We need to also point out this was in the 70s. No internet or cell phones to check this guy out. He was taking senior citizens s.s. checks. Poor people's food stamps. Preying ( and not the good kind) upon people down on their luck. And lastly his ego was drug fueled. Very dangerous combo. Creepy creepy man.
Im from Ukiah CA. Jim Jones compound was in Redwood Valley 10 min away from here. My sons daycare provider was one of the victims. Her and a sister and father were able to escape...unfortunately her mother was shot and killed when they tried to escape on a plane w the reporters that visited Jonestown in Gana. 😢
I am from the San Francisco Bay Area. I remember the Jonestown events really well. I had friends talking about their families going to “The City” to check out the early beginnings. My cousin was a cop there too and had an interesting take on it all. What was most crazy to me was that Jim Jones was appointed to chairman of Housing Authority Commission! He became pretty powerful and thus was able to do a lot of crazy stuff!
The congresswoman from where I used to live in CA who recently retired was at Jonestown with the congressman’s entourage. She was shot several times at the airfield and left for dead. Luckily she was rescued.
I've seen her talk about her experience. How terrifying to go try to do good for others and get so injured. Thank God she was able to recover and tell her story and still be part of government. She's amazing.
I actually know her brother. They are estranged over MAGA. Love that Jackie is trying to help female servicewomen who are victims of sexual assault in the military
The saying, "He/she drank the Kool-Aid," means that they bought into the nonsense. Over 900 people drank the Kool-Aid that unalived them. The video of it is horrific.
This is not true. Over 900 people did NOT do as Jim ordered. MANY people refused and were injected with cyanide. Those who tried to run were shot. All the more reason why “drinking the kool aid” is an incredibly insensitive phrase to casually throw around. Over 300 of the 900 were children who were murdered, and MANY of the adults were murdered. This was a mass murder/ suicide. Although the exact number of murders to suicides, we will never know.
Many survivors would contradict this-certainly the 300+ kids who died didn’t buy into any nonsense. Many victims had signs of injection marks on their bodies and others were forced to drink. It certainly was not a situation where the majority committed suicide imo
I also grew up in a cult. My impression is that beliefs based on ideas related to 'serving God', 'forgiving those who sin against you' and having 'faith in the word of the lord' inherently lend themselves to cultish dynamics. However, it is when churches / groups really cut themselves off from the world around them that abuse and cult-like behaviours are given the room to emerge more openly and become normalised. Lack of oversight protects would be abusers from the normal social and legal consequences while isolation keeps members of the group suggestible and easily manipulated. In my church they constantly banged on about 'not allowing the devil to plant seeds of doubt' (leading to backsliding) and how the group was 'of the lord' while life outside was 'of the world' and therefore not 'of the lord'. These concepts were repeated over and over again, in every meeting, prayer group and service.
I was 25 in 1978. I remember wanting very much to be part of a community that worked together, shared with each other, and cared about each other. I’m lucky I never got drawn into a cult.
My Mormon cousin was kicked out of the house after becoming pregnant as a teenager. She ended up in Berkeley and the Hari Krishnas took her in. Fail on the Mormons to turn her out
Sam, in response to your comment about Jones becoming or already being violent, he WAS!! There were many accounts of him beating up members, after they were in Jonestown. He was being discussed more and more in the media because he had fathered a child with one of the members, Grace Stoen. Grace was married and she left, followed later by her husband, but Jones wouldn’t let them have her son, John Victor. Grace got an order from a California superior court giving her custody, but Jim refused. He was spiraling further and further from the drug abuse and he knew that the court order and all the media exposure was eventually going to catch up with him. It’s been speculated that this was a HUGE factor in how he chose to end it all.
He claimed he fathered John Victor but Grace has always said she only wrote that on the affidavit because that’s how control worked in that group. She’s always said that JV was Tim’s son but because she wrote that affidavit, Jim basically convinced himself he was JV’s father.
@@piratesswoop725 she said John Victor was Tim’s son because under California law, he was legally considered Tim’s, as he and Grace were legally married when he was born, and they were trying to get custody and get him out of Jonestown. However, he was in fact, Jim’s biological son.
