You're Wrong About - The Jonestown Massacre

Episode Date: June 16, 2018

Special guest Rachel Monroe tells Mike and Sarah what's really behind the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Digressions include David Koresh, East Germany and how flower children were the first millennials. Mike inadvertently reveals his prejudice against extroverts. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

Also, I'm on an Abdomenizer Ball today, by the way, so if I'm like extra great, then we can know that that's why. Welcome to You're Wrong About, a show where we tell America what it's wrong about. I'm Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. And I'm Sarah Marshall. And I'm a writer for BuzzFeed and The New Republic, and also some other places. Today, we have a special guest and a special topic. And our guest today is Rachel Monroe, which Michael, have you read any of Rachel's work? I googled Rachel this morning and I found that I have read a number of your articles

and that you have won a number of awards that I have been rejected for. I don't think I've won a single award. Weren't you one of the 40 notable women writers under 40? I didn't get that. Yeah, aren't you? Is that an award? I didn't get any money. I guess I hear a word. I think I heard a check, maybe. So yeah, tell us about yourself, Rachel. Yeah.

Oh, me, Rachel. I am a writer. I live out here in Martha, Texas. I write about many different things, but I write a lot about crime recently for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, many different places that I'm working on a book about women in crime and the obsession with true crime. And today, we're talking about Jonestown, right? Yeah. Yeah. And specifically, the phrase drinking the Kool-Aid. Yeah, I was thinking that's where we should start.

Like, what should we think about that phrase? Well, I guess the first pedantic thing that one would say about it is that it wasn't Kool-Aid, right? That it was flavoring. If the Kool-Aid wasn't even Kool-Aid. Why is it, Rachel, that when there's like something that we misremember in all these complicated dimensions, we start by getting like the most visible facts, right? Like everyone has Nancy Kerrigan's like getting hit by a lead pipe or a wrench. It was a police baton. All of them is conceptions with Jonestown. It's like we're signaling them by not bothering to remember what they even actually drank.

Like, why do we do that? Maybe it's just the lasting power of the brand, right? They bought the cheap generic stuff, but that word doesn't linger in our heads in the same way. That's true. Can we start by talking about like what's the, what do you see is the culturally accepted version of this? Like when you, when the average, like John Q driveway here is drinking the Kool-Aid, like what does he think? To put words in his mouth, I guess it would be that you had a bunch of total crazy hippies.

I think a lot of people think of Jonestown as being a hippie phenomenon just because it happened in the 70s and that these, these crazy hippies went out and were in thrall of a, to a madman who instructed them to kill themselves and they all obeyed. That's what I started off thinking too. I think that there was just this automaton like quality to the people there. Rachel, do you want to just kind of walk us through it chronologically? Like what really happened? Like how did, how did the whole thing begin? When do we start?

You tell me, like the formation of the planet earth 45 billion years ago. Well, okay. I know, I know a little bit about Jonestown purely through Rachel, because when I visited you in Marfa last spring, you gave me the road to Jonestown because you were just finished reading it. That's where it is. And I remember that we talked about the fact that Jim Jones played a significant role in desegregating Indianapolis. So I feel like that makes sense as a place to, to start both chronologically and in terms of the complexity of the people's church.

Yeah. So you have Jim Jones who grows up as a poor kid in rural Indiana and not from a churchy family, but becomes really interested in church as a child and would preach to his friends, like his little 10 year old friends, which I think is interesting. You get the sense that he, have you seen that really creepy YouTube video of the baby preacher who's like a child he's a child who's not old enough to say words, I don't know, two or three or something. And he's just, he's in front of some huge church and he's babbling that he's babbling in the preacher cadence. That's kind of you get out of quiet and then you get really loud and passionate. And he's doing kind of the hand gestures and it's, it's really fascinating and really creepy.

And when I think of Jim Jones as a young man, I think of him as the baby preacher, mastering these, these cadences and these rhythms that people would respond to just learning how to stir people up. He was really attuned to that. So he's like a prodigy. Yeah. Like a little preacher Mozart. Little preacher prodigy. And he would, he had a bunch of animals and the little kids would come to his house and listen to him preach. And he would go to all the different churches and kind of absorb their preaching styles. And then he, he becomes a street preacher. He grows up in a rural area that goes to kind of a more industrial urban zone becomes a street preacher and is preaching in a lot of like working class areas. Black churches are really interesting to him. He feels

drawn to them. He likes the, the energy that he finds in those places. And, and that starts to be a home for him. He starts going to black churches and, and preaching to black people. And when he starts his own church, it's really important to him that it's a mixed race church, that the congregation is diverse. When is this? This is like 50s, 60s in Indiana. Okay. And it's growing. And I mean, that's the crazy thing about Jim Jones is he is awful, right? Where it ends up is a really awful place. I love how we have to, when we're talking about reconsidering someone's legacy as a pure monster, we're just like, I mean, obviously we're conceding that coercing about what, eight, 900 people into suicide is bad. Like we're not saying it's not. However.

I never say monster. I don't, I hate calling people monsters. Oh yeah, I hate that too. Yeah, it's terrible. Yeah. You guys both write about murderers more than I do. So I call people monsters all the time. But maybe I should reconsider that. Well, we'll get, we'll get into that inevitably. But isn't it interesting though to think about how he did seem to have this moral giftedness? Yeah. And it was sincere. Yeah. It was sincere. And so yes, like stipulated, bad man. But in the 50s and the 60s, and this, I think even when people do know that he had these, he moved in these progressive circles, I think there's often a misconception that, oh, this was this canny manipulation, kind of in that Charles Manson way is like Manson was not

particularly interested in the counterculture, but it was, he saw that he could use it. Right. I think it was different for Jim Jones. Jim Jones really did sincerely feel like moved and enraged by the racial prejudice in America. Like that was a real sincere belief. And you read about the stuff that he was doing in Indiana and he would, you know, like a congregant would come to him, a black congregant would say, you know, I wasn't, I tried to go to this place for lunch and they wouldn't serve me because I'm black. And he would rally up a whole bunch of other people and like go sit there until they agreed to serve black people. Or he had like an incredible media, he was like a really good media manipulator. So he would write letters if he found

that a business wasn't hiring black people, he would write letters to the local press. He's like a literal social justice warrior. He totally was. And do you have a sense or any theories about where this came from? I mean, do you think that some people are just born able to tolerate less ethical cognitive dissonance than others? Where do you think this came from, Jim Jones? You know, it's really hard because like certainly other things like gender wasn't a big preoccupation with him. It was really like specifically race and sort of the plight of black people in America. You know, he grew up as he was kind of an outcast. His family was pretty messed up. He had a hard time. So I don't know if you know, that's sort of a lazy way to psychoanalyze him. Like he identified

with the outsider. He also had a huge persecution complex. Like that was a part of his brain that was like really activated. And so I think in some ways made him kind of want to be in that space. I don't know. But he and they did, they did social services. They had a free restaurant where they would serve good meals to poor people or anybody who showed up. They had a, they started noticing that he had a ton of elderly black women mostly in his congregation and he would see that they weren't getting health care. So he opens like, ah, his wife was a nurse. He opened these nursing homes that were either free or super reduced cost for people. They were providing, they saw very clearly, he saw very clearly the social services that weren't on offer

and gave them to people. I mean, so I guess that's one big thing is that people were drawn to this church not because he cast some magic spell on them with his googly eyes, but because there was a real, he identified a real need. So I'm going to come in and do the like really bad, you know, true TV voiceover argument so that you can now speak back to it, because this is how I imagine the true crime voice would talk about it. Jim Jones pretended to care about racial justice, but it was all an ongoing ploy to slowly gain power and money so that he could take a bunch of people down to South America and kill them. I lost the cadence at the end there. Like that's what I imagine the argument would be because it

always, in stories like this ends up being that if someone ends up committing an awful crime, then it was always their long and convoluted plan to do so and that all of this was just like, you know, he's hiding behind this mask of goodness. I mean, it's not entirely untrue. When you read about these books, you also find him talking about things like, if we all have to die for the cause, he's talking about that's a fairly early, you know, so that idea, that's not like an idea that spontaneously erupts in his head in 1978. But I don't think that that was what he wanted. He just was such a control freak and such a perfectionist. I don't know, you see, looking back, it's easy to see how the threads of what

happened were there early on. But, you know, he wanted to have a lot of power. Like that's the other thing. So he drew people because he had this social justice warring that he was doing on the like side of righteousness and good. But he also manipulated people. He had, he would do those kind of like preachery things that he would do these kind of healings. He would heal you and he would be like, this disgusting thing was in you. You know, I took this tumor tumor out of you. And I was like, you know, a rotten chicken liver or something. And he did like fake psychic things like he would research people in advance and then sort of saying like, I feel Sarah that you're in Halifax. How did you know? His willingness also to like manipulate people's reality

was really present early on. And he staged so many fake suicides. Fake suicide, fake attacks all the time. I think this started in California. So they moved from Indiana. They're like, he gets upset with the rate. Basically, he's too progressive for Indiana. Indiana's not woken up for the like murdering, faking preacher. But it's kind of true. Like the segregation like really gets him down. And also he's obsessed with nuclear war. So he reads an article of Esquire that's like places where he that are the safest from nuclear fallout and ends up in California, Northern California. This persecution part of him is super activated. He'll he'll kind of manifest it. And this ranges from being like

there are there are so many bomb threats, we're getting all these bomb threats, death threats to actually faking being shot. He does this like constantly. What? Like, I'm James Jones pretending to be shot again. And by this point, he's like his family, they've got all these. It's a very like Angelina Jolie set up he and his wife have where they have like multi like adopted orphans from Korea and like some adopted black children and then their own children and then some adopted white children. So they have this like, this big family, big diverse family, and he'll get his like sons to kind of do this fake shooting thing where he'll you know, he'll be outside of his church.

And then like all of a sudden shots ring out and I told you, I told you I was under terrible threat. They're all after me. And then, you know, he'll like run behind a tree or something and then spontaneously heal himself. And then his bloody his bloody shirt would like put his bloody shirt on display at the church. Do you feel like Jimmy Jones? Because woke up sometimes and was like, I just need a fake getting shot today. Like, I just need it. Yeah, exactly. But it comes out of that whole church thing that he was doing was like, well, you know, like whatever it takes to get the people in the mindset, right? It's theater, I guess. It's like you create this spectacle. Total theater. And then he did one also he did like he had this group of kind of as these people

always do this inside group. I think they're called the planning commission. And at one point he like, at this meeting, let's all drink this wine and they all drink the wine. And then he's like, I just wanted to tell you guys all that wine was poisoned. We're all gonna die now. And then a few people start like dying. Oh, and everybody else like and then the people are kind of not sure what what's real or not because the people who are dying kind of seem like they're faking it like they're, you know, when people fake die and it's just a bad acting. And then he says actually, never mind, you've drank this poison, you're gonna die if you try to leave this room to get medical help, you will be shot a woman actually does try to leave and one of his security guards

shoots her. But there's a blank in the gun. But it's just like these crazy theatrical things that we would stage. And then he says, actually, that was all just a loyalty test. And he does this stuff over and over again. So people, the sense of what's real and what's not real gets really fuzzy, I think, for people. And you just stop taking it seriously. I bet when things like that happen. And I don't think that it's all of these people were dupes and thought this stuff was really happening. I think they understood at least some of them have later come out and said, you know, like, yeah, we knew some of this was was fake or was staged. But it was the theater of church, the theater of community, binding them all together was almost like a metaphor that he was

enacting. So they're in California for a while, become really popular, entrenched with the democratic state politics. Oh, good. He like has tea with Rosalind Carter and Walter Mondale. Like he's hanging out with top top people. Wow. And it becomes like a really powerful political figure hanging out with like Black Panthers and stuff. Black Panthers are kind of like, we think we like this guy, because he's a revolutionary socialist. But the kind of bad news, the more popular he gets, the more press starts to pay attention to him. And that freaks him out. And then also, I think that people don't know about Jim Jones is so excited. People always assume that the megalomaniac cult leader is coercing

female followers into sexual relationships, which Jim Jones totally did. Jim Jones also fucking his male followers. Wait, what? Much less none. Much less none. Yeah, fucked them all. And yeah, and with a man, it was a much more dominance thing. He was obviously always at the top. And he needed all of the women to say like, Jim Jones, I'm so overwhelmingly sexually attracted to you. And he needed all the men to say like, actually, I never realized, but I am a homosexual. So he's just able to enact all of his sexual fantasies. Yeah, all these men aren't really real men, which is a weird thing that he had. But anyway, he had gotten arrested for lewd conduct, I believe, like soliciting someone in a man in a public bathroom. And he was real freaked out that

that news was going to come out as these reporters start circling around looking at the finances, looking at the stuff. And what's the level of interest in him at this point? Like, is anyone trying to get him on like cult busting or anything like that at this point? I mean, cult busting, in some ways, exists after Jonestown because of Jonestown. Interesting. Okay, so we'll get to that, I guess. I didn't know that he was famous before the massacre. I thought it was only after the massacre that we even heard of this guy. So like, what was he doing in San Francisco, or San Francisco, right? San Francisco and LA, you know, they had a fleet of buses, they would travel around. So I mean, he was doing political activism, and also like really

super grassroots, like a lot of housing stuff. Again, it's like, you kind of have to believe that his heart was really in it, because if what he was trying to get was glory, he wouldn't have picked these really small scale issues. So it was, it was just like, oh, a lot of these elderly people of color are being kicked out of this, this public housing, because they want to redevelop it. And he would stage huge protests against that, that really kind of like the local things that mattered to the people that he was preaching to. And there was communal housing. And again, he had this like media empire, you know, like a direct mail list with I think 50,000 people. Wow. Some of that is soliciting donations, right? So they have like a ton of money coming in.

But it's also rallying people to these causes. Yeah, how big is the church at this point? I think a few thousand, I think maybe three thousand or something. And is it a Christian church? Like what are his actual religious beliefs as such? Or what is he preaching? And then I guess what are his beliefs? Yeah, exactly. Because I think, you know, who knows what's in the dark heart of Jim Jones, who am I to say, but it was ostensibly this Christian church. I think one of the theories that you read is that, that his political beliefs were much more sincere than his religious beliefs, and that he used the religious beliefs as a way to get people to take political action. He would

say, you know, Jesus was the first communist. Sure. And he had no qualms, obviously, about like manipulating in a religious way because it was for this higher good. So it was, you know, ostensibly this, this Pentecostal kind of holy roller, miracles and falling down, kind of preaching, laying hands. Just super dominant talking and talking and talking. Oh my God. Yeah. Talking forever, like endless church services of him just going on and on, you know, baby preacher all grown up. Yeah. And like, and David Koresh used to have like 12-hour Bible study sessions. And didn't Jim Jones, he would preach for like, would he preach for 12 hours or upwards of that? I don't, I'm not sure how many hours, but like, certainly hours and hours.

I have a good David Koresh twist coming up soon that you will like. And is he pretty well liked or is kind of the establishment, the politicians, the kind of normies in San Francisco at that time? We don't trust this guy. What you hear in terms of people who don't like him tend to be people whose family members have sort of vanished into this church. That's where the opposition comes from. I mean, San Francisco is a pretty progressive city at this time. So his, the stuff that he's saying is in keeping you donated a ton of money to the American Indian movement, you know, like bailed people out of jail after the wounded knee uprising. You know, it's like, really, he's like in there with all these activists. But then at the same time, you have these people who are like,

I never see my daughter anymore. There was that classic cult thing of isolating people from the rest of the world. And so those family members are where a lot of the rumblings first start to. Yeah. Do these show up in press accounts? Like, are there like GQ investigations or whatever where they interview these people? It starts out with local San Francisco newspapers. I think the examiner and then there's a magazine that no longer exists called New West. And so you have some journalists looking into it. But again, you know, he is this beloved progressive figure doing all this good work with a huge media campaign. So anytime anybody, like he gets the sense that somebody's going to write a negative article about him. It's very Scientology like in

that way, like gets all his people like just barrage the newspaper with phone calls and letters to say, you know, how dare you do this or like, you know, posing as a reader being like, I hate this coverage or just that kind of trying to shut something down. And this was also you said kind of before we had like antennas up for cults. Like this was before kind of the phenomenon of cults was known. It was like, Oh, this guy seems nice. Right. And also in terms of like his political legitimacy, he also would lend his media empire or hundreds of willing people who would like call and write letters and stuff and like knock on doors. He would lend them to candidates who were running. So he helps get them. I believe it was the mayor of San Francisco. He helped get the more

progressive guy elected. And then that guy was that guy was sort of in his pocket a little bit. So he did have a lot of power at the local level. Like he was really, yeah, he could be a gatekeeper even. Yeah. And he had he had like a radio broadcast and was connected with these communities that maybe, you know, was particularly white politicians, maybe didn't feel like they had access to. It speaks well of Jim Jones and really badly of America that we can make the argument that he wasn't just heartlessly trying to amass power as fast as possible. Like he did want power, but it was a it was complicated by other desire, I think, because it's just a self-evident truth in America that no one has ever made a career on helping elderly women of color. Like

just that's like you couldn't pick a worse demographic to help if you wanted to make a career as a senator. Everyone would, I mean, today, I think people would see was being this horrible lover of welfare moms. You know, I mean, that's the demographic that gets most ignored by politicians trying to curry favor. I mean, I guess the cynical explanation is there's maybe a cynical edge to his affection for particularly that population is that the more people that you have on social security with like a fixed income or pension or something coming in, you get them to the church. And in a way, it's it wasn't just this evil thing of like we want to steal these old women's social security checks. It was it was a communalism kind of thing, right? So he's like,

you, you turn over your check to us, you live in this communal housing, and we will like provide for your food and your health care and stuff with this money that you give us. They were kind of creating these ad hoc systems of care that were failing otherwise, but it did mean giving up your money and your control. If I didn't know how this all ended, I would probably really like him right now, right? Like even with the weird media manipulation and even with the weird faking being shot, his heart's in the right place. He's doing good. Like if you're going to have a problematic demagogue, like I'd rather have a problematic demagogue that's actually trying to make things better for marginalized people. We just had a big mega church in Seattle where it was the same thing,

