Ep 18 | Daniel Flynn | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Die with a degree of dignity.

Don't lay down with tears and agony.

There's nothing to death, it's just stepping over in another plane.

Don't be this way.

So that's the voice of Jim Jones as 900 people are committing suicide.

He seems pretty calm.

He's chastising people to relax.

You're just dying.

Who was this guy?

Yeah, there's a long road from

Hoosierville, Indiana to Jonestown, Guyana.

And that's where his story starts in Indiana.

And I think one of the interesting things about Jim Jones, he was not brought up in the Christian tradition or in a church tradition.

I spoke to a kid, I say a kid, he's close to 90 now, but someone who grew up with Jim Jones knew him when he was 10 years old.

And Jim Jones started going to church at that time.

It was a sort of a Pentecostal, local,

you know, small church.

And at the end of the service, the priest would say, okay, who wants to get, who needs to get saved?

And Jim Jones would say, I need to get saved.

And the next week, he would do the same thing.

And Jim Jones would say, I need to get saved.

And you only get saved once.

But Jim Jones liked this whole pageantry and loved sort of going up in the attention of everyone.

And he would get saved every week.

And this gentleman thought this was very peculiar about Jim Jones.

Jones would preach to the trees and to the animals and to the local kids.

And he got pretty good at it.

But he never really was a believer.

And when he went to Indiana University, he ran into some Marxists.

And he thought...

And his mom, too, was very left-wing at the time.

She was someone who

believed she lived as the rich and famous in past lives.

She changed her first name three different times.

People thought it was peculiar because she wore pants when everyone else was wearing a skirt.

Hello.

So back then, and in Indiana, she really stuck out and she passed on, you know, the apple didn't fall too far from the tree and she sort of passed on some of her

strange DNA to her son.

And it was at Indian University that Jones ran into some Marxists and he said, you know,

How can I demonstrate my Marxism is what he said years later.

And he said the thought was to infiltrate the church.

Now, Jim Jones is not always the best authority on Jim Jones, but I think right there,

you can sort of take him as an authority, that that was his intent all along, to use the church as sort of a vehicle to

popularize Marxism.

And that's what he did.

That's not a new idea back then.

It's not, I mean,

Jeremiah Wright.

Sure.

I mean, isn't that the same kind of thing?

I mean,

in looking at his, what do you call it?

The People's Temple?

People's Temple.

And we'll get to this later, but in looking at it he is

he's all he is is a community organizer using a church which

which is kind of the the jeremiah right thing i mean without the kool-aid in the end in indiana um this wears thin on people because in indianapolis um it's not san francisco it's very particularly in the 1950s and the early 1960s and so he wears out his welcome he goes to brazil and then he brings his flock to California.

He has a prophecy and he says that, you know, basically there's going to be a nuclear Holocaust 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.

And you've sort of heard this story before.

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

We're in Redwood Valley.

And they go there and ultimately they go down to San Francisco.

And sort of that's where the Jonestown story begins.

Because, you know, in Indianapolis, he tried to ingratiate himself with the locals.

He, you know, had a show on WIBC and was on the Human Rights Commission.

But it really, it really isn't until he gets to San Francisco that he gets really in with the in crowd.

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

That's the hangover after the high.

You had the high of

the summer of love and Haight Ashbury and the human being in Golden Gate Park and all that fun stuff that happened in the 1960s.

always a price to pay, you know, that that for a party.

And in the 70s, you had that price to pay with the Zodiac killings, the zebra killings, the

Weather Underground hiding out in San Francisco, the Semites Liberation Army, kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the assassination of Marcus Foster.

It's all in San Francisco.

It's all in the Bay Area.

The New World Liberation Front, they put a bomb on Diane Feinstein's windowsill of her daughter.

They shot up her vacation home, the the windows out of her vacation home.

All these competing crazy groups.

It was very difficult for people to differentiate between political crazies and just plain crazies.

And in that environment, a guy like Jim Jones all of a sudden doesn't look that crazy.

He looks almost mainstream.

And so a lot of the mainstream figures in San Francisco, they were mainstream for San Francisco, perhaps not for anywhere else in the country, they start looking at Jim Jones as something more than a community organizer,

as a civic leader, as a person of civic responsibility.

And so it's really in San Francisco that this guy gains power.

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

It was the formula, everything was right.

It was a perfect storm.

So what's his church like at this point?

When he goes to California, he's having his church out of a, essentially, a carport, like a, almost like a garage, but like an open-air kind of garage with spots for two cars.

This is at his house, and there's maybe 100, 150 people coming to services.

They obtain a number of like old Greyhound buses, and they go from city to city, and sometimes they go across country.

And mainly, you know, they're coming from Indiana, so it's a mainly white church, a rural church.

It has sort of an Indiana twang.

They're in a rural area in California, in Redwood Valley, but they start going to San Francisco.

They start going to Los Angeles, and it becomes very quickly becomes more of a black church, more of an urban church, and more of an underclass church.

And so the dynamic of people's temple changes very quickly.

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, and she made the point that a lot of African Americans, they're really rooted in the Bible.

And Jim Jones, he wrote a tract called The Letter Killeth.

It was all to discredit the Bible and how the Bible was a bunch of lies.

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

So he changes his tune a little.

But ultimately,

people eventually come to find out, like a lot of cults, there's sort of layers.

And when they find out, this guy is an atheist.

He's someone who is trying to undermine Christianity.

He's stomping on the Bible in front of people.

He's throwing the Bible down.

In fact, in Jonestown, I spoke to two survivors from Jonestown who

noted that they had their Bibles confiscated.

Everyone had their Bibles confiscated who brought them to Jonestown.

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

The Bibles were redistributed only when they ran out of toilet paper in Jonestown.

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

Obviously.

Yeah.

And they were instructed how to use them.

And I asked, did people do that?

And the gentleman I spoke to said yes, and indicated that, you know, he sort of

desperate times called for desperate measures.

So if you're going to, if you're someone who was initially a Christian, maybe a fundamentalist Christian, maybe evangelical,

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

Okay, so it's what year when he lands in San Francisco, 68?

70?

You know, a little later than that.

But here's the thing is

they have a presence in San Francisco.

They don't really move en masse to San Francisco until the early 70s,

but they're still present there in the late 60s.

Okay, so when

San Francisco's always been San Francisco,

but

California wasn't always nuts.

What was California like?

I mean, it was not

Indiana,

but

what was it like when he was there?

Did the people stand out?

Was it his cultish

feeling at that time when they first started?

One of the things that happens with Jim Jones in California is he starts wearing sunglasses 24-7, which is a very California thing to do.

And one of the reasons why people wear sunglasses 24-7 as they start is a lot of people use drugs,

a lot of people in the music industry or comedians or people who are on drugs.

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

So you could say he kind of went native in California.

That's part of the reason they sort of go off the rails.

In California, some of the local people, regardless of their political affiliation,

you know, might like this group because they clean after themselves.

They have, you know, they help people out in the community.

You know, Jim Jones, a snap of a finger, can get people to help people.

And they give donations.

The group gives donations.

And so they sort of engendered goodwill.

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

that's when things start to go a little haywire.

So what's he preaching when he first starts?

And how long before he's way out of Bible country?

You know, he always was railing against the Bible and trying to undermine the Bible.

It's just

he's being selective.

And so when he's in San Francisco, I'm sorry, when he starts having a predominantly black church, he changes his message.

He knows his audience.

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

There's no celebration of Christmas in Jonestown.

They acknowledge that they are an atheist group.

There's no even,

you know, there's no even attempt to sort of feign that they're Christian any longer, maybe to the public authorities, but not everyone in Jonestown knows what's up.

People are changing their name to Stalin and Lenin and Che and Jim Jones.

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

He's pretty good at it.

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

So most of the names they're changing to are names of very prominent communists.

And so, there's no, you know,

the security force in Jonestown called the Red Brigade, the force that killed Leo Ryan, the Congressman.

You see people wearing red handkerchiefs or wearing red

shirts.

They're singing the international.

There's no pretense about what they're doing there.

In San Francisco, there's a pretense that there's, you know, if you are new to the church, you might think

this is a Christian group.

And Jim Jones sort of pays homage to that to an extent.

But

when the media and when people, outsiders are not there, he is making the point that socialism is God.

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

And some

he is saying that explicitly.

I'm not saying that.

So who's sitting in the...

Who's sitting in the pew?

I mean, because you would think any rational person, hear that,

you know, because I'm the pure embodiment of socialism, therefore I'm God.

You'd think they'd get up, leave.

Well, what's that song?

There's a load of compromising on the road to my horizons.