Looking good with that new hair cut Sam. And Melissa beautiful as always ❤. I love this chanel so much. I find my self keeping an eye out for mormon missionaries when I am out and about.
I don’t think they would allow a congressman to make such a trip now without security and I think it was this incident that changed the policy. I’ve been studying Peoples Temple since 1978, I was 13 when it happened. So many layers to this onion! Stephan Jones is everything his father wasn’t. He saved many lives that day by calling the temple in San Francisco and telling those people do not commit suicide. Several of the survivors have mentioned there is a current politician who reminds them exactly of Jim Jones. This stuff repeats over and over and over.
You said it-there’s SO many layers!! Every time I go down this rabbit hole, I find some I hadn’t heard before! I found all of the interviews with Stephan to be the most telling, as he had so much insight into his father that no one else had! Also the documentary The Women Of Jonestown was fascinating. There’s just SO much to this whole story and it’s so much deeper than “some crazy cult who all killed themselves”…….couldn’t be further from the truth!
This is sooo crazy! I literally had such a weird feeling about this same thing when I was watching the last revelations videos. Praying for your family sam!
I watched this docu-series fully already. You two are such warm hearts, and kind souls, if you don't know Jonestown 's story already please brace yourselves. This ones hard to watch. I'm tough as leather and I cried, a lot.
I live in San Francisco and there is so much more to Jonestown that does not compare to the FLDS. The area where the Peoples Temple was located was the Fillmore. That neighborhood was devastated during WWll when the Japanese were interned from there. Many African Americans swooped in to work in the shipyards and lived in the newly vacated homes. After it became a ghetto homes were destroyed and Geary became a quasi freeway that divided the community. These are the people who followed Jim Jones. The FLDS are more similar the The Branch Dravidians Now the Peoples Temple property is a giant post office
guys this doco was rubbish! tim carter and grace know alot more than they telling us, especially tim and mike carter!!!! very rushed lazy doco with good footage thats it.. Carter was smirking the day after in a interview vs crocodile tears of today..
I can’t believe they keep raiding these compounds, but they never shut them down. What happens when the next raid goes horribly wrong? Can never forget there are kids there🥺
With regard to your comments about how he used fear and hatred to motivate people, sadly multiple studies have shown (and this is something known in the marketing world) that negative emotions are much more motivating to action than positive emotions. That's why scapegoating, scare campaigns and negative advertising (or advertising that creates a "problem" and then sells you something to "solve" it) is so effective. When people are happy, they will get complacent or not necessarily feel the need to act to maintain that happiness. When people are unhappy, frightened, etc, they are more likely to actually take action to get themselves out of the situation that they perceive to be causing those emotions, especially if someone is there to "help" them.
I met a survivor, she visited the college I was going to, and she said she was happy to be there and believed in his views, but towards the end, I realized something was wrong. She was able to escape. I wish I could remember her name, but this was 10+ years ago.
These groups don’t start of with these crazy beliefs,it’s a slow progression over time. The doctrine gets further and further from what it was in the beginning. Along the way they can weed out those that disagree until all they have left are totally loyal followers. That’s usually when it starts getting really bad for the people who stayed, most of whom were born into it.
The book “Raven” about Jim Jones is absolutely amazing. It was written by Tim Reiterman, a reporter on that ill fated trip with Congressman Leo Ryan. Phenomenal.
I was 9 years old when Jonestown happened and I do remember the news footage from the air showing the bodies and Jim Jones had been in my area when I was a kid though I didn’t know what until after he was in Ukiah, California at one point which is in Mendocino County and I grew up in the neighboring County of Lake County, Lake County is a very rural area of Northern California. So knowing that I developed a curiosity about Jim Jones and the catastrophe of Jonestown 😢😮
I am sorry you fail to see that Jim Jones included people of ALL RACES, people were going to share their skills and resources. The church also did huge out reach to the community. Little more research of the 70’s is needed, racism was a huge problem. Also Jones had a cult of personality. Far greater than Jeff’s and Daