Historically High - Jim Jones and The Peoples Temple

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Jim Jones....Jim Jones....what can we say about Jim Jones? Early on young James found he had two things going for him, his newfound love of religion and his ability to memorize sermons and scripture. What started out as lil Jimmy preaching to the other kids in town, took a slight detour in dealing monkeys (not a euphemism) before he finally performed enough bullshit faith healing to start a church of his own. It didn't take long for Jim to find his own brand of religion which if we're being honest here, sounded pretty damn good in the beginning. But then the doomsday dreams started happening, combined with the power that came with being worshipped, and add in some drugs cause why not. Jim did what any sane person would do, he made himself the Messiah, kidnapped a kid, and took a bunch of his followers to the jungles of Guyana, normal shit. Well I wish I could say that was the end of it, but it gets tragic when Jones' god complex results in the death of over 900 people in a mass cult suicide. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Imagine if you will, a story of a man. A man so utterly terrifying. It must be something out of the Twilight Zone. Dun, dun, dun. Today we are discussing for a special Halloween edition of Historically High. A man so heinous that, you know, you'd think he was made up. Or he's just from Indiana. I've never met somebody from Indiana, so I can't.

really judge everybody off of that. Larry Bird, pretty cool. But probably opposite ends of the spectrum as far as... So Indiana's one for two? Yeah, according to you okay. Indianapolis 500 is pretty cool. I think there's some cool stuff in Indianapolis. A future episode, they're probably not going to be pumped about when we do the Ku Klux Klan, but... Yeah, there you go.

So Jim, James Warren Jones was best known as a... initially a religious leader, a preacher, pastor, what have you, depending on I guess what church he was actually leading at the time, because there are so fucking many of them, but that essentially kind of pivoted over into the cult game and established one of, if not the most well-known cult, would you say? Just basically by the ending. I think the ending is what makes the cult so famous.

I'm not really sure if there was, I mean, it only got to 3,000 people. So I'm not sure if there was the popularity as far as while the cult was happening as far as what the outcome led to. Yeah, it's not known essentially for what it did during its active stages. It's known by how it all ended. No, if we did, if we really take a look at this and take a look at who Jim Jones knew and who Jim Jones was friends with, we got a lot of questions to ask about our government. Oh, yeah, definitely.

But you have to also imagine if this thing just happened to, have continued itself down in the jungle where it ended, we probably wouldn't hear, I mean, it probably would have ended one way or another in a, you know, an ugly fashion, but I don't think it would be as well known as it is today, which kind of makes me think, is, is Jonestown and Jim Jones simply well known to us, or maybe not well known before this, but at least known to us because we're from the United States and that's where it originated, or is it just that this was something that happened that made national headlines because of

how fucking despicable the act was. I would probably say it made, well, maybe not back then, but if this happened now today for any country, this would make worldwide news and we wouldn't be able to... I'm just wondering if other countries had their own version of Jim Jones and Jonestown.

Not same version, but mass suicides. This isn't a new thing. We've talked about them in war episodes. There's plenty of other cult episodes that will do that these happen in. I think the big thing about Jim Jones is we talk about Jim Jones so much. We don't really talk about the people's temple. Like if you asked a thousand people, I would bet 250 of them would know what Jim Jones Colt was called. Yeah. Well, they would just say wasn't it called Jonestown?

Uh-huh. Because that's what, you know, is the most memorable portion of it. But no, this begins way, way, way before Jones Town. This thing is a slow burn. This guy essentially led a life of manipulation and I guess just psychological mind fuckery on anybody that kind of came into his orbit and stayed long enough to listen to what he had to say. He's a weird kid too.

Oh yeah, I mean, you probably aren't going to be a well-adjusted kid and then grow up to want to do this. I think there's probably a pattern. Not typically. Yeah, exactly. Well, before we get into it, just remember guys, rate, reviews, subscribe, find us wherever you find your podcast. Wherever you do listen, please give us those five-star reviews.

We forgot our introduction again. That's Chris. I'm Adam. Bad puns or name games that we usually do. We will be your stewards into the world of Jim Jones today. Yeah. So without further ado, let's drink some Kool-Aid. Flavorade, man.

Sorry, I did not mean to besperch the good name of Kool-Aid and the Kool-Aid man. Yes, sorry, flavorade. The common saying is, is don't drink the Kool-Aid, but it should be, don't drink the flavorade. It's more British propaganda, because Flavorade is what they had over there. They tried to hang everything on us. I was going to say, you got to imagine Flavorade dodged a fucking bullet. Yeah.

They had to have been like, they used our shit to flavor the poison. They're like, well, yeah. Please say grape drink. Hold on a second. People are saying it was Kool-Aid. Oh, thank God. We can continue to be in business. That's what we'll forever be remembered by is just Kool-Aid.

But I don't think James had Jimmy. We're going to use every version. Jimmy, Jimothy. Yeah. The guy probably didn't have a whole lot of Kool-Aid or Flavorade back when he was a kid. He was born at a very interesting time. And he wasn't necessarily even an old man when he died. I struggle to think about what an elderly Jim Jones would have looked like.

Because 1931, the year he was born, while super long in the grand scheme of things, I mean, there's people still alive that were born in 1931. Yeah. There's a chance, probably not with the way that he lived his lifestyle and the things that we get into that he did. But there's a chance that there could have been like elderly Jim Jones walking around and what I hope would be like a prison senior living facility. And it's tough to really envision how Jim Jones couldn't have died to cement his legacy. Like, I don't think you would be that big of a deal if he was just wasting away in a prison somewhere still.

Well, you know, I was going to say Charles Manson is probably a good example of that. But he is, actually. That's a good point until he died. Yeah. Because he still got a news headline here or there. when he attracted some wild 28-year-old that wanted to marry him. He did manage to kind of stay relevant in the zeitgeist, I guess. Also, too, just any of the times that he would get like a parole hearing or something like that,

it was always in the news. Yeah, it was going to make news what he said at the parole hearing. So maybe that's what it would look like. But at the same time, they were working. It's almost like Jim Jones was working the streets of California prior to Manson doing it. Like, Manson was just a redo. There was a lot of crossover. I'm not sure what the timing was, but I kept thinking, you know, and we're kind of

getting our head of ourselves, we'll take you back. But during their time spent like San Francisco, I was trying to remember if that was concurrent with Zodiac or if that was concurrent around the same time as like Haydashbury or anything like that. But there's a lot of, and here's the thing. When it comes to these cults that we're talking about, weirdly enough, they do have this common denominator, which is they tend to actually kind of establish themselves

in California at a certain point. Who did we do the one, the satanic cult? What was that one? Anton LeVay. He was in California. True. Yeah. Manson was in California. They really get their footing. The people's temple

really get their footing in California. Yeah. There's something about that. What I'm getting at is there's something about that free love movement. Oh, hell yeah. That just made that area. of just hunting ground for these people that were trying to establish these religions, and I use that in quotes. But going back, we get James Warren Jones, born May 13, 1931 in Indiana.

You think it was a slap in his face that he wasn't James Jones Jr. Or Jimmy Jones Jr. or Jim Jones Jr., because his father had a different middle name. because isn't that how you get the juniors you have to have first, middle, and last the exact same? No, I think you can have a middle name that's different. And you can still be Jimmy Jr. I'm pretty sure. He was never referred to as Jimmy Jr.

No. His dad was a very interesting man, though. Bad guy. But during World War I, he was involved in a German gas attack that left his lungs and his eyes and his immune system just shocked, just frazzles.

Yeah, he would try to work kind of these jobs here and there, but essentially because of the lung damage that he sustained, he didn't have any endurance. He couldn't really do any type of work. And so... That he was addicted to gambling. That too. But like also so many other people that were coming home from World War II that had been scarred by that experience, it's probably not all that common for that generation. And that's probably something that doesn't get talked about too much is... Oh, sorry, World War I.

Which you're still getting people coming back that are just fucking rocked by what they saw over there. artillery barrages, all that kind of stuff. And if you're caught in a chemical attack, that's going to be, that's going to fuck with your head quite a bit. So he ends up turning to alcohol, gambling, and that leaves it to,

um, Lynette or Linetta, his mother to basically kind of act as the, the breadwinner, the one keeping the house together. Linetta was, I usually don't use this word in not a great way. Uh,

she was a pretty crass woman. She Not all bad as she was educated She went out went to college But she was just kind of a rough and tumble gal She seemed like a bar fight Wasn't something that was foreign to her She seemed like she worked down the factory

Yeah exactly she's a factory worker lady She's constantly out of the house She's trying to make money for the family James is either struggling to be a janitor somewhere or he's at the horse track or he's at the poker table spending what meager amount of money that he could have brought into the family

and luckily they did say that he was on some sort of military pay for his disability but at the same time it wasn't enough to cover anything. World War I, that had to have been dog shit and they didn't know how much it would cost. They'd never been in a situation where the United States knew how to support a veteran coming back like what it would take

if someone couldn't go back to work. Well, yeah, he's born in 19, So right there, Great Depression. The Great Depression in Central Indiana sounds like it would be a tough time. Yeah. It just, there's no way that it would have been a good environment for him to be in. But Linetta not being the mother of the year said that her son, Jim, couldn't be in the house if she wasn't home. Not even a latchkey kid.

No. Not alone in the house. Uh-uh. So once Jim got done with school, he would just kind of prowl around the neighborhood. And there's so many different little interesting stories about some things that he would do. He was really into like collecting feral animals. And there was a story that just can't be true about him taking a liking to a pack of feral dogs. I'm one of you now.

Yeah, yeah. But like. Preach into these feral dogs. They said that Linetta would be scared to try to discipline Jimmy. whenever the pack of feral dogs is red. Like, come on, that can't be real. But it's his finger and this dog just come out of the word work. Exactly.

Like, there's no way. At the same time, though, he did like trapping animals. He did like keeping animals in their backyard. It does some pretty bad things to animals coming up, which is kind of a, I don't know, a marker to a cult leader or a crazy person. But he didn't really have much. He had school. He was the odd kid, just based upon what we said.

So friends were probably not easy to come by. He was, you know, you can say he was neglected by his parents, and that's probably an understatement. But because of that early on, he was almost kind of cared for by the community. He would, you know, kind of be taken in for meals and things like that by, you know, women in the community. And this ends up leading to essentially his introduction into religion when he meets this lady, Myrtle Kennedy. Bad lady. I don't care if she was a saint. She released some badness under the world.

Oh yeah, she unleashed the beast. So you get Myrtle Kennedy, who was the wife of a pastor or preacher, and he's over there one day, they're talking. She's giving him like a slice of apple pie or something like that. And he notices like a Bible. Of course, there's going to be a Bible's in a pastor's house. And he's like, hey, what's that? And she's like, you don't know what the Bible is.

And so she proceeds to kind of go through and read him some stories and kind of tell him the gist of it. And this just captivates him. And not only does it captivate him, but he discovers that he has this both photographic memory and is able to also retain like these elaborate like Bible verses and speeches and things like that to where he can then almost recite them back verbatim or verbatim. He's got just a solid memory, a memory for this stuff. And while that's a really great thing to have when you mix it with somebody who doesn't

really have a stable home life and is looking for attention or love or adoration, that's when things can kind of get a little tricky. And I think that that's really just how to sum up his entire life. But his childhood just seemed like it was about trying to find acceptance and never being introduced to church until this time. As much as it is corny to say, he was looking for a sense of community. Yeah. He didn't have parents. So he was looking at certain people as parental figures and just kind of looking for some direction. So he starts attending this local Nazarene church author recommendation of Myrtle

and is just mesmerized by, you know, the preacher up there that has everybody's attention, what he's saying, the way he's stirring people's emotions. And one church, he determines one church isn't good enough. So he ends up actually going around to several churches, several days a week, in this town,

also actually baptized under several of these churches as well. So he is just absorbing this and he's finally, I guess, found something that interests him. And not only is he there watching this, but after he leaves, he's starting to implement, you know, preaching these sermons, these kids at school and everything like that, he's able to, being kind of the odd kid, he's still hanging out with a group of friends or what he considers friends. And he has a gift with words that he's able to basically, just captivate these younger boys who aren't on the same level he is and preach to them about society and the Bible and how they're sinning and all this kind of stuff. Pretty fucking weird shit for a kid.

Yeah, I don't know how captivating he would have been to those kids just because there's no way that some kid preaching and being weird would ever, I think, be something that would draw kids to him. Unless you're going to be preaching up there, playing with Transformers. Like, I don't know if you're going to be keeping their interest too much. Yeah, if you got a nudie mag, something like that to draw attention. But part of the reason why he felt like he could implement this was almost like, because

he was at these churches, he would memorize these different scriptures. He would repeat them to the adults. And the adults, like, wow, that's, you have a gift, son. You are very important. This is a very good thing that you can do. As adults are one to do with children to try to kind of nurture their. especially like within a church community being like, oh yeah, like that's, that's a gift. You should keep doing that.

Yeah. So you take it to the schoolyard because you received adoration and praise from adults. Share your gift. And then the kids are probably not super impressed. And he just kept getting weirder. There were situations where he would like go find roadkill and he would bring them to wherever the kids were playing and do like mock funerals for just dead animals that he would find. there were stories that he actually killed a cat.

You're telling me a possum doesn't deserve proper burial rights? I don't know what you say. You didn't know the guy. And chances are he wasn't very smart if he was crossing road and got hit. So there's not a lot of praise that you can give him. Just certain odd things as far as he would somehow, I don't know, again, this is probably not true. But I'm sure some of these are stories from friends or kids that grew up in that same town. he locked a couple of his friends

inside of caskets and was talking about how the angel of death kind of implored him to do this to teach them a lesson about how life can be taken in an instant and then he'd let them out and just I don't know everything that he did was odd.

He would act as their savior when he also took them out too which is going to be this is the early establishment of a move that he's going to use pretty much for his entire life. Yeah. This is playing out. in almost every situation,

which leads into him finally kind of hitting his people. There's an apostolic, or, yeah, a, Jesus, I can't even say the words. Apostolic. It's apostle is what you're trying to say, but it's apostolic, maybe. Apostolic, there you go. Yeah, a Pentecostal church that's on the outskirts of town. We're talking about, he was born in Crete, they moved to, Lynn, Indiana.

Thinking about a church that they want to keep on the outside of town in Lynn, Indiana, got to be a pretty wild church. Pentecostal folks, I'm sure there's a lot of nice people. You guys kind of get a bad rap because there are branches of Pentecostal churches that dance with snakes and do some pretty weird ritual stuff. At the same time, I think a pretty big part of being a Pentecostal church is people being able to speak up and praise the Lord and speak in tongues and that's a really interactive

type sermon, I think. I'm so lost between the delineations for all these different, it's all Christianity, but as we discussed this during the episode, it's sounded weird to me because I come from a background where I worked kind of like adjacent to real estate. And if you're a real estate brokerage,

you're the brokerage that's in charge of a whole bunch of agents. Yeah. You have to have your broker's license. You have a bunch of agents working under you. That's the same structure that a lot of these churches or these denominations are just utilizing. You can basically just create a church and then you just have to go around and find like a patron church or a church that's willing to basically kind of like sponsor you to be like, yeah, they're under our umbrella. They're a legitimate church.

And there are so many these different ones that get brought up during this. Like he doesn't find just a home and then decide to just focus on that. He basically is just trying to get his foot in the door. And so this Pentecoster church that has a little bit more of an open-mindedness, I guess, well, they're, you know, some from dance with snakes and all that shit. That's going to be something to where he's going to start learning and adding like skills and picking and choosing things out of all these religions that he's basically just going to turn into an amalgamation of what his own is going to be.

He was on a religious buffet. that he just kind of took different things that he wanted to. And I mean, starting out, Nazarene Church, I don't know what you would, I don't know what the hell Nazarene is. That's what I'm saying. You got Pentecostal, you got Nazarene, you got Methodist, you got, there are so many of these things that it's just like. Lutheran, Calvinist. He doesn't mess with those too much. But yeah, they're just branches under Christianity, I guess.

Yeah. And everybody kind of does their own different things. and there are like, there's a Pentecostal league, I'm sure there's, like, Lutheran leagues, there's Methodist leagues, all those kind of people that hang out together. But at the same time, they're all kind of under this Christian, yeah, like you'd say an umbrella. How does that even work? What is the justification for that, that everyone just has their own way of interpreting it? Because everyone calls bullshit on that when they're like, well, no, that's so you have all of these

religions or these churches under the umbrella of Christianity, but they're each doing something a little bit different. but they're all claiming to be doing it the right way. Well, and I think that's sort of where it becomes tough because on the outside, all the churches want to seem like they're accepting of everybody else. But on the inside, they look at it as, well... It's bright on the inside is what you're saying.

There's a lot of white on the inside. I think it's more on the outside. They're accepting they love everybody on the inside. They're like, well, those people have more members. they're making more money than we are. We probably need to fix that. And at the same time, they'll find little differences to do just a slight variation of something. Or it's an offshoot.

