(UPDATED 2020 and today [2025] – first posted late 2010)
Jim Jones was a hard-core atheist/socialist. It wasn’t a “religious cult,” rather, it was a cult in Marxian ideology. Here is one example from a sermon of his:
HARVEY MILK & Dan White
Remember, as NATIONAL REVIEW makes the point, “Willie Brown, Walter Mondale, and Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter ranked high among his [Jim Jones] supporters.” Continuing with the line of historical connections between “Leftism” and Jim Jones, NR also clearly reports that the media still gets their biased views mixed up with reality:
…But the first draft of history depicted the political fanatics as Christian fanatics, despite the group’s explicit atheism and distribution of Bibles in Jonestown for bathroom use. The words “fundamentalist Christianity” were used in a New York Times article to describe Jones’s preaching. The Associated Press called the dead “religious zealots.” Specials on CBS and NBC at the time neglected to mention the Marxism that animated Peoples Temple.
Beyond the ideology that inspired Peoples Temple’s demise, the media whitewashed the politicians who aided and abetted them.
Learning that San Francisco mayor George Moscone appointed Jim Jones to the city’s Housing Authority Commission, a body of which he quickly became chairman, piqued my curiosity, which led to my writing Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco. This revelation, particularly shocking in light of the fate of his tenants in Jonestown, led me to come across this: Willie Brown, who would become the speaker of the California State Assembly and then mayor of San Francisco, compared Jim Jones to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Harvey Milk described Jonestown as “a beautiful retirement community” helping to “alleviating the world food crisis.” California lieutenant governor Mervyn Dymally actually made a pilgrimage to Jonestown that led to a gushing reaction typical of ideological tourists.
The politically inspired delusions of San Francisco Democrats proved contagious. Jimmy Carter’s running mate, Walter Mondale, met with Jim Jones in San Francisco in 1976. Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, found Jones so impressive that she campaigned with him, ate with him, allowed him to introduce her during a campaign speech, telephoned him, and put him in touch with her sister-in-law, Ruth Carter Stapleton. Friends in high places suppressed investigations in the United States, misled officials in Guyana into dismissing allegations against the lunatic in their midst, and biased State Department hands into siding with Jones in his fight with outraged relatives of the captives in his concentration camp….
THE CITY JOURNAL has a short review of Daniel Flynn’s book, “Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco.”
…. Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.
Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.
While Harvey Milk was a strong advocate for Jim Jones, he was never a member of the cult as such, and Flynn may overstate the comparison between the two figures, though he draws no moral equivalence between them. It’s true that Milk amplified Peoples Temple propaganda, and even wrote letters to President Jimmy Carter defending Jones after disturbing reports of abuse emerged from the Jonestown compound in Guyana. But Milk was essentially just an aggressive municipal official willing to play hardball; he was murdered by a political rival. Jim Jones, on the other hand, was a diabolical lunatic for the ages.
Flynn nonetheless makes a compelling argument about our faulty historical memory of these events. Dan White killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone because he felt stymied and betrayed by them politically, not because Milk was gay or Moscone was friendly to gays. There is no evidence that White was homophobic, but with the help of two Oscar-winning films, Milk has been elevated to sainthood, a martyr to gay liberation.
At the same time, Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.” ….
The SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY had an article critiquing the popularization of the myth that this killing of Harvey Milk was over struggles of sexual identity: “Dan White’s Motive More About Betrayal Than Homophobia“
….. The film’s production company has kept Big Love writer Dustin Lance Black’s script under tight wraps, but SF Weekly was able to obtain a recent draft. The story focuses primarily on Milk’s life before his election and does an impressive job of capturing his compassion, charm, strength, and prodigious ability to inspire.
For the most part, the script is loyal to actual events, but there are a number of factual inaccuracies in the treatment of the story’s villain. In one scene, Milk is challenged by one of his aides, who asks, “What does Dan White do for you? Really? Politically?”
