back when Democrats and Republicans used to be friends, he wanted

01:09:37.600 to go and he couldn't go with them.

01:09:38.480 So Ryan goes down there with an entourage that doesn't include any members of Congress.

01:09:44.100 Um, it includes, um, many journalists, uh, some people from the state department, his

01:09:50.600 aide, Jackie Speier, some members of the concerned relatives.

01:09:53.820 And initially on the 17th of November, 1978, they're kept out, but finally they're allowed

01:09:59.980 in to people's temple.

01:10:01.460 At first they're greeted as sort of like conquering heroes or something that, that there's cheers

01:10:06.740 and celebration.

01:10:07.580 And instead of singing the international, they're singing like the, I don't know if they

01:10:11.320 sing a star spangled banner or God bless America or something like that.

01:10:14.720 Um, there's performance that you can see on YouTube.

01:10:18.320 They have a band that's covering earth, wind and fire.

01:10:20.840 That's really better than the original.

01:10:22.580 I mean, they're really talented people in Jonestown.

01:10:25.200 So this is festive mood.

01:10:26.620 There's an announcement that the Jonestown basketball team has defeated the Guyanese national

01:10:30.460 team.

01:10:30.820 It turns out not to be true.

01:10:31.780 Like a lot of things in Jonestown, but they were, there was this big excitement within

01:10:36.380 Jonestown.

01:10:37.020 And then Vern Gosney, who's a guy I interviewed, um, hands a note to Don Harris, a journalist,

01:10:45.740 because he believes Don Harris, the NBC newsman, he's so stately looking, he thinks that's the

01:10:50.540 congressman and Harris drops it and then he has to pick it up and give it to him.

01:10:55.780 A young boy says, you know, he's handing him a note.

01:10:58.880 He's handing him a note, snitches on him.

01:11:00.900 They have a snitch culture in there. 1.00

01:11:02.120 And then everything grows dark and the note says, help us get us out, you know, get us

01:11:09.700 out of here.

01:11:10.320 We want to leave.

01:11:11.240 It's basically, I mean, there, there's something that's specifically said on it, but, um, and

01:11:16.660 so there's a few other people that decide they want to leave as well.

01:11:21.400 The way it's been explained to me that Jim Jones was such a narcissist that he viewed his

01:11:25.880 followers as sort of an extension of his own body.

01:11:28.500 And whenever anyone would leave, he felt like he was being ripped apart inside.

01:11:33.680 And, um, and he was also on heavily on drugs at the time.

01:11:38.180 And you can tell that from some of the video that you see, he's slurring his speech.

01:11:41.980 Um, he, his eyes are sort of not, not all just staring in the same direction, I guess.

01:11:48.320 Um, pupils dilated, that sort of thing.

01:11:50.420 And, and so, um, at that point, uh, Vern Gosney realizes the danger that the congressman

01:11:58.040 is in and says, you need to leave.

01:11:59.760 You need to get out of here.

01:12:00.780 Now your life is in danger.

01:12:02.840 And Leo Ryan, who was a brave guy, courageous and great, but didn't realize the danger he

01:12:08.500 was in.

01:12:08.840 He said, it's okay.

01:12:09.560 I have the, I have the, I have the protection of the congressional shield around us.

01:12:14.220 As though there's some invisible shield that's going to protect them.

01:12:18.780 Right.

01:12:19.000 And of course, up until that time, I think there was one congressman who was sort of

01:12:22.640 killed in the line of duty.

01:12:24.360 And so this didn't happen.

01:12:25.500 He probably thought this isn't going to happen.

01:12:27.100 What is he?

01:12:27.400 Yeah.

01:12:27.620 Back in the day, you don't kill, you don't kill Americans, passports and foreign countries.

01:12:32.140 And you certainly wouldn't kill a congressman because all hell would rain down.

01:12:35.340 That's right. 0.86

01:12:36.640 And if you're planning on killing everybody, it doesn't matter. 0.98

01:12:39.640 Correct.

01:12:40.020 And I think at that point, Jones already knew what was going to happen.

01:12:42.940 They had enough dry runs of revolutionary suicide.

01:12:45.760 They had some...

01:12:46.740 Explain revolutionary suicide.

01:12:48.360 Revolutionary suicide was what Jones termed the mass suicide of the 900 and so people in

01:12:57.340 Jonestown.

01:12:58.600 The name came from a book written by Huey Newton in 1973 called Revolutionary Suicide.

01:13:05.260 Now, the way Huey Newton lays out the case, the Black Panther leader, is that reactionary

01:13:12.940 suicide is just suicide of surrender, that you just...

01:13:15.540 The conditions of the world are so depressing that you're going to kill yourself. 0.61

01:13:18.820 Revolutionary suicide is you're sort of willing to kill yourself in order to make things better. 0.99

01:13:22.820 Now, it's idiotic to begin with, but it's a little bit different than how Jones understood 0.99

01:13:26.260 it. 0.99

01:13:26.920 And so Jones in Guyana pushes this idea of revolutionary suicide.

01:13:32.160 And on the death tape, he said, you know, we're not committing suicide.

01:13:36.000 We're protesting...

01:13:37.380 We're committing suicide to protest the inhumane conditions of the world.

01:13:40.420 And at several points in that death tape, they talk about dying for socialism, dying for

01:13:45.560 communism.

01:13:46.360 So one of the reasons those people did what they did is because they were committed communists,

01:13:51.380 they were hardcore ideologues, and that they believed that what they were doing was an

01:13:55.360 historic event, that it was a protest, that people would look at this and think, these

01:14:01.600 people all killed themselves because our world is so messed up, not because Jonestown was so

01:14:05.440 messed up, because the world was so messed up, capitalism is so messed up, that we need

01:14:09.180 to do something about it.

01:14:10.040 We need to change the world.

01:14:10.920 We need to all become communists, or whatever it was.

01:14:12.900 And that was how it was presented to the people in Jonestown.

01:14:16.960 So on November...

01:14:17.840 So long before the congressman comes.

01:14:21.080 Uh, well, that, what I'm talking about there was all on the death tape, but...

01:14:25.360 But he had, but he had rehearsed this, or he had talked about it?

01:14:29.760 He had talked about it, and with smaller groups, they'd rehearsed it.

01:14:32.620 They bought a pig and killed a pig with cyanide.

01:14:36.360 And so they were, this was going on for a while.

01:14:38.560 How to do it?

01:14:39.320 There's memos back and forth.

01:14:40.660 How are we going to do this?

01:14:41.900 And he had a group of women around him. 0.99

01:14:44.300 Um, one of them, he impregnated, um, didn't get the abortion, despite the church law.

01:14:51.080 And the other one, uh, was also his mistress at various times, two sisters.

01:14:56.360 Their sister, incidentally, has written a number of books,

01:14:59.260 Sympathetic History of Jonestown, or People's Temple, uh, uh...

01:15:02.900 Yeah, you know, books with those kind of titles.

01:15:04.860 And so there's a group of people trying to resuscitate People's Temple,

01:15:08.920 separating them from Jim Jones.

01:15:10.440 And that's one of the groups that's led by this.

01:15:12.580 So these sisters were in on this.

01:15:15.460 Um, there was a woman named Maria Katsaris, who was certainly in on it.

01:15:19.120 And a guy named Larry Schacht, who was from Houston,

01:15:22.340 whose parents were leaders of the local Communist Party in Houston.

01:15:25.600 And in the 60s, he goes on, I think, over 100 acid trips,

01:15:29.580 starts doing meth, um, is just really out there on drugs.

01:15:34.240 Jones gets him, helps rescue him from drugs.

01:15:38.080 They put him into medical school.

01:15:40.000 And he becomes a doctor.