this guy who's like controlling the media and amassing all these followers and stuff. But like he didn't do shit. He was like trying to make things better for like rich white people in Seattle. Like won't someone finally listen to the rich white people homeowners in Seattle? Like finally, we have a platform. Like if you have to have one of these assholes, at least he's like looking in the right direction. Right. And I think that's the really complicated thing about Jim Jones. In some ways, I think of him as just being like a total politician and that he's motivated completely by ego. But it's this blend of ego and cause, you know? And I think the politicians are like that too. And the politicians are also terrible people. Right. And terrible in a way that's more

insidious, but also ultimately kills way more people. Right. And if you are so convinced of your own righteousness, then whatever means it takes is okay. And convinced of your own righteousness. You know, it's all very much like people following him. It's not like, there's nothing about this that is a power sharing or listening to other people. It's totalitarian. It's super totalitarian. And he was just fortunate, I guess, in that American society was fucked up enough that it gave him plenty of real things to rail against. So he's not setting up an org chart necessarily, not a corporate governance example. No. And he's super manipulative. And I mean, he would do things like that people in his inner circle, of course, you know, none of whom have outside jobs, or if they

have outside jobs, they're turning all over all their money to the People's Temple, who would make people sign, like write out and sign confessions. I think starting out with like adultery, but then ultimately, you know, like that they had sexually abused their children and sign them. And the idea was like, if you ever betray us, we're going to release this. He's getting leverage. Totally getting leverage over everybody. It's totalitarian in that way too. Everybody's informing on everybody else. You know, who's not loyal enough, you get kind of points for selling, ratting people out. I used to live in Germany, and I did a lot of reading on like how East Germany worked. The whole strategy wasn't even necessarily to get people to do anything for you. It was just

getting enough leverage on them that they could. It was just like getting people spying on their neighbors, who's cheating on their wives, who's gay, who's using drugs, and then you just get these files on everybody. And it's like, you don't even need to make them do anything. It's just like, now we know if we ever need you, we know that you're like stripping the kids whose soccer you coach. And it's a, and it implies a view of society where you just need to be constantly ready to flip on anyone at any time because you never know when like the men are going to come. And sometimes you would have them sign just blank pieces of paper, like they would write the confession to be written in later. But again, yeah, it's this atmosphere of paranoia and persecution from all sides.

And was he feeding his congregants this idea of like, they want to destroy me and ruin your life? Yeah, they're at the government. And again, it's like, it's the 70s. He's not wrong that the government is, you know, doing creepy things. There are corroborating factors here. Paranoia is very much validated by things that are going on in the world. So he starts reaching out to like the Soviet unions, like, will you guys take this with them? Oh, good. Yeah. And that, obviously, does not go over well. But yeah, his paranoia is not, it doesn't come out of no. My main takeaway so far is that I don't think extroverts should be allowed to run things. But introverts, I don't want to run anything. Yeah, what introvert would ever, how are you going

to sucker us, introverts, into running things? Yeah, I mean, because I just finished listening to this like seven part podcast about Bikram Chowdhury, the guy that founded hot yoga, Bikram Yoga, who was like exactly the same. And he ended up raping allegedly a bunch of the people that were into it. He ran these like yoga training things that were like total cults. And he would do the same thing where he would give these like three hour long speeches. Mao would give famously like eight to 12 hour speeches. They just love to hear themselves talk. They are incapable of listening or taking in new information. They're incapable of just like thinking as another person, like the ability of empathy seems like the first thing to go, right? That everything is about

you. And then somehow they're able to get people to like hitch their trailer to them. Wait, and that that's your perception of extroverts? Every extrovert is like that, yes. Every extrovert is a cult leader. I mean, obviously, like introversion, extroversion is obviously a huge spectrum. And there's like a massive, you know, there's different kinds of extroverts and introverts. But it just seems like it's taken everything I think of about extroverts, but like exaggerated it by a thousand times. That to me is like the ultra, ultra, ultra extrovert. Like one of the things that this hot

yoga dude always said was that he can't be alone. So he has, he's like women with him all the time, like giving him foot rubs and stuff. And Hitler was like that too. He can't be alone. Yeah, don't trust someone who can't be alone to like be in a policymaking position, I would say. You know, you hear this from politicians all the time and it's very benign as a thing like, oh, I like to have people around. But then it does become this like compulsive thing where you just have to have somebody who you're like bouncing yourself off of all the time. And you're not even like listening to them or asking them questions or gaining information from them. You're like talking at them. And yet you still need it, which is totally as an introvert totally

baffling to me. Yeah, if they don't reflect what you need them to do, then it's like you are being wounded. I find that very scary. You know, I figured it out. I figured out the best situation for everyone. And I'm going to rope everyone into my emotional reality, my sort of, you know, what works for me, what makes sense to me, it just has to work for everyone. And because anybody who's like, I don't want to live this way, or even I don't want to, I did this for a while, I don't want to live this way anymore, is deeply threatening to his ego. Because once all of these other people become part of your ego structure, like they're not even real people, they are a part of you. And if they defect, it is deeply betraying to your soul.

Right. That makes me think of reading that I've done about the psychology of people who are physically abusive to their partners, and how domestic violence, like the way, from the way that people describe their need to be physically abusive, is this idea of the victim of your abuse holding this power over you, and the terror of them leaving you, and the terror of them not going along with your version of reality, and being totally loyal to you. And you just, you have to just make sure that they're on your side through sheer physical force. And it feels like the most terrorizing behavior is rooted in that terror. Oh, it's like desperation. It's like you're desperate not to lose them, and you'll do

anything including harming them. And you're like, I just have to terrorize you into validating my beliefs and staying with me. And like, if I can't do that, then I'll die, like what will happen to me? Right. And you are less real than me, like you are fundamental because you're sort of actually just a part of me. And that's why it's like, this hurts me just as much as it hurts you. With Jim Jones, I also imagine he must have at some level been cognizant too, that if people were defecting, they would start to talk. Yes. Right. About all the crazy stuff that was going on behind the scenes where it's like, the more extreme the inside of the organization gets, the more you have to keep those people in because once they go out and start talking to the newspapers,