It all comes from Christianity, but everybody kind of finds their own niche to try to keep people's attention so they can get their money. The structure of religion seems capitalist, right? Very much so. Okay. Very much so. Which I don't think Jesus was a capitalist if he was alive. I mean, it just doesn't strike me that he would be. Speaking of other influential figures in this guy's life,

so kind of during his early years, he does study people like Hitler, Stalin, Karl Marx, not just those guys, but he also studies the religious teachings of Gandhi. So he's drawn to powerful figures. They don't necessarily have to be religious figures, but he's picking and choosing these things. He really admired Hitler's oratory skills

and his ability to essentially capture an audience, probably not so much with Stalin, but probably looked at Stalin, and was like, because the idea of communism is going to play into, you know, it's part in this pretty largely. He's looking at Stalin for that. Karl Marx the same. Then he's also looking at Gandhi, somebody that's revered by so many people. So he's trying to find the qualities that Gandhi exhibits.

And again, he's making this just little fucking hodgepodge of picking up these little skills that he's going to utilize later. Not 100% sure, but I think he has some, unsavory skills that Gandhi had as well. Probably. I think it talked about a little bit less. But regardless, he's finding, was Hitler a great order? I'm not going to say no.

The guy was able to speak clearly enough in a language that I don't understand that a lot of people believed in him. It's one of the answers that you can give people and they're like, how did Hitler get into power? He was great at fucking speaking to people. He knew exactly what to say and when people can hear exactly what they want, they're going to agree with you. Did Stalin have absolute power

in the Communist Party over Russia and the Soviet Union? Absolutely. Yeah. So just because generally what they did, bad people can do impressive things and good things. And that's sort of what it comes down to. He was more looking at them for the bad things

and wanting to maybe use those, being jealous of those traits that while looking, I have a tough time dancing around this. are a very tough thing for me because I find so much impressive shit about them just because the game

that happens inside the mind is so interesting as far as just the way that they do stuff. I don't want to praise any of these people. Jim Jones, undoubtedly a bad guy. Never a question, not a good guy in my mind in any point in time. But there are things that it's like

you figured out how to do this and that's pretty impressive. You're in a safe place. Okay. I just... You can be... This is a whole thing. between separating the art from the artist. And I'm not calling Jim Jones an artist by any means. But looking at some of the stuff that he espouses early on that is able to gain him these followers with a,

not an insanely extremist message. It's a very simple message. The guy knows exactly what points to hit, which is why he is so successful as a cult leader. So in any type of field, Colts, presidents, politicians, fucking farmers, athletes, you can be in that elite tier.

Jim Jones, as far as a cult leader, is in that top tier. He's a fucking horrible, reprehensible person. Yes. But at the same time, you have to look at it, and you can't just dismiss it as saying,

this guy was crazy. He was crazy, but there was a certain type of, genius hiding behind the fucking madness. And that's how he was able to operate and get people, you know, under, under its wings. Well, there's so many cult leaders and so many people in life that are, that have a mental illness as far as like a sociopath or a psychopath or anything like that. But to study other sociopaths and psychopaths and megalomaniacs and figure out what they did,

it's almost sort of brilliant because you know where to look for. Like you and I is kids looking at athletes and seeing how they train and being like, I want to be like that one day. That's a good thing. This was a very bad thing, but he knew where to go to find it. He also was doing this research, which I don't know why it's just clicking now, but he's also building a roadmap of what not to do. Yeah. Because he's reading about guys that failed. And at the same time, he's learning that, well, I can't take it here because that's what eventually led to this person's downfall.

he had this statement about being always alone and it was in reference to essentially his mother and his father the statement is a little bit more in depth but the message essentially is that he's always been alone whether it be not having a lot of close friends or anything like that he develops this aversion to racism due to his father being either associated or a member of the clan and this essentially makes him feel like he has this type of because of the way that he was brought up, the hardships that he went through early in his life and is probably still experiencing that that point, he kind of felt that he shared a kinship with black people because of their struggle as well. It wasn't essentially a shared

struggle in the sense of struggling through the same types of things, but he essentially looked at these people as being outsiders and downtrodden and overlooked. And he's like, that's how I feel like I've been in my entire life. And he instantly felt like he kind of had a kinship with these people. And so he develops this strong, you know, aversion to racism, so much so in the fact that he tried to bring home one of his black friends. His father said he wasn't allowed in the house. And at that point, he said after that he didn't speak to his father for years. It's justified. The crazy guy is justified in his kind of future. beginnings. As odd as he was as a kid, his moral compass wasn't always the worst.

That's what I'm saying is if you, you hear about Jonestown, you see what the result was, but if you were to get in this, it's the frog boiling in the pot of water. You can't drop a frog in a boiling pot of water or hop out. If you bring it to temperature, it'll just simply boil alive. The message that he has when he builds the people's temple in its infancy is really admirable. And that's how he was able to draw people to him. And had he just stopped there, it could have been very successful. And I was talking to my wife about this. And I'm like, this sounds weird, but there's certain admirable things about what this guy was trying to do and what the message said. But it's hard to tell if that message was a smokescreen for what he was eventually going to try to do.

Or if he found at some point during that journey, he found a road to turn off and he took that path. So it's really hard to separate what the early intentions were. but the message itself in itself is very admirable. Well, it was so much his message, but the way that he kind of learns over time to hone that message in a way it makes it feel more like there was a means to an end in doing it that way.

Yeah. Yeah. And just along those lines, I mean, he, as he continued to grow up, like Chris said, he loved to read. He loved dictators. He love communists. He love bad people.

There was a point in time when he talks to his future wife that he just espouses his love of Mao Zedong. Just some odd stuff along those lines. But as a kid, he, like Chris said, again, he really wanted that family aspect of religion. And he knew if he could hop around from church to church, he would get those family aspects and also, or the family aspect from just a bunch of different people. In high school, he ends up spending that in Richmond because, his mother and father had gotten a divorce finally in 1945. It didn't take long for James Sr. to pass away after that. But part of the deal was when they ran out of money and didn't have a place to live,

James family was able to buy like a shack for them to stay in. Yeah, like no plumbing or anything like that and no electricity. Once the family broke up, all of that financial support just went out the door. Um, so while he was spending his days walking around his high school campus with a Bible in his hand, and I'm sure those kids were super cool because they were just, they throughout history. Yeah, kids are extremely nice to people that are a little bit weird. Yeah. Um, he also took a job as an orderly at a place called Reed Hospital. Um, his kind of obsession with religion and death and maybe just the way that. he acted put off a lot of his bosses and kind of the management structure. But it sounds like he was actually fairly good at the patients.

Yeah. It sounded like they liked him a lot. His bedside manner was always very nice. Being an orderly at a hospital in the 40s sounds like it would just be one of the worst things on the planet. Oh, yeah, you're just changing bedpans and shit. And everybody's got gangrene and you're disposing of bodies that probably didn't pass in a very good way. Yeah. but along that time

a nurse named Marcelline was working the same night that he was working at the hospital she was having trouble getting out a dead body she called for an orderly maybe it was a yeah maybe it was a dead body and again this is their story

once Jimmy showed up to help her out she was so impressed by the respect that he showed the dead body in moving it in treating it in a way to where she felt that he really genuinely cared for people. She fell in love. I would assume that would probably be the first

meat, cute story with a dead body involved. As I looked across the cadapper. I saw his eyes twinkling. His skin against the gray of the corpse shown into the fluorescent lighting. I watched him hold the mirror up in front of the nose, no fog hit. And he said, yep, that guy's cold.

Yeah, so she is smitten. and follows him to attend University of Indiana Bloomington while he's going to school she ends up working at a hospital there near campus or somewhere in that city She was four years older too Four or five years older yeah

I know damn I know right Not sure how she If she was a looker or not No no Probably wasn't getting a lot of attention But during And his stay in college was pretty short-lived

But during college You know That's when he actually begins to kind of openly talk about the merits of communism and kind of making his position known about, you know, what his like political leanings would be. So much so that being kind of in a like a situation where he's in a, I guess, interfaith marriage where they're kind of different because she's a Methodist. He's a, I don't know what the fuck he is classified at this point. He's a conglomerate. Yeah, but hey, it works.

Um, yeah, they get married June 12th, 1949. And it causes kind of some arguments between them, because the Methodist church was still segregated at that point. They didn't allow black people to be in the church. And so he had a huge, you know, a huge beef with this. And being at her position as a Methodist, she's probably like, yeah, like I get your gripe. I don't think it's right that the church does this. But. I'm not in charge. So he's trying to basically convince her even up to this point about trying to kind of change her religion and like what she believes in.

And it comes to a head essentially one night at dinner. They're over at her family's house. They're eating. Her mother says something about how, you know, she's glad there's no black people allowed in church. They shouldn't be allowed to attend the same church. And Jimmy and her end up getting into this heated argument. He's packing his shit.

He's walking out the front door. she comes out to try to calm him down. And he basically gives you the ultimatum of like, your mother is racist. I'm not dealing with this shit. You're either staying here or you're leaving with me. And she's like, let me go get my suitcase.

So she ends up leaving with him. And at that point, you know, we're sitting up to early 1952. He basically decides that the route he was going in college, which was to be a lawyer, I believe, initially. I thought it was to be a doctor.

It might have been a doctor. One of those things it takes eight years. Yeah. Yeah. So... For him, probably 10. Yeah. So he ends up deciding, you know what?

I already kind of have this gift. I've been told by these individuals within all these churches my entire life that I have a gift that can be used in the church. So I'm going to be a preacher. So early 1952, he becomes a student pastor at a Methodist church, which you're probably saying to yourself, he just has a huge problem just a couple years ago with the Methodist Church. There are different factions of the Methodist Church.

some that allow more openness within them. And so he's able to find one that gets a little bit closer to more of his moral center and ends up serving as a student pastor. Well, yeah, there was a social shift within the Methodist Church to where they started to look at these social issues that he held so dear. And once he found something, somebody that agreed with him instead of him agreeing with them, that was when he finally was able to open up. more to the church. There's so many

varying stories. I read multiple different things and listened to multiple different things where they said that right around at this point in time after him and Marcellina got married, he had talked about how he just didn't believe in God anymore, just about how he was

completely put off by religion. But it doesn't really make a lot of sense if that was true because he goes through a lot to be a preacher and everything. So if that is true and he was Jesus, why do I

not remember what they're called? You don't believe in God? Atheist. Atheist. For him to be atheist. What's agnostic then? I think it's like you believe there's a God, but you don't know who he is. Or you're spiritual or something. Something like that, yeah.

So, perfect example. I don't know if he was just more spiritual than religious at this point in time, but it seems like to dive whole hog into being a pastor. you're probably going to believe in something still. I think he also realized at this point because he's getting more into the study of communism. He's starting to merge those beliefs with his religious beliefs and seeing similarities between like commune, communal type living, everybody trying to be equal within the social and, you know,

economical hierarchy. He's looking at the Bible. He's looking at these, you know, communist directives or whatever. you want to call him. And he's like, there's a lot of similarities aside, you know, with Jesus's teachings about treating everybody, you know, kindly as your equal, all that kind of shit. And it starts to kind of dawn on him that I don't know if it's more him steering away from God per se at this point, but he's got this idea in his head that no one has it right as far as religion is going. Everyone is just kind of getting the message wrong about what God's teaching should be.

And they should be this form of like socialist religion, religious ideology or something like that. Well, yeah, if you look at Old Testament, inclusion isn't really a big tenor of the Old Testament in the Bible. And so I'm sure some of that was off-putting. But in true Jimmy fashion, while being a student pastor at the Somerset, Southside Methodist Church, he's also still speaking at Pentecostal meetings. So he's double-dipping. He's going over at the Methodist Church. He has a voice inflection that you can always tell when he's on.

Because there were different interviews where he would be talking, like we'll talk about their adoptions, but he did interviews for the adoptions where he's just very monotone and he's very quiet and kind of me. And then he gets up on stage. And he starts to talk to the people. Yeah, when he jumps on that Pentecostal stage, he's here to save their souls.

and so much so that while he's making this, and he ends up making more of a permanent move over from Methodist to Pentecostal, serving under what's called the banner of like the Assembly of God, something like that. I remember that in my hometown, I had an Assembly of God church. I thought churches all just had different names,

but they all did the exact same shit. No idea that depending on the name of the church that they had different, like, teachings, and they focused on different shit. I just thought it was like, you know, you go get your auto parts from either Napa Shucks or fucking pet boys or whatever it is, but they're all selling fucking the same auto parts.

No, it doesn't work like that, apparently. So he starts moving over to the Pentecostal Church and doing these healing revivals. And if you've ever seen in a movie, somebody, you know, putting the hand on the head and the person's convulsing and shaking and they're taking away illnesses and everything,

that right there are healing revivals. People that are up there, you know, removing tumors and that kind of shit, making the blind see again making the crippled walk that's the kind of shit that he starts getting into because he sees this audience that's responding to these things and looking at him in this leadership role and he has control and so he's just going along with this stuff well to get to that point it's so incredible how he jumps into these revivals because he just used exactly what he had learned before so he

He shows up to this big, gigantic, it was called the Pentecostal ladder rain convention. The latter rain movement inside the Pentecostal church was kind of again another offshoot, another flavor of the week, if you will, that would go off into its own area. And at this convention that he's at, he is trying to figure out what he needs to do to get on stage, to preach a sermon to really bring the house down. So as he's walking through, he's using his mind and he's looking at name tags. He's reading things. He's hearing different conversations and he's committing these things to memory.

So finally, once a guy gets off stage, he goes and says, hey, I was called by the Lord to be here. I need to get on stage and I need to preach. I feel the Holy Spirit inside me and it needs to get out. So he jumps on stage. He starts to kind of go into a sermon, working his way through. you know, is his A material. And then he decides that it's time to switch on the crowdwork. And these revival type situations,

you almost want to believe in. It's something that he adopts into the people's temple kind of at the baseline level, but that you have gifts because you're a manifestation of God on earth. And so he's up there calling out names for people in the audience and they're standing up. And he's asking them questions about things. that he heard them talking to somebody else about in the crowd. And there's no way that he could have put plants in this convention, right? There's just no way that any of this could happen.

Well, he ends up... Are you saying that sarcastically? Um, I would say at that point, probably not, but it sort of leads to what he does in the future. I think he was just probably, it was a parlor trick at that point. He heard a name, or he saw a name, he heard a story and he was bringing them up on stage to, uh, just exploit that. So that thing that you were talking about, I think they called that movement, the manifested sons of God.

Is this the one where what's the name of the pastor that he takes like the flashy? William Branham, William Branum, he takes the flashy evangelist stuff from. We'll talk about him. Father Divine is kind of... Father Divine is the one I'm talking about. He was also, I think, part of that manifestation, sons of God, where their belief was that God, I'm going to make a D&D reference. So I think this is nerdy as shit.

So basically these guys are warlocks and God is their patron. They get their powers through God. They act as essentially a conduit of these gifts that they were then provided. It's like when in remember when we were talking about the Vikings in like Norse mythology? Yes. On the battlefield, Odin would make somebody put the spirit of Odin into them and they'd become like the berserker warrior. And it would be like the champion of Odin. the battle. That's, I think, what they're getting at here is that they're provided these gifts.

And then their, you know, their job is to use these gifts. Not necessarily in a way that like, I think the focus was supposed to be like, yeah, I mean, there is a God, but I'm basically Godlight. And so your focus should all be right here. Because anything that then you, you know, anything that you flow through me as far as your worship and your adoration, that just goes straight to God because that's where I get my powers. So instead of, you know, looking at the figurehead as God and me just essentially being like his employee, we're kind of partners in this whole thing.

So you can look at me like I'm on that same tier almost. You don't have to give your glory to him. You can give your glory to me for getting the message to him. I'm right here. Yeah. Yeah. You don't got to pray up. You don't got to call long distance and pay the charges.

Like, you can just talk to me here and I'll make sure he gets the message. Yeah. So he goes on stage. He puts on this performance. He shows these superior characteristics that are superhuman. And once he gets off stage, the leaders of the conference are like, whoa, you're good. And you're very good. The gifts you were talking about is he's able to call people out in the crowd.

Say it almost reminds me of the guy's name is John Edwards. Yep. The medium guy. Crossing over. Yep. It reminds me exactly of that is he's pulling out people and he's like, your name is Susie, so-and-so. This is where you live. Your father is this.

And it would be stuff that these people would have just talked about literally 15, 20 minutes within the last hour with somebody else. But here in this situation that they're in, they're not thinking about that. They're not thinking this guy was just walking around picking up this information. This guy is calling you out and giving you information about yourself that for all intents and purposes, you think he shouldn't know unless he has some type of divine power. Yeah. He's speaking to an audience that's already primed for this. It's the John Edwards thing.

It's like, I'm getting a John. Yeah. John in the audience and four John raises their hand. Okay, I'm getting a John with the last name S. All of a sudden, only one of them's left. That's my guy. Doesn't throw out left-handed just because of the oddness of it. You have to cast a wide net to be able to just generally do it.

And for all intents of purposes, this is the other part that I don't get. I can't keep going into a sides, but there's no way that all those other guys that get on stage and do that, don't just look at him and know exactly what he did. Like, nobody can do this. That's the thing that I have such a hard time with, is all of these guys know their parlor

tricks. All of these guys know that it's bullshit. But it's almost like they have to be nice to their faces in order. Magicians code. It's like if you're a fellow magician, you don't give out the tricks. You know how someone might perform a trick. You're up there watching it. It's like an amateur magician watching.

a professional magician, you're like, I actually kind of know how he's performing that trick, but I can't perform that trick. I don't have that skill set of sleight of hand or of, you know, misdirection, things like that. So everyone is in, is using something out of the same toolshed of tricks. Yeah. There are some people that just can reach the taller shelves. But nobody wants to acknowledge it because it gives away the trick. Because then the stuff they're doing, comes into question because someone's like, well, if he's doing this, you're doing something very similar. If so facto, you're doing something very similar to what he's doing. And I guess maybe it's just there was a big enough pie that everybody could eat, but you would think

that they would be trying to squash other people. But I guess in order to squash him, you would have to then reveal what you do as well. Yeah. Okay, that kind of makes more sense. But after this, he goes home to Marcelline. He's really, really adamant that they need to jump into this latter rain movement of the Pentecostal church. And Marcelline ends up deciding to convert with him to Pentecostalism or whatever they call it. Along with that, he starts just like Chris is talking about hitting this healing revivals circuit. And he starts growing in popularity as he's performing these parlor tricks. And the reason that I keep using the word parlor tricks was he would call somebody on stage that had cancer.