01:15:41.740 Uh, he gets, you know, goes down to Mexico and, you know, um, 0.75

01:15:45.620 he is overseeing these experiments to see if cyanide is going to kill a pig.

01:15:51.900 Ultimately, the cyanide that they buy, it's less than a penny per person, per dose.

01:15:57.640 They mix that with grape flavor aid.

01:16:00.540 It's not Kool-Aid, but flavor aid.

01:16:02.720 And Valium.

01:16:03.920 And they thought that the Valium was going to sort of numb people before it hit.

01:16:08.460 Cyanide is almost instantaneous, isn't it?

01:16:11.060 Yeah, pretty quick.

01:16:12.240 Yeah.

01:16:12.440 Pretty quick.

01:16:13.220 Um, at least in its pain and ugliness.

01:16:16.440 So on the 18th of November, the congressman takes about 15 people with him.

01:16:20.680 And with him is also a plant.

01:16:22.720 One of Jones's henchmen.

01:16:24.560 They check him for a gun.

01:16:25.520 They don't find one, but he does have a gun on him.

01:16:27.140 Um, as they're waiting to leave on the airstrip, just 15 people out of 1,000 or so, uh, a truck

01:16:35.660 pulling a tractor comes up and some gunmen come out and they start shooting and they murder

01:16:41.860 Congressman Leo Ryan.

01:16:43.240 They kill three of the journalists and they kill one of the concerned relatives on the,

01:16:48.360 one of the planes.

01:16:49.480 Um, Vern Gosney, this man we spoke about, uh, he told me the story how he shot three times,

01:16:54.400 he's basically in the abdomen by this plant on the plane and the guy's gun jams.

01:16:58.660 So as he has three bullets in him, he has to fight this guy to get off the plane.

01:17:03.820 Luckily the gun jams, they get, you know, they get off the plane.

01:17:06.780 Um, but people are basically Charles Krause from the Washington post.

01:17:10.420 He told me he just feigned dead because they were going around giving the coup de grace

01:17:13.300 to people.

01:17:14.460 And he just hoped, hope they don't shoot me in the back of the head.

01:17:17.700 That turned out the right course for him, but for other people, they would just come

01:17:21.540 and pop them.

01:17:23.140 Um, one of the interesting things I found just as an aside, the red brigade, the group

01:17:27.980 that killed these people in the airstrip, one of the guys, uh, years later, we talked

01:17:33.240 about this Lester Consolving piece in 1972.

01:17:35.000 One of the pieces that got spiked that didn't get air, uh, didn't get brought, didn't get

01:17:39.420 printed, talked about a four-year-old boy at a camp in Oregon that the temple went to

01:17:45.220 who refused to eat the food, thought the food was disgusting.

01:17:48.140 Like a lot of four-year-old boys, right? 0.93

01:17:49.600 This is gross.

01:17:50.260 I'm not going to eat it.

01:17:51.200 So Jones says, you will eat that food.

01:17:53.080 And I'm not eating this food.

01:17:54.140 So he forces the kid to eat the food.

01:17:56.120 The kid vomits.

01:17:57.880 Jones forces him to eat the vomit.

01:18:00.040 He vomits again, naturally.

01:18:02.080 He forces them to eat the throw up.

01:18:03.520 And this goes on.

01:18:04.680 This four-year-old boy's father, you'd think he's going to run.

01:18:08.600 He's going to fight this guy.

01:18:10.460 No, he stays.

01:18:11.640 He's one of the 12 or so people that killed Congressman Leo Ryan on the airstrip.

01:18:16.120 In other words, it goes back to that pattern that we're talking about, that if you will,

01:18:19.740 if you will do that, if you will stay with a guy after he'd forced your four-year-old

01:18:24.280 kid to eat his own throw up, you're going to stay with a guy through anything and you'll

01:18:28.500 do whatever that guy wants you to do. 0.98

01:18:30.040 And that's part of the way that Jim Jones got these people to do this, to kill these people 0.99

01:18:35.160 on the airstrip.