You know, these people had made deals with themselves.

They made compromises

and smaller things, and it get bigger and bigger and bigger.

Give you an example, a little bit off topic, but

the main reason we're talking here is revolutionary suicide.

These people all kill themselves.

This starts in 1975, and I think the way it starts is sort of instructive to the question that you have there, which is that they have this thing called the wine test.

And I interviewed a couple of people for the book who were at this test, and they give out wine.

I said, everyone have some wine.

And this is a luxury in people's temple.

They're usually not drinking alcohol.

So after they drink the wine, Jim Jones informs them, this is the planning commission, the leadership council, essentially, you're all going to die in 45 minutes.

A woman starts freaking out, an overweight white woman from Indiana starts freaking out and going crazy.

Someone comes out with a gun and shoots her three times.

Now, these were blanks, and this was all staged.

Someone that I interviewed to this day believed that she was legitimately freaking out and not acting as sort of an agent of Jim Jones doing his bidding.

Nobody dies.

This woman is shamed and scorned for speaking out against the suicide.

And this drill is repeated.

And the lesson there is pretty clear: drink the wine, drink the Kool-Aid.

You're not going to die.

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

You're going to be a pariah.

And so just go along.

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

that it was, you know, they felt squeamish about it.

But you boil that frog.

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

And in Jonestown, there starts to become something called White Knights, where Jim Jones acts as though that there's sort of a siege mentality where there's people outside of the perimeter ready to attack.

And he's speechifying for sometimes, you know, hours and hours at a time.

And he lets them know that at some point it may get to the point where they all have to kill themselves to save themselves from these people torturing their babies and all that kind of thing.

And so you go, you're talking about a seed that's laid in 1975 when they first have, and one of Jim Jones's lieutenant, Tim Stone, who I interviewed, he said, Jim came up to me and said, Tim, because Tim surprised him.

He didn't usually go to these meetings.

He said, Tim, I want you to know, whatever I say tonight, I don't believe in suicide.

And Stone said, okay.

And he sees what happened.

He thought, this was really weird.

But Jones had told him, well, I don't believe in suicide.

So even a level-headed person like that, a lawyer, a guy who is wealthy in the temple,

went along, at least to a certain point.

And I think that

for the people that left after some of these loyalty tests, or the the people that found Jones to be so out there and so strange that they left, even that was serving his ends because you weed out the independent minds.

And what's left behind are people that are just followers, joiners.

Okay, so let's

take Spach.

He moves to San Francisco.

He starts the church.

He's got it going.

How does he become involved in politics?

How does he become involved with another guy who

you say, and I've read enough to know as well,

not the guy everyone thinks he is, Harvey Milk?

Sure.

He

had been involved in politics for a long time, but really where he makes his mark is in 1975, the mayoral race in San Francisco.

Willie Brown brokers a meeting.

with Jim Jones, said we need people because there's a very close election between George Moscone, who's the liberal Democrat running, and John Barbara Gelotta, who is a conservative Republican, at a time when you could almost have that winning in San Francisco, particularly.

Well,

they had a police strike that year.

And so people were fed up.

They were angry with the public employees.

And that's why Barbara Gelata was so close.

I mean, sort of the last gasp of Republicans in, I don't know, how conservative.

I mean, it was somewhat conservative.

Anyhow, Moscone wins by about 3,000 votes.

And most people believe that Jim Jones is the difference maker in that election because he has thousands you know thousands of people where he can send them out uh volunteer uh for a candidate leaflet do all the things that volunteers do so he becomes popular with anybody who wants to run or is in office correct now there's a second dynamic about that which is that not only a lot of people believe that he not only gets musconi elected because of these above-board activities but he also busts in people from outside of San Francisco to cast ballots people that many suspect were improper electors in the city of San San Francisco.

That doesn't happen.

That's what you think this is, Chicago?

Well, here it gets better.

It gets more Chicago.

So there's an outcry that this was a fix.

And the pressure is so great that the Moscone administration is sort of forced to investigate its own election.

And they have

the district attorney looks in to see if there was voter fraud.

And the district attorney gets his deputy to investigate.

His deputy also happens to be Jim Jones's deputy.

Oh, my gosh.

That's how in with the in-crowd People's Temple was in San Francisco, that they are investigating accusations of fraud against themselves.

And lo and behold, they found that they did not commit any fraud.

So

is there any inkling at this point,

other than just being a community organizer, in with the in-crowd, dirty politics?

Is there any inkling that this guy is a madman or something else is going on?

There were

different reports that came out.

For instance, in San Francisco in 1972, Lester Kensolving, a somewhat famous reporter, wrote an eight-part series for the San Francisco Examiner, basically exposing all of the things about Jim Jones that we know about him now, that he was engaged in fake faith healings, that they were stockpiling arms.

Let's stop for a second.

Fake faith healings.

You talk about in your book that it almost became like the holy of holies, where he has, is it a bag of meat?

Yeah, they have a chicken.

They have chicken where he claims he's pulling cancer out of people, and it's just sort of some smelly uncooked chicken, chicken gizzards, chicken this, chicken, that.

And the people around him know that this is fake.

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

But at that time, he's also claiming to have raised dozens of people.

Very specific boast, raising dozens of people from the dead, telling people, don't, whatever you do don't use embalming fluid because i can't help you at that point if you use you know um that uh were the people did he produce these people and they were in on a scam or

correct there were other instances where people were drugged um and they would claim to have healed them and the people thought that they were healed because they were you know someone had put drugs in them um there were all sorts of scams that they were involved in but um tim stone who's his deputy and his lawyer when i talked to him, when this consolving piece comes out and exposes them, he said, Well, I talked to Jim and said, Well, we really need to get affidavits from people attesting that they have been healed, just in case there's any sort of legal repercussions.

And so they start documenting all the people that he's been healed.

And so it's not like these are these sort of vague claims.

There are very specific claims about how many people he raised in what year from the dead and who was cured of brain cancer and who was cured of this and that.

And so so that in in writing the book that was the fact that they were able to document all this it was pretty easy to sort of to to to to put that all together so

what's his motivation to be this faith healer does he just want to be a powerful political guy does he

Why is he doing the fake faith healing?

The faith healing is the biggest means by which they're able to get members into people's temple.

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

So he increased his numbers.

He increased his numbers more by faith healing than any other thing.

And people would sit through these Fidel Castro-like harangues about socialism in order to get healed.

And so there was a large contingent, primarily old, a lot of them black, who were in it for the faith healings.

There was a smaller contingent, primarily white and young and socialist and maybe influenced by the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War,

who were in it because of the socialism, because of the politics.

And they sort of stomached the Charlatan Act.

So did they?

Because I mean, I know Marxists.

And justify the means.

Yeah, but I guess maybe that's what it is.

Okay, because I'm trying to think if

you're a 25-year-old, 30-year-old Marxist and you hate

Christianity and everything else, how you're sitting there watching a guy claim to raise the dead and everything else.

They knew, and I mean, did they know?

Michael Prokes did they know it was, that he knew that it was fake?

Some of them did.

Some of them believed.

I spoke to a guy

who hates Jim Jones and defected long before Jonestown.

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

He said, what are you talking about?

I said, when did you realize that this was all ABBA cadab or that this was fake?

He said, I don't understand the question.

So when did you realize that this guy was a phony?

He said, Oh, no, Jim Jones had power.

And I said,

Still to this day.

And I said, What do you mean?

And he said, No, Jim Jones had extrasensory perception.

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

Did you tell him the chicken gizzard thing?

Well, he sort of conceded that, well, maybe some of it was fake.

But to this day, a guy who hates Jim Jones, and this is an intelligent man, was insisting that this was not fake.

And I had spoke to other people who believed that Jones had these powers.

None of them as insistent as this man was,

but saying carefully worded statements that would indicate, that would not preclude the idea that he had power.

Now, this guy was coming out and saying it.

So it tells you something about his power.

Even if we both realize that this guy didn't, this guy was a scam, that he didn't have this kind of power.

He had power of some sort, that 40 years later, someone still believes that he was able to, you know, read minds and cure people of cancer.

That's a power.

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

So it's a power of persuasion

at least and manipulation.

In thinking back on those interviews,

did you consider that I don't want to be a fool?

That these people who left, they left, but they didn't, they couldn't bring themselves to say, I was this stupid.

I think that's part of it, that there was an element of being all in.

And that's one of the reasons why you have Jonestown happening, because the people were all in at that point.

And it's hard to sort of invest and invest and invest in someone.

And once you say, you know, the emperor has no clothes, or you see that guy, you know, pay no attention to that guy behind the curtain or any of that kind of thing, you're really saying something about yourself

and not the scam artist.