And he would tell them that he would take the cancer out of the, their bodies because through slight of hand he would have a thing of chicken guts or some sort of guts in his hands he would press his hand up against their stomach he would say let the cancer be gone give me all your badness he pressed it into their stomach while they laid down using his hands to disguise it moving it around and then act like temple of fucking doom style he then holds up this chicken gizzard or these chicken guts he's like i've removed the bloody tumor that person's not going to know any better they just think they're healed well beyond that The thing that we see in politics now with everybody just lying about everything, once you

already hear that liar, once you see that happen, it doesn't matter if that person drops dead next week. Because if there was 20 people there that knew them, knew that that that happened. Like, okay, well, that guy was lying. Must have had another, must have had another tumor. Yeah, that too. Like, there must have been a tumor somewhere else that he didn't get. But the 500 people that go home from that revival that didn't know that person that was just

quote unquote healed just dropped dead. they're in full belief that he would just perform a miracle. And when we're talking about these revivals, some of them are in established churches. Other ones are like, if you've seen anything like in pop culture, like these tent revivals, they would just set up these huge tents

and just do these, you know, sermons there. This feels like royal gemstones to me a little bit. It feels exactly like real gemstones, except a little bit lower class. Yeah. This is the early stage of righteous gemstones. Indiana, rural Indiana.

So he ends up in 1955 due to kind of some of the momentum that he's gaining on this healing revival circuit. He has this momentum that he built from this conference that he went to that Adam was talking about a little bit earlier. He ends up establishing his own church called the Wings of Healing and is able to attract roughly about 20 members. And that's, it doesn't sound like a lot. It isn't a lot.

It's not enough to basically pay the bills as the leader of this church. You're not going to go ahead and be able to do this full time. And so while he establishes this Wings of Healing Church, he's doing these weird kind little odd jobs and one of them happened to be selling pet monkeys. Yes. This is fucking insane. Yeah, he's actually selling pet monkeys and while he's doing this, this guy

is a hustler. So as he is selling these pet monkeys, he's also talking about this church to these people and is basically trying to recruit while selling them these pets. Well, he has a very different

approach to the way that his sermon would go. Because while he's out on the street hustling, talking to the church about selling people monkeys or selling people monkeys and talking about the church, when they get to the church, it's not him just standing up on the pulpit and screaming at them about scripture or religion or anything like that. He's looking out the crowd in one of the first questions is what is troubling you, what is bothering you? So these people who aren't doing great in life that maybe are there, They're looking for a religion for a reason.

Come into this church and they see a guy that cares about their needs that wants to take care of them. He is a vessel of God. This is a big heavy air quote episode. But at the same time, it's not preaching damnation or sin or anything like that. It's reaching out. It's social outreach that he's doing under the guise of being a religion. He built a pretty big following with these. and they're not, like Adam said, they're kind of parlor tricks, their strategies.

He's seeing things that these other churches aren't doing. People will come in, they'll be talking about, hey, you know, I'm having trouble with the power company. They're not keeping the power on my house. Normally another church, you know, you would stand up, you would talk about that. Everyone would be like, let's all bow our heads and let's give a prayer for sister, you know, Williams, trying to go ahead and make sure these things get taken care of and keep the lights on for her and her family.

he took that many steps further to where he would be like, who's your power company? Okay, what's your address? All right. Phone number. Okay, we're going to go ahead and he would essentially write out this letter from him and then pass it around and have everybody in his congregation. In his congregation sign it.

And he's like, we're going to walk this down there and we're going to get your power taken care of. And he would actually follow through on some of these. There was a lot of activism within the church. in which made it very appealing to people who had maybe gone to other churches and didn't quite get the results they were hoping for. This guy seems to be not only have a solid message at this point, but he's also kind of a man of action who isn't just promising fucking tease and peas. He's actually doing something about this. And you do one thing for this person. All of a sudden, you've got someone there for life because you stepped in and did something where other people weren't.

Well, whether the letter was effective or whether there was a $50 bill slipped in with the letter, anything along those lines. If one person comes back and shares that he made a real tangible change in their life, everybody else is going to think, well, I can trust this guy because he did it for them. Why can't he do it for me? You're looking at it from a financial standpoint of being like she owes $150 on her due to get or on her bill to get her power turn back on. Fantastic, here's $150. And then turning around, you now have someone making donations. to your church continually, you might be like, well, it's going to take us two months, but we're going to get that $150 back.

And then everything we make after that from this person is just going into the coffers. Spend money to make money. Yep. Along with selling monkeys, I just can't quite get over the fact that Jim Joe had sold monkeys. You got to do what you got to do. There's a show on HBO. I think it's called like Monkey Fever or it's the same people that did Tiger King, except for it's them exposing the story of this.

trade of monkeys. And being close to Indiana, Missouri is like the state with the most lax laws for, well, for importing exotic animals. So this one's kind of stationed in Missouri. But Missouri and Indiana are so close to think that Jim Jones was just in the monkey trade. Well, he was trying to do everything is. They tried to distance themselves from that. The monkey market tried to distance themselves from Jim Jones at a certain point. Because it was just so pure before that. But once he finally establishes this church, this wings of healing, this is the precursor to the people's temple. And this is where everything springs out of. His people, his congregation was very small. Like Chris said, to supplement it, he did the monkeys. But he knew that he had to figure out a way

to expand his public footprint. He needed to get out among the people and start doing some things. And one of the ways that he did it was there was this evangelist that we talked about earlier, William Branum. William Branum was big on the revival circuit. He was a very large personality that would go in front of these large evangelical crowds. Very respected, very established. And he saw kind of how magnanimous Brannum was in front of a crowd and would go up there and preach his sermons and do his parlor tricks to kind of get people to enjoy him and to get his name out there. But the same time, he starts crafting his message in a very similar way that Branham did, but in his own way, because it's not just strictly religion. Yeah, and he's trying to fill in the gaps where

Branham has gaps in. He's trying to kind of fill those in. It's so crazy to me that some of these churches operate like a fucking concert where they have like an opening act, and they have a middle. Then all of a sudden, lights go down, the preacher comes out. Dude, growing up in the Mormon church, in the LDS church, where everything is so like solemn and quiet and there's an organ and a piano and that's it. I remember the first time I went to another church and I saw a set of drums and just thought to myself, what the fuck are the, why are the drums here? What, God doesn't drum. This isn't how it works. God shreds. Yeah. And then I see these people coming in in like jeans and cargo shorts. That's not an LDS thing.

You show up in your nice suit pants. You got your tie and your white t-shirt or your white colored shirt on. And to see that, I just thought it was so odd. But it seems like that's more, more of how religion is. Maybe I was the odd one, the fact that I dressed up and was so solemn during church. Like, this guy's fucking depressed. Yeah, maybe it's more on me than I was the outlier. I can't imagine hearing like a full on rock concert and smoke machines at a church. But at the same time, if you want to get people hyped up, like you're saying, like a concert, you've got to bring the flare.

You want to bring in younger people. You've got to start doing that. You've got to start adapting. So he brings in Branham to basically kind of do like side by side sermons and basically trying to kind of hitch his wagon and use the publicity that Brandon would bring in and the crowds that Brandon would bring in to try to get his message out and try to, you know, pull people over to his side a little bit. The publicity basically helps just swell his numbers over there at the wings of healing. Not to like insane numbers, but compared to the 20 members that he has. he gains, you know, double, triple those numbers. If you're making a hundred bucks off of 20 guys or 20 people a week and you turn that into 300 people, then you're making 300 bucks or whatever.

And you have more people to spread the word and get the word out. Yeah. You also have him in 1956, finally getting ordained as a minister by the independent assemblies of God. So this is kind of, again, like the fucking real estate brokerage thing. You have to have essentially be ordained, which is like your license to preach. And basically it puts you under that umbrella of that church saying, hey, this guy's with us. We can vouch for this guy. He's an ordained minister under the independent assemblies God or independent assemblies of God umbrella.

William Branum also provides his endorsement. And by providing his endorsement basically increases his visibility. Oh, yeah. they start basically going, huh? So much. This guy was not like the god of gods at that point, but he was a name that everybody knew. It's like that weird dead guy that does the 500 Club, Robertson.

It's a name that you just everybody knew. Whether they were involved in the church or not, he was the big act. And by getting his endorsement, you're also being invited and being allowed to come speak at these larger conventions, being in front of larger audience, being all to spread your message out further. and being able to recruit from a wider base. So all of this is just going toward helping Jones, you know,

build up his congregation. And at this point, you know, he goes ahead and rebrands the church as the People's Temple. It's not People's with an apostrophe, so it's not possessive. It's the People's Temple. And as the full name in order to keep it under the Independent Assembly of God, he has to name it the People's Temple Christian Church Full Gospel. Why does he need to keep it under that umbrella? For the legitimacy of it?

Tax exemption. Yep. So yeah, you want that sweet, sweet religious tax exemption. You've got to be recognized or under the umbrella of a officially recognized tax exempt church or group. Yeah, how you get to fit that shit on a sign? No, not at all. Three-line sign? And so we just, the building that they were moving into had already had the word temple

like scrawled into the stone. So he just figured to go with that and they could just type in peoples. But what was different about why they did it? Why he named it People's Temple, but no apostrophe. You're going to explain that to me. So when he called it the People's Temple,

normally the possession comes from the apostrophe S on peoples. But since he was communist or had communist beliefs and nobody should own anything, it was just the people's temple and there was no possessive apostrophe. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. It's just a very little thing that you would do that you wouldn't think of,

but he even went far enough to try to push that brand as nobody owns this. I don't own this. This isn't your guys, is this is everyone's. It's a little Easter egg. Yeah. At this point, you know, once he kind of adopts that,

we talked about that manifested, sons of God type deal, he ends up having a split from Branum that kind of go their own separate ways he learned all he can from Branum and he's kind of going off in a different direction as far as his message goes. When you have these

people that he's looking up to Father Divine basically he's trying to hitch his wagon to these people that have not the same following he's come from I feel like he goes to different wells and he pulls up all the water you can

from one well and he's like, can't get any more water out of this one. Then he moves over to the next one. Then he's like, let's see how much water I can get out of this one. He's kind of moving between these different, I don't want to say mentors, but people that he admires in the religion game for their performance aspect or their success

and then just tries to kind of cozy into that niche of where those people are. What Father Divine did, real well with his ministry, I believe it was called the peace missions, was, he was out there. He was wild. He always dressed very nicely, probably had a sweet chain, and was a guy that people were just naturally attracted to by his look.

But what these peace missions did was community outreach. It was feeding the hungry. It was clothing the naked. It was taking care of people on the ground level with just, hopes of being able to get the return of those people potentially getting on their feet and then again contributing to the church, but also showing the congregation, this is what I care about. And these are the people that I want to help. You have the ability if you had the money to be able to fund these peace missions that we're on. And once Joneses, that's a lot of money changing

hands. We could really probably bring a lot of people in doing that. Maybe we should start employing that. Well then he finds out that Father Divine remarries and passes along the little tidbit that the new woman that he married is actually the reincarnation of Mother Divine. And

Jim hears that he's like well Father Divine's getting old. He just used reincarnation. I wonder if when he dies I can tell people that I am the reincarnated soul of Father Divine.

Father Divine, like I was already here, but Father Divine, his soul found me. And now I also carry the message of Father Divine. Yeah, how can you be reincarnated if you're already alive when he's alive? That's what I was going to say the same thing with the wives when he got remarried. Like she, they're like, they were five years apart. He's like, yeah, don't ask too many questions about it. It's just wild to me how he sees it. He leeches onto it. And then he just decides, okay, well, this is mine now. This is my bit. This is what I'm going to do now. But at the same time, all of these outreach programs are very good for poor people. They're very good for the community. And when you're doing good for the community, you sometimes want to start

protecting yourself, but at the same time, you tend to get more politically involved. Marcellane, his wife, was pretty involved with the politics of Indianapolis, where they were now. She would listen in as far as, like, in the meeting, she would take notes, if there was ever a position that could be opened up, she would mention it to Jim, kind of keep him abreast of what's going on in the city. There is something that's being created called the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission. And when this position pops up, Marcelline tells Jones, hey, this could be a good in for you. Jones is like, well, yeah, that's great. I'll put in for it. He puts in for it. He ends up winning the seat. He wins the seat because

nobody else ran. So the mayor of Indianapolis appoints him this director of Indianapolis Human Rights Commission and he starts to try and get his hand in local businesses to desegregate. And maybe it's just my frame of reference, but I figured that segregation was just mostly a southern thing through most of like the not early times in the United States, but the 40s. 50s, 60s, that type of thing. Very segregated in Indiana. And again, the Ku Klux Klan connection could be some reason that Indiana may still reflect the South more than other northern states.

But he starts working to desegregate restaurants. He starts working to desegregate things like libraries, schools, anything that he can start opening up to black people or other people of color. it's furthering his mission, but he's using politics as father Jones out there spreading the message. Well, at the same time, looking flawless while doing it.

Yeah. He's using government funds to just advertise. Basically, yeah. It really works out for him, except for, again, the clans around, there was a lot of pushback against these measures. Um, the people's temple was kind of a, a mark for some of these things. There was numerous times where there was a bomb threat or somebody would throw rocks through the windows, anything along that line.

Yeah. Yeah. But then there were a few other things that were a little bit more interesting. Um, there were some alleged gunshots that were fired at Jim Jones house, where his family lived and we'll talk about his special family, because they're pretty much in at this point. but when the police show up to take the police report that Jones is calling in about somebody shooting at his house, they start looking at the trajectory of the bullets and realize that more than likely these shots are coming from inside of the house out towards the street. The call is coming from inside the house. Yeah, so that seems a little bit suspicious.

Maybe like he was trying to play up somebody's after me because I'm trying to make a change in the community, which undoubtedly the clan being there, they weren't. very pumped about desegregation. That's a for sure thing. But when they start specifically targeting his house and his family, the emotions towards that, the empathy that people are going to be feeling, this guy's out there trying. He's putting his neck on the line for us to be free. It just increases that ingratiation. Yeah. And along with that, just like we were talking about, Jones wants to create an all-inclusive religion, an all-inclusive way of life. And he wants to have an all-inclusive family. So he comes up with this plan called the Rainbow family.

In 1954, they adopt, I believe she was eight or nine years old at the time, a Native American girl named Agnes. They would end up adopting three Korean children, a little boy, Stephanie, and then Suzanne. Stephanie was actually killed in a car accident. She was driving with one of the other members of the People's Temple, and it was a DUI case where they ended up getting hit and Stephanie passed away. They went back to the same orphanage that they got Lou and Stephanie from, and Suzanne was either like a friend or a little sister. She'd been like Stephanie's best friend. Okay, is that what it was? And so they end up adopting Suzanne and Stephanie's place. As they were adopting Lou and Stephanie, Marcelline found out that she was pregnant, and she

would give birth to their biological son, Stefan Gandhi, in 1959. Right on the nose. Finally, they round out the family, which this was just a massive slap in the face. I got to think to Stefan.

Oh, they named him Stefan because Stephanie, S-E-P-H-A-N instead of E-N. They adopt a young African-American boy, a black kid that he named Jim Jones, Jr., in 1961. Just to leave no doubt. Yeah. Yeah.

And the thing that they wanted to do was they wanted Jim Jr. And Stefan to kind of grow up as like twins. Because this outward appearance of having a black child and a white child growing up as twins as equals, it's to point that out almost feels worse than to just say it and let it happen. It's like a microcosm of what he wants to do. Yeah. He's like, look, I'm definitely practicing what I preach personally in my own home. So I'm beyond reproach of anyone saying that I'm just sending this out as, you know, just a message without any type of backing to it.

Yeah, it's just so fascinating. Before we get into the next thing, when things start getting interesting, let's take a bathroom break. Well, hey there, all you sexy historians, how are you guys doing? It is time for socials. Where can they find us on Instagram? If they want to follow us, they can find us at Historically High Pod on Instagram. That goes the same for threads as well. You can also find us on Twitter.

Tell them about Twitter. Historically high. That's historically H.I. on Twitter. And if you want to email any of your comments or suggestions, where can they find us at, Adam? At Historically High Podcast at gmail. Gmail. All right, and back to the show. All right.

Let's get weirder with it. 1961 rolls around. Things are going great. You know what tends to throw a wrench in a well-oiled machine? Bad dreams? Bad dreams. Jimmy starts having dreams that a nuclear war is coming. So much so, in fact, that he is.

is seriously looking into locations that the People's Temple can relocate. And he's looking for areas that are least likely to be essentially affected or destroyed during a nuclear catastrophe. So much so, in fact, that he travels to South America. You're in Indiana. Apparently, there was some type of, because I think Indiana, there was something close enough as far as Indianapolis, Chicago, maybe even the fact that there could have been a military base nearby.