it's going to like the whole thing is going to start to fall apart. So he must have gotten more and more strongly like, you have to stay here. Exactly. Exactly. And the secrets, it's a system that's bound by secrecy and fear, and it just can't, there's no looseness there. It's like a very brittle structure. When one person leaves, then it becomes a possibility, it's sort of the unthinkable, now becomes thinkable, and now our other people are going to leave. And whatever perfection that he had in his mind, it's, it betrays his idea of like, no, this is great. We're having a wonderful time. Everybody's super happy. It's perfect. So they all have to live like in a compound or not, not everybody. So not all 3000 people or

whatever congregants, but the people who were, who were closer in lived in these kind of dorm like situations. And, and there were even people who were, there was a lot of pressure to, you know, you don't have Christmas and Thanksgiving with your family, you have it with the church and distancing you from other family members who are not members. So you have to show, you have no God above Jim Jones. The interesting thing that he's able to do is build this congregation that is majority black, or I think it ends up being something like 45% black women, but also like a lot of guilty hippies who are mostly white and activating them by being sort of like, oh, any, any kind of resistance is a sign of they're bougie. They're, they're, yeah, they're

bourgeois programming. That's how you get like a guilty lefty to do anything. You're like, oh, rather bougie of you to not do this. Right. Right. I guess there's also probably something, I always think about this with Scientology that like, at the lower levels, like when you're first getting into it, it's actually pretty great. It's all this like stress relief stuff. And you're making friends. And it's like, you're doing your day job. But then like, once a week, you go hang out with these like cool new people who are like helping you get your life together. And then it's only as you get in deeper that you're like, Oh, this is like maybe not totally in line with my values. But by that point, you've already invested so much time. So you have all this sunk cost.

And you've made all these friends and you've adopted this as your identity. So that by the time you realize how problematic it is, it's like, it's much harder and more hurtful to leave. And so I'm imagining for the congregants that weren't living in the dorms and weren't in the leadership and weren't like signing blank page confessions. It was probably great. Like they're doing special justice stuff. They're meeting all these cool new people. They feel like they're part of a national movement. It was probably awesome. And then it was only once they got inside that they were like, Oh, shit, this is not great. Yeah. And especially for like elderly people with health issues, you know, they're being taken care of. It's like, they give up their social

security check, but maybe they're getting more back. I don't know. I guess that's arguable. You know, they haven't worked for a few years. Like they have no many of them have like dropped out of school, right? So that makes it harder and harder to go back to any sort of other world. And yeah, it's like less and less fun as it goes on. It's funny to think about if this happened now that he would, instead of making them sign confessions, he would make them give the company five star reviews on Glassdoor. Oh my God, he would be like, Yeah, such a Yelp terrorist. Love it here. So yeah, how did they get to Guyana? As he is feeling more and more persecuted as these media stories are coming out, there were a couple high profile defections like people

from the inner circle. There's this custody battle that's like ends up being really dramatic. There was like a couple that came into the church. He impregnated the wife. So she had his baby, ostensibly. That's not great. Yeah, you know, it happens. And then the parents left the church. But essentially, like the child was more or less kidnapped. So he became like really fixated on this kid is guys often are like my son, my son, my offspring. I mean, if you're talking about like literally like, this is a part of me, like my ego structure, very literalized. The press stuff is getting heated. He's worried about the IRS coming. These defections happened. He's got this court case for the lewd conduct thing that he like really doesn't want to become

public. Does he feel that his congregants would that that would be a blow to their ability to have faith in him or see him as this larger than life figure? Yeah, I mean, he obviously has some like extremely complex things about like men having sex with men. So yeah. And if it's something that he's in control of, then that's one thing. But although that was always a secret, I think, the sex that he was having with his male followers. So anyway, they like decide that they are going to it's this sort of like a plan B, like a plan to sort of flee a contingency plan. And he's also like, part of him is like, maybe the US government is going to come besiege us. Right. Because they were known for besieging people with less reason. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That makes it much easier

to market instead of like, my empire is rumbling around me that you're like, Oh, the government is after us, we have to go somewhere safe. Right. Oh, that's the classic. Yeah, we are, we are too, we're too radical for them, they're going to shut us down. Yeah. But anyway, so they, they decide that they're going to build this socialist utopia in Guyana, which is a former British colony with a socialist government and like majority black leadership. So they all move to Guyana. And that's when things start to go a little nuts. So they moved. So they have been like have this land that they got Guyana to give them. And I mean, also again, it's like the beginning of Jonestown before Jim Jones shows up seems kind of fun. It gets you have like a few

hundred people there, like young people clearing the land, starting a farm, like they're all living together and working on this huge noble project, like they're trying to prove that socialism, a racially integrated socialist community, like thriving is possible. And that's like, that feels great. I would be so fucking joyfully self-righteous if I were down there at the start of Jonestown, you know, clearing the land, making a new utopia. Yeah, there's like, there's fruit and you're doing all this like labor all day. And that there are the endorphins from that. And you're just like hanging out with a bunch of other attractive young socialist dedicated people, like building a better future is so romantic. I can imagine just like all of the

insufferable blog posts. And like, oh, you got like a lot of emails today, like, oh, that's interesting. I was growing papayas and sleeping in the shade of a palm tree. Okay, like the instagrams for the start of Jonestown would have been it would just be like, you're extremely irritating friend on Facebook, who's just like, hashtag blessed, like hashtag Jonestown. Yeah, I'm just, I actually can't believe this hasn't happened yet. Well, we're getting there. And yeah, and this is 19, is this 1978 at the start or does it? I think 76, 77, you know, that it's like a slow progression. But then when things start heating up in California for Jim Jones, he moves out there, they start like importing people like really quickly. And at the beginning,

it was like all the young, young strapping people who could do the labor, but then they start bringing more and more of the old ladies. And just things get so strained and so intense. And it just seems so awful. And Jim Jones is like, either like just popping a ton of amphetamines and then when like, and not sleeping and PA system that, you know, blasts over the whole community. And he's like, hopped up on amphetamines just like preaching probably for 12 hours, you know, like all night, you know, you're working in the fields. And Jim Jones is just like ranting in your ear. So it's like North Korea a little bit where you're just the dear leader is constantly talking to you. And he actually had had like, took intentionally adopted the North Korean model,