And that's very hard.

That's a very hard thing to do.

that's a very hard thing to do all right so

let's stop here for a second and get into harvey milk um because i remember i remember this i remember seeing the bodies on television it was the first time i'd ever seen anything like that on television i was a young kid and and i remember how horrible that was and i remember how it just stopped everything.

But I swear to you, I thought, and maybe I just, this is the way I processed it, but I thought that was a religious cult, which I guess in kind of it is, he was God.

Sure.

I don't remember anything about Marxism.

Harvey Milk, as well, is being made into this wonderful human being.

Tell me about Harvey Milk.

Harvey Milk is a transplant from New York who prior to coming to San Francisco was sort of a jack of all trades, was a teacher, was in the Navy, later claimed he had a dishonorable discharge from the Navy in San Francisco to to get kind of street cred.

Who does that?

I mean, that's how crazy and upside down it is.

Usually, people say, No,

I had honors.

Maybe you got like that guy in Connecticut.

They fake, they say that they did all sorts of great things in the military.

He said he was dishonorably discharged.

He wasn't.

I have his copy of his honorable discharge.

So he served honorably in the military.

He was a teacher.

He was sort of an analyst on Wall Street.

He worked on Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, Broadway Productions.

And when he gets to San Francisco, and he lives out there a few different times,

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

You know, go west, young man, go west, grow up with your country.

And that's what he did.

He goes out there and he decides, you know, wouldn't it be great to be mayor?

or

supervisor or whatever.

And so he runs for office in 1973.

He loses.

He runs again in 75.

He loses.

It's really not, he runs again in 76.

He loses again.

It's really not until he gets in touch with Jim Jones that he goes from being a novelty candidate to being a really serious force in the city.

And why was he a novelty candidate?

Because even at that point, being a homosexual running for office, even in a place like San Francisco, was a little bit different.

And people thought, even gays thought, let's just put our support behind straight candidates who believe in our cause and let's not sort of be out in front because it's going to alienate too many people.

San Francisco was, we think of San Francisco as this really left-wing town, but like at that time, Joe Elioto is the mayor, who's a very conservative Democrat, friends with Eric Hoffer.

You know, he's not the kind of San Francisco Democrat that we think of now.

So it's he's not a guy that would be welcome in San Francisco today.

Correct.

And so it was a city in flux.

And I don't think it was apparent to everyone that a gay could be a political force in San Francisco.

It was apparent to Harvey Milk.

It took an outsider to see that.

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

Jones is able to give him hundreds of volunteers, a printing press,

a pulpit to speak to a thousand people.

He's able to give him publicity in the People's Temples newspaper, which is widely distributed.

And of course, a lot of the People's Temple members are African American, so he has African Americans in his district.

Rather than having this gay white guy show up at their house, he has those.

So very helpful to Harvey Milk.

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

Now, Jones already had credibility at San Francisco at this time, but when things start going south for him, some of the politicians go east and west.

They're running from him

because it starts coming out that they're beating people and they're taking advantage of people financially.

Harvey Milk acts as one of the most loyal supporters of Jim Jones.

So one of the things Jones does is he kidnaps a little boy, John Victor Stone, when he goes down to South America, his parents in the United States.

And there's thought that they're going to intervene, the government's going to intervene and get that boy back.

And this becomes sort of like an existential crisis for some reason for people's temple.

Harvey Milk writes Jimmy Carter a letter saying

Jim Jones is a man of the highest character that he's thought of like that in San Francisco, that this boy's mother is a blackmailer and his dad, the guy who says he's his dad, is a bald-faced liar.

Jim Jones is the real dad.

You have that copy of that letter.

I do, yeah.

And the Carter administration, I want to say they didn't intervene, but really they did intervene on behalf of Jones.

Because Rosalind actually met with Jim Jones.

Walter Mondale did as well.

Yeah, Rosalind Carter meets with Jim Jones, has dinner with him.

They have private conversations on the phone.

We know this because Jones surreptitiously recorded the conversations that he had with the, at that point, she's not the first lady, but she's, you know,

when she comes to San Francisco to campaign for Jimmy Carter for president in 1976, Jim Jones introduces her.

The guy that she has introduce, you know, the future first lady of the United States is this cult leader who kills over 900 people

two years later.

Walter Mondale, when he comes to San Francisco, steps on the tarmac, one of the first persons he meets is Jim Jones.

Are either of them on record at the time

in any, in handwriting, in personal conversations, saying, I don't know, there's something wrong with that guy.

I mean, great, we're going to use him for this, but they all just think he's fine.

Correct.

Jerry Brown speaks at People's Temple.

Ed Bradley, the mayor of San Francisco, the mayor of Los Angeles.

I found a letter from Jane Fonda to Jim Jones, written after she'd attended People's Temple service in San Francisco, saying that she wanted to be an active and full participant in People's Temple and that she wanted to do this for the sake of her kids.

Oh, my God.

So Jim Jones said publicly that Jane Fonda was a member of his temple.

I don't think he was wrong.

I mean, if you read that letter, it's very hard to read that letter and not come to the conclusion that Jane Fonda was saying, I want to be a member of People's Temple.

I want to be an active and full participant, were her words.

I don't know how else you interpret that.

When things start going south, Fonda starts, Fonda joins with Milk and Tom Hayden and some others.

They put out a public letter in defense of People's Temple in 1977.

She really aggressively

supports Jones.

So Milk's not alone.

He has a whole cast of characters, some of them very famous, like Jane Fund.

And the interesting thing about her, I mean, you've seen some of the interviews, the interview he did with Megan Kelly.

You ask her about her facelift, people ask her about her trip to North Vietnam.

They ask her all sorts of indelicate questions.

Nobody says, hey, why did you join People's Temple that time?

Why did you do that?

That never comes up.

And I just find that very odd that that would get dumped down the memory hole.

That's part of the reason I wrote the book.

People like Harvey Milk, who have become heroes, who, you know, has his name, Terminal One.

You're flying to San Francisco.

It's now Harvey Milk Terminal.

They have a Navy ship named after Harvey Milk.

Barack Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

And it's hard to,

you know, on the one hand, there's a lot of the sex stuff that some people bring up, and it's brought up in my book about Milk that he was not, you know, the stuff is sort of brushed under the rug, you know, the type of guy he was, involved with a lot of young guys.

But the other part of it is, is that...

Define young guys.

Okay, so he goes to New York in 1964.

I'm sorry, he's in New York in 1964 and he picks up a 16-year-old runaway off the street.

He moves him into his house.

He tries to get legal guardianship over the kid.

He is big into photography at the time, takes a number of pictures of the kid's rear end and decorates the house with the kick pictures of the 16-year-old's rear end.

At the same time,

they're handing out Goldwater leaflets in the subways because at that point, Harvey Milk is a Goldwater conservative.

Yes.

What?

Yes.

So, and

it makes a little bit of sense because back then, this is before the cultural wars and the cultural, so those issues aren't really defining Republican, Democrat, that kind of thing.

And if you're a stock analyst on Wall Street, you might be attracted to a guy like Goldwater.

And it might have, you know, sex has nothing to do with any of this.

So he was living a double life.

You know, it's interesting, Milk told people to come out.

He never came out to his own parents.

His own parents weren't in Long Island.

And he had the 16-year-old living with him in

Manhattan in San Francisco.

I heard a much more disturbing story.

And I was called 10 or 11 years ago by a rather prominent gay man in San Francisco.

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

And this guy knew Harvey Milk.

You know, some well-known to other gays in San Francisco, but for obvious reason wants to remain anonymous.

He told me the story in the early 1970s.

He went out on the town with Milk and some friends.

Milk was with a young kid that he thought was 16, 17, maybe 18 years old.

And there were some other friends.

The Milk's friend could not get into the bar.

And so Milk and that boy went their way.

Everyone else went the other way.

And

the next morning, the man who I talked to

stumbles upon this boy in Harvey Milk's doorway, and he's balled up, he's bruised, he's bloodied.

And the boy's not really coherently getting out what exactly happened and so the guy says let's go to breakfast at that point the boy gets it together and says he beat me up he raped me and he described what had happened and as my source says you know you didn't need to be a male gynecologist to figure out what happened he was he had cuts about the ear and about the face and all that kind of thing and something obviously happened now He didn't witness what happened.

I didn't witness what happened.

This happened 45 years ago or so.

Oftentimes, there's people in these kind of relationships where it's he said, she said, he said, he said.

And, you know, maybe they got in a fight and the bigger guy, Harvey Milk, was kind of a big guy.

