Tag Archives: Jim Jones

NAVY ASKED TO HONOR JIM JONES ADVOCATE

The Navy have been asked by the San Francisco board of supervisors to honor Harvey Milk. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted 9-2 in favour of the move. Milk was a prominent homosexual activist in San Francisco in the 1970s, but was gunned down by fellow board member Dan White in 1978.

Now Milk’s memory is revered amongst the homosexual community not only in San Francisco but across America.

However, what is less well known is Milk’s connections to Jim Jones.

Jim Jones was the leader of the People’s Temple. Jones cult organisation campaigned for Milk and other San Francisco politicians, like Mayor Mascone. Jim Jones’ is even reported to have bused in his followers from Redwood, California, to vote in the mayoral elections, which saw Mascone elected.

The liberal left elite were even reluctant to investigate Jones when allegations of financial irregularities began to emerge. The People’s Temple ended in tragedy with the mass suicide of Jones followers in Jonestown Guyana.

The liberal left are still trying to write Jones’s out of Harvey Milk’s life. In the movie, Milk, starring Sean Penn, there was no Jim Jones figure. Why would this be, given he played such a vital role in the political landscape of San Francisco at that time?

JIM JONES AND HARVEY MILK

Jim Jones was the leader of the cult group the People’s Temple

Jones will forever be famous for the mass suicide in 1978 of 909 cult members including over 200 children at the groups isolated commune of Jonesville, Guyana, South America.

This massacre was, until 9-11, the single biggest loss of civilian life not caused by natural disaster in American history.

Jim Jones was born and raised in Indiana where he first started a church in the 1950s.

In 1962 Jones moved his family to Brazil, believing it to be the only safe place from an impeding nuclear apocalypse, there he spent time learning about the Brazilian’s religious practices.

The Jones’ family moved back to Indiana in the mid-60s

However, still looking for a safe haven from nuclear apocalypse, he moved the People’s Temple to north California.

In the early 1970s Jones began to court the liberal establishment of San Francisco

Before setting up the Temple Headquarters in the city in 1975, 859 Geary Boulevard.

Jones’ attracted a huge following, his San Francisco congregation numbered around 8,000 and was regally host to the Liberal elite of city as well as those in the media.

Whilst in San Francisco Jones became increasingly involved in politics. Part of Jones’  vision was to create a communist utopia.

Jones ability to mobilise his followers was instrumental in the narrow victory of Mayor Mascone in the1975 elections.

His supporters canvased the city and the New York Times later reported that Jones allegedly bused in supporters from Redwood California to vote for Moscone, many of whom were not eligible to vote in the elections.

Jones and the People’s Temple also helped U.S. Representatives Phillip and John Burton, Assemblyman Willie Brown consolidate power; as well as the campaign to elect Harvey Milk, who became the first openly gay man to hold public office in America.

Jones’ efforts did not go unrewarded after his election as Mayor, Mascone, appointed Jim Jones as Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Commission.

Masocone, Milk,  Willie Brown and then-Governor Jerry Brown were seen at temple services.

Willie Brown was quoted as saying at testimonial dinner in Jones’ honour, “”[l]et me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein … Chairman Mao.”  He later said in his defence, “If we knew then he was mad, clearly we wouldn’t have appeared with him.”

How could the political establishment of California been so deceived by him? Was Jones such a master of deception? Or were there warning signs that things were seriously wrong at the People’s Temple?

Sadly for the hundreds of people who lost loved ones in the Jonestown massacre there were warning signs.

As early as 1972 people were beginning to question whether Jones was who he portrayed himself to be, when an article appeared in the  San Francisco Examiner.

Coincidetly a year later Jones handed out grants to 12 Californian newspapers, for the purpose of protecting the medias First Amendment Rights of free speech.

Then again in 1977 more questions were beginning to be raised about Jones.

Slowly stories began to emerge about abuse at the People’s Temple: beatings and sexual abuse.

Later it emerged that Jones had sex with his parishoners- female and male. He told them to be truly part of him they had to have sex with him.

As the pressure on Jones increased Mayor Mascone rejected calls for an investigation into the People’s Temple and Jim Jones.

Temple members would later tell of how Jones’ began to think of himself as the reincarnation of Jesus, Lenin and Buddha.

Jones reportedly preached against the Bible saying, “I’ve got to destroy this paper idol!” and “You’re gonna help yourself, or you’ll get no help! There’s only one hope of glory; that’s within you! Nobody’s gonna come out of the sky! There’s no heaven up there! We’ll have to make heaven down here!”

In August 1977 Jones’ moved permanently to Jonestown, promising his followers a socialist utopia. Jones’ left behind growing speculation as to his financial affairs as well as more allegations of abuse.