which is like work work from 6am to 6pm at six or seven days a week with like a one hour break for lunch like that. I mean, he was I think he was writing to North Korea too. He was trying to he was like, so it was great, like trying to find these alliances. It's like, Jim, you look at your choices right now. Like you can see there's something not great about where things are going. One of the things that I didn't know growing up, I read this history of communism a couple years ago, and they said that one of the things that sort of we forget now is that there was a very long period of time where it wasn't clear that communism wasn't working that well. Like for a long time, a lot of Americans, it was like it was actually seen as a race, like does capitalism do it better

or does communism do it better because information wasn't coming out of the Soviet Union and North Korea that this wasn't working and that all the numbers were faked and that the farms were really miserable and people weren't working and the living standards were really low. And so it was only really in the early mid 80s that the consensus formed that like, oh, it really isn't working there. And I think there was this weird period where there were actually people in the States that wouldn't necessarily identify as communists, but were kind of like, well, it works pretty well. And it is worth looking into this because it seems to be working in Russia. The information that we have is that they're growing lots of crops and people are happy and they're living on these

farms that do sort of seem utopian. Yeah, I mean, both communism and capitalism have strong reasons to spread this brand and smother dissent. But then the thing with Jim Jones is part of it is you look at what he built and like, oh God, if only Jim Jones, if you could sort of subtract Jim Jones from the situation, you would have this like nice, this integrated super progressive activist congregation and you would have this like cool agricultural commune in Indiana. That would be great. That all seems fine. You can't really subtract Jim Jones from it because it all kind of formed around him. Like he was so central to it. Because his ego catalyzes like the raw force behind all of this.

Totally. Yeah, exactly. There's so much here about like organizational cultures too that maybe if he had done it, I mean, maybe if he wasn't a crazy person basically, maybe he had done it in a way where he really was building an organization or he was building structures with succession where it wasn't 100% built on his personality. Like if he was installing some form of rule of law and checks and balances in his own structure, maybe it would have lasted longer or maybe it would have been a better force in people's lives because the thing with those personality led cults is that once the personality of the person starts to erode, the whole community erodes because they

haven't put in any structures in place to support anything other than them. And so it sounds like once he starts to lose it and once he's taking methamphetamines all day, then the whole system breaks down because he's the bottleneck for making all of the decisions, I suppose. And I don't think that that's not just sort of like an accidental oversight on the part. I mean, I think to me that this is what belies his standing as this warrior for justice or whatever is that he didn't do that because that actually fundamentally wasn't, he wasn't trying to build kind of these lasting coalitions or something. It was the fundamental important thing to him was serving his ego. He was starting with himself and building everything around it,

not starting with like the justice and building everything around that. Yeah. Right. And again, to me that that's like the politician thing is that you see that in so many people, whether their politics are good or bad. So is Guyana, is the compound expanding really quickly? Is that kind of what puts more strain on it? Yeah. So through 77 into 78, you have people just like coming in to the point where you know, 50 people a week or something, 100 people a week, couple hundred people a week. And then by the mid 77, you have 1000 people living there. That's a lot of people, dude. And are they eating enough? So there's like, it's actually kind of bad. It probably could have worked as like a small scale

social co-op, agricultural co-op thing if they had time to kind of grow it slowly. But they had terrible soil. You have like a ton of old people there who can't really work in the field. It's like, definitely not enough food. Things get more desperate. Probably a lot of like accountants and stuff that don't know how to like plow sweet potatoes too. Like there's probably not a whole lot of expertise there either. Right. Oh no. And especially like in this place that none of them have any background in, just trying to figure this thing out and people are just hungry. Jane Jones forgot how hard colonialism can be at times. Exactly. And you know, like to his credit, he is living in a communal situation. He's not doing the Rajneesh.

Here is my like parade of Rolls Royce's things. Like money actually, he didn't seem to be all that super materialistic of a dude. He was quite vain, egotistical, but he like, he didn't need stuff. It wasn't like he was living in a much better quality of like, he had like a slightly better quality of life. Like he had a refrigerator with like Coca Cola in it, which most people didn't have, but it wasn't like he had a palace. He was, you know, there were a ton of people living in his house. And did he always wear sunglasses? Was that his look? Yeah, I don't, I like that's, I feel like that started early on and like the super jet black hair and very Roy Orbison kind of Yeah, which I don't know if he thought it made him look cool or mysterious or I mean,

I could see the advantage if you're a cult leader, not wanting people to see your eyes. So how did we get to the ultimate denowment of this that we're also familiar with? And my, and I would add to that question, like, what in your opinion made Jim Jones's psychological situation unsustainable? Because it seems also like he took, like he wanted all this power over people and he was given it. And it seems to have, you know, made him go a little mad. That's my, my guess in the dark. That's terrible that I always kind of want to blame them, amphetamines, but when in doubt, it's like lighting a match and dropping it on dry tinder. There's always darkness in these culty spaces, but not only darkness and then the amphetamines

seem to just like turn the volume way up on the dark parts and the violence. Because of just like the mania and sleep deprivation or Oh, he's also doing stuff like, like making adults fight each other, you know, no way. Like that's yeah, like, like these sort of public boxing matches, public humiliation of people, you know, like making people be naked in front of everybody. They have like a box that like lock people in this sensory deprivation box. Was he doing any of these things in California? Or does he feel the need to tighten the the binds on people? Some of it had happened before, like humiliation in front of a group. But it's all just getting like more and more unhinged. And I think when you have people, you're not on the streets of a major US city,

kind of like seeing normal people walk around, your idea of like, what is acceptable can maybe be pushed farther. Yeah, you're not like going home and watching TV and being reminded of like that version of reality and just subsumed in the same. Like, yeah, I guess like having adult men like box each other to the point of extreme injury, like that's like a reasonable. Also, I guess these people are kind of trapped there too. They need to buy plane tickets, right to deal with a language and a culture they don't understand to get out of there. They're deep in the jungle, given up all their money, often that they've given up their passwords, you know, they know that the guineas government is friendly with Jim Jones. And then

then they don't have a ton of information. He's increasingly saying, we're under siege. So this like his staged attacks thing gets like way more intense. It's like, if you have an adult man on methamphetamines, playing with a lot of guns, because he's got a lot of guns to like playing at war games, there's this one time called like the six day siege, where he's just sort of play act slash hallucinates slash invents this like siege from without like the government, the government is attacking us like everybody at the perimeter, you're kidding. No, you know, like a little kid, like there's something so childish about it. And how it feels like this felt real to him in some way. And he was able to transfer his fantasies,