Maybe he won.

You know, maybe it was an unpleasant sexual experience that in hindsight he labeled a rape.

I don't know.

But the bottom line is that, you know,

this guy, the guy was beat up and

there was an unwanted sexual encounter.

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

that you're the bad guy if you sort of report on that story and no one is touching it with a 10-foot pole.

No one is saying, hey, maybe we should think about naming this terminal in San Francisco after this guy.

Or maybe we shouldn't, you know, maybe we should rethink having a holiday in the schools in California on Harvey Milk's birthday because, you know, he was going after kids who were supposed to be in school.

So that part of it is totally excised from the story.

It's totally omitted.

I can see someone, a milk defender, saying that this story that this man came forward with years later, well, it's something that maybe wouldn't hold up in a court of law, sure.

But this is the court of public opinion we're talking about.

And it didn't stop anybody on Kavanaugh.

No, it didn't stop anyone on Kavanaugh.

But beyond that,

the fact that there's a history there, that there is, no one is debating whether he picked up the 16-year-old runaway off the street.

Milk tried to alter the boy's birth date in a notebook that he had.

But we know when the kid was born, and we know when he met Harvey Milk, and he was 16, and that was illegal at the time.

And even if it wasn't illegal, it's kind of creepy that you have a 30-something-year-old guy having a relationship with a 16-year-old runaway.

And that was sort of the pattern with him, that he would pick up vulnerable guys that were either on drugs, had big psychological problems, had history of suicide attempts, or several of them did commit suicide after or during the relationship with Milk.

So he was really slumming it.

He may have been working Wall Street,

but he was slumming it on Skid Row with some of his relationships.

So why was he protected by so many people?

Why is he

well?

I think in death, he's become the gay Martin Luther King figure.

And part of that, I'm sure we'll get into that, has to do with this narrative that's been constructed about why he was killed.

We know Martin Luther King was killed by a racist.

And so the parallel to that was that this guy would be killed by a bigot and homophone.

But he wasn't.

But he wasn't.

And I'm sure we'll have time to get into that.

How do we do that now?

And then we'll come back to Jim.

So

with Jones's help,

Milk gets elected in 1977 to the Board of Supervisors.

And at this point, Jones has skedaddled down to South America.

But there's sort of a remnant of People's Temple still in San Francisco.

And Milk is getting help from them and help from other people.

And he's established himself after three runs.

He gets elected.

Another guy gets elected, Dan White,

who is in probably

the most conservative, if you want to put it like that, district in most working class conservative district in San Francisco, sort of more of a law and order guy.

But he's really Dianne Feinstein's protégé.

I mean, that's who he's closest to politically, and that's who he looks up to the most.

And Dianne Feinstein looks upon Dan White as kind of an Eagle Scout character.

She really looks at him as like a little goody two-shoes.

So they get on the board,

and on the first day on the board of supervisors, Dan White

helps engineer a coup of sorts.

Usually, the person getting the most votes in the previous election becomes the board president, but they're able to finangle it so that Dianne Feinstein becomes the board president.

That's really the only impact Dan White has in his whole time on the board of supervisors.

He was outwitted, outmatched, outplayed

by Harvey Milk quite often.

And it's not until his last day in City Hall that he has a very similar impact on Dianne Feinstein's career.

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

Her husband had recently died.

She had an about a sick bout of sickness.

She was about done with politics until Dan White comes in and murders George Moscone and murders Harvey Milk.

Now, the narrative is, is that Dan White did this because he was a homophobe and a bigot and he hated gays.

The reality is, is that Dan White had resigned his seat on the board of supervisors.

He was very frustrated.

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

And so he resigned.

The people who got him elected were generally the police and the firemen, the public employees' unions, and that's who he kind of represented on the board.

They came to him and said, Why didn't you tell us?

Why did you resign?

You got to get your seat back.

If we, you know, we have all these important votes before the Board of Supervisors, and they were going to be 6'5, and you were the linchpin of those votes, and now we're going to lose.

So he begs us for his job back.

And Mayor Moscone publicly initially says he's back on the board of supervisors.

And so White thinks he has his job back.

Milk gets in Moscone's ear, the mayor, and says, Look, we're losing too many 6'5 votes.

This is insane.

You know, don't put this guy back on the board.

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

And he changes his mind.

This sets Dan White off.

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

never can admit fault.

And he

is extremely angry and upset and out for blood for this.

Now, the narrative that he did this because of gay issues or something like that, the reality is I interviewed Dan White's chief of staff, his campaign manager, his business partner, a guy by the name of Ray Sloan.

Ray Sloan is a gay man and was gay then and is gay now.

And openly then, at least with Dan.

What he said to me is that Dan, at first it just wasn't brought up, but eventually Dan White knew and it wasn't really talked about, but it made no difference to Dan White.

Dan White had a very mixed record on gay rights.

Some of his votes, I think, rather petulantly were to punish Harvey Milk because there was an issue that White wanted Milk's vote on.

Milk initially said yes and then reversed his vote

about setting up sort of a home for youth offenders in White's district, which he, you know, not in my backyard kind of thing.

And it went against White, and he freaked out about that.

And that sort of harms the relationship between him and Milk.

But, you know, they're friends.

They're going out for coffee.

They're going out for breakfast.

Milk is coming, not like the other supervisor, milk's coming to the baptism of White's kid.

And he knew.

I mean, there's no way.

I mean, everybody knew he was gay.

That Harvey Milk was gay?

Yes.

Yeah, I mean, everyone knew Harvey Milk was gay.

I mean, he was quite clear.

He was gay.

He made everyone knew it.

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

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they were,

and politically, they sometimes voted the same way.

I mean, White very aggressively voted for affirmative action, you know, very aggressive affirmative action policies on the Board of Supervisors.

He gave the keynote address for a California gun control group, ironically enough, is what happens.

When Proposition 13 passes in California, there's all these scare stories about this tax limitation measure, Jarvis Gann, that

all the cities and towns are going to run out of money.

And so Dan White initially votes for all these tax increases in San Francisco.

And then when things become, it becomes clear that those were just scare stories, he votes against, he votes to rescind those tax increases.

And that kind of, in a little snapshot, is who Dan White was.

He's a sort of a mercurial politician, not very ideological,

you know, would vote liberal on some things, conservative on things.

He certainly wasn't the most conservative member of the board or the second most conservative member of the board.

And the person he most identified with was Diane Feinstein.

When Proposition 6 in 1978, which is the Briggs Initiative, that was, I think, a rather unwise initiative that would have empowered local school boards to just fire a teacher because they were gay or because they supported gay rights.

That initially was going to win, and Ronald Reagan came out against it, and then the poll numbers sort of reversed.

Dan White was pretty vocal in opposition to that.

You read some of the histories that say Dan White was a supporter of it.

He was not.

He attended the largest gay rights fundraiser in the history of the United States up until that time to defeat the Briggs Initiative.

So this narrative that Dan White was some sort of seething, angry homophobe who

killed Harvey Milk for the same reasons that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King, it just doesn't hold up water.

So when did that narrative begin then?

Immediately.

In the Bay Area Reporter, immediately.

Didn't people know?

I mean, weren't there people around that said, no, I knew him.

He didn't.

Well, Diane Feinstein has come out and said, this is ridiculous.

This wasn't about anyone's sexual orientation.

She said this 10 years ago in a press event, and she went into detail what it was about.

Quentin Kopp, who was also on the board, who I interviewed, another Democrat, said this had nothing to do with anyone's sexual orientation.

It's just a myth.

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

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

Yeah, it's a great story.

And I think for a lot of people who were very hurt by Milk's death, who maybe have looked up to him, you want to find some meaning in something.

I mean, we think about like when Lady Di dies or any any big figure, Malcolm X, there's always some real theory about why they died.

And maybe the people that we know killed them was someone else.

And so a little bit of that, we know who killed Harvey Milk and Mamris Coney, but the why of it has been obscured for political reasons.

And I think that's, you know, it's just tremendously dishonest.

I mean, it's not as though Dean White was, you know, a left-winger or was voting with Milk on every gay rights initiative.

But, you know, he was going back and forth.

This had nothing to do with gay rights.

This had to do with a petty office desired by a petty man, a petty grievance, and he goes and commits a petty act against

these two guys.

One guy was beloved, had family, another guy was also beloved

in the Castro district and elsewhere in San Francisco.

And so it's bad enough what he did.

You don't have to create this, you know, phony baloney

story to,

you know, like a creation story, a campfire story.

How weird is it, you know, when you hear this?

I remember being a kid and hearing about all of this, that Diane Feinstein was part of all this.

