OnlySubs Episode 55: Don’t Drink the Woke Kool-Aid is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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Little do many people realize today that the People’s Temple cult run by Jim Jones (and famous for ending in a poisoned Kool-Aid-facilitated mass suicide) was in fact a progressive, if not communist, affair. Also, little do people realize its relationship to the Woke movement of today. In this episode of my subscribers-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, I take listeners through a radio message sent from Angela Davis to Jim Jones at his compound in Guyana in 1977, a year before the gruesome end. In it, Davis expresses support and solidarity with Jones and his movement and thanks him graciously for all his help in her own struggles toward her neo-Marxian vision for society. I also take time to link Davis to Critical Race Theory directly through both Kimberle Crenshaw, who cites her in the most important paper about intersectionality, and, more surprisingly, through Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi, you might be surprised to learn, featured Davis as one of five characters in American history who tell the story of racism and antiracism as he sees it in Stamped from the Beginning, where he devotes over 100 pages to Davis and her influence.
Previous episodes of OnlySubs can be found here.
7 comments
The Utopian Socialism of Jim Jones.
https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=102313
It’s even more bizarre than I had thought. Jim Jones was an odd duck, except at least he was original and unique. He appears to have been an atheist with a plan of infiltrating the church in order to subvert religion. The plan evidently was to eradicate religion (which he dubbed the opiate of the people), implement communism and create a “heaven on earth”. Here is a video where Jim Jones says, among other things:
“The only God you need is within you. None other.”
“When that transition comes, there will be no time for Gods or any other kind of ideology, rituals, religion, or tradition. The opiate of the people shall be removed from the consciousness of all mankind. There shall no longer be any need for anything religious when freedom comes. There will no concerns for the tomorrows because everyday will be heaven. We will have built the heaven that man has dreamed about. We will have the heaven that we have been taught by the white masters will one day be given to us that we might be able to shine somebody’s shoes in the throne room.. We shall have our freedom here and now!
In the meantime, I come in the Phenomena of religion to get people OUT of religion. The very thought of heaven in all its might and fools. All the power that you said God had. I have come to make one final dissolution, one final elimination of all religious opinions. There is no room in the consciousness of truth for religious people and until I have eradicated it from the face of the earth, I shall do all the miracles that you said your god would do and never did.”
He then proceeds to ramble on about him being the real God, how the Christian God is an impostor and tells how he healed people. He finishes off the sermon with a song about how socialism will bring heaven on earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RaQ9dyyhnc&t=887s
Yikes
Jim Jones engaged in massive electoral fraud in San Francisco, altering the outcome of an election.
“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.”
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/jim_jones_sinister_grip_on_san_francisco/
Here is a tape of Jim Jones speaking. Evidently, some people had the audacity to not only voice their disapproval, except actually resist when ordered to feed the poison to their children. This was after they had been hearing more and more children screaming in agony and terror before dying. You can hear Jim Jones say at the 36:00 mark while children are screaming and pleading for help as they die:
“This is not the way for people who are Socialists or Communists to die. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity. ::: I call on you to quit exciting your children, when all they’re doing is going to a quiet rest.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofbGZDbbUsE
Here is a video of Jim Jones where he says:
“The only thing that brings perfect justice, freedom, and equality, perfect love in all its beauty and holiness is socialism, socialism, socialism!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDB4I6S63gU
Here is Jim Jones bragging that he was such a master manipulator that he actually used the church to bring people to atheism and communism. He claims that a visiting representative of the government of the Soviet Union was “spellbound” and allegedly stated:
“Jim Jones took the church and used the church to bring people to atheism and the study of communism!”
Whether or not a diplomat of the USSR actually said that, Jim Jones was clearly bragging and claiming that he had ironically used the church to bring people to atheism and communism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GziWfD5TSyU
Women were encouraged to berate their husbands in front of the community so everyone could join in and mock them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehm_fu_–dY&t=1971s
Jim Jones could have sex with any member of the community, male or female. If men resisted, they were beaten by guards and held down while Jim Jones sodomized them. He preached that he was the only heterosexual man in the world. He said he was willing to purge the male members in his community of their homosexuality by sodomizing them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmwVHUNkY-s&t=84s
He would sometimes call individuals to the front of the church, chastise them and order them to be beaten in front of everyone. Here is an audio of him laughing while a 70 year old man was beaten bloody in front of the congregation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUrd0h8-a6A
Incidentally, Robin DiAngelo was also born and raised in 1950s-1970s San Francisco.
1970s San Francisco politics was apparently pretty crazy. The difference back then was that San Francisco was not (yet) home to the world’s most influential, most transformative economic sector capable of spreading its vision to the world!
I recommend reading this link on how Jones was intimately linked with 1970s San Francisco politics.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/jim-jones-harvey-milk-cult-city-secret-history/