Okay. Or, you know, how they knew where certain launch sites were and things like that. Yeah. It could have been something, the location of like a launch site. But, yeah, Indiana was not on the list

of places least likely to be hit by, and Indiana could have been 100 in the list of 100 places in the US that were going to get hit. Yeah. But he was looking for places not even on the list. He was looking at the list

of safest places. So he ends up heading for South America. He's thinking of moving the act to Rio de Janeiro. And while he's traveling down there, he actually stops in Guyana, Guyana. There's an English, a British, Guyana, and a French Guiana. And I think it's Gis and, like, Guy in French. Okay, Guy. So I think it's Guyana, though for the British one.

I don't fucking know. Gleana. So Guyana on the way to Brazil. So he stops there. takes a few days, kind of has a look around, he's not thinking of moving here. He now knows of this place in Guyana. Move to Rio de Janeiro in like mid-1963

and is kind of taken a schick international at this point. He's trying to figure out if there's going to be enough of a fan base, I guess you would say, down here, that he's able to establish, you know, a successful church. Language barrier is going to be an issue because he doesn't speak Portuguese. or anything like that. So that's going to be a big one. Rarely enough, kind of going back to Guyana, they actually spoke English because up until a few years prior to that, they had actually

been a British colony. And it just recently had to establish their independence, so they actually spoke English. So after a little while here in Rio de Janeiro, he's actually also having the church send him funds to basically fund his life down there of trying to get this church established. He has to have housing. His entire family's down there with him. The People's Temple up in Indiana ends up dropping to about a hundred people attending. Well, this is the perfect example of why Jim Jones is great at doing bad things and great at what he did was when he leaves, he leaves it in charge. He leaves a church in the hands of a guy named Russell Winberg. Russell Winberg almost immediately deviates from the things that Jim Jones was teaching

and dives right back into the Bible. He's basically like, jims out, God's in, pull out your books. Well, I think it's, they lost the magician. They lost the guy, or they lost the spoon that stirs the drink. When you lose the guy that's up there just rambling and kind of incoherently breaking through to the other side, if you will, as far as explaining what the church's goals were, it's all coming from up here. There's no written scripture. There's no written doctrine that Jones left for him.

He just goes, just keep praising my, keep pushing my word. I hate to keep making this magician analogy, but basically you have your star magician, you have your magician's assistant. Yeah. Star magician leaves, all of a sudden,

you don't have all of your big tricks. So you've got to fall back on the old stuff. You fall back on the first 45 minutes of the show that you're just doing basic things that are like, ooh, ah. But it's the stuff that you know is your bread and butter that'll work. Yeah. Eventually, you just have to get back to, okay, there's a book that everybody in every other religion kind of,

or every Christian religion subscribes to, we need to start bringing the Bible back into this, whereas Jones said, for all intents of purposes, pushed the Bible out of any teachings that he was doing. Yeah, he actually made it to the point. I don't know if it was here in Indiana while he was still there, or it's after when they relocate to California,

coming up soon. But he basically turns the Bible into like a symbol of oppression to steer people away from it. And he's like, this book right here has done more harm to like the black community because this keeps you subjugated. This keeps them in a position of power and this keeps you, you know, under their, under their thumb.

So he's able to somehow spin it and sells it pretty well. Yeah. And it's not a bad idea. If you want people to start looking at you as a godlike figure and the conduit to God, the book that everybody else teaches out of, if you can distance yourself away from plan A for everybody else and they can look at you as just a standalone figure,

that's going to be a lot different because you don't have to have that crutch of the Bible. You're not teaching the same thing. Discredit the stuff that's in here is answers to people's questions or prayers and make it seem like they need to come to you for those answers. Yeah, which not terrible.

But unfortunately, Russell Winberg was just, he was 70 miles an hour, right down the center of the plate, just preaching the Bible. It's the meatball. And your numbers go down because the guy that puts asses in seats isn't there to do it.

he's out on safari in the South American jungle trying to find a new place to move to because he's scared of the boom boom. Yeah. But at the same time, when he gets back, he uses all of his emotions to really help his cause. Yeah. I mean, he ends up, the church ends up going into debt supporting him. And in late 1963, so it's not even that long, like a period of eight to six to eight months, someone ends up coming down.

I think it was the guy that was like third in command. He hadn't put this guy in complete control for some reason. This guy comes down and basically gives him the status of how the church is doing. It's like this thing's fucking falling apart. We're in debt with you being down here because we don't have enough people up there to make enough money to do this. If you don't get back, this thing that you've tried to build is going to collapse and it's going to be in a state that you're not going to be able to recover from. What's the guy's name? Sorry. He's very important to this story. Aldi or something like that.

I can't remember of his name. I think it's like Al Lee. But the reason that he's so important to the story is he ends up being the only high-ranking black member of Jones's inner circle. Yeah. So for a guy that preaches tolerance and equality and that everybody's all the same, his inner circle, his lieutenants, his what we're going to be talking about soon, something called the planning commission. There's only one black voice on that panel. Yeah. that doesn't seem super inclusive.

It's not a great representation of your actual, your congregation. So late 63, he ends up begrudgingly moving back and has to kind of pivot now. This isn't getting rid of his, you know, his fear. This isn't alleviating his worry that they're all going to perish in fucking nuclear fire. He just has to figure out a way to get the church back up on its feet and then kind of pivot and relocate somebody someplace else because Brazil isn't going to work out for him. so he ends up he gets back he sells the building

that the people's temple is using and ends up getting into like a smaller building they make a little bit of money there and then he's like this still isn't cutting it I'm going to go back to what I'm going to go back to my old tricks I'm going to hit the healing circuit again

drum up some more support drum up some money drum up a bunch of new followers because this thing worked like fucking gangbusters when I did it the first time and goes back out on the circuit well his second trip out on the circuit is different though because now he has followers

and when he goes on this healing circuit he decides to bring a couple ringers a couple plants to put in the crowd and if there's one thing that you guys want to reach out for the Jim Jones beyond this episode if you Google some of Jim Jones

faith healing sermons whatever what have you just Jim Jones faith healings. It's the most unbelievable shit that you've ever heard. The prompts that he's giving the people that he brings on stage to heal, or yeah, to heal sound so rehearsed and so bad. Because they were rehearsed. Yeah.

They would put some people even in what would account to old people makeup at that point, try to change their appearance a little bit. Again, these are people that are in his, kind of in his inner circle at this point. or people close to him within the church that are willing to put themselves in a position of falsifying this faith healing in front of all these people in order to trick them. That some people may have been attracted to Jones because that's what he did to get them. Yeah.

They might be in on their own tricks now. Yeah, exactly. But there's new stuff now that they found out that, of course, it makes perfect sense. He has all the answers. My favorite one, if you look up Jim Jones, Lady Waxigan, healing something like that. They have a plant. She was someone that worked within, I think, like the admin department.

And she was like a secretary or something. She is there in church. No one has really seen her before because they're not local. And she's in a wheelchair. And basically there's like another plant in there that's with her and is like, yeah, she can't walk. She found out you were coming here. and wanted to be able to meet you

and see if you could help her walk again. And he's up on the stage and this lady's about, I don't know, like 20 feet, 30 feet away from him kind of down in like the hall or in the row of the pews. And he is basically like, get up. And he's sitting there and he's kind of like he used to do this thing where he would be

holding his hand out to somebody and then he would kind of make this face or like kind of close his eyes like he was doing something and kind of shake his body like something that had infected him. Mudder something in Latin usually. Yeah. And then he would open and be like, you're good now. And the guy's like, I'm good.

So this lady basically, she kind of rises from the wheelchair, really, really unstable. And she takes a stepboard out of the wheelchair and he's like, and another. She takes another. And he's like, you've got another in you. And she takes another. And all of a sudden, within the course of about three seconds, she is jogging and running up and down these fucking aisles. And people are losing their fucking minds. It is crazy.

It is the biggest load of bullshit you will ever see. And these people are just shoveling it in their mouths. This is. It's the Wonka moment. It is. It's Wonka coming out of the factory. There's a woman who can't see. She has, she's wearing glasses.

And he's like, can you see me up here? And she's like, I can see his shape. Where are you? And she's even wearing her glasses at the time. He's like, I want you to take off the glasses. And she takes him off. And he puts out his hand. And all of a sudden he does the little motion.

like he just was possessed by some illness and then he shakes it off and opens his eyes and he's like, how many fingers am I holding up? And she's a good 40 feet away from this guy and she's like, she starts crying, she's like, one. He's like, I'm holding up one finger and everyone just fucking goes crazy again. I mean, it's,

if it wasn't so fucking slimy and awful, you just almost got a clap. Oh, yeah. For how he's able to convince these people of something so obviously just fabricated. Got people coughing up fake blood.

Just anything you can think of. And again, we're talking about more innards of chickens and birds and animals that are being magically pulled out of people that are tumors. He's curing people's husbands while they're at home

for a stroke that they were going to have next Wednesday at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Yeah, preemptive healings. That's what it moves on to. You don't got to bring him into the church if you can just, that's like when you go to the dentist. And they're like, this is why you do certain things. It's all about preventative care instead of waiting until the problem arises.

He's healed in people and people are having to thank him. And then the marks in the crowd whose family are getting healed at home are like, oh, thank you so much. I'm so happy he's not going to have that stroke. It's like, oh, what a great. You saved my husband. What a canned line. Yeah. And then it's, oh, well, I think you have trouble with your back.

Oh, you're right. I have trouble with my back. Everyone has fucking trouble with their back. Is it, is it your lower back? It's my lower back. Can you bend over? I can't bend over any further than this. Um, um, say, honte.

I got it. I pulled the impingement out. Oh, I can bend over again. Come on. You people can't hear this and be cheering this at the same time. Laugh. It's funny. This isn't, there's nothing serious about this.

he ends up making some money, he ends up recruiting some new people, and he decides in July 1965, he's like, listen, nuclear war is still coming, we still got to get the fuck out of Dodge. So they end up moving to California to avoid the fallout. They moved to this place in the Redwood Valley called Yucaya, which is a little bit outside. He wanted to essentially scouted Eureka because it was on a list of places least likely to be destroyed in a nuclear war, and then found a place like 100 miles outside of Eureka. called Ykaya. Which seems so much smarter because there's only massive cities in California that could

be hit by nuclear bombs. Like it's, you just moved to a place that you got out of, it was like an article in Esquire magazine. This guy that has a direct conduit with God that could ask God, hey, if you let nuclear fallout happen, where would you put us? I mean, who's just hoping his congregation didn't read Esquire. Yeah, dude, it just, did you know he passed that office. His idea, he's like, I had a vision.

They told me to move to. a place called, and I heard Eureka. And then you're working a couple hundred miles outside of San Francisco or a few hundred miles, however close it is, to a major city that could be a legitimate nuclear target. Like,

you can't explain it. The best part about it is is to scare everybody into leaving Indiana to come out west with him to Yucaya. He tells them that there's going to be a nuclear strike that happens in Indianapolis. I think it was

like in 1966. Yeah. So he gives himself a little bit of a runway so he can come up with another lie

when 67 comes in Indianapolis is still there. Yeah. Well, it's still standing because we're not there. We were the targets.

He's able to convince 140 of his most loyal followers to actually go with him. This to me is just weird as shit. I have been to church

a few times within my life. I understand there are many people. that are churches just their fucking jam. It's their thing. I'm not here to judge. If that's your thing, that's your thing.

I don't see any situation where I am uprooting my fucking life and moving halfway or three quarters of the way, two-thirds of the way across the country to follow the fucking preacher man and establishing an entirely new life. And basically, he also kind of pitches this idea when they moved to Yucaya,

that they'll have the opportunity that they don't have in Indiana. You know, it's a place where there's not as much racism. Integration is, you know, more prevalent there. They can buy land and actually establish a commune and start, you know, practicing what he's actually been talking about. Living as, you know, a communist society and everyone helping everyone and taking care of everybody and ends up convincing 140 people to go with them just on a fucking whim. They said they formed like a convoy when they were driving there.

And when he gets there, he ends up taking a job at an adult education school. I think I can't remember what he was teaching. But he ends up using it again as another recruiting ground. Because not to be disparaging about that, but if you have people going back to like adult school to continue learning, they probably made some mistakes earlier on in their life. They're trying to go ahead and find a proper direction to go in. They're trying to better themselves. and now you have this guy that's talking them about additional ways that they can better themselves

and he's going to help them he's not only helping you earn your GED or whatever it was at that time but now he's saying that he can help you in other ways giving you a community making you feel part of something so he's always fucking selling no matter where he's at well that whole thought process is the exact reason why those people followed him from Indiana you don't go looking for a religion or find a new religion of shit's going good. That's not really how it works. So if you're living a not great life in Indianapolis, you're facing a lot of racism,

you can't get ahead, then you meet this group of people that gives you this sense of family and togetherness. Some of the things that he was doing just forgot to mention him in Indianapolis. He opened up nursing homes for elderly people. and Marcelline excuse me

actually converted their original home into a nursing home and did a bunch of great things for the community as far as end of care life for older people. I think he also did some type of drug rehab or drug recovery.

I can't remember if it was something like that. It could be. But when you look at the other side of that, if people are getting admitted to nursing homes, they have to usually, give up a substantial sum of money to get their treatment for the rest of their life. There are also people there that maybe haven't decided who they're leaving their stuff to

or have someone in mind, but while they're there, all of a sudden this charismatic gentleman comes in and basically is hanging out with them and talking about stuff that they like and is making promises and basically stepping into doing the things that maybe their children aren't doing as much and being they're more present. And at the end of their life, maybe they leave a little bit of something to the People's Temple as well. Can't hurt.

Another drop in the bucket can't really hurt for them. Another thing that they did in Indianapolis, or that Jim did, was he opened up a free restaurant. And with every meal that was served in this free restaurant,

a homeless, unhoused street person could go in and get, a free pair of clothes. So it wasn't like new stuff that they were buying off the rack. I'm sure it was donations or anything like that. But they were at least getting a set of clean clothes. Sorry, it was foster homes for children.

Oh, that's even worse. And a ranch license to care for the mentally disabled. Oh, that might be the worst. But with all of that happening and all that going on, you are pulling people up out of the bad parts of society. and if you get somebody from any of that outreach or you have somebody that feels like doing that outreach and giving back to the community makes you feel like a better person,

you're going to look at Jim Jones and you're going to say, well, you made me feel this good through helping other people or you picked me up when I was down. Yeah, I'll follow you to California. I'll do what you want. And as soon as you get those hooks in those people and they're willing to do that, it's almost like a test. You know your most developed...

Yeah. He likes to be a lot of tests. tests. You know your most devout followers will go to that length to be with you still and to continue following this dream. So as they're establishing this place in Yucaya,

a couple years ago by, they're doing their thing. They're also, I think they do like a bus tour at some point. They may have also done this when he was in Indiana, but they would actually It's a little further down the road. It's a little further down the road. Okay. In 67, they're able to convince 75 more people to move

from Indiana. So, not only do they have the people over the last two years that they've been able to bring in from the local area around Yucaya and the Redwood Valley, now they have 75 more people that already kind of have a history with Jim Jones already know about the church to actually come in and swell those numbers a little bit more. By 1969, they have 300 members. Now again, that doesn't sound like a lot, but for a church just moving into an area four years ago to be able to have that kind of reach. It's making more progress than it probably should. But these are also 300 voices that you have spreading the word out to the community, bringing in other people, and also 300

sources of income for this church to start kind of enacting other plans. Oh, yeah. And the big deal about coming to UKIA is this communist communal lifestyle. I think he called it Apostolic Socialism, was the term that he called it. Yes, that's right. It was an apostolic socialism. It was a move away from religion to socialism. So basically he just tried to blend them and run it into the other. He basically took the socialist parts of the Bible where Jesus was helping to heal and feed the poor, all of the charitable acts, all of that kind of stuff. And then basically just pivoted and been like, you realize that that's just Jesus was a socialist and that he was caring for people. So for the people that the message he already had, it was probably a very easy transition to move over into that.

this is again where he establishes that the Bible is a tool of oppression. He has his claim of self-diffinity where I think I can't remember if he was just talking like one-on-one or he was talking to his inner circle. But he was telling people, you know, he's like, I'll be what they need me to be. He's like, that's the thing about me. He's like, I can be whatever they need to me. Oh, yeah. If they need me to be a father figure, I'll be a father figure. If they need me to be a brother, I'll be a brother.

if they need me to be like a Christ figure, I'll be a Christ figure. If they need me to be God, I'll be their God. Yeah, so this is his exact quote is what you need to believe in is what you can see. If you see me as your friend, I'll be your friend. If you see me as your father, I'll be your father. For those of you that don't have a father, if you see me as your Savior, I'll be your Savior. If you see me as your God, I'll be your God. So he is just basically saying,

I am the whole or the void that you have in your life. I can fill that void in any way, shape, or form that you want. Now, as much as he has blended this with his kind of his rhetoric, even back in Indiana, this is a pretty sizable leap. It's not a sharp pivot, but he's changing direction and taking them somewhere else at this point. Yeah, not the guy John. He hits my favorite quote that he's ever. ever said, just because it's, I don't know if I'm fully in on it, because I think that religion

can be good in some situations. He says, those who remain drugged with the opiate of religion, uh, had to be brought to enlightenment. So the opiate of religion, the drug of religion, the addiction that you have to religion needs to find enlightenment. We can't keep dealing with just these normal cookie cutter under the umbrella of Christianity religions because they're all taking you down their path and keeping you under their control, find enlightenment. If you fall under my control and enlightenment, that was still your choice.