Around 1,000 of his congregation moved to Guyana with him.

Let the liberal establishment of San Francisco continued in their admiration, Harvey Milk even wrote to President Carter praising Jones’ character in February 1978.

With mounting concerns Californian Congressman Leo Ryan headed up an investigative team to go to Guyana.

However, on 18th November a delegation from the US, led by San Francisco congressman Leo Ryan, went to Jonestown.

Congressman Leo Ryan had become involved with a concerned relatives group, and became increasingly concerned about the groups activities- his friend and former Temple member’s mutilated body had been discovered in October 1976.

Ryan gathered a group of representatives from the media and the concerned relatives group and went to Guyana in 1978.

Tragically as Ryan and his delegation tried to leave with some of Jones’ followers gunmen opened fire.

Killing Ryan and 4 others in the group. After the shooting Jones and his followers committed mass suicide, or as Jones’ called it in their practise drills  “Revolutionary Suicide”.

 

 

Jim Jones’ Sinister Grip on San Francisco

How did the Peoples Temple cult leader ensnared Harvey Milk and other progressive icons?

BY Left: Former San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk. Right: The Rev. Jim Jones, pastor of Peoples Temple in San Francisco (Credit: AP)

“Season of the Witch,” the new book by Salon founder David Talbot, tells the story of the wild and bloody birth of “San Francisco values.” The following excerpt – Part 1 in a three-part series — recounts one of the darker dramas before the ultimate triumph of those values.

Jim Jones, the strange and charismatic leader of Peoples Temple, proved a master at politically wiring San Francisco in the mid-1970s. The driven preacher had begun his climb up the political pyramid by planting roots in the Fillmore district, the city’s devastated black neighbourhood. Jones’s flock, was electrified by the preacher’s vision of a new Eden.

Again, Dalai Lama is all about birthing Shambala. Robin Williams lives in San Francisco again new eden called Shambala.

At Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, everybody was exalted in his services, even the lowliest recovering drunks and addicts. “He made us feel special, like something bigger than ourselves,” said one temple member. “Total equality, no rich or poor, no races,” said another. “We were alive in those services,” testified one more. “They had life, soul power.”Which is right and wrong. It borders on a commune. In fact in black africa, tribal living is a normal thing

In the USA, a real “Pioneer” spirit was the “independence” not relying on someone else, but being thrifty and using inginuity to bring security into our world.

Perhaps this is exactly what the US and French presidental elections are all about.

Jones found his identity by taking on a black persona. He saw himself following in the footsteps of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, leading “his” people out of bondage and into the promised land. Church membership was primarily black, the 37-member planning commission, as Jones called his leadership council, was dominated by white women —at least six of whom were his sexual conquests and firmly under his sway.

“When people talk about my father manipulating black people, that’s true,” said Jim Jones Jr., the preacher’s black adopted son. “It was politically advantageous for him to give me his name.” There was something exhibitionistic about the way that Jones and his wife treated their black son. “I was the chosen one,” he said. “I was more loved in my family than the other kids, even their biological son, Stephan. I remember Mom wiping charcoal off a dirty pot one day and rubbing it all over her face — to show that we were all black.”

Jones learned his control over a mixed-race army of 8,000 dedicated followers gave him major stature with San Francisco’s liberal elite. Phil Burton — quickly identified the Peoples Temple juggernaut as a potentially game-changing ally in its long battle to take over city hall. It was Burton ally Willie Brown – a rising force in California’s state capital — who first recognized that Jones’s organization could play a pivotal role in his friend George Moscone’s run for mayor. Moscone, a charming and handsome state legislator, had electrified San Francisco progressives with his campaign for city hall.

A champion of gays, women, minorities, tenants and organized labor, Moscone was locked in a tight race with a pack of opponents led by conservative realtor John Barbagelata, whose campaign evoked a nostalgia for an older San Francisco, when it was ruled by traditional Catholic values.

A meeting was set up between Jones and Moscone in the office of Don Bradley, the candidate’s veteran campaign manager. Bradley was initially cautious. “I was a little leery we were getting into something like the Moonies,” he later recalled. But after he looked into the temple’s campaign history and saw how effective it was in delivering victories, Bradley enthusiastically embraced Jones’s volunteer army. Nearly 200 temple members showed up at Moscone headquarters, fanning out to campaign in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, and helping the candidate finish first in the November 1975 election.

In the December runoff between Moscone and Barbagelata, Peoples Temple went even further to secure victory for its candidate. On the eve of the election, Jones filled buses with temple members in Redwood Valley and Los Angeles and shuttled them to San Francisco. Security at polling places was lax on Election Day, and many nonresidents were able to cast their ballots for Moscone, some more than once.