01:18:36.980 And so once that happens, Jones announces to the people in People's Temple, look, the

01:18:41.860 congressman's dead. 0.99

01:18:43.100 They're going to come in here and kill us all. 1.00

01:18:46.000 They're going to kill our children. 1.00

01:18:46.960 They're going to torture them. 0.98

01:18:48.260 People that start speaking say, well, they're going to take our children and not have them

01:18:53.900 grow up to be socialists like the one and only Jim Jones. 0.99

01:18:56.620 They're going to grow up to be dummies. 0.99

01:18:58.020 We have to do this. 0.98

01:18:58.900 And so there is a woman by the name of Christine Miller, who's the sole adult on that death

01:19:06.440 tape, who objects to Jones.

01:19:07.940 She's very logical.

01:19:09.440 She's very courageous.

01:19:10.340 And she takes Jones on.

01:19:12.000 And at the same time, you had people rushing her, shouting at her, threatening her, basically 0.98

01:19:18.300 saying, you're going to kill the kids?

01:19:20.400 You're going to, what about Russia? 1.00

01:19:21.640 I mean, that's her section of the choices in Jonestown, that it was either kill yourself 0.83

01:19:24.980 or can we all emigrate to Russia?

01:19:27.060 As you said, we could earlier.

01:19:28.900 You know, I think there were probably a third or fourth option, but that's what they, that's

01:19:33.200 what the debate was at that point.

01:19:35.140 Ultimately, she sort of acquiesces.

01:19:37.880 Other than her, there's just kids who are objecting, you know, screaming and yelling,

01:19:42.520 probably showing wisdom beyond their own years.

01:19:44.580 Right.

01:19:44.860 You think about over 900 people there.

01:19:49.060 There's only four African-Americans who escape.

01:19:53.020 There are five people, Charles Gary and Mark Lane, the two left-wing lawyers that Jones allows

01:19:57.900 to leave.

01:19:58.900 Three other members.

01:20:00.660 He tells to take a lot of money to the Soviet Union, take all our money, give it to the Soviet

01:20:05.760 Union.

01:20:06.080 So those five people leave.

01:20:07.700 There's a group of about a dozen people that left earlier, before all this starts, that day

01:20:12.260 on the pretense of going for a picnic.

01:20:14.700 They just escaped.

01:20:16.240 But once the killings start, only four people avoid getting killed, who Jones doesn't allow

01:20:23.440 to leave.

01:20:24.340 Two rather street-smart African-Americans and two elderly African-Americans, one who 1.00

01:20:29.100 hid in a ditch and one who wakes up from not hearing the call to come down to the pavilion

01:20:33.800 for everyone to kill themselves.

01:20:35.080 And when she sees what's happened, she said, I better go back to bed. 0.96

01:20:37.420 You know, she thinks the better of it.

01:20:40.400 One of the guys who escapes, a former veteran, I believe, and a cousin of some sort of Huey

01:20:46.900 Newton's, just sort of had a brain, something happened.

01:20:51.760 He said, well, I don't have my passport.

01:20:53.020 I better go back into Jonestown and get it.

01:20:55.600 And so he escapes twice.

01:20:57.520 I mean, he should have just left.

01:20:58.840 He should have just left.

01:21:00.320 But just four people.

01:21:02.160 And that's how effective Jim Jones was in his manipulation and in the murder of these people.

01:21:10.480 And the people in San Francisco, they had blood on their hands.

01:21:14.280 But very quickly, you know, they, hey, our hands are clean.

01:21:18.020 We move it down.

01:21:19.200 We got tired.

01:21:23.020 So give me the aftermath.

01:21:33.820 The aftermath is that, obviously, Moscone and Milk, nine days later, get assassinated.

01:21:42.440 And that puts an exclamation point on a really crazy and chaotic decade in San Francisco.

01:21:47.480 Within San Francisco, people run from Jim Jones, act like they never knew the guy.

01:21:53.520 There's an exception to that.