Yeah. If that just happens to occur. Well, one thing that might have something to do with it is after the move from California, I don't know if you heard of anything where it came into play before when they were in Indiana, but he starts to use drugs. And basically, I think it's kind of combination he's using barbiturates amphetamines he's using kind of a cocktail of different things quay ludes yeah loots ludes baby if anyone's seen wolf wall street quailudes that's yeah it's a tranquilizer right uh yeah okay it's it's kind of an all encompassing it'll give you a little bit everything on the full roller coaster ride geoffrey yeah but this is incredible to me because i didn't know that this was still happening this late in the world i guess it kind of makes sense because we're so

close to World War II. Amphetamines were legal. Pep pills had amphetamines in them back then. He wasn't just doing meth that was illegal. He was buying this shit off or off the rack across the counter. What did they call? What did the Nazis call it? Hitler something.

Hitler juice? Yeah, something like that. Hitler crack. It's like greenies. He was just popping greenies the entire time. What they used to take the amphetamines, they would take to play baseball. If you see pictures of Jim Jones, almost every single picture you'll see he'll be wearing sunglasses. And they said that he started wearing the sunglasses when he started getting a little heavier into the drug use or started the drug use because his eyes were usually like either blood shot or dilated or pinned or something like that.

Wrecked his blood vessels in his eyes. Yep. And so he was wearing sunglasses up there. But if I'm being honest, man, it gave him some fucking style. Yeah. Well, and it's probably a good idea if you're up there preaching the word of. God that your eyes aren't red as the devil's dick. He looks like a young baby Billy.

He does. Yeah. Like a mixture of baby Billy and an older Korean woman. He's just, he's got to look to him. And when you see him, he's one of those faces that if you know Jim Jones is, you can pretty much connect the dots.

If you had to guess and you looked at a picture, you'd be like, yeah, that sounds like Jim Jones. But just along with this communal living, the reason that it grows to 300 and so important is to live on these communes, you have to give all of your earthly possessions to the church. And when you give all your earthly possessions

to the church, you then write a statement saying that even if you leave the church, you will never request these items to come back to you. So while it doesn't sound like a huge number when you're getting just basically everything that these people ever owned, they're down there hawk and shit at flea markets. They are selling cars. They're selling houses. They're just in a little bit of everything. And another big draw to this communal living is they have these multiple communal spaces. And when your tax exempt, a large property that you can be exempt from is

your property taxes. So all of these properties are accruing, um, like equity. Yeah. And you're not having to pay taxes on that land every single year. And you kind of start to see that they work their way into religions in almost the same way. Because for a cult to really thrive, it needs a tragedy. Like, you just need sadness to build a cult. It has to be around these massive events. COVID, cults were huge because you had the internet. You had people feeling isolated at home.

They found a community. That community turns out to be a little bit nuts. But they're already in deep enough that they just don't want to pull out. Yeah. 9-11. Plenty of conspiracy-type cults. cults, all of that kind of an idea. There have been cults whenever a tragedy has happened.

One of the most recent ones people have probably heard of is what, the nexium one? The sex cult, yeah. Well, speaking of sex, it's kind of, it comes into play in almost every cult. It's woven in there, and it's just, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when this is actually going to rear its head. Well, like Adam was saying, once the Planning Commission is created, basically it's the People's Temple communal lifestyle is what the Planning Commission is supposed to be in charge of. And one of the things that kind of rears its head, like you were saying, turn over your assets,

but you'll be taken care of. Turn over your wages if you're working jobs that are outside of the commune. But you're going to be taken care of. What do you have to spend money? Exactly. We're going to give you a certain allowance, and you can use that for whatever you wish, because he also started to steer them away from the concept of possession. And he'd kind of been subtly doing that, I think.

People's temple. Yep. But he was basically making them believe that those possessions were a tool of capitalism to keep them subjugated. And that by freeing yourself of those possessions that you were truly able to kind of embrace this lifestyle that he was selling. So ironic too, because one of the things that he pulled away from Father Divine was that sense of style. Yeah. The slick suits, the glasses, the dark glasses, the pot. The pompadour hair.

He was still living with those luxuries. Oh, yeah. And there were sermons where you would hear him be like, do you think that that capitalist Cadillac that you drive around is going to make you happy? Do you think those new clothes on your back are going to make you happy? Well, I'm the happiest man alive, and I do not buy new things. I do not have fancy things as he's wearing like a full silk suit. Like a velvet robe and shit.

Yeah. This is when stuff, you know, stuff is getting progressively crazier, but now we're kind of moving over into the territory of control over anything he can get his hands on. One of those things was the control of people's basically relationships and also sex lives. And one of the things that some of the people that were former People's Temples members, people that even survived Jonestown, have come out and said, you know, they, would call people out during these services and ask who have they been sleeping with within the congregation, who have they been with, and be asking for them to repent about it. And it got to the point where this was prior to this, but it also kind of established precedence that this was something that they could discuss and that Jim Jones had a hand in this part of their lives. This allowed him,

once they're in this communal living situation, to basically kind of decide, hey, you're not going to be with this person anymore. I think you should be with this person. and would basically rearrange people People that were even married Would be like you guys aren't married anymore You're gonna be with this person And would control people's Not only relationships

But who they were sleeping with David Koresh type shit David Koresh type shit While at the same time Jim is fucking everybody Dudes, chicks You name it He is

There was a quote I'm not gonna get it completely right But this was the gist of it Ouch he is the only perfect heterosexual all men are gay women are lesbians and sex men having sex with women is just simply compensating and what he would do is he would sleep with these male followers of the church and while they were doing it or in the act he'd be telling them i'm doing this for you i'm doing this to show you who your true self is And not only are these guys fucking confused this shit, they've somehow been talked into this,

but they completely trust this person. They're just like, thank you. And they would actually thank him for this shit. He would do the same thing with the women. He would end up sleeping with the women and just be like, I'm doing, I'm not doing this for me. I'm doing this for you. And somehow would spin it into the fact that they were being given this great honor or gift of his fucking dick. It's Samandra Tate shit.

Yes. And there were even some circumstances where people that were within the People's Temples on a documentary were talking about how he would be very casual about it. He was walking past this guy one time and I think he was backstage like doing some curtain work or lighting or sound. And Jim was asking me, he's like, so the guy was, I think, within his first year there. He's like, so how do you like? And he's like, I really like it. I like the community. I like the people.

He's like, great, great. That's what we like to hear. Listen. Do you want to fuck? Do you want to fuck? Like, I'll fuck you. And the guy was just like, no. And Jim was just like, okay.

He's like, just letting you know, though, that's something that I can do for you if you ever want to do that. And then just literally just walks on stage to go do one of his sermons. Slaps him on the ass, winks at him, says, I got your six and walks on the stage. Mm-hmm. That. So it's now transition to that point that all cults find themselves in, where the messianic figure, the leader, is now, finding he can have control of basically creating himself a harem. This is an argument that I heard made, and I think it was made from more of a religious

bias. For some reason, they were getting into the sexuality of Jim Jones and trying to claim that the male sex he was having. wasn't because he was homosexual, but because it was a power move. Just to establish some type of other domination on somebody? Yeah, like a mental kind of hold that you have. Like I, you are so subservient to me that I can have sex with you, which. And make you thank me for it.

Doesn't sound bad. There's an issue that comes up before he leaves for Jones Town that's going to maybe shed some different light on that. Yeah. But one of the things that I was getting at along with Chris's control and power was this baiting system that they would use using tragedy or bad things. And Martin Luther King is assassinated. I believe it was 1968.

It was either 68 or 69, I think. After his assassination, there is a big ceremony that's held as, like multiple different African-American churches in San Francisco or having a visual. 68. Okay. A visual for Martin Luther King. Predominantly African-American churches, the congregation, they're all going to be African-American. All of a sudden, the door swing open and a large group of whites.

Whites. mixed in with some black folks led by this small pompadorian little white man walking. It looks like an Elvis impersonator. A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. They walk in. And of course they draw a ton of attention because, again, that's the only white folks in the room just walked in.

And he listens to all of these teachings and all of these preachers up there speaking about what a great man MOK was. Everybody, you know, was doing him justice. And then just at the end, as an aside, they saw that Jones brought in his congregation and allowed him to go up and speak. He goes up, he speaks about the love that he had for Martin Luther King, about him being a visionary, about his belief in humanity and what it can do. And then just off the cuff, while the church is still kind of having money issues, he says, we're going to have a celebration back. at our church in Yucaya, you're all invited to come and be with us and joining our family and our friendship and we can really celebrate Martin Luther King the way that we want to. And it was just little things like this to show up to a congregation like that and to play

not really on their emotions. Oh yeah, 100% though. Yeah, it just, it sounds weird with the color issue there, but he's doing it to try and basically net other people's church goal. He's trying to turn tragedy into recruitment. Yeah. And it's just another form of if you can get them in that way, and they only see everything on the outside that looks good and that you care about equality and things like that, and you can get them in just deep enough that you can start getting them to either start spilling secrets or start maybe talking about things that aren't great around somebody on the planning commission, you start to have power over these people. Because as soon as you learn people's secrets

that they don't want anybody else to know when you're digging deeper to try to get to know them to create a bond with them, as soon as they trust you, they just trusted the wrong person because that commission member can go ahead and write all that stuff down. And if they're ever wavering,

if they're ever walking away, if there's ever a conversation about, hey, I don't want to give you all my stuff to move on to the commune, it can backfire. they know your deepest, darkest secrets. And so this whole idea behind the communal living experiment that was all kind of controlled by the planning commission starts to work.

Service in the community, because as they were growing, they were purchasing buses so they could bus members of the people's temple into these smaller communities for jobs, for outreach, anything like that. and it sort of starts to change the opinion of the people in Yucaya because again, when they moved out there, they were told that they were going to face less racism. Well, I'm sure if they moved to San Francisco or Los Angeles or any of the big cities where racism was a little less prevalent, it probably would have been better. They moved to the country. They moved to the Redwood Valley.

There's not a lot of black folks walking around in the Redwood Valley. That's just kind of how it was. But once they see the outreach and they see these people actually trying, in the community, it starts to kind of ingratiate them to everybody else around them. And that's when he decides that they got to go national. And so he hand chooses a few groups of members of the People's Temple. He throws them on buses. And this is where we get the Holy Rollers.

Hell yeah. The Holy Rollers traveled the country in these buses, basically doing the revival bit for another time of going out there and putting on the... shows, putting on these revival festivals that are mystifying people by just this terrible sleight of hand, these, again, parlor tricks by this magician on stage, but at the same time, they're gaining traction. And while they don't ever really expand outside of California, they take a little stop back into Indiana.

And they go and visit James' mother's house back in Indiana. And she had moved out to California with him. And basically it was like a victory lap in his town of, look at what I did. Look at what I achieved. All of you members that decided to stay here and hang out with Winberg or didn't trust me enough to come to California. You haven't been blown up yet by the atomic bomb that I promised. That's not happening yet. But it's because I saved you by moving.

Like, that's all it was, was just him trying to show off. He also had a room in the back of one of the buses that had like a desk in his books and also a bed. And there were several people that came forward that had survived or gotten out of the temple that said that he would like tell people to go back and wait for him. Once people had D like bused at like rest stops and everything like that, he would use those opportunities to basically like he would flirt while they were driving and then afterward be like, you know, whenever one gets off, once you just head for the back of the bus. Well, and you've got to ask yourself, Marcelline has to know about this, right? She does. Marcelline was sick, and when she couldn't keep up with the vigorous demands of a meth-up, quail-leuded-out, short little Elvis impersonator walking around, he pitches her the idea that he needs to start taking other... He needs to get his manly gratifications from another source.

Yes. So while she didn't like this, excuse me, divorce wasn't an option. No. Her Methodist family told her that she needed to stick all this stuff out. You got crazy Jim Jones just speaking in tongues and telling her that if she leaves, excuse me, he's keeping the kids. She tries to take the kids. He'll kill her. He's just basically manifesting all of his anger onto his wife. And she's in a position where she just can't really get out. She's a prisoner just like every other people's temple member. And Adam said that, you know, I sounded casual because we've talked about so much weird shit so far during this episode.

But there was an instance where she tried to actually divorce or wanted to let him know that she was seeking a divorce. And basically he pulled all the kids downstairs, pointed out and said, you know, your mom's trying to break up the family. You guys need to choose right now who you're staying with. And under that kind of pressure, he's like, choose now. They ended up choosing Jim. and so she has no choice because she's not leaving without the kids. She stays and he basically tells her in no uncertain terms, if you try to take my kids away, I'll kill you.

And at that point, he'd also started to kind of travel with a little bit of an entourage because he was paranoid about not only this nuclear war thing, he was also paranoid about people coming after him personally. So he actually has a few people that he's begun surrounding himself with that actually will carry guns and things like that to protect him. and so she's terrified that one of these people, he's going to order one of these people to basically kill her. So she ends up kind of putting on her brave face

and she ends up staying with him until the very end. But I mean, this stuff is, she's aware of this stuff from pretty much the jump. Yeah, but it's all awful. He's torturing everybody in his life. You can imagine the kids knowing about these extramarital relationships are just torn up too. I mean, their family is just kind of falling up.

part in front of their eyes, but their dad saying everything's okay and their mom's not saying anything because she has no other recourse. So it's a strain on the family while being a strain on the people's temple because he's not only playing matchmaker, he's taking out all of his sexual frustrations and just for lack of a better turn,

raping whoever he wants. And you want to start hearing shit go bad for him. And it just doesn't happen yet. Because by 1970, the People's Temple had branches that were open in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Fernando. And they had actually had such a groundswell of support in these bigger cities that they moved their headquarters from UKIA to San Francisco. Membership in 1973.

So we're talking 1969, there were 300 people. By 1973, membership had reached 2,570 people. that's a lot. And it's still, in major religious numbers, not shit. But when you're talking about a cult in a movement

that's happening in a place where movements gain steam very quickly, that's a lot. I think the birthplace of movement. That's basically what it is. So much so in fact

that there was a guy that was running for the mayor of San Francisco named George Muscone. And he basically went to Jim Jones and was like, you know, I've heard a lot about you.

I know you have a tremendous reach out in the community, I would be wondering if he would be willing to work with me in an effort to, you know, for my bid for the mayoral canacy. And he's like, it's going to be a really tight race. And Jim Jones was like, yeah, definitely. He's like, we have buses that we can pick people up and take them to the polling stations. My congregation can go out there and talk to people and spread pamphlets. And, you know, whatever you need us to do, we're willing to help and, you know, be a part of this. Because we understand that you're going to be able to help the community and help us in turn. It was kind of an unspoken agreement of quit pro quo. Yeah. So. This guy ends up winning this mayoral seat in San Francisco, and kind of as you scratch mine and I'll scratch yours, ends up making Jim Jones the chairman of the housing authority of San Francisco. That's huge. It's huge.

The other just absolutely mystifying part about this is he gains that seat and he becomes friends with Mascone, like two years after a woman named Rose Case, who was a former follower, started speaking out to the local police about these fake healing revivals and telling them that he's just basically pulling shit out of his ass up on stage.

But the thing is, that's not really... I mean, what do you do? If you're a police officer, what do you do? These people paid a ticket for a show and this guy's putting on a show. Like there's no... It kind of gets the ball rolling on showing cracks in the People's Temple. This story comes out, which all it has to do is interest to one reporter or one journalist.

And they can start digging. And if they find something or something else happens, now you've got two journalists writing on this. So they kind of start asking questions. A few things start to actually become exposed, nothing concrete. But you have journalists that are writing these multi, you know, edit or multi, I guess, episodic articles. and everything that are kind of exposing these things about the people's temple, just kind of pointing out some of the weirdness about it. You know, it's a story.

They're looking into, it's a time during, you know, the 70s human rights type stuff. It's huge on everybody's radar. So if there's something about somebody in power that's abusing the people that are underneath them, it's going to get some attention on it. And they're also looking at this guy who is now the chairman of the housing authority is friends with the mayor and is also taking meetings or in on meetings with at one point, was he the vice president or was he the vice president,

Ken? I think he was a candidate. I think he was running Walter Mondale. I'm not 100% sure who his running mate was. Jimmy Carter, maybe? Yeah, he was able to end up, you know, sit in on a meeting with him. And, you know, it's going to draw some attention

from people being like, who is this guy? Like, how did this guy get in here and taking a peek behind the curtain? stuff starts to come out and then we come to December 13th, 1973. Oh, I guess a little bit, well, that would be after it. Before we get to there, when you're talking about these people writing these editorials and coming after them and doing these pieces with these former members, the issue is like the was a bunch of reports released that were, I guess, allegations against planning commission

members of abuse, of mistreatment, all these different things. There's even one alleged rape that a male member of the congregation had come forward and levied against Jones. The issue with all this is nobody wants to put their name to any of these allegations to legitimize them because they know the reach of the church and they know that they will just be harassed, even though they've left the church if they try to speak out against them, what's going to happen? If they put their name out there, they're just going to be tortured for it before anything, before they see any change. And people within this commission aren't going to do anything because they're all jockeying for power. They're backstabbing each other to try to get in Jones's good graces to become his number

two, become his number three. And he actually has them in an effort and in a way to get control over them, basically subjects them to these little tests. One of them, they're having a meeting, and he basically is like, I just want to make sure everyone's loyal here. So what we're going to do is I'm going to pass out these pieces of paper, and I just want you to sign them. And they're like, okay, what is this? And he's like, you're just going to sign your name down. And you're signing it with the knowledge that should you do anything that is detrimental to the church or to my or anything like that, we'll make sure that the rest of this page is filled out with

all of the things that we know about you and maybe even some things that we just kind of embellish or elaborate on or even make up and you've signed it. So this will, this is a, it's a method in which to ensure all of your loyalty. And everyone's like, we're in your fucking planning commission. Like,

we're already lonely. He's like, yep, he's like, not good enough. So the control he's exhibiting over these people is just simply going to grow further and, and further and further.

And then, so I see that you had December 20th. I had December 13th. So let's just say during a balmy week in December, 1973, Jones is actually arrested for beating off in front of an LAPD undercover, vice officer, I think, at a theater. Mail. A male officer at a theater. In the bathroom.

In the bathroom. And so he's arrested for this. And the lawyer that they had was his name, last name, Stone. Tim Stone. own. The lawyer that they had that was in the church that was basically the lawyer for the people's temple, okay, I'm going to see if I can get through this without trying to fucking crack up. But basically the argument during this case was that Jones was afflicted with a urinary tract infection. And in order to basically heal, which he should have just been

able to reach into his penis and pull up the infection. What the hell? Where's the chicken guts now. But instead of doing that, what he had to do was he had to get himself and provide release to himself multiple times a day under doctor's orders. In order to, yeah, in order to go ahead and clean out the pipes to get rid of this UTI. And this somehow, I don't know if because of his clout in the, in his status in the area, he ends up being, you know, of course, like convicted of this because he fucking did it. But at the same time, the record. end up being sealed on it. So no one is able to find this.

I don't even think he got convicted. I think they dismissed the charges and then they sealed the indictment as well. Yeah. Oh, it was the indictment that's right. It wasn't the conviction. It was the indictment that ended up getting sealed. So this ends up getting, no one finds out about this until, you know, well after the fact. Also, kind of showing his reach and his power, one of these journalists that had written

this, you know, multiple episodic article, he got through, I think, four. he had printed four of them. And the paper had actually run them. And I think it was the San Francisco Chronicle or San Francisco Journal or something like that, Examiner. Chronicle Examiner Journal. Yeah. It's one of the three.

And he comes out with these four stories. And the last three or two or three, four, he had four more, were actually going to be the things that dug into like the really damning, like damaging stuff. So Tim Stone pops his head in again and basically tells the paper that if they run anything else, they're going to go and sue them. and in an effort for the paper to avoid the heat from this, pulling the journalist, they talk to them and they're like,

you know what we've had, you know, you've been doing great work, we respect what you're doing here. With this story, you know, we've talked to them, they're threatening legal action against us. He's like, well, that's how you know that they're fucking scared that something's going to come out, that there's legitimacy to this. We're on to something.

And he's like, yeah, but in previous articles that you wrote, you missed, like, counted a number of people that were at this place. You spilled people's temple with an apostrophe, when it's not. A few other just little ticky-tacky things where he maybe got a date wrong by a week. The amount of people that traveled from Indiana. The amount of people that traveled. But they were discrepancies that would, in their argument, that would cause questioning of the entire,

if these are little false truths in here, what else is false? And he's like, I have my sources. This has all been vetted. I have spoken to people. I'm not using their names, of course. but this has all been, you know, heavily researched, like, we're going to need you to kill the story. So story doesn't end up coming out. The guy's name was Lester Consolving.

Lester Consolving. Part of the reason he probably had an axe grind was he was actually a confirmed Episcopalian priest. Yeah. So he was a religious man himself seeing the veil of religion draped over socialism, draped over a cult. Mm-hmm. and basically, you know, after Tim Stone does this thing, he's, he's, he's, you know, he's Jones's right-hand man at this point. He's his confidant. He's his second in command.

He's helped him out of all these jams. Well, Tim Stone. The reason Tim Stone is so important to this story and the reason that he keeps popping up and probably a really fucking good reason why Jim Jones can pull this shit with the examiner and get out of jerk. off in front of the undercover. Tim Stone was the assistant or an assistant district attorney. Yeah, that's right. So he is below the DA working on cases. So any criminal cases will go through the district attorney's office.

He can work to squash this stuff before it becomes a big deal. I think there was even like a special commission or something created to look into the people's temple. It's coming. And he, okay, yeah. So, Dodge's fucking bullet again doesn't get the last four pieces of this article written. And so this guy is continually, as shit progressively gets worse, he's able to basically continue to keep his nose clean or at least kind of keep the dogs at bay for a little bit. Now, stuff is going to start kind of falling apart for him a little bit, which is going to accelerate the craziness.

And what kind of kicks this off is you get this group of eight people. and I'm trying to remember what they were called. They called me eight something. But they were eight youth leaders within the people's temple. And they actually left in 1973. There were allegations of, you know, racism of white staff and administrators or administration. And, you know, they had all gotten together at several points to talk about how this wasn't just a thing where they could just walk away. They had kind of built their lives within this church and they were fucking scared of Jim Jones.

So they had all got together, written this letter, and basically had it delivered, and the eight of them were able to leave. Now, the eight people that ended up leaving are going to be coming back into the story a little bit later as part of like an investigation into the people's temple. They're going to be a source of resource or a source of information once people start taking a little bit closer look into this. Well, this is huge too because a lot of these youth leaders weren't just like newbies. There were some of these youth leaders that had originally moved as children with their families from Indiana to Ukiah now to San Francisco. So potentially your most ardent supporters children are leaving and they're alleging all of these different things against the planning. committee while being so scared of Jones. This is, it has absolutely nothing to do with it, but this stinks of the American Revolution when they're writing about all of their grievances with

Parliament and not with King George. It's funny you said that because they were called the eight revolutionaries. Okay. Interesting. But they, in their letter, they pointed everything towards the planning committee, committee instead of just Jones himself. Yeah, they made sure to be like, while we still respect and we believe in Jim Jones and everything, we feel that people in his inner circle are causing all of the problems. So they were able to dance around the fact that Jim Jones was to blame when they knew fucking full well that that's who it was. But I think maybe by skirting the blame and focusing it somewhere else, they were maybe hoping to avoid repercussion because Jones had the power and had they called him out personally, that's who they would have

been dealing with. But if Jones is able to focus that attention and say, you know what, If there are people, you know, doing wrong things within my church, I'm going to go and get to the bottom of it. And then he ends up looking like the fucking hero again. Yeah, but Jones runs the planning committee. Jones put these people in power to be able to discriminate the way that they weren't. But they control the narrative of the inside. People don't know that from the outside. He's able to, obviously he's able to determine what people are seeing.

Yeah. As Chris was talking about, this is right after the consolving piece. which again, I went back to it because it's so incredible that Mosconi would be good with working alongside Jim Jones, just knowing that there already were like pieces out talking about maybe some of the bad things that he had done. But maybe it had gotten squashed so early by stone that there's a chance that he may not have seen it or they may not have believed it or it just wasn't bad enough at that point. Yeah. But when he gets rewarded with this chair of the San Francisco Housing Commission, Assemblyman, I believe he went on to be the governor of California, Willie Brown,

ends up meeting with him. Current governor at that time, Jerry Brown, they were both attending dinners at Jones, San Francisco apartment. Like, he's not only in with Moscone, he's starting to move his way up California leader. And they're all incredibly just taken aback by this larger than life figure. They're just captivated by him. Yeah, all of these followers. And they're in this beautiful apartment that he's living in. He's not taking under the commune.

They're not seeing what the commune looks like. They're not seeing day to day there or anything like that. They're just seeing kind of the gilded part of this cult. They're also seeing someone who can help them. Yeah. someone who is in a position to sway people to a certain way of thinking. And should those people happen to be voting a certain way or re-electing somebody, that's very useful. Canardt?

Yep. And so he's much more useful at this point than he is essentially a nuisance or a danger to anyone's career. And right around this time that the piece came out that ends up being squashed by stone in 1973, the plant. Planning Commission begins making some exit plans for the temple in case things get a little too hot. Well, four of these articles had already come out with four more on the way. And it'd already been pretty damaging. And at this point, they didn't know if they were going to be able to get those other four articles squashed. So basically, Jones is like, the time is, this is the time.

This is what I've been basically talking about. We need to fucking make our exit strategy. I had a nuclear dream. Yeah, I had another nuclear dream. You know, Rio's not going to work. for us, but you know what will work for us is there's this place that I actually had a pit stop in on the way to Rio called Guyana. And I bet we could go down there and take a look around and we could start our commune there away from the American government. We can do things the way that we want to do

them. We can finally build our idyllic society without interference from, you know, people judging us from the outside or trying to stop us. It was a win-win too because Guyana was terribly afraid of Venezuela who had already kind of tried to poke the bear, or not poke the bear, but poke into Guyana, kind of make some assertions about maybe taking them over. And if you put a large group of Americans between you and Venezuela, you're going to have a pretty good buffer zone that they're not going to want to touch because they don't want to get the U.S. involved in whatever they're doing in South America. Yeah. So, and this was even before these escape plans to Guyana, where even before he was beaten off in the bathroom in front of the undercover cop.

So that was a celebration, man. Yeah, that was the celebration. They scored Guyana. So fall 73 is when they make the escape plans. By summer of 74, they'd already purchased supplies and land. They'd gone down to Guyana. They had spoken to the government. They were like, yeah, fantastic.

Of course we want you guys down here, especially because like you're saying with the whole Venezuela situation, if they end up invading and there's American citizens that are in danger, we think that that's going to, you know, give us the support of. the American government, we might have a little bit of backing. So they're like, yeah, how about this beautiful piece of land? It's not in our capital, which is called Georgetown, but it's going to be its own place. It's a little bit of a distance, not a huge distance, but where they'd be landing in and bringing everybody in would be this air strip, which was right outside this town called, what was it?

The port was... It was just called port something, but I think it was... So anyway, they end up finding this place So I'm going to get the name here of it in just a second But they basically landed this Port Kaituma, that's right They land at Port Kaituma They drive them out into the jungle

And basically show them this stretch of land Which is just fucking jungle Trees everywhere And he's looking around and he's like I really like this He's like but you know where are we supposed to do our farming And they're like oh we're very good at tree removal Like they're like we will make sure we clear a large

area for you guys. He's like, fantastic. We've got the support of the guy on the government and everything to do this. So purchase the land, they purchased supplies, and by December of 74, the first group of People's Temple followers arrive at what is going to be called Jonestown. Not even fucking clever in the name. He's not even trying to hide at this point. What are we going to call it? It's fucking Jonestown. I mean, what's the capital name? George. Oh, yeah.

They're not super original. It's just people move into this part of land and name and shit after him at that point. Yeah, but he didn't even try to name it like anything related to the people's temple. No, fuck it, it's Jonestown. Revival Town, but I don't know. I think the other part about it, just besides feeding his own ego, is it's so indiscriminate that you wouldn't think anything else is going on there. That's true. And there was something that he had said to the Guyanese government member that he was with there, that Guyanese guy says,

we understand that the remoteness of this area could be a problem. And Jones is like, that's the biggest selling point. We don't want to be messed with. That should always be a red flag when somebody's moving a bunch of people to a foreign country. And they say, we just don't want to be messed with. There's a chance they're doing something odd.

But hey, they're going to have money. They're going to provide a buffer against Venezuela. So they kick Gianna some change too. Oh, yeah. They made sure that the coffers were full in order to make the move happen. So they're constructing Jones Town. Now here's the thing.

They're trying to basically build this thing with kind of a skeleton crew at first in the middle of the jungle. Without any type of amenities, you know, fresh water, anything like that. They're building it from fucking scratch. And so it's taking them time to do this. And while this is going on, you know, Jim, I think, is making some trips down there to kind of see the progression. He's not living down there yet. He hasn't made that exodus quite yet. He made a smart move.

he sent a guy down there to do construction on Jonestown, I think his last name was Beam. Mm-hmm. So like John Beam or something like that, beam structural. He must have been a builder. Yeah. So while this is happening, like you say, he's going back and forth. He's spending some time overseeing construction. There's literally, I want to say it was like 74 members or something like that that were down there working.

Yeah, those initial group in December I think was, yeah, 74. There's just, that's nobody. What are you getting done? Well, and they said they sent them there and it was like months before any of the farming equipment would arrive or any of that stuff. So they're literally just trying to subside off of what's been shipped in, trying to basically all the materials would have to be brought in from Georgetown and then taken up to Jones Town. It was like a muddy path going up to this commune. And so this is bare bones building in the middle of the jungle type shit. This is like rough living and all these people are like, it's so nice to.

be down here, like taking part in this and we're building the utopian society. It's all well and good if that's what was actually going on. I would support that, but that is not the case. It's the exact opposite. At the same time, if this is where you're moving everybody in your congregation to, and you have, what was it, it was like 2,700 members, you're going to put 74 people in charge of building housing in a complete infrastructure for 2,500 people. What do we do it? I think he's, He's pushing up his plans in case he needs to get while the getting's good. And in March of 77, this is when it actually pops up. You end up getting a situation, and this has occurred before this,

where you have someone, a married couple within the church. They have a child. Is this Tim Stone? Yep. Okay. Tim Stone and his wife, they have a child. Jim Jones tells Tim Stone to sign over the parental rights basically declaring Jim Jones as the legitimate father of this kid without the mother knowing and once this happens when Jim ends up making his exodus down to Guyana in

Jones town takes this kid with him there's also things coming out as far as um more articles there was a guy name i think Phil Tracy he published an article in the uh it was called New magazine, basically with the collection of stories from this lady named Grace. Oh, from Grace Stone. So it was from her claiming basically that Jim Jones had kidnapped her child taking him to Guyana. And this investigation into this also brought some eyes not only of, you know, I don't know if it would be CPS or anything, but it's going to bring this to attention and kind of put him in the spotlight. It also kind of exposes some other things of possible claims of fraud. this place has been tax exempt for a long time.

So anything that's going to be looking into fraud is going to be a huge blow to this church if it ends up going through. Not only that, but because Grace Stone had been so deep in the people's temple because Tim Stone was way the fuck up there. She was able to get all the information on the assault, the kidnappings essentially that, you know, the kidnapping was her own son. Yeah. So be able to provide information about that. but also to provide information kind of from the inner circle about what was going on there, not just the verbal and behavioral abuse, but also the physical abuse that was happening. And this wasn't just the people within the inner circle.

This was throughout the congregation. You had situations where kids within the People's Temple were going to public schools. They didn't have schools that they were specific to the People's Temple, but teachers noticing like bruises on kids that were all part of families that were in the People's Temple. and they'd be like, oh, we just got them while playing. Well, one of the teachers pulled the kid aside and is like, no, they actually made us go on this like march out in the woods by ourselves without any like food or anything like that. And, you know, we were falling down. It was dark and everything.

We got all of these bruises. So all of a sudden, things start popping up. And there's more and more reason for an investigation to take place. And basically it brings it to the attention of the DA's office to, Tim Stone is probably trying to do his thing within the DA's office to try to squash this thing or try to alter it

and doesn't it end up getting It turns up no evidence of any wrongdoing Because every time they went out there Everything was hunky dory right? Yeah, I will say I don't know I mean Tim Stone can definitely potentially be attributed to this

because it did happen through the DA's office But you have to remember his ex-wife, Grace Stone, who moved out of the church in a way is one of the ones that's levying the accusations. And even though they had split up, even though Stone was still a member of the people's temple,

still under Jim Jones' thumb. Tim. Did I say Jim Stone? You just said Stone. Oh, yeah, Tim. Since he's still in there, he has these feelings towards, like, Jim stole my son.

And part of the reason that Jim believed that he, Tim needed to sign over the paternity was Jones was telling him. And I saw back and forth one way or the other, excuse me, some people said that Stone wasn't involved in, I would use the word affair, but it's not an affair. It was definitely forced by Jim Jones to the point that Jim

thought that the son was actually his. So he tried to convince Tim Stone that even though him and Grace were fucking him and Jim were fucking And it was actually Jim C'd that produced the child So even though Tim's name was on the birth certificate He wanted Tim to sign away all the parental rights I got to think at some point After all of this happens and Tim sees Grace fighting for custody of their son He's probably like well that's that's my kid

I know that's my son I can't keep having this guy attack my ex-1 wife and take my son. I don't know if he really did it. I think this one getting squashed was more because of the influence he had had in the government up to that point. Yeah. Because you have the district attorney's office that's answering to Jerry Brown or answering to Musconi at that point. And all these guys are saying, Jim's on the up and up. And even if he's not on the up and up, we've endorsed him. So you probably got to make something like this go away. At the same time, if this is a six-week inquiry on this specific thing, that might not have turned up any evidence of wrongdoing, but that also opens the door to the possibility that he can be investigated. Oh, absolutely.