right, like any and his delusions to large groups of people and to make them real in that way. Totally, right. And he kind of believed in it. I think it wouldn't have worked if he didn't. So how do we get to drinking the flavor aid? So basically, we have a growing chorus of concerned parents back in California being like, look, my kid is in Guiana. I have no idea what's going on. There are these news reports coming out from like a handful of these defectors talking about these things that seem pretty extremely controlling and abusive. And just talking about like, yeah, sometimes like Jim Jones has been talking more and more about revolutionary suicide and like, we got to do what we got to do. And so there's a congressman from California, Leo Ryan, who

gets a delegation. He's like, we're just going to go down there and check it out. We just want to check it out. If anybody wants to leave, they can leave with us. He goes down with a group of press people. Jim Jones is like super freaked out about this. Everybody, they do like a ton of media training beforehand, where it's just like, what do you say? What do they, what do you say when they ask you if you like it here? They come, it's like delegation of eight people. And they're like, you know, it seems weird here. It seems intense. But like, ultimately, it seems okay. Most people like seem like they're here of their own free will. It's just like the collective farms that they used to set up for Western journalists in the Soviet Union. It's the same

thing. They do these like theatrical farms. And then journalists would come back and be like, you know what, it's a little weird, but it seems to be working. I don't see, you know, why we can't think about it here. Like, yeah. And so, and then you have like a handful of people say that they want to defect. I think it ends up being like a dozen people. And that there's like some sense of creepiness. Like some people, I think there's a moment where they're like, does anybody want to leave and nobody raises their hand. They're like, see, nobody wants to leave. But then like, a couple like passes like a secret note and like, hey, we want to leave. So there's a sense that like, not everybody is able to speak freely. But then yeah, ultimately, after this two day visit, I think it's

a dozen people say that they want to leave. And the congressman is like, you know, ultimately, I feel like positively about this a dozen people out of 1000 is like, really not that like, 1% of your people one way. That's not a big deal. Like this seems fine to me. I'm gonna basically had a good time here. And yet he and like the dozen people, they like, go back to this remote rural airstrip. And this sort of assassination happens, like the congressman has killed a few of the press people. Wait, what? I had no idea about this. That someone shoots the delegation. One of the people who said that they wanted to defect turned out to be like a double agent or something. So he gets on the plane with these dozen survivors and start shooting people. No

fucking way. Meanwhile, this truck of guys from back at the farm are like barreling down on the airstrip also shooting. And so you have like, I can't remember how many people died, but like four or five people died, cameramen, like an NBC cameraman, like journalists and the congressman. And then there are these two like little planes, the two little planes like take off with whoever managed to get on. And then you have, you know, half dozen people there, some of whom have been shot and are alive. And they're like, fuck, we're stuck out here in the jungle with these people trying to shoot us. Holy shit. You know, and the planes just took off. This is a huge deal. I think Jim Jones, he knows at that point, this is not something that you come back from.

Like he knew what he was doing and he knew if this, then not. Right. Well, it's also really interesting that, you know, it seems as if he's docked a bullet, if he'd been able to not send a death squad, that was functionally just so unnecessary unless you have like deep paranoia. He succeeded. He succeeded. The congressman came and the congressman was like, I think this is fine. That's a huge victory. He had like Jim Jones is one. Is that what triggers the flavor aid? Like then he like, he realizes what he's done. It's a classic murder suicide move, right? But like rather than just being like in one romantic relationship, it's written upon, you know, a thousand people, I would rather destroy myself

than let you go. So yeah, so meanwhile, so as he sends these guys off to like his death squads off to kill the congressman, he's like ordering the flavor aid to be mixed with the cyanide, I think it is. And it's like, all right, everybody line up, it's time. And I think there is that sense because they had rehearsed this, they had done like basically a version of this a few months before. And then the poison had been fake. It's unclear. I think at first people, again, couldn't tell like, is this real? Is this really happening? But it became really clear really quickly because people died within, you know, minutes of drinking this stuff. And because of how distributing that much of anything goes, like you would, I would guess

that not everyone got it simultaneously. Yeah, I was just going to ask about the logistics of this. Is there like a, I'm imagining like a lemonade stand table and like a queue of people? I think that's right. And I mean, that creepy thing is that there's a, he did these audio recordings of all of his speeches, and there's an audio recording. It's like, you can listen to it. If you really want to know about the logistics, you can hear it. It's all recorded. You can hear people screaming. And you can hear people saying like, wait, do we really have to do this? Like, can't we go to Russia? You know, and him being like, no, no, no, he's a great manipulator. It's start, he started with like the mothers and the children. And I think 300 of the, like a third

of the people who died were children. And so once, once you've given the poison to these children, it's hard to maybe feel like you want to save yourself after that. And then he also had the perimeter ringed with his security team. Who were these guys with guns? A couple people did manage to flee, but like really just like a couple. Wow. And then once you get out, you're in the jungle. Right. Exactly. Exactly. You're in the jungle. You know, what do you even do? You're in the jungle. You're completely alone. You're everything you've built your life around has been destroyed. And I think, and he was able to frame the suicide as this revolutionary act as as a political act. It wasn't, again, it wasn't sort of like we're all committing suicide. It was

we're committing revolutionary suicide. But this is, we're fighting a battle. Like this is, this is a victory of a kind. And it was also very much like, if we don't kill ourselves, like they're going to come kill us tomorrow. So that framing of it, I guess, I mean, you know, I don't know, these people were super desperate. The classic triangle in interpersonal drama is victim, villain, savior. And if you can create a narrative on these people that you've already, you know, already have such psychological power over that, you know, you are the victim. I am your savior. Someone else is the villain. I am saving you from this other force. That seems like it would be so powerful. And these people have been in Indiana for a year or two years.