01:21:54.600 And this guy, Carlton B. Goodlett, gets on TV two days after People's Temple, after Jonestown happens.

01:22:02.260 He defends Jim Jones, says he's, you know, could see no wrong in this man.

01:22:06.560 He embodied all the principles of Christianity.

01:22:08.800 He starts attacking Leo Ryan, the concerned relatives, the journalists who exposed Jones.

01:22:12.640 He really gets bitter, and he is all in on Jim Jones, even after Jones kills over 900 people.

01:22:20.640 The amazing thing about that for me is that the most prominent street in San Francisco is now named in honor of Carlton B. Goodlett.

01:22:28.820 Jim Jones is an apologist.

01:22:30.500 City Hall is one Carlton B. Goodlett place in San Francisco.

01:22:34.600 And that's a pattern that you see in Herb Cain, the journalist who was a booster of Jim Jones.

01:22:42.260 You know, he wins a Pulitzer in 1996.

01:22:44.440 They call him the voice and the conscience of the city.

01:22:47.080 And he was one of Jim Jones.

01:22:47.980 He was the guy legitimizing Jim Jones in the press.

01:22:50.820 You think about Willie Brown.

01:22:52.480 There's like a bridge named after him now.

01:22:54.600 There's buildings named after Moscone.

01:22:56.520 They have part of the airport named after Harvey Milk, who was one of the biggest apologists for Jim Jones.

01:23:02.800 So the people who went over the top for Jim Jones, I mean, Jane Fonda wins another Oscar.

01:23:10.640 She wins a Grammy Award, I thought, or an Emmy or something for her exercise. 0.95

01:23:14.860 She wins millions of dollars for exercise tapes.

01:23:16.640 She wins all sorts of awards.

01:23:18.340 And no one brings up, hey, what about that time you were buddies with Jim Jones?

01:23:22.720 So all of these people evade responsibility.

01:23:26.080 The sadder fate for me is, one, the People's Temple victims, they're not allowed to be buried in San Francisco, where their home was, essentially.

01:23:37.140 They were buried out in Oakland.

01:23:39.300 And, you know, there's a famous quote, Gertrude Stein, there's no there there, she says about Oakland or hometown.

01:23:44.500 There was no there there for People's Temple either.

01:23:46.520 So why those bodies and that memorial is in Oakland, I don't know.

01:23:50.640 And by the way, the memorial says for the victims of Jonestown, and one of the victims listed Jim Jones.

01:23:58.900 Why do they do that?

01:24:00.060 That's a big source of controversy, a big, you know, a real raw spot for a lot of the victims.

01:24:06.800 Leah Ryan, he's assassinated.

01:24:09.540 One of his daughters joins a cult up in Oregon, the Rajneeshi, you know, the cult.

01:24:14.580 They try to poison some people.

01:24:16.080 And the Washington Post asks her, you know, would you kill for this guy? 0.66

01:24:20.840 And she says, well, I don't think he'd ask me to kill for him.

01:24:22.940 But if he did, I'd like to think that I would.

01:24:25.440 This is the daughter of the man who tried to save people from a cult.

01:24:29.620 She joins a cult.

01:24:31.080 Worse than that, you know, he's a Democrat.

01:24:33.340 His district goes Republican in the next election.

01:24:37.240 San Francisco does nothing to honor this guy.

01:24:39.540 He has like a post office in San Mateo and a few other buildings named in his honor.

01:24:43.060 But San Francisco acts like he doesn't exist.

01:24:46.000 And they honor, you know, they honor the Burton brothers.

01:24:51.520 They honor Willie Brown.

01:24:53.620 They honor Harvey Milk, George Mosconi.

01:24:55.740 All these people who aided and abetted Jim Jones are given places of honor in the city.

01:25:01.200 But Leah Ryan and the victims of People's Temple, their persona non grata.

01:25:06.440 Lesson we're supposed to learn from this.

01:25:08.320 What are we supposed to take from this?