“You could have run around to 1200 precincts and voted 1200 times,” said a bitter Barbagelata later, after losing by a whisper of a margin. But he was not the only one who claimed that the Peoples Temple stole the election for George Moscone.

Temple leaders also claimed credit.

“We loaded up all 13 of our buses with maybe 70 people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” recalled Jim Jones Jr.

“We had people going from precinct to precinct to vote. So could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk.

He only won by 4,000 votes.

I’m sorry, but I’ve got to give my father credit for that. I think he did the right thing. George Moscone was a good person; he wanted what was best for San Francisco.”

Jim Jones made sure that George Moscone never forgot his political debt to Peoples Temple.

The man who began his term in city hall with a ringing promise to make San Francisco a beacon of enlightenment would start off his administration with a wretched burden on his back.

The mayor could never rid himself of the stench of contagion that Jones brought with him, and as time went by, the power-hungry preacher only sunk his fangs in deeper.

The pastor was a wickedly smart reader of a politician’s character, and he knew that the way to enchant Moscone was with young women, not money.

When it came to bribing politicians, the temple leader had ample supplies of both.

Jones bragged of supplying Moscone with black female members of his congregation.

Jim Jones Jr. remembered the mayor as “a party guy. He’d always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.”

Temple insiders talked about how Mayor Moscone was one of the politicians under the control of “Father.”

They gossiped about the night that the mayor had fallen into Jones’s hands. “Moscone was known to be a boozer; he liked to drink at parties,” recalled temple member Hue Fortson, now a pastor in Southern California.

Black Pastor, part of this commune mentality (no one should have anything more than anyone else, regardless of their skills or talent or ability to use such advantages)

“One night there was some sort of temple event that the mayor attended. The next morning I heard that Jones phoned Moscone and told him it was a pleasure to see him the night before and to see him having such a good time.

‘But I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,’ Jones told him. ‘Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you — because we know that you’ll take care of us.’”

Jones might have made up the stories of sexual blackmail.

The mayor initially resisted the temple’s efforts to insert its members throughout city government.

In October 1976 Moscone announced that he was naming Jones to the San Francisco Housing Authority, which oversees the operation of the city’s public housing.

The agency, the largest landlord in the city, was a notorious maze of corruption, and it provided Jones’s organization with ample opportunity for shady self-dealing. A few months later, Moscone pulled strings to promote Jones, making him chairman.

Jones swept into the normally tedious meetings of the housing commission like a banana republic despot, surrounded by an entourage of aides and grim-faced security guards. Looking stern and inscrutable behind his aviator sunglasses, Jones ran the meetings with scripted precision while sipping a frothy white drink brought to him by a hovering retainer. The audience, packed with elderly black temple worshippers, erupted into wild cheers at his most routine pronouncements. Temple enforcers roamed through the meetings, keeping a watchful vigil, and even blocking people from entering the bathroom while Jones was inside.

Jones used his position to take possession of public housing units and install temple members in them, and he put other followers on the housing authority payroll. The preacher was building his own power base within city government. “He was using his power to recruit members and to put the hammer on people,” said David Reuben, an investigator for San Francisco District Attorney Joseph Freitas, another politician under Jones’s sway. “He had a lot of authority.”

“Jim Jones helped George Moscone run this city,” said Jim Jones Jr., a chillingly matter-of-fact assessment of the temple leader’s creeping encroachment in San Francisco.

Political leaders, aware of Jones’s ability to deliver — or manufacture — votes, lined up to pay tribute to the preacher. He worked his way into the good graces of officials high and low — most of them Democrats, since that was the party in power in California and San Francisco in the mid-1970s. But Jones was also happy to exchange mutually complimentary correspondence with the offices of Ronald Reagan and statesman Henry Kissinger.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, Jones wangled a private meeting with Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, at the elegant Stanford Court Hotel on Nob Hill, arriving with a security contingent that was larger than her Secret Service squad. Later Jones accompanied Moscone and a group of Democratic dignitaries who climbed aboard vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale’s private jet when it touched down at San Francisco International Airport.

Governor Jerry Brown sang the preacher’s praises. Congressman John Burton, Phil’s brother, lobbied the governor to appoint Jones to the high-profile board of regents, which oversaw California’s sprawling public university system. San Francisco Supervisor – now U.S. Senator — Dianne Feinstein accepted an invitation to lunch with Jones and to tour Peoples Temple.

But no political figures were more gushing in their praise of Jones than Willie Brown and Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s rising tribune of gay freedom. Milk, a perennial candidate for office until he finally won a supervisor’s seat in 1977, aggressively sought Jones’s political blessing. “Our paths have crossed,” Milk wrote Jones during an earlier campaign for supervisor, in a letter filled with the kind of awed reverence that the cult leader demanded from his followers. “They will stay crossed. It is a fight that I will walk with you into . . . The first time I heard you, you made a statement: ‘Take one of us, and you must take all of us.’ Please add my name.”

