Very interesting. I’ve never heard of this. The press has always portrayed Jonestown as an example of a “religious” cult.
I was living in San Francisco at the time, and Jim Jones had been known as a radical leftist for years. He was the darling of the left in SF, because he had started off as a Pentecostal-type preacher in a black area and had developed a large congregation, mostly of poor, uneducated blacks, but then began to direct his activities to “social justice” causes. Mostly, that consisted of getting government monies for his various endeavors. He was always being honored by left-wing people and organizations in SF.
He picked up whites of the “seeker” type, similar to those who died a few years later in that mass suicide in LA with quarters in their pockets so that they could make phone calls from space when the aliens carried them off. SF at that time was full of them - older women who were divorced and lonely, young mothers without husbands, etc. He seems to have slept with as many of his female followers as he could, and I recall that people commented on this even while he and his cult were still in SF. But that was pretty common for your average guru and was one of the perks, I guess. He built a truly scary cult of personality.
Jim Jones used to publish a newspaper or newsletter that was given out on the streets and contained his ravings, which were exceedingly left wing and more or less in the Reverend Wright mold when they mentioned God at all. But he was wildly popular with all the “progressivists” in the area because he shared all their objectives and could be counted upon to turn out, with his horde of mindless followers, for their causes.
I have a religion aside from my Catholism: minarchism.
Oh, Mr. Walker’s right. I’m old enough to remember the Jonestown massacre, and back then, the media did not try to hide the cult’s left-wing leanings. Just the fact that it was called “The People’s Temple” told me these weren’t conservatives, inasmuch as there were several communist states at the time calling themselves “People’s Republics.”