01:25:09.640 I think that the end does not justify the means.

01:25:12.420 It's that think for yourself.

01:25:16.760 Don't outsource your mind to a guru, to a leader, to anyone.

01:25:22.800 I think there are a lot of lessons, you know, specifically, let's say question authority.

01:25:35.980 There is a, you know, that you have an authority, that you accept an authority over you.

01:25:40.000 Jim Jones didn't accept an authority over him.

01:25:41.860 And that's why he was so egocentric. 0.95

01:25:43.360 That's why he was so narcissistic.

01:25:44.580 It's hard to be humble when you think you yourself are God.

01:25:48.360 And if someone, I think one of the marks of cults, if the leader of the group is pretending to be God, you might be in a cult.

01:25:56.240 If the leader of the group says, well, you can't visit your family, you might be in a cult.

01:26:00.180 I think there are a lot of lessons.

01:26:02.240 In Jonestown, in the pavilion, ironically enough, it said, you know, it had the old Santayana quote, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

01:26:10.360 It's very difficult to think of Jonestown repeating in such a grand scale.

01:26:16.100 I mean, nothing like this really has ever happened in human history.

01:26:18.580 There are, there are on a smaller scale or you can go back to ancient history and, but this is such a unique event.

01:26:24.960 But having said that, you know, the idea of, of politicians not being held into account, I mean, something I get into the book, the same thing happened with the earthquake in, in San Francisco, where you had, you know, the head of the chief, the fire chief saying, we need to get new water pipes and we need to do all this kind of thing.

01:26:43.900 And they're all corrupt and giving the money to their friends rather than doing what was good for the city.

01:26:48.580 And no one goes to jail for that.

01:26:50.200 And the mayor at the time, this guy Schmitz, later gets reelected to the board of supervisors.

01:26:55.100 And you have to look at what happened with Jonestown in a similar light.

01:26:59.680 Art Agnos, who is boasting about referring destitute youth to People's Temple, he becomes mayor of San Francisco.

01:27:06.120 Willie Brown becomes mayor of San Francisco.

01:27:07.660 Dianne Feinstein becomes mayor of San Francisco, who gave a certificate of honor to Jim Jones.

01:27:13.720 So people were rewarded.

01:27:15.800 And, and this, this didn't plague their careers.

01:27:19.960 And because of ideology?

01:27:22.320 I think because of ideology, because this is a one party town.

01:27:25.480 And one of the reasons why Jim Jones was able to get away with so much is because there was no opposition.

01:27:30.060 He was just helping the elected office holders and rather corrupt, in a corrupt sense, they didn't look into the misdeeds, the wrongdoing, the criminal acts that he committed in San Francisco.

01:27:40.500 That would have prevented him from going to Guyana in the first place.

01:27:44.500 They just decided to give him a free pass.

01:27:47.580 And Jonestown, the carnage is a crime.

01:27:52.160 Obviously, it comes to fruition in Jonestown.

01:27:54.200 But this is something that starts in California.

01:27:56.500 You know, the seeds are planted in California.

01:27:59.000 And a lot of people ran from it, but it's very difficult.

01:28:03.900 And a lot of these people are power players.

01:28:06.700 And, you know, Jerry Brown is still the governor of California.

01:28:09.480 Why does someone ask him, why did you speak at the People's Temple?

01:28:12.660 Dianne Feinstein is still a senator from the state of California.

01:28:16.060 Willie Brown is, you know, as amiable and likable as he can be.

01:28:19.680 You know, he was neck deep involved in People's Temple.

01:28:23.940 And none of these people have been called into account for the past.

01:28:28.480 The name of the book is Cult City, Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and Ten Days That Shook San Francisco.

01:28:35.520 Author, Daniel Flynn.

01:28:37.840 And thanks.

01:28:49.680 The name of the book is Cult City, Jim Jones.

The Glenn Beck Program - January 05, 2019

Ep 18 ｜ Daniel Flynn ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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