I mean, it's the same woman.

She's still.

To me, it's interesting that she,

you think a few months back when this whole Kavanaugh thing went down.

She's public enemy number one for conservatives in this country.

For a long time, she was hated by the left.

They never really accepted her.

And you can see this guy that ran against her, De Leon, or whatever his name was, the fact that the extent that he got support against someone who's been there, I don't know, six terms or whatever it is, she's been there.

She was never really accepted.

Harvey Milk hated her.

simply hated her.

And other people, just, I think culturally, she came across in a certain way, almost like a blue stocking or

patrician.

She's a very classy lady.

She holds herself with dignity, and some people are sort of offended by that.

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

They put a bomb on her windowsill.

You know, I have some great respect for her for what went on.

And she in San Francisco in the 70s.

And for the most part, she's not a part of that.

She's a target of it.

With people's temple she does sign on to a certificate of honor that's unanimously passed in the board of supervisors for jim jones saying what a great guy he was but less so than like a guy like willie brown take a guy like willie brown willie brown when jim jones wanted to go to cuba and he did go to cuba wrote fidel castro and said

urged him to extend a state visit to Jim Jones, as though Jim Jones were like a world leader, to sort of grant him the privileges of a world leader visiting Cuba.

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

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

Jim Jones won the Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award in San Francisco.

But the point about Brown is that years later, when Brown writes his memoirs about 10 years ago,

he writes in such a way that he was sort of a detached observer, that he didn't know this Jim Jones guy.

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

He was one of the main people.

He was the main guy aiding and abetting Jim Jones along with someone like Harvey Milk.

And so what happens when things go south for Jim Jones is that guys like Brown and Harvey Milk come to his aid.

Mervyn Dimley, who's the lieutenant governor of California, he flies down to Jonestown with Jim Jones and he says, I'm tremendously impressed.

He's looking at a concentration camp and he's telling everyone that what he's seeing is like the second coming of Eden.

And that's where Harvey Mill comes into the story, running interference for Jim Jones, aiding and abetting him.

And that's something that really outweighs anything that he did in his very short time on the Board of Supervisors.

So give me the peak of Jim Jones' power in the city of San Francisco and then how it begins to fall apart.

In 1976, when George Moscone takes office as mayor, he's talking about putting Jim Jones on the housing, I'm sorry, the Human Rights Commission.

And Jones says, I was on that commission back in Indianapolis.

You better do better than that.

I got you elected.

And Moscone says, well, Jim Jones examines his conscience more thoroughly than any man I know.

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

He's not playing hard to get.

Moscone comes back with a better offer and he makes him the

Housing Commission Authority, one of the members.

And then very quickly, Jim Jones becomes elevated.

He's the chairman of the Housing Commission Authority, effectively the largest landlord in the city of San Francisco in charge of 35,000 housing units, public housing units.

And, you know, when we think about Jim Jones, we usually think about guys like John Wayne Gacy or Charlie Manson or Ted Bundy.

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

We don't think of them holding positions of civic responsibility.

Jim Jones did that.

So when you ask about his peak of his power, certainly 76 and 77, when he's chairman of the Housing Commission Authority in San Francisco, when they're giving them the human rights, the Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award, when one of the Los Angeles papers names him the man of the year, when he is named one of the 100 most important clergymen by religion in American life and meets in New York with 100 other clergymen and the vice president of the United States, Yelson Morocco.

He's not preaching God.

Well, you know, how?

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

So he had the, and the point of all that is before the poor drank the Kool-Aid in South America, the powerful did in San Francisco.

In other words, so many people act as though, how do these people get duped and how they were so stupid?

And they don't look at the fact that

they gave him all these awards.

They gave him

people with better educations, more money, and more power than those people fell for him too.

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

They didn't fall for him, or do they just see his

And they didn't care.

It's probably a little bit of both.

With Harvey Milk, he had never been involved religiously.

I mean, really, I mean, he had been involved in Judaism to an extent, but he really was just sort of a secular guy.

And some people say he was an atheist.

Some people say he just wasn't religious.

In People's Temple, he kept coming back and he said he found something there.

He said, my name is written in stone for you and your people to Jim Jones.

He was very emphatic, over-the-top letters to Jim Jones.

Which said this?

Harvey Milk said it to Jim Jones.

Wow.

You know, so there's all these emphatic letters that he wrote to Jones.

And when things go south for Jones, Harvey Milk starts lobbying world leaders, saying what a great guy Jim Jones was.

He wrote Forbes Burnham, who was the prime minister of Guyana, that Jim Jones, such greatness I have found in Jim Jones's People's Temple.

He writes the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph Califano, that Jonestown is a beautiful retirement community, the likes of which people of means would pay thousands of dollars to attend, that it was helping to alleviate the world food crisis.

This is a time when people were starving in Jonestown.

I talked to people who never ate meat there or that ate the only meat they ate was fish heads or chicken feet.

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

He was saying they're solving the America's crime problem by taking criminals and turning into productive citizens.

So he basically was lying on Jones's behalf to Jimmy Carter, to his cabinet officials, to various leaders down in Guyana.

And

the result of that, I mean, if you're in Guyana and you're hearing reports, because there were reports months and months before Jonestown happens, there were reports that there was plans for mass suicide.

But wait, wait, before we get there,

tell me,

why did he flee San Francisco?

Tell me about that, where he looks at these, he has to, he realizes, I got to get out of here, and

I got to convince these 900 people it's time to go.

Yeah, they didn't need much convincing.

He just said the word.

The reason he leaves is that there's

reports coming out, similar to what happened in 1972 with Lester Kinsolving, but Lester Kinsolving people could dismiss because he was a conservative.

There was reports coming out from a publication called New West Magazine, which was a Murdoch publication

and was a magazine at the time big in California.

Jones was able to jettison that piece.

Harvey Milk helped in that regard, telling them they should kill that piece, and they did kill it.

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

And the piece talks about Jones' ties with powerful California officials like Willie Brown,

like Governor Brown.

And it also talks about these fake faith healings.

And he he had people coming on record saying that these were chicken gizzards, that these weren't cancers he was pulling out of people, but he was pulling out chicken gizzards and napkins.

That there were fake faith healings.

Other people saying that they were pressured to sign their homes over to Jim Jones.

A teenaged lesbian girl beat up because she dared to give a woman a hug.

And, you know, there were sort of rules about celibacy.

There were rules about forced abortion in people's temple.

Stop.

Let's go for the talk to me about the rules.

Sure.

Let's examine examine some of those.

Well,

this is in San Francisco.

This is in San Francisco.

And some of these rules were followed and some of them were not religiously followed.

I mean, people are going to have sex, you know.

But

people outside of Jim Jones were not supposed to, even within marriage, to have sex.

Unless he said.

Unless he gave the word, yeah.

And beyond that, if a pregnancy would ensue, that the rule was they were supposed to get an abortion.

The temple couldn't sort of

feed too many more mouths.

Sort of a peculiar church where the rule is, you got to get an abortion.

So, the idea, like we talked about,

the New York Times afterwards saying that Jones preached fundamentalist Christianity.

I don't know too many fundamentalist Christians who say you got to get an abortion and we're going to use the Bible as toilet paper.

So, there was this misinformation coming out about people's temple.

And still to this day, you'll hear when people say drinking the Kool-Aid,

maybe they're talking about you or me or someone like that.

I don't know.

So,

with regard to the rules in the temple,

you know, a lot of it just had to do with Jim Jones wanting to humiliate people.

So someone was a vegetarian.

He had forced them to eat chicken.

If there was one man who was condemned as a prude and as racist, so he was forced to perform a sex act on a black woman who was menstruating in front of, you know, 100 or so people.

Oh, my gosh.

Other people.

Who would go to this?

Who?

You'd think you'd leave at that point.

But again, if you're going to do that,

you're going to do anything for this guy.

There was someone that Jim Jones would force.

It's funny.

I spoke to a number of gay men who were involved in People's Temple.

And to a man, they all said, well, Jim Jones never came on to me, never had to try to have sex with me.

But the straight guys, he would try to bed.

And it tells you something about him.

Maybe he was sort of omnisexual, sure.

But really what he was out for was power.

He wanted to humiliate people.

He wanted to, I mean, he had no interest in guys who wanted to have sex with guys.

He only had interest in guys who didn't want to have sex with guys.

He wanted to force the vegetarian to eat chicken, that kind of thing.

Guys, straight guys that he would have sex with, he'd call them out in front of everyone and say, pull down your pants.

I think you gave me, you know, some social disease.

Spread your backside.

And everyone would sort of examine and look and see if this had happened.