Jones staged a testimonial banquet in his own honor and demanded that politicians in his debt offer him public tribute on September 25, 1976, at the Peoples Temple headquarters on Geary Boulevard. Hosted by Mayor Moscone, District Attorney Freitas, and Assemblyman Willie Brown, who acted as the evening’s exuberant master of ceremonies. As he introduced the man of the hour to the overflow audience, Brown reached new heights of shameless, ass-kissing puffery. “Let me present to you,” Brown roared, “a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao.” By the time Jones rose to tumultuous applause, he seemed likely to walk on water.

Privately, San Francisco political leaders expressed doubts about Jones and his strange church. One day a friend of Milk’s named Tory Hartmann dropped off some boxes of campaign brochures at Peoples Temple, so that Jones’s army could distribute them. Hartmann was immediately unnerved by the uptight, high-security atmosphere inside the temple, where sentries stood at attention outside each room, like the palace guards in the Wicked Witch’s castle. “This is a church?” Hartmann said to herself. Later, after she sped back to the Castro and told Milk about her bizarre experience, the naturally cheery politician turned deadly serious. “Make sure you’re always nice to the Peoples Temple,” he told her. “They’re weird and they’re dangerous, and you never want to be on their bad side.”

Cleve Jones, a young Milk aide, accompanied him to Peoples Temple for a couple of Sunday services. “Harvey told me, ‘Be careful, they tape everything.’ Everyone knew Jim Jones was creepy, everyone knew he was a megalomaniac. But everybody also saw this church full of black and white people — black people from the Fillmore who had been subjected to apartheid-like policies and seemed to finally be getting some respect.”

Members of Moscone’s staff were also beginning to hear troubling reports about Peoples Temple. One day mayoral aide Dick Sklar suggested to his family maid — an African-American woman who had followed the Sklars to San Francisco from Ohio — that she attend a Sunday service at Peoples Temple. “I didn’t know anything about it,” Sklar said, “but she was a churchgoing woman, and I thought she might like it. Afterward she came back and said it was the scariest place she’d ever been. They searched her, asked her questions. I had no idea.”

Moscone himself could not ignore how peculiar his political ally was. “I was at every meeting that Jim Jones ever attended with the mayor,” said Moscone press secretary Corey Busch. “I can tell you that after every one of those meetings, the reaction was, ‘This is one weird bird.’ He always wore the dark glasses. You couldn’t predict Jonestown, but he was definitely weird. In retrospect, maybe we should have seen that, but we didn’t.”

Excerpted from “Season of the Witch” by David Talbot. Copyright 2012 by David Talbot.

Jim Jones’ “Days of Darkness” San Francisco City Hall Exhibit

San Francisco.  Its been twenty years since Jim Jones and Jonestown, Guyana.  A large photograph is mounted on the fourth floor near the Board of Supervisors meeting room.  There is a series of photographs of Jones in the exhibit called “Days of Darkness”.

The photos are of about 900 people who will die in a couple of hours including Congressman Leo Ryan and Greg Robinson the photographer who took a lot of the photographs.

“You can’t believe that one guy can be that powerful, that he can get so many people to kill themselves” said Claes Ostlund a resident of Stockholm who is trying to make sense of how this evil was possible in San Francisco.

Patty Moran, a Democratic Party activist during the time of Jones, had worked for Harvey Milk and George Moscone who were murdered a week after the tragedy in Jonestown states “I can understand why people here wouldn’t like it, having to look at that every day”.

“…Is there some darkness at the heart of this beautiful city, or is it just that San Francisco welcomes anyone charismatic who preaches social justice?” asks the San Francisco Examiner Columnist Rob Morse.

To answer Rob Morse’s question about the darkness in the heart of the city of San Francisco that would allow a fog to blind the residents to the evil before them, see this teaching by Prophet.tv’s Building the Warrior series.

 

Source article Pictures of a nightmare past – SFGate.

Followers Say Jim Jones Directed Voting Frauds – Busloads of Voters – Article – NYTimes.com

December 16, 1975.  San Francisco.

Former temple members state that the Rev. Jim Jones orchestrated a campaign of illegal practices in voting to elect politicians that were People’s Temple friendly.  These fraudulent practices included brining in busloads of voters not eligible to vote in the 1975 San Francisco municipal elections.

See this source article in the New York Times for more information Followers Say Jim Jones Directed Voting Frauds – Busloads of Voters – Article – NYTimes.com.