And so now he knows that if essentially the corks been taken out of the bottle on these investigations, that if they were able to do a six-week inquiry without Tim Stone being all to shut that down within the first couple days or a week, chances are something else could gain some momentum. and this one actually finds some things because there's shit, you know, skeletons in the closet. So regardless of the findings, Jones and a majority of the members, he basically tells them, hey, I've been telling you guys about this. There's a plan that if we have to take off that if the government is trying to come for me or anything like that, if the government's coming for me, they're coming for you, they're coming for all of us. We're leaving for Jones Town now. So they're still down there building and he's like, hey, we're getting ready to come down there and like,

we're not ready for you guys. We don't have, I think we have enough housing for like 200 people right now. And so Jones, and I'm sure that the drug use probably increases with all the additional stress and kind of the walls feeling like they're closing down on him. He's basically ramping up his sermons. He's leaning heavy into the got to get away from the government. They're coming for us. We need to be in a place where we're free, all this kind of stuff, the propaganda. He's fighting this additional custody case that now the stones are actually.

you bring against him, he's still running these loyalty tests and they start implementing these things that are fucking terrifying called white knights. And it's white and an NIGHTS. So white knights were basically Jim Jones ultimate test of how much control and loyalty he had over these people. What they would do is they would all gather in Jonestown in the pavilion, which was this huge area covered by metal roof. It's where they did like all of their group meetings and their all that. shit. He basically would have people bring out like a vat or a drum of flavor aid. I don't know if it was flavorate at this point, but it was some type of drink. And the first one was actually alcohol. Oh, correct. He will, the first one, he let them drink, but then after he told it, after everyone

drank, he told them that there was poison in it when there really wasn't. And then had actors that were on the take that acted like they were dying. Exactly. And then he looked like a of course, the hero, because it really wasn't poisoned. He had actually just been testing them, and their, you know, loyalty had been confirmed. Well, these white knights were essentially dry runs of what was going to be his plan, should he feel that the situation was hopeless. And he would call together all of these people and basically have them drink this drink, that he told them that there was poison in.

And, you know, after 45 minutes or an hour or whatnot, he would finally, And you'd have people that had a placebo effect, so they felt like they were sick. You had people throwing up. And he would finally then tell them, you know, there's not poison in it this time. But he knew then he had that control of that these people would do this when he called upon them to do it. It's just, it's literally psychological torture. And there were multiple instances of this. Yeah.

It wasn't just one dry run. He did this multiple times just to confirm that he had this type of control over these people. You just, at that point in time, how many times do you have to go through white nights before you just finally resign yourself that if it does happen, at least you won't have to worry about it happening anymore. Like, it just, it's one of those things that keeps building up. And something that we haven't mentioned yet that just somehow has to, even though we didn't say you guys already had to have known it at this point. Jones loved guns. Jones was a very big fan of guns. and this whole entire time that they're in Guyana and their building,

the two things that Jones loves the most, which were drugs and guns, were being shipped in on a monthly basis down to Guyana. And the guns were shipped under the, like being disguised as like bibles. Yeah. Crates of Bibles. And as this is going on and happening,

that's, is there anything bigger than a federal crime? Like crossing into. international lines? International crime would probably be bigger than general. Yeah. So this is international crime that you're moving guns and drugs all the way to a whole separate continent.

But they're stocking the shelves with basically everything that you would need to defend yourself and all of these different paralytics and drugs that they're stalking up down there so they can control chemically anything that they can't shut down physically. The main, and we'll get to in a second, but the main thing they used for the, the actual poison was it was a type of cyanide. And they got it through, I want to say it was a painting supply company, because cyanide was used to do what in painting? I think clean brushes.

Something like that, but they were able to acquire it in pretty significant amounts because, hey, they're opening a commune. They need a lot of painting supplies and everything. So no one really bat an eye about this. In addition to that, like Adam said, they had a ton of other, like medical grade, barbiturates, tranquilizers. Awesome stuff. antidepressants, all the goodies.

Goody bags. So as they're all moving down there, by May of 1977, Jones and 600 followers arrived. 400 more would arrive within the coming months. And at this point, once they moved down there, when they were figuring out how much money the church was worth, they said they had about $10 million in assets. So they had some money to do this. And I think you said that they had moved a lot of that money over to Russia or to other, like, offshore accounts where it couldn't be seized or frozen or anything.

like that. Yep. Not to Russia yet, but offshore accounts with the idea that if anything were to happen to Jones or the temple, those assets would then be moved to the USSR. Yep. While they're also down there, Jones had been, you know, of course he's talking to members of in his inner circle. And he had made a quote that I thought was just, I think it's pretty much an encapsulation of just any cult in general. But I mean, it makes a lot of sense. what he's saying. He basically says, let's keep them poor and tired, because if they're poor, they can't escape. And if they're tired, they can't make plans. So people were working six days a week, building, farming, anything they needed to do around this commune. And they would spend the Sunday that

they had off basically attending these hour-long sermons all day. Hours long, yeah. Yeah, hours long. And then while they weren't attending these sermons while they were working, there was loudspeakers all over the commune to where Jim would just basically sit up in his little cabin or whatever it was. They had an East House and a West House. West House, I think, was where Jim and his family lived. The East House was where people that were like visiting or people he wanted to impress would actually stay. And he would just sit in his house and basically have the only access to the loudspeakers and would basically just be preaching these sermons day in and day out while these people were working on building these houses

and the infrastructure and farming these fields. While they were sleeping, he was playing. playing the hits. He was playing tapes of past sermons and past sermons. It was just complete and total immersion in this stuff to where you were tired, but you had no one talking to you. You always heard. And at this point, they started calling him father, right? Yeah, yeah. The father, they'd been calling them this for a while, but you heard the father's message at all times. So it was just constant fucking bombardment of this guy day in, day out, and at night. You get no peace. You get no chance to try to reset your brain or really put any logic into what you're doing just

thinking about why am I here? What am I getting out of this? Not to mention, there was a lot of people that were believed to have traveled down to Guyana on fake passports. And the people that weren't traveling on fake passports when they got down there, all of their documents were seized by the planning commission. So even if you want to escape, how are you going to leave the country? You're surrounded not only by jungle at that point, but if you're could get to port kaituma you couldn't pay for a plane to get you to georgetown to then get back anywhere so you were pretty much trapped there in in every sense there were also people that were armed there were armed guards there that were there for their protection i think they called them

the red red brigade which i'm wondering if that was a touch like play on communism the red army the red army good chance well even if you make it to georgetown there's still an outpost that they had in Georgetown that they could stop you there Yeah Yeah Now the majority of people at Jonestown Were either minors or the elderly And I think they said it was 68% black right

Yes M-I-N-O-R-S not M-I-N-E-R-S Yes they could have used some actual miners there If they were trying to dig for you know Or resources things like that No but they were younger Around this time as well He started to kind of show signs that he might have been sick

he had times where he would gain weight very rapidly and lose weight very rapidly he started to become more erratic he started to kind of slur slur in some of his sermons chances are he was probably just taken some type of fucking cocktail of a whole bunch of different shit

because he knew kind of that the writing was going to be on the wall and it basically came in the form of this guy named Leo Ryan who was a congress was he a national congressman or a California congressman so he was a California He was in D.C.

Okay. Oh, so he was part of the House. Yes. So he was a congressman in the House of Representatives. So in 1978, Tim Stone in a group called the Concerned Relatives visited California Congressman Leo Ryan in Washington. And basically provided him enough information which Tim Stone would have access to everything. He was the fucking lawyer for Jim Jones and for the People's Temple. And basically laid this out on the table for Leo Ryan.

And it was like, you need to do something about this. There's like 900 people plus down there at Jonestown. They're being abused. They can't leave. And in November 78, Leo Ryan and NBC camera crew, news reporters from a couple different outlets. And then also a collection of the people that were in the concerned relatives. They were a group called the Concerned Relatives. Basically traveled to Guyana on just kind of a fact-finding mission to kind of see what the status of Jonestown was, how the people were getting along.

They didn't go with an armed guard or anyone like that or an escort. Why? It was basic, yeah, exactly. It was a fact-finding information. They were just going down there to kind of see what everyone was doing and how the, you know, the welfare or welfare of everyone there was. Well, and the U.S. provided Dick for help. Yeah. Because the State Department, Leo Ryan tells them that he's going on this fact-finding mission.

He goes and talks to the State Department, talks to some of the intelligence heads. He goes, okay, what do you guys have on the People's Temple? And they're like, fucking nothing for you. Yeah. And he goes, why? He goes, you want us to hand over confidential documents on a religion in a place that has freedom of religion in what, the Bill of Rights? Like, we're not going to turn over governmental secrets that we have on something that we

give tax exempt status to. Like, this seems like a very bad idea. It's not going to look good on us. A lot of red tape. And at the same time, you're going after American citizens. So it's still kind of, there's this. weird, like, we're not going to help you, but we'll still let you go. Part of the thing that's really steaming over Jones is through this custody case that Grace is putting on to try to get

her son back. Tim now as well. Yeah, who's living in Guyana. They've actually got the Guyanese government in on it too. She's living in Georgetown, I believe. She comes down with the concerned citizens. Yes, but I believe her and Tim Stone stay in Georgetown. Because they, when they come down for the fact-finding missions. Yes,

when they come down. Because they're soft targets. Exactly. But all of these, throughout this custody case, every single time Jones is compelled to show up to court with Greystone's son,

he just refuses. So finally, after enough times of that, these warrants are put out for his arrest in the United States. They talked to Guyana. Part of the reason that they chose Guyana,

there was at that time, no extradition treaty between them in the United States. the Guyanese government starts compelling Jones to come out with the kid. He's still telling them no. So he's starting to run a foul of the government that he was supposed to be friends with in the closest thing that could protect. Sanctuary isn't becoming sanctuary much longer.

Yep. The walls are kind of closing in. So not to fast forward, but you talk about he was real messed up. I think they said when they did his autopsy, it might have been phenobarbital, which I think. is what killed Michael Jackson. It was some anesthetic. They said that when they did the autopsy,

he was found with so much of it in his system. It would be considered a lethal dose for like 99.5% of the population. Someone who hadn't been a heavy user. Yeah. To build up the tolerance. So he was loading himself up on anything he had down there. And

anything else that they had as far as a way to put somebody out or calm them down or anything like that, anybody that ever just finally had enough or was trying to leave, they would consider them long-term care risks where they would actually take them into a cabin that they converted into a place where they would just feed them drugs and keep them comatose until they could bring them out and they just weren't a threat anymore.

They said there were people just walking around Jonestown that looked like zombies. because they were so zooted out of their minds because they were the people trying to leave. Got to keep them compliant. Yeah. So Leo Jones ends up getting into Georgetown with this. Oh, sorry. Yeah.

A lot of Joneses, Tim, Stones, Jones, all that stuff. So Leo Ryan ends up getting into Georgetown, November 15th of 70, where this is 78. Yes. And two days later, after, you know, Tim and Marcy? What's Stone's wife's name? Grace. Oh, sorry, Grace.

it's late in the podcast. I'm getting names mixed up. Marceline Grace. That's right. So Grace and Tim stay in Georgetown. Two days later, the not really committee, but the group ends up flying to Port Kaituma and then are trucked into Jonestown. Now, the first day they get there, everything looks fantastic.

Everyone's happy. Everyone's smiling. There's a big feast held in the honor as Ryan to her Jonestown. He meets Jim Jones. they're walking around, they're talking about stuff. All the people are just praising Jim Jones. He's wonderful. We love it here. That night, you know, they're in the communal center with the big covered area.

A band was playing while members danced and celebrated. I think Leo Ryan even got up there and he's like, given a speech. He's like, this is not at all what I thought I was going to be walking into. You guys all look fantastic. Everyone here seems happy to be here. It's really nice to see. I had feared something worse. And as, you know,

know, people are kind of making the rounds, whether it be journalists, the camera crew, people that were with the concerned relatives that were doing kind of wellness checks on people, their relatives, people that, you know, they didn't know or didn't know or knew just, you know, through their time with the people's temple, they're kind of conducting these little private interviews. And one guy ends up writing a note. Vernon Gosney. Vernon Gosny.

Gosney, yeah. Vernon Gosney, yeah. Vernon Gosny passes a note to an NBC reporter. And as he's passing this note, he's got it palmed. He goes up to the NBC reporter and goes to try to slide the note in his jacket. The note slips out of his hand and falls onto the ground. And almost instantly, a little kid points and starts yelling, he's passing a note, he's passing a note. Because these people were indoctrinated to fucking rat on each other.

Anything that was showing disloyalty or that someone might be trying to leave was supposed to be pointed. out. And as this is happening, he thinks he's caught, he picks the note back up and goes to hand it to the reporter. It's like, I think you drop this. And the reporter's like, I don't think I, he's like, I think you drop this. And the reporter gets it. And he's like, oh, yeah, thank you. And goes and reads it. And it's basically this request to help them leave, to get them the fuck out of there, along with, I think, this 18 year old girl named Monica Bagby. In addition to this, they go back, and I think they go back to Port Kaituma. They had requested to stay there. And, Joe, was like, no, we don't have room for anyone.

We, you know, no room at all. We're, you know, that's, you guys are going to have to stay somewhere else. So they end up going back to Port Kaituma. And I think they end up staying at Port Kaituma. And while they're there, this guy bust out this known. He's like, hey, you know, Congressman Ryan, and I've received this note from somebody. And they end up going back the next day.

As they go back the next day, completely different vibe around Jones Town. And this is basically due to the first, fact that news of these people that were wanting to be defectors or disloyal as Jim Jones was called it traders kind of had spread around and while this spreads around all of a sudden there's this talk about well if these people are leaving it starts to kind of give courage to other people that were scared to do this but wanted to get the fuck out and basically while the Ryan party kind of attempted to leave with the members another member basically sneaks up

behind Ryan. While they're trying to gather these people that are wanting to leave, these people are dragging suitcases across these muddy paths, trying to pull their trunks. People are trying to help them. And kind of in all the chaos, this member sneaks up behind Leo Ryan and holds a knife to his throat. And basically is just going to kill him in order to, because what he feels is he's going to stop this whole thing. Well, a bunch of the other members of the people's temple see this guy. They jump on him, they pull him off of him. Ryan's not hurt, but during this entire time, they noticed that Jim Jones hasn't said a word. He's just staring at all this happening. Just watching it. Didn't even flinch. Didn't call this guy to stand down or anything like that.

So after they pull this guy away, as the party basically is trying to bust ass to get the fuck out of there, they load up in the trucks. They had to call in another plane on their way back to Port Kaituma because now there were more people than they were expecting to leave. and they're being bust back by members of the temple, like loyal members of the temple that are driving these trucks, and they end up getting back to the airstrip, and as they're kind of getting off trying to load up in these planes, there's several people.

I think there was close to what, like 30 people, including the people that they had, that wanted to defect, that includes Ryan, the media, and all these other people. So as they're starting to kind of load up the plane and wanting to get boarded, this dump truck basically starts pulling up to the airfield. And they can't see what's in the back of it. They just see someone driving it,

but they know the truck is from Jonestown. And this truck ends up pulling up kind of alongside, a little bit of distance away from the plane, but alongside the plane. And as these people are just loading their luggage and boarding, these guys pop up out of the back of it and just start opening fire on this group. Yeah.

The red, what were they called? The Red Brigade is who these guys were. Well, and this whole entire fact-finding mission had hinged on Ryan getting permission from Jones to come see Jones Town. And there were so many requests that he put in where he would ask to come down and visit and say, oh, Father Jones is way too busy for this. Come back another time. We'll tell you when we want you here. and so Jones, or it would come back to Ryan. Ryan would then say, well, we need to do this.

These are American citizens. These are my constituents that are concerned I need in there. They'd say, well, Mr. Jones is sick, or Father Jones is sick. He doesn't really want you being here or anything like that. And then finally, Ryan sets his nuts on the table and hits Jones where it hurts. And he goes, well, I was up touring some of your guys' areas in the People's Temple. and I didn't see anybody with the Bible. There were no scriptural references anywhere.

There were no pictures of the Lord or anything like that. And for you guys being a tax-exempt church, it seems like maybe you're not doing church things. Not very church-y. No. For being tax-exempt. And so once Jones hears that Ryan's going to be looking into his money situation, then Jones finally agreed.

to let this happen. So you have to think that Jones wasn't too pleased about this fact-finding mission. He was definitely not happy that Ryan was taking these defectors back with him. He had actually, I don't know if he ordered it or if this was just somebody that got a wild hair. I'm assuming he probably ordered it.

There was actually a defector whose wife Jones was having sex with had said, hey, I want to get out of here. A few of the surviving members. There were so few people that survived this. It actually said that they knew he was one of the most ardent supporters and there's no way in hell that he would ever defect. So they knew something was up.

It was like everyone was loading up on the trucks at Jonestown. And all of a sudden this guy runs out. I was like, hey, wait, wait, wait, I want to go too. And everyone's just looked at this guy. He gets on because they're taking anybody that wants to leave. And as they get back and they're able to talk to Ryan, they're like, hey, you should know that this guy, he's 100%. Jim Jones guy. He's down. This guy would never

fucking leave him in a million years. This guy, when they end up attacking, when the red, why do I keep forgetting this? The Red Brigade. Yeah. You want to say Red Army. I do. When the Red Brigade ends up opening fire, prior to that happening, or kind of concurrently, this guy goes after the pilot. And they end up, I think, getting him off and subduing him somehow. But this guy is basically trying to, by any means possible,

if the Red Brigade fails or this plane ends up taking off, he was supposed to actually crash the plane. He was put on the plane actually that Ryan was actually not. He was put on the other plane. His job, as Jim Jones sent him, was to be on the plane where Ryan was and crash it after the plane had taken off. I think maybe the Red Brigade was just sent as a backup. Maybe after Jones sent that guy, he's like,

I'm not going to leave it just to one guy. And he's like, you guys load up in the truck and take care of this. Yeah, and I think it was a measure of, were the defectors going to be on the other plane too because they weren't getting out of this alive. No. So as soon as they open up fire, they kill five,

including Ryan. The fict defector opens fire on the airplane, ends up shooting, I believe it was one of the NBC cameramen. And while this chaos is going on, everybody that is, I think probably more trained for this situation living in Jonestown,

And as soon as they hear gunfire, they either hit the ground or they sprint for the jungle. Fucking got to run to the jungle. Yeah. They take cover. So only five killed, which, again, is far, far too many. Tiddly winks for what we're about to talk about. Most of them were injured in the attack, whether it be from trying to get away or a bullet wound or anything like that. We go back to camp.