And so it was real humiliation, hardcore humiliation.

People who had gone against the rules may have hung out with people from outside of the temple, may have had a crush at school on some girl who was not in the temple.

They were, you know, one guy told me he was shoved in a toilet because of having a crush when he was 13 on a girl that was well endowed for that age.

He said, I couldn't help it.

She looks so beautiful.

Others were forced into these punitive temple boxing matches where they had people who were pretty tough and they would pit them against weak people that had transgressed some rule.

And they'd get beaten up.

And this was for entertainment.

Foxing for Jesus.

Yeah.

If that isn't a fundamental Christian Saturday night, I don't know what is.

They had

a board that they would use to beat people with.

It was called the Board of Education.

Wow.

They had, in Jonestown, they had,

or they had something called the blue

They'd tell kids that there was a blue monster or something and they'd get freaked out, throw people in ditches, put put people in boxes with no light,

all sorts of punishments and all sorts of rules.

Was he a sadist or was this

just for con just for

manipulation?

Manipulation.

I think a little bit of both.

I think he was certainly sadistic, and people did notice his face when

things were going on like that, that he was clearly getting off on this, that he clearly was liking the fact that he was so powerful and that he had power over these people, and he could make him them do whatever he wanted.

Was he

betting people?

Yes.

Some of it rape, certainly.

A lot of it would certainly be called rape today because he's sort of forcing himself on it and they were under his control and that kind of thing.

Men and women.

And mostly for the women, he had a type.

It was very 70s type.

So you'd see like Farah Foster Foster in those posters, very skinny,

small-breasted white women in their early 20s.

In Jonestown, he deviated from that once.

There was a beautiful, beautiful teenage black girl who had dated one of his sons prior, and he wanted her to have sex with him.

Now, at this point, he's sort of overweight.

He's like 47 years old, or whatever he is.

And, you know, if you're a 21-year-old or a 19-year-old girl or a 17-year-old girl, whatever she was, you're not going to be going for a guy like that.

And she says, thanks, but no thanks.

At which point, he decides that she's insane and has to force drugs on her.

And she becomes compliant.

Compliant, so-called.

Okay.

So this is raped.

So this is starting to come out in San Francisco.

That particular story, no.

No, but the others are starting to, some of this stuff is starting to come forward.

So he knows he has to leave.

That he's facing potential legal problems, but also a lot of people who are bullies like that, they're very thin-skinned, very sensitive.

And he needed to get out of Dodge.

And he leaves, and shortly thereafter, this is in the summer of 77, shortly thereafter, he has about a thousand people follow him.

All of a sudden, one day, just go to San Francisco airport and go down to Guyana.

Okay, why Guyana?

He, they buy a tract of land, about 3,000 acres, or I'm sorry, they lease it from the Guyanese government in 1973.

Guyana itself was interesting in that it was a majority-minority country that was ruled by blacks, but blacks were not the dominant, they were a minority, you know, the sort of a minority ruling the majority.

South Africa in reverse.

Yes.

And beyond that, this is a Marxist government run by a guy named Forbes Burnham, who's a communist.

And

at the time, there were thousands and thousands of people fleeing Guyana.

It's right next to Venezuela.

We know, you know, we're 20 years from Venezuela

being taken over by Hugo Chavez.

and you've had thousands and thousands of people leave there, and thousands and thousands of people were leaving.

Jim Jones was going to

Guyana because that appealed to him.

Jonestown was about 100 miles away from the capital.

It was in the jungle.

There was a railroad nearby.

There was a river.

There was a small mining community that was nearby.

There was an airstrip.

But pretty much it was off on its own.

It was sort of seven miles from the nearest town

and a jungle surrounded.

So if you wanted to escape, you probably didn't want to escape.

You know, you weren't going to try.

It was a little dangerous.

Is this at all the people who go down?

Who pays for their tickets?

Does he pay or does church pay?

Yeah, I mean, the people are basically giving over their checks to people's temples.

So who's paying?

I don't know.

In 70, you know, I talked to people who were down there in 74, and they compared it, no joke, to the American pioneers, that they felt that they were building a better life, that they were starting from scratch, and they were turning into this jungle into a place habitable for man.

And they were very proud of what they did, and they felt free.

It changes very dramatically once Jim Jones gets down there.

In 77.

In 77.

It changes dramatically.

So

is this

cult and this move, are there calls at the time from parents or families who say, this guy is basically kidnapped.

He's brainwashed and kidnapped.

Well, he kidnapped outright Tim Stone, John Victor Stone, who's a six-year-old boy

whose parents formerly were high in the leadership in People's Temple.

Two young, attractive, intelligent people who Jim Jones really loved having them there because it sort of legitimized what he was doing, that he was attracting sort of the best and the brightest.

It wasn't just the urban underclass.

And in 1976, on July 4th, Gray Stone declares her independence.

I'm done with this guy.

And because kids are raised communally, she can't take her kid.

The following year, her husband, who's sort of estranged from her at this point,

he decides this is getting too crazy.

He gets out.

But again, he can't get his kid out because you're not raising your own kid in people's temple.

Everyone's raising your kid.

The idea of

parental love, that's selfish.

That goes against sort of the communist ideal.

So everyone raised a kid.

So they couldn't get their kid.

Jones leaves with that kid.

I mean, this is probably a stupid question because, you know, what kind of people are involved in this in the first place?

But what kind of parent who's left behind by the other parent leaves that child there?

Do they think they're going to get their child out if they just get out?

Is it an escape?

What is the situation for the adults?

I'm sure they thought that because it was

initially it was very hard to see the outcome that happened.

As time went on, it became clearer.

There were news reports in the United States six months prior to Jonestown that people were saying that they were going to kill themselves en masse.

They were writing the State Department saying these people are going to kill themselves en masse.

Wrote every member of Congress warning them that this would happen.

And so the idea that this just sort of all happened in a vacuum, that it came out of the blue, that's not what happened.

But how do you convince people of that?

Plain devil's advocacy.

Yeah, sure.

When you know that he had people drink wine earlier and it was a test.

I mean, how do you

it's very difficult because it's the story is so unique and I mean there are certainly I mean some people might compare it to Waco or some people might compare it to the the hailbob comet.

I mean so things like this happen every once in a while but on this scale

And to say it's so crazy that even if you you warn people you start sounding like the crazy person.

Like if you start describing a person's crazy behavior Someone's going to look at you and say, well, maybe he's crazy, you know, because it's so wild and it's so out there.

And I think a lot of the people who are warning various members of Congress, they were getting those strange looks.

I spoke to a man.

I remember you're talking to the guy who warned about a caliphate.

So I understand now

you're all of a sudden appearing to be the crazy one.

People have looked at you crazy before.

Yeah.

Yes, they have.

Yeah.

So Charles Krauss, who is a Washington Post reporter who got shot on the airstrip outside of Jonestown,

he explained to me that when Tim Stone, who is this kid's father, came to him and said look you know jones is doing x y and z and that this is a concentration camp and he's crazy he's on drugs his initial thought was this guy is the madman

and obviously when he gets bullets in him from jones's henchman he realizes how wrong he was but i don't know i mean think about it this way if you are in a position of power in guyana and you are getting letters from harvey milk an elected official in san francisco if you're having the lieutenant governor of California come down to Jonestown and proclaim what a great place it is, if you have Willie Brown

and other leaders, Jane Fonda, a famous person, vouching for Jim Jones, who are you going to believe?

People that are respected, rich, powerful, wealthy, and in positions of responsibility?

Or these disgruntled people who are leaving.

Or these disgruntled people.

And oftentimes, those disgruntled people had signed blank confessions prior prior to leaving, saying that they had molested their kids or that they had stolen money from the church.

They would just fill in whatever they wanted to fill in.

And so People's Temple put out this message that these people were sexual perverts, that they were child molesters, that they were thieves, that they were involved in some sort of criminal enterprise.

They would do whatever it took to discredit them.

And of course, usually within those press releases, they would say things like, well, we've seen this before when people attacked Martin Luther King, or we've seen it before when they've attacked progressive elements.

They are just, they just hate us because we want equality.

And that was a very seductive message for people both in Guyana and the United States.

And I think it's part of the reason why the Carter administration not only didn't intervene,

but they kind of did intervene to help People's Temple, to sort of rat on some of the people that were coming to them with information about Jones and trying to get something done.

And that's something, if you read Jimmy Carter's autobiography, his memoirs, it doesn't say anything about People's Temple.

It's one of the biggest events that happens in his presidency.

It's the largest loss of civilian life in American history up until 9/11.