They're not getting newspapers. They're not getting news broadcasts. Like they had no idea. He's, he's sort of creating their whole reality. And this is at a time when the United States does feel like it's sort of spinning out of control. So this, these stories that he's telling of, of invasions and immediate threat and, you know, like we're surrounded, like that doesn't seem as crazy as maybe it sounds from the outside. Well, that reminds me of like an individual kidnapping case that happened in the 70s. This woman named Colleen Stan was kidnapped by a couple when she was 17 or 18 and then was first horribly abused by the husband of the couple and then kept literally in a box underneath the bed a whole year and then had what she called her year out

and then had, I think, a couple more years, like in the box. And Cameron had told her this story that she had come to believe about how she had been sold to him and he owned her and they were being surveilled by this company called the agency. But like if she tried to go and tell her parents or if she tried to escape, they would kill her, they would kill her family. And she believed it because she had kept in a box. And so when she escaped and this went to trial, it was a very hard sell for a jury because they were just like, why didn't you leave? Like why didn't you leave during your year out? Like why did you believe that? You know, and I think there's a sense of like, I wouldn't believe that. Like my psyche is uncrackable. But it's just like, how do you know?

You've never been kept in a box. You've never farmed in Guiana for two years with sermons on for 12 hours a day, not getting enough protein. We don't know. So how many survivors were there? Oh, there were like only a handful. There were, you know, there were some people who were not at the compound. So they were not in the jungle because they had a house in the capital city and Jim Jones' sons were on a basketball team. And he sent an order over the radio saying like, okay, you guys, we're all going to do this, right? You know, and they had some people back at home in San Francisco and basically like nobody who was not there killed themselves. Although actually, there's one creepy story about a lady who was in the capital city in Guiana and she heard the

radio, like I forget what their code name was, but they had some code that sort of meant like, all right, now's the time for us to all the kill ourselves. And everybody else who heard that was sort of like, oh, actually, I don't think I'm going to. But this one lady who was like serious troop reliever was like, all right, she took her three children with her into the bathroom, slit their throats and then killed herself. No fucking way. And that is like, whoa, because you could sort of make the case that there's something about this closed world out there in the jungle, like the sort of peer pressure, the lack of escape, the inability to imagine another way. But like she was in the city, she could have just walked out the door. But no,

she was a troop reliever. She did it. And then there was like, there was a, I think there was like a death guy who sort of didn't hear the call to like, come to the pavilion. There was a lady who hit under the bed. But it's like talking about the survivors of Hiroshima, where it's like, well, it's someone who happened to be like under a rock at that time. Yeah. And nine, nine hundred people died. Nine hundred. It's just, yeah, these are mind boggling numbers at a time when like, I mean, we like rightly consider a mass shooting to be unreal if it's like 13 people. Well, the statistic that like, I think really impressed on me how big Shone's Town was and also how big it was to people at the time was that this was the largest

American civilian death until September 11th. Oh, wow. Yeah. So there's three decades of nothing was ever as big as Shone's Town. And what is the response then? I mean, what happens? Well, I think, I mean, a super interesting legacy to me is the aware, this growing kind of cult awareness movement that comes out of this where people are, and that's just, you know, there's, there's a number of other like intense cult actions that happen around this time. But you have these organizations that like talk about, you know, like our young people are being programs. And it's just sort of like you guys are saying there's not necessarily a huge awareness in the 70s of the way that trauma works or the way that manipulation works. And so the

cult, these cult awareness groups try to make that more known. But then you also have this situation. Sarah, this is where David Koresh comes in for you. So the, the cult awareness network is run by, I think she's the daughter of Leo Ryan, who's the congressman who's killed at Jonestown. And during the Waco siege, she as president of the cult awareness network makes these like really strong statements, like you need to go in there and you need to arrest this guy by any force necessary, there becomes this after Jonestown, the sense like, we weren't paying close attention enough, we didn't do enough. And then you see at Waco, like, we kind of go to the other end of like not being tolerant of these fringe groups. I know there's a, because a buddy of mine

is part of a cult survivors network. And there's like, there's support groups where people can come together and talk about it. And I think, like once he had started telling me about his experience, it just dawned on me that it is the kind of thing that if you've gone through it, no one who hasn't gone through it would get it at all. Because there is this kind of blaming or how could you be so stupid? How could you fall into this? But if you grow up in a cult, which many people have, there's probably a lot of shame about telling people afterwards. Right. And it's yeah, like just like Sarah was saying, it's easier, more pleasant for those of us who haven't to think that that is a flaw in that person, rather than a flaw in like human

nature that we could it could have been. Right. What was the press coverage like at the time, like has our cultural understanding of Jonestown changed over time? Because more of the survivors were the more high level people and the people who had defected were more high level people. And the high level people tended to be the white hippies. Right. There was this sense of like, oh, this is another, you know, the flower children have been led astray again. Oh God, it's so just like the discourse on millennials. It's always like finding a way to blame young people for these like completely insane acts that are like,

yeah, clearly just human. But it's like, oh, well, young people like, if you're a hippie, this is where it gets you. Right. Like some guy brainwashed you and told you to commit suicide. Maybe you shouldn't have listened to so much Neil Young. Exactly. So Rachel, after like researching this, like what do we tend to get wrong about Jonestown? I mean, the details, what are the lessons that we should take from it versus what we actually have? Well, I think there's too quick of a movement after these things to be like any alternative movement, anything that's trying to be an alternative to the mainstream way of life, any sort of communal living, anybody with strange beliefs or ideas, anybody who descends from the

mainstream is like actually a murderous fruit. That's just the saddest thing about the way that these things that start out as exciting, progressive things end up being fodder for reactionary forces. And so, yeah, I think it's like take the lesson of Jim Jones, he identifies some real problems in society, and then he thought that he was a solution, not the case. And maybe it's just that the more that we improve social services for all of us as a whole, the less room there will be for these like charismatic maniacs to come in and be like, I'll save you. If we can create a more just world where fewer people are in desperate need of saving, then there's less room for manipulation by Jim Jones types.

Right. I guess that's what nobody ever brings up about these local heroes, these local community heroes that you hear about making breakfast for poor kids and these heartwarming stories, that that does confer them a sense of power over those people and that they then can cash in that power not always for good means. And most people that make breakfast for poor kids obviously do not end up feeding them cyanide. But it does when you have these little pockets of informal justice mechanisms, it creates a vulnerability. Yeah, exactly. And they're based on individuals rather than sort of like this diffuse network of care and mutual responsibility. Right. That's accountable and transparent. Yeah, it's less sexy, it's less charismatic,

but it's less able to be exploited. It's less culty. Less culty.