Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco An interview with the author of 'Cult City.'
October 16, 2018
Mark Tapson
We are approaching the 40th anniversary of two shocking events that most people are unaware are linked: the assassinations of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone by disgruntled Supervisor Dan White in November, 1978, and – ten days later – the ghastly, bizarre murders and suicides of 918 cult followers at Jonestown, which constituted the largest loss of civilian life in American history (until the terrorist attacks of the morning of Sept. 11, 2001) and the largest mass suicide of the modern era.
These dark episodes have been brought back into the light in an investigative new page-turner titled Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco by Daniel J. Flynn, also the author of The War on Football: Saving America’s Game, Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America, A Conservative History of the American Left, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas, and Why the Left Hates America.
I interviewed the author via email about his just-released book ...
DF: Jim Jones used the forms of Pentecostalism, particularly phony faith healing, to lure people into his services. He was so good at it that one very intelligent Temple member I interviewed insisted that Jones possessed supernatural powers. Others conceded that much of it was an act—but not all. Once Jones hooked the people drawn by the healing and prophecies and extrasensory perception, he preached from the gospel according to Karl Marx. Jonestown did not celebrate Christmas, hosted no religious sermons, and confiscated Bibles until Jones distributed them for bathroom use. Jones, though not the most trustworthy authority on his own history, reflected on what catalyzed his entry into the ministry: “I decided: How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church.â€
Despite the explicitly atheist and anti-Christian outlook of the group, the media painted the Jonestown carnage as the act of cultists or religious fanatics. The New York Times described Jones’s preaching as “Christian fundamentalism,†while the Associated Press described his followers as “religious zealots.†This telling proved politically convenient but false.
Peoples Temple left millions of dollars to the Soviet Union. Books by neither Matthew nor Mark nor Luke nor John inspired their last act. A book by a guy name Huey did.
Jones explicitly outlining the group’s aversion to Christianity and embrace of Communism—“even if we were Judeo-Christian, even if we weren’t Communists†he reasoned to his followers—on the death tape did not prevent journalists from conveying the idea that Christian cultists killed themselves. Even today, the spate of cable-television documentaries on Jonestown downplay the socialism that Jim Jones emphasized. Some recent authors stress the left-wing causes as a means to rehabilitate Peoples Temple. Whether by obscuring the group’s raison d'être or highlighting it as a way to offset their evil end, chroniclers of the event have not come to terms with the political element—really the group’s central focus—of Peoples Temple and how it led to Jonestown,
a project aiming for full equality that ultimately achieved it. ...
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