Marcelline is trying to calm down the members. after Ryan and the defectors left. Defector sounds like a dirty word. Refugees? Yeah. Okay. After the refugees left. And Jim is giving the final go-ahead

on the mixture of flavor aid that is going to be handed out. The mixture of flavor aid, we're going to be getting into some scientific words. They use grape flavorade. ade first. Great taste. Great choice on the flavoring. I would have probably gone orange myself, personally. I'm more of an orange man. Grape also a good second, though. Um, dipth, ooh, this is late in the episode for this. Dipthy hydramine. Yeah, dip in hydramine. Um,

promethazine, I know that one. Uh, chloropramezene, uh, chloroquine, uh, chloroquin, uh, chloral hydrate, diazepam, which is again, it's a mixture of sedatives. And then, along with the sedatives, the ingredient that everybody is going to end up perishing from is the cyanide. So it's supposed to take away all the pain, and it's supposed to kill you painlessly. And me and Adam were having this conversation about during the phase of the white nights and everything like that, they would also be working on the actual formula. They wouldn't poison it at that time, but they were working toward the stuff that they were going to be using. And it went through several iterations where he's talking to basically the people that are making this.

and they're like it's too bitter and we were just talking like who's fucking testing this shit like who gets the they have to draw straws and then someone has to be like I'm just going to take a taste enough to like tell you what it tastes like and I'm going to spit it out

even spitting that stuff out can you imagine just all of a sudden your hands start going numb and you're just like oh man I feel I'm sleepy I'm going to go lay down yeah it's cyanide poisoning yeah even if it's just in your mouth there has to be some type

of reaction You have to absorb it into sublingually, into your mouth, wherever it's happening. It has to be getting into your system somehow. This is my whole thought behind, like, how we figured out that rocks were inedible. Yeah. It was probably either the weakest or the- The simplest member of the tribe would go out there and eat a rock if he died. No big loss.

No, that we can't eat rocks. Whereas this is happening, they actually were sick enough to start testing this out to try to get the right mix to kill on pit. because they said they had sort of like the same digestive organ system similar to a human. And they had access to pigs probably. Yeah, but at the same time, is that really your biggest thought? Yeah, Porky's not telling you if this stuff tastes good or not. What are you going to judge it on if the pig will actually eat it or not or drink it?

But that's what it is. It's, you're only solely basing this on the taste because it's not like you can give them too much cyanide. Yeah. So you're just trying to figure out. You just might not give them enough tranquilizer or something like that to make it, make it painless. So as he's given this call to basically everyone gather up like this alert, I think it was like actually something over the loudspeaker was like alert, alert, alert, and that was their signal to actually all meet a kind of the communal center. You have roughly 900, a little over 900 people

all meeting at this, you know, all gathering in this group. Jomes comes out and basically tells them, hey, this is the time they're coming for us. While he's actually addressing them, he gets the news of what happened at the airstrip, Ryan being killed. and knows at this point that there is no getting out of this, there's no going back. He gave the fucking order. So he knew what was going to happen, which is probably why he,

before they even got back, why he started to give the go ahead for that. And basically tells his people that all of, you know, the government's going to come down. They're actually going to destroy all of us. They're going to destroy what we worked for, which I don't get how these people are sitting there thinking like,

well, we didn't issue that order. We weren't the ones like they forget how. law works where they're thinking like we didn't pull the trigger on these people we haven't done anything wrong but he somehow has gained so much trust with these people that they're just listening to him tell them that their way of life is going to be destroyed they're going to be destroyed because they've taken part by association in this act and that you know the u.s. military was going to come after them the guiana military was probably going to be coming after them as well and would take Jones Town and kill everybody.

I don't know if he would have gone through with the full plan had they killed everybody at the airstrip. But they still would have found out because what's going to happen when Jones and his party within two days doesn't radio back to Georgetown or something,

they're going to know something happened. And that's why also, after that occurred, that's why the guy on a military was so quick to actually be able to respond to find out what was happening. Well, a big part of that was the actual base that was back in Georgetown. Once she had gotten the alert from Marcelline

that the white night was an actual go this time, she put out a radio call saying that the enemy was coming. They're all going, or we're all going to perish before we let them take us. And she actually, in Georgetown, scooped up her three kids and took them into the bathroom and stabbed all of them to death. their throats before she killed herself. So the white night incident that happened in Jonestown wasn't just the only place where there was death because of this. It's, it's, and we're not going to talk about the conspiracy theories on this because the story is wild enough as it is.

And there's not a lot of merit. There's some connections, but this is MK. Ultra Shit, or what sounds like is essentially programming that when they're told to do this specific act, there's really not a lot of question. you know, he's up there in front of these 900 people basically telling them that, you know, they're not giving up. They're committing revolutionary suicide as, you know, as a stance. It's still got the fucking word in it, even though if you try to church it up and put revolutionary in front of it, it's still got suicide in there. Well, revolutionary suicide was a belief of the Black Panthers, and he so screwed up the translation of Revolutionary Suicide. When the Black Panthers were talking about Revolutionary Suicide, their definition. of it was to understand that once they fight the oppressors and they fight the people

stronger than them, that there was a great chance that they were going to die trying to progress their beliefs. So not that everybody was going to commit suicide for a revolution, but because they knowingly went into something that they knew was probably going to kill them. So just a complete bastardization of that term. But he just kept driving home that what they did would start a revolution, which, is so ass backwards to me, but at the same time, we're trying to dissect the words of a man who is so doped up. Yeah.

I mean, what? You can't. The crazy is now pharmaceutically and is crazy at this point. There was a lady that kind of was a dissenter, at least voiced her opinion, because he asked people, like, if you have a problem with this, please speak out. She stood up and she's like, this doesn't make any sense. She's like, look at these children here. Like, all these children are in a sense, they deserve to live lives.

and his response to that was that a life, this life was not worth living or a life in like subjugation or something like that wasn't worth living. And she was like, well, what about Russia? You told us one of the contingency plans might be for us to go to Russia. We moved from California to here.

Can't we move from here to Russia? He's like, yeah, they don't want us. So basically he already has his mindset. There is no contingency plan. There is no backup. And after this lady is pretty much just kind of like realizes that she's talking to a wall, they start passing out the flavor aid.

Kind of weird for me to talk about this because I have a kid, so this hits a little bit differently. You want me there? No, I got it. So they bring out the big vats. Adults are drinking and everything. The children that, you know, aren't drinking it, they're basically filling up syringes like you would give your kid medicine and basically squirting it into kids' mouths. The adults kind of drink it after the kids are taken care of. And I think it was supposed to take the effective time.

Was it 45 minutes? I think they said the first people would start to pass within the first 15 minutes of the children, the smaller. Okay. And then it would just keep moving, moving, moving progressively. People get sicker. As they're taking these turns, drinking it with the security force, kind of being the last to drink it. Well, not only were they the last to drink it, but as they're all within this communal area, they're kind of surrounded by the Red Brigade with guns and everything.

thing. So not only do you have this pressure of this fucking father telling you to that this is the only way out. Now you have the added pressure of looking over to the side and being like, oh, I'm putting two and two together. Either I drink this or they're going to shoot me. Because what also ends up happening is once they discovered Jonestown and what went on here, not everybody just had drank the fucking flavor it. I see I didn't say drink the Kool-Lade that time. Not everybody drank the flavor. people tried to resist and those people that did try to resist were actually subdued and injected directly with cyanide. None of that other shit with it. And when you're injected with just cyanide, that's when it's the really fucking painful death

where you're foaming at the mouth and all of that shit. The reason we know most of what goes on during this period in time was there's a 42-minute recording that Jim Jones made of this whole entire thing going on. The final sermon or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it. Now, there are people that end up not taking this. They end up either being out in the fields where they can kind of get away from the gathering and out of the eyes of the security. One person ended up sleeping through it was in their bunk sleeping.

And so you have a few people that weren't, you know, participants in this. But then at the same time, that makes for some of the worst instances, there was a guy in the documentary I was watching that it didn't, you know, cover it until the end when they're talking about Jonestown. But his wife and his kid were there. And he, his kid was like one or two years old. And by the time he got to them, they had already taken it. And they were already dead. And so he's sitting there holding his dead wife who's holding their dead baby surrounded just by fucking death. I was looking at this guy when he was doing the interviews. I'm like, fuck man, how are you still alive. Like that, that to me is just that fucking loss. Like, that would take your entire

reason for living. But this guy was openly talking about this. Like, it really drives home how fucking horrible this instant was. And so as he's basically, you know, people are drinking this. He's giving his final sermon. Um, he's telling people to, to stop complaining, basically. He's responding to complaints. He's telling people, mother, mother, please. Please, please. He's basically handling objections as he's, you know, it's the thing where he's like tipping the cup into their mouth. He's like, shh, shh, shh. And basically, 900 in total, 918 people end up dying at Jonestown.

Counting the air strip. Counting, yes. And Georgetown. I think it was 906 total or 908 total from the actual poisoning instance at Jones Town, including Jim, who, surprise, surprised, didn't drink the. fucking flavor aid, but waited until everybody else had taken and he was satisfied that everybody was on the right path and then took the

way out by fucking shooting himself in the head. I want to push back on it with my one conspiracy for this episode. We did a Colt. We got a throwing conspiracy. Okay. I don't think Jim Jones shot himself. Did he get someone shoot him? I think Jim Jones had a plan in place

that after everyone killed themselves, he was going to flee to Cuba. Now, there was some talk that one of the survivors that they had found that was away from the camp and all this was happening Was actually a pilot and There was a belief that the reason that the Red Brigade showed up to kill everybody before they left Was that there would be one plane that was still there. Oh yeah, they didn't shoot both planes They had fired into the larger of the planes that everybody, but they left the other plane? Yeah, and touched

So potentially Jones plan was he had smuggled some money and out to some people that was just cash in bags basically. He was going to wait until everybody was dead. He was going to then flee to the plane. The person that didn't drink any flavor aid that was outside of there that had the pilot's license would then fly them to Cuba. There's a belief that because the gun that was traced back to the one that he shot himself with allegedly. He was like 20 feet away from him.

Yeah. Which is pretty far away that. And then Jones head was actually, the way that his body was laying his head was on a pillow. So almost as if after he was killed, someone set him in that position and gave him comfort. So you think one of the survivors came upon or even someone that had taken it and it hadn't kicked in yet. Or somebody that knew he was getting ready to get the fuck out of there. Yeah. So regardless, he fucking dies doesn't have to answer for all of this shit.

And they call this thing, if you ever hear about it, they call this the Jonestown Massacre. And I do think that that's an. apt. It shouldn't be called the Jones Town suicide. It is a massacre in the sense that one person is essentially responsible for this and it's fucking Jim Jones. He's responsible for over 900 people dying. 85 and it's weird to say this, but thankfully 85 managed to actually escape the death ritual. All of his legal team somehow escaped the death ritual. They told them that they would tell the story of Jonestown properly. As they're pulling out, beep, beep, we'll tell your story. Yeah, they're all leaving in like the three Mercedes that are in Guyana.

Weirdly enough, Jones three sons were actually in Georgetown during the ritual. They were, I think, at some point they had been convinced they started a basketball team. Yes. And they were actually in Georgetown playing in a basketball tournament. They had lost their game. Against the Guyanese national team.

Against the Guyanese national team. They had lost their game. But then they had reported back in, I think one of his sons, I can't remember which one was called. And it's like, hey, we won. We have another game. So they were going to get to stay a little bit long. And yeah, they end up surviving.

There's testimony from from his kids and everything. It's pretty interesting if you want to go listen because later in life after they got out of this and after this instance, they really realized what their father was. There was also a note written by Marcellin and was basically kind of a last, last will and testament or kind of last directive for what they wanted to do. And basically directed all of the remaining assets to be transferred to the. communist party of the Soviet Union. And it ended up being to the tune of $7.3 million. So, I mean, I don't know what more to say about this other than just like, fuck. Yeah, and it's, I focus so much on the cult leaders during cult episodes and just the fact that I like to study these guys.

that sometimes I forget about the people that are involved. And just you ask yourself how somebody could have such a hold on 900 people that he could tell them to drink poison. And basically everybody did. But the lives and the conditions that these people were living in, it's so ironic that he talked about not wanting to live under subjugation because that's all these people were. They moved, some of these people moved all the way from Indiana. to California. And then life was okay.

It wasn't great. They were being followed by the planning committee. They were just being extorted in every which way to stay in this place. That wasn't everybody. There were some people that were just fine with what was going on. Then they end up moving down to Guiana, which they're told is going to be this socialist paradise. They're promised land. It's their utopia.

They get down there. Their work to the bone, 12-hour shifts, six, sometimes seven days a week. And if they're not working, they're living. literally listening to sermons 24-7 on repeat. They're being fed gruel. They're not getting these wonderful, because the area that they had wasn't really suitable for farming. They had some fields,

but it wasn't enough to feed this many people. They didn't have the infrastructure to be able to do. It wasn't a sustainable thing with that many people. And, yeah, just for somebody to have that much control to be able to exhibit that, and, you know, doing this podcast, we've done so many episodes on wars and battles that you can kind of get desensitized to the number when you just say 900 versus you know stalingrad a million that kind of stuff but when you compare the two and like one's a battle and the other is the fucking work of one man who has somehow brainwashed all of these people into paying the ultimate price it kind of resets that perspective that it's almost the this is a horrible term. It's the quality of the casualty. It's the substance of the casualty and the

story behind it. While all of them are tragic in their own ways, this one fucking hits because a third, if not more of these people that died were minors. We're fucking kids. And that fucking hits me in like a very raw way because just like that lady that stood up and tried to object, like those kids were innocent. They were dragged into those situations. And some of them, even the ones that were 17, 18, you know, kids' brains are fucking mush and everything. And they trusted that they were doing something good with their lives and that they were helping to build the world that they had envisioned and wanted to live in. And instead, they essentially get tranquilizer and fucking death syrup. Yeah, there's no, there's no really silver lining in this just because there was so much tragedy.

and it did hit children worse than anyone else. The only real kind of, I guess, bow you can tie on it is, luckily something that we talked about earlier, there wasn't a contingency plan to continue the People's Temple once Jim Jones was gone. When Jim Jones left to go on vacation,

the church fell into disarray because he didn't leave any doctrine behind. There was no future plans beyond Jim Jones' life for the People's Temple. so after he perished, there were still people in the United States. There were still people that were working for the people's temple actively after this happened. Which told you that this was a plan for a long time, that this is how he envisioned it ending for a very long time.

Yeah, but once he died, if there's no future plans, what do you do? You have to figure out how to pick up the pieces. You have to figure out how to go back to a life after everything had been taken from you to live on these communes. you have no ties to the outside world because everybody else told you that you were crazy for following this guy that you believed in and to a certain extent there's a minute amount of blame

that they can take for putting their faith in somebody to try to make their lives better because that's sort of what everybody looks for in life. Yeah. And it's what you hope for in your leaders and they found somebody to do it and now they just have nothing. So what do you do?

I think that's the biggest thing is the biggest takeaway from this is question. Don't be afraid to question things that don't make sense. Don't put all of your faith in one entity, one individual, one source of power,

like, question it. I think that's what I like about this podcast is that when we get to review these things, we take a deep dive, we try to explore the psychology, bullshit around about what this person might have been thinking,

but at the same time, we get to question what these people were thinking and what the motives were. And even on a depressing subject like this, it's still very fascinating. The sunk cost fallacy in any of these situations, the thought that you've already put so much into it

that you have to follow it through is literally just that it's a fallacy. It's not something that you have to continue to believe because people can rebuild. You're strong enough, if you're strong enough to overcome being a cult member, you're strong enough to rebuild your life. Well, I'm a ranger's fan.

I don't know if that's true. Not yet. It's hurt me so much. All right, well, happy Halloween, guys. Hope you enjoyed it. We kept it for a long one, three plus hours. You guys are hard, fucking core. There was a lot to discuss, a lot of Jim Jones.

Last thing I'm going to say on this one before I passed it over to the bed guy, fucking kiss your kids tonight. You? I'll kiss my dog. Okay, sounds good. Well, thanks for joining us on another one, guys. We'll catch you next week. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode.

If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like. button, follow us. If you didn't like what you heard, still hit that anyway, because we'll probably cover something in the future that you do like. Please follow us on our social media. Adam, hit them with it. Our Instagram is historically high pod, historically high POD, and we are on Twitter at historically high. That's historically H.I. All right. And if you guys want to send in any feedback suggestions, hit us up on those two, or you can even do it on Gmail. It's historically high podcast at gmail.com. Thanks again. Peace.