Milk replies that he suspects White is “one of us” (meaning gay), and that he sympathizes with White for living “the daily lie.” While it’s possible that White was confused about his sexuality or was secretly homosexual — though there is no evidence of either — Milk’s scripted response does not answer the aide’s question of what White did for Milk.
The real answer is surprising. According to voting records, newspaper stories, and anecdotal information, White supported Milk’s agenda with his influence, vote, and pocketbook. More than that, Sloan says, White respected Milk and actively sought his friendship.
That is, until the two had a bitter falling-out over a land-use issue in White’s district.
But instead of giving a historical nod to White’s political support of Milk, the film’s script advances the idea that White was struggling with his sexual identity. …..
More from the CITY JOURNAL’s article:
- Mythology As History: The troubled man who murdered Harvey Milk and George Moscone killed them over a petty grievance, not anti-gay bigotry.
…. White delivered the keynote address at the California Coalition for Handgun Control’s 1977 annual meeting. Like Feinstein, he supported gun control (he sometimes carried a firearm himself). As a supervisor, he voted for an aggressive affirmative-action policy that evaluated those in city management by how many minorities advanced under their leadership. On the board, the former cop and fireman essentially served as the representative of the city’s public-employees’ unions. When California’s Proposition 13, a tax-limitation measure backed by Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, passed, White voted for tax increases to protect public employees from threatened cuts. Later, when those threats began to appear more like scare tactics, White voted to rescind the tax increases. The two votes illustrate White’s politics—not particularly ideological, and often inconsistent.
White’s stands on gay rights appear consistently inconsistent as well. The first person White hired in politics was a gay man, who served as his campaign manager and later his chief of staff and business partner. “That was never an issue,” Ray Sloan told me in an interview for Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco. “In coordinating his campaign, I don’t think anyone knew or cared if I was gay. I neither hid it but I wasn’t out participating in any way that would say that. I sort of lived my own life. As time went on, it was clear that he knew. It just didn’t make any difference to him.”
Milk often joined White for coffee or lunch. Unlike other colleagues on the board, Milk attended the christening of White’s son. When Milk introduced the sole legislation authored by him to become law—a sensible ordinance requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets—White seconded it. But after Milk reversed his support for White’s efforts to keep a home for troubled youth from opening in his district, the troubled White reversed his support for a gay-rights measure important to Milk. Milk perhaps never saw White as an ally, but White clearly saw Milk as such, which led to feelings of betrayal.
During White’s brief time in politics, he sided with Milk on the most important issue involving gay rights. He endorsed “No” on Proposition 6, a ballot measure sponsored by California state senator John Briggs seeking to empower local school boards to fire openly gay teachers. White attended the largest gay-rights fundraiser in the history of U.S. politics at the time to mobilize support against Briggs, donating $100 to defeat the anti-gay measure.
About a week after Prop. 6 went down to defeat, White abruptly offered his resignation from the board of supervisors. Then the public employees who had worked hard to elect him let him know, at times angrily, that they objected to his sudden decision. Just as suddenly, the mercurial politician asked for his job back. Moscone initially welcomed White back on the board, but the mayor changed his mind after Milk lobbied him to seat someone else and encouraged political players in White’s district to jettison his attempt to regain his seat.
White felt betrayed. More important, he felt as though he had betrayed those loyal to him. A petty man nursing a petty grievance over a petty office murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
“I know why Dan White killed Milk,” board colleague Quentin Kopp explained in an interview for Cult City. “Because Milk was lobbying Moscone not to weaken and not reappoint White to the board. That got around.” Dianne Feinstein, a fellow Democrat who nevertheless disagreed with Kopp on much, agrees with him here. “This had nothing to do with anybody’s sexual orientation,” she reflected ten years ago. “It had to do with getting back his position.” ….
Dianne Feinstein: Harvey Milk’s Death Political, Not Over Sexual Orientation