And it doesn't even rate mention in his autobiography.

I think this fits the pattern of people just getting amnesia rather conveniently when the history involves them because it involves his wife, it involves his running mate, and involves his own administration's inaction.

So, now take me to

when Jim is

down there

and

the last few days before things, you know, before the Kool-Aid is made.

Sure.

What's happening?

Leo Ryan, congressman from San Mateo County in California, a guy with a history of really taking his job seriously,

you know, became a substitute teacher in Watts after the riots in the 60s.

He got himself imprisoned in California to see what the conditions were like.

He really was over the top in his job.

Some people thought he was a grandstander, and some people thought this guy is awesome.

He just takes his job very seriously.

He had a friend whose son died under mysterious circumstances a day after leaving People's Temple.

And Jim Jones, I spoke to people in the temple.

They said he took credit for that.

Now, he was a liar, so we don't know if he killed that guy or not.

I mean, he might have just died.

This sparks his investigation.

He is met with letters and visits from members of concerned relatives, people that have family members down in Jonestown and believe that they're being held against their will.

And they convinced Leo Ryan to go down there.

Were they?

Leo Ryan leaves with about 15 people, and there are over 900 people there.

So only 15 people took the opportunity to leave with him.

And, you know, so it's a very interesting question, a very difficult question to answer.

I mean, I think they were brainwashed.

You could say the same thing about the suicides.

Were they suicides or were they murdered?

Well, they voluntarily did it, enthusiastically did it, but

there was a long road to that, including what we talked about earlier, the wine tests and the false siege mentality.

So Ryan goes down.

I spoke to Dan Quayle, and he tried to get Quayle to go down there because Quayle was from Indiana.

He was trying to get any member to go down there.

And Quayle being from Indiana, a lot of the temple members being from Indiana.

And what saves Quayle's life is that he has a daughter that's born right around Thanksgiving in 78.

And he says, I can't go with you, Leo.

And they were buddies.

Back when Democrats and Republicans used to be friends, he wanted to go with me, couldn't go with them.

So Ryan goes down there with an entourage that doesn't include any members of Congress.

It includes

many journalists, some people from the State Department, his aide, Jackie Speer, some members of the concerned relatives.

And initially, on the 17th of November, 1978, they're kept out.

But finally, they're allowed into people's temple.

At first, they're greeted as sort of like conquering heroes or something.

There's cheers and celebration.

And instead of singing the international, they're singing like the, I don't know if they sing a Star-Spangled Banner or God Bless America or something like that.

There is performance.

You can see it on YouTube.

They have a band that's covering Earth, Wind, and Fire that's really better than the original.

I mean, they're really talented people in Jonestown.

So this is festive mood.

There's an announcement that the Jonestown basketball team has defeated the Guyanese national team.

Turns out not to be true, like a lot of things in Jonestown.

But there was this big excitement within Jonestown.

And then

Vern Gosney, who's a guy I interviewed,

hands a note to Don Harris, a journalist, because he believes Don Harris, the NBC newsman, he's so stately looking.

He thinks that's the congressman.

And Harris drops it.

And then he has to pick it up and give it to him.

A young boy says, you know, he's handing him a note.

He's handing him a note.

snitches on him they have a snitch culture in there and then everything grows dark and

the note says help us get us out you know get us out of here we want to leave basically i mean there there's something that's specifically said on it but um

and so there's a few other people that decide they want to leave as well

The way it's been explained to me that Jim Jones was such a narcissist that he viewed his followers as sort of an extension of his own body.

And whenever anyone would leave, he felt like he was being ripped apart inside.

And

he was also heavily on drugs at the time.

And you can tell that from some of the video that you see, he's slurring his speech.

His eyes are sort of not

all just staring in the same direction, I guess.

Pupils dilated, that sort of thing.

And so

at that point, Vern Gosney realizes the danger that the congressman is in and says, you need to leave.

You need to get out of here now.

Your life is in danger.

And Leo Ryan, who was a brave guy, courageous and great, but didn't realize the danger he was in, he said, it's okay.

I have the protection of the congressional shield around us.

As though there's some invisible shield that's going to protect them.

And of course, up until that time, I think there was one congressman who was sort of killed in the line of duty.

And so this didn't happen.

He probably thought, this isn't going to happen.

What is he?

Back in the day,

you don't kill Americans, passports, and foreign countries, and you certainly wouldn't kill a congressman because all hell would rain down.

That's right.

But if you're planning on killing everybody, it doesn't matter.

Correct.

And I think at that point, Jones already knew what was going to happen.

They had enough dry runs of revolutionary suicide.

They had some.

Can you explain revolutionary suicide?

Revolutionary suicide was what Jones termed the mass suicide of the 900 and so people in Jonestown.

The name came from a book written by Huey Newton in 1973 called Revolutionary Suicide.

Now, the way Huey Newton lays out the case, the Black Panther leader,

is that

reactionary suicide is just suicide of surrender, that you just, the conditions of the world are so depressed you that you're gonna kill yourself.

Revolutionary suicide is you're sort of willing to kill yourself in order to make things better.

Now, it's idiotic to begin with, but it's a little bit different than how Jones understood it.

And so, Jones in Guyana pushes this idea of revolutionary suicide.

And on the death tape, he said,

you know, we're not committing suicide, we're protesting, committing suicide to protest the inhumane conditions of the world.

And at several points in that death tape, they talk about dying for socialism, dying for communism.

So one of the reasons those people did what they did is because they were committed communists, they were hardcore ideologues, and that they believed that what they were doing was an historic event, that it was a protest, that people would look at this and think these people all killed themselves because our world is so messed up.

Not because Jonestown was so messed up, because the world was so messed up.

Capitalism is so messed up that we need to do something about it.

We need to change the world.

We need to all become communists or whatever it was.

And that was how it was presented to the people in Jonestown.

So on November 8th.

So

long before the congressman comes.

Well, what I'm talking about there was all on the death tape.

But he had rehearsed this or he had

talked about it.

He He had talked about it and with smaller groups they'd rehearsed it.

They bought a pig and killed the pig with cyanide.

And so they were, this was going on for a while.

How to do it?

There's memos back and forth.

How are we going to do this?

And he had a group of women around him.

One of them he impregnated.

Didn't get the abortion, despite the church law.

And the other one was also his mistress at various times, two sisters.

Their sister, incidentally, has written a number of books, Sympathetic History History of Jonestown or People's Temple.

Yeah, you know, books with those kinds of titles.

And so there's a group of people trying to resuscitate People's Temple, separating them from Jim Jones.

And that's one of the groups that's led by this.

So these sisters were in on this.

There was a woman named Maria Katsaris, who was certainly in on it, and a guy named Larry Schacht, who was from Houston, whose parents were leaders of the local Communist Party in Houston.

And in the 60s, he goes on, I think, over 100 acid trips, starts starts doing meth

is just really out there on drugs Jones gets him

helps rescue him from drugs they put him into medical school and he becomes a doctor gets you know goes down to Mexico and you know

he is overseeing these experiments to see if cyanide is going to kill a pig ultimately the cyanide that they buy, it's less than a penny per person per dose.

They mix that with grape flavorade.

It's not Kool-Aid, but flavorade,

and valium.

And they thought that the valium was going to sort of numb people before it hit.

Cyanide is almost instantaneous, isn't it?

Yeah, pretty quick.

Pretty quick.

At least in its pain and ugliness.

So on the 18th of November, the congressman takes about 15 people with him.

And with him is also a plant, one of Jones's henchmen.

They check him for a gun.

They don't find one, but he does have a gun on him.

As they're waiting to leave on the the airstrip, just 15 people out of a thousand or so, uh,

a truck pulling a tractor comes up, and some gunmen come out, and they start shooting.

They murder Congressman Leo Ryan, they kill three of the journalists, and they kill one of the concerned relatives.

On the one of the planes, Vern Gosney, this man we spoke about, he told me the story how he's shot three times, basically in the abdomen, by this plant on the plane.

And the guy's gun jams.

So, as he has three bullets in him, he has to fight this guy to get off the plane.

Luckily, the gun jams,

they get off the plane.

But people are basically,

Charles Cross from the Washington Post, he told me he just feigned dead because they were going around giving the coup de grace to people.

And he just

hoped they don't shoot me in the back of the head.

That turned out the right course for him.

But for other people, they would just come and pop them.

One of the interesting things I found, just as an aside, the Red Brigade, the group that killed these people in the airstrip, one of the guys,

years later, we talked about this Lester consolving piece in 1972.

One of the pieces that got spiked, that didn't get air,

didn't get printed, talked about a four-year-old boy at a camp in Oregon that the temple went to who refused to eat the food, thought the food was disgusting, like a lot of four-year-old boys, right?

This is gross.

I'm not going to eat it.

So, Jones says, you will eat that food.

And he's like, I'm not eating this food.

So, he forces the kid to eat the food.

The kid vomits.

Jones forces him to eat the vomit.

He vomits again, naturally.

He forces him to eat the throw-up, and this goes on.

This four-year-old boy's father, you'd think he's going to run, he's going to fight this guy.

No, he stays.

He's one of the 12 or so people that killed Congressman Leo Ryan on the airstrip.

In other words, it goes back to that pattern that we're talking about, that

if you will do that, if you will stay with a guy after he'd force your four-year-old kid to eat his own throw-up.

You're going to stay with a guy through anything, and you'll do whatever that guy wants you to do.

And that's part of the way that Jim Jones got these people to do this, to kill these people on the airstrip.

And so once that happens, Jones announces to the people in People's Temple, look, the congressman's dead.

They're going to come in here and kill us all.

They're going to kill our children.

They're going to torture them.

People say on the people that start speaking, say, well,

they're going to take our children and not have them grow up to be socialists like the one and only Jim Jones.

They're going to grow up to be dummies.

We have to do this.

And so

there is

a woman by the name of Christine Miller, who's the sole adult on that death tape who objects to Jones.

She's very logical.

She's very courageous.

And she takes Jones on.

And at the same time, you had people rushing her, shouting at her, threatening her,

basically saying, you're going to kill the kids?

You're going to, what about Russia?

I mean, that's her sex with the choices in Jonestown, that it was either kill yourself or can we all emigrate to Russia, as you said we could earlier.

You know, I think there were probably a third or a fourth option, but that's what they said.

That's what the debate was at that point.

Ultimately, she sort of acquiesces.

Other than her, there's just kids who are objecting, you know, screaming and yelling, probably showing wisdom beyond their own years, right?

You think about over 900 people there.

There's only four African Americans who escape.

There are five people.

Charles Gary and Mark Lane, the two left-wing lawyers that Jones allows to leave.

Three other members he tells to take a lot of money to the Soviet Union, take all our money, give it to the Soviet Union.

So those five people leave.

There's a group of about a dozen people that left earlier, before all this starts, that day on the pretense of going for a picnic.

They just escaped.

But once the killings start, only four people avoid getting killed,

who Jones doesn't allow to leave.

Two rather street-smart African-Americans and two elderly African Americans, one who hid in the ditch and one who wakes up from not hearing the call to come down to the pavilion for everyone to kill themselves.

And when she sees what's happened, she said, I better go back to bed.

She thinks the better of it.

One of the guys who escapes, a former veteran, I believe, and a cousin of some sort of Huey Newton's,

just sort of had a brain, something happened.

He said, well, I don't have my passport.

I better go back into Jonestown and get it.

And so he escapes twice.

I mean, he should have just like that.

He should have just left.

But just four people.

And that's how effective Jim Jones was in his manipulation and in the murder of these people.

And the people in San Francisco, they had blood on their hands, but very quickly, you know, they, hey, our hands are clean.

The infinite suicide is a mere act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhuman main world.

So give me the aftermath.

The aftermath is that,

obviously, Moscone and Milk nine days later get assassinated, and that puts an exclamation point on a really crazy and chaotic decade in San Francisco.

Within San Francisco,

people run from Jim Jones, act like they never knew the guy.

There's an exception to that.

This guy, Carlton B.

Goodlett, gets on TV two days after People's Temple, after Jonestown happens.

He defends Jim Jones, says he's

see no wrong in this man.

He embodied all the principles of Christianity.

He starts attacking Leo Ryan, the concerned relatives, the journalists who expose Jones.

He really gets bitter and he is all in on Jim Jones, even after Jones kills over 900 people.

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.

Jim Jones is an apologist.

City Hall is one Carlton B.

Goodlett place in San Francisco.

And that's a pattern that you see.

Herb Kane, the journalist who was a booster of Jim Jones, he wins a Pulitzer in 1996.

They call him the voice in the conscience of the city.

And he was one of Jim Jones.

He was the guy legitimizing Jim Jones in the press.

You think about Willie Brown.

There's like a bridge named after him now.

This building's named after Muscone.

They have part of the airport named after Harvey Milk, who was one of the biggest apologists for Jim Jones.

So the people who

went over the top for Jim Jones, I mean, Jane Fonda wins another Oscar.

She wins a Grammy Award, I think, or an Emmy or something for her exercise.

She wins millions of dollars for exercise tapes.

She wins all sorts of awards.

And no one brings up, hey, what about that time you were buddies with Jim Jones?

So all of these people evade responsibility.

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.

They were buried out in Oakland.

And, you know, there's a famous quote, Gertrude Stein, there's no there there, she says about Oakland or hometown.

There was no there there for People's Temple either.

So why those bodies and that memorial is in Oakland, I don't know.

And by the way,

the memorial says for the victims of Jonestown, and one of the victims listed, Jim Jones,

why do they do that?

That's a big source of controversy, a big, you know, a real raw spot for a lot of the victims.

Leo Ryan, he's assassinated.

One of his daughters joins a cult up in Oregon, the Rajneeshi, you know, the cult, they try to poison people.

And the Washington Post asks her,

you know, would you kill for this guy?

And she says, well, I don't think he'd ask me to kill for him.

But if he did, I'd like to think that I would.

This is the daughter of the man who tried to save people from a cult.

She joins joins a cult.

Worse than that, you know, he's a Democrat.

His district goes Republican in the next election.

San Francisco does nothing to honor this guy.

He has like a post office in San Mateo and a few other buildings named in his honor.

But San Francisco acts like he doesn't exist.

And they honor,

you know,

they honor the Burton brothers.

They honor

Willie Brown.

They honor Harvey Milk, George Moscone.

All these people who aided and abetted Jim Jones are given places of honor in the city.

But Leo Ryan,

and the victims of People's Temple, they're persona non grata.

Lesson we're supposed to learn from this.

What are we supposed to take from this?

I think that the ends do not justify the means.

That

think for yourself.

Don't outsource your mind to a guru, to a leader,

to anyone.

I think there are a lot of lessons,

you know, specifically,

and say, question authority.

There is an, you know, that you have an authority, that you accept an authority over you.

Jim Jones didn't accept an authority over him, and that's why he was so egocentric.

That's why he was so narcissistic.

It's hard to be humble when you think you yourself are God.

And if someone, I think one of the marks of cults, if the leader of the group is pretending to be God, you know, you might be in a cult.

If the leader of the group says, well, you can't visit your family, you might be an occult.

I think there are a lot of lessons.

In Jonestown, in the pavilion, ironically enough, it said, you know, it had the old Santiana quote, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

It's very difficult to think of Jonestown repeating in such a grand scale.

I mean, nothing like this really has ever happened in human history.

There are on a smaller scale, or you can go back to ancient history.

But this is such a unique event.

But having said that, you know, the idea of politicians not being held into account,

I mean, something I get into the book, the same thing happened with the earthquake in San Francisco, where you had

the fire chief saying, we need to get new water

pipes and we need to do all this kind of thing.

And they're all corrupt and giving the money to their friends rather than doing what was good for the city.

And no one goes to jail for that.

And the mayor at the time, this guy Schmitz, later gets re-elected to the Board of Supervisors.

And you have to look at what happened with Jonestown in a similar light.

Art Agnos, who is boasting about referring destitute youth to People's Temple, he becomes mayor of San Francisco.

Willie Brown becomes mayor of San Francisco.

Dianne Feinstein becomes mayor of San Francisco, who gave a certificate of honor to Jim Jones.

So people were rewarded.

And

this didn't plague their careers.

And because of ideology?

I think because of ideology, because this is a one-party town, and one of the reasons why Jim Jones was able to get away with so much was because there was no opposition.

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 that would have prevented him from going to Guyana in the first place.

They just decided to give him a free pass.

And

Jonestown, the carnage is a crime.

Obviously, it comes to fruition in Jonestown, but this is something that starts in California.

You know, the seeds

are planted in California.

and

a lot of people ran from it, but it's very difficult.

And a lot of these people are power players.

And, you know, Jerry Brown is still the governor of California.

Why does someone ask him, why did you speak at the People's Temple?

Diane Feinstein is still a senator from the state of California.

Willie Brown is still, you know, as amiable and likable as he can be.

You know, he was neck deep involved in People's Temple.

And none of these people have been called into account for the past.

The name of the book is Cult City, Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco.

Author Daniel Flynn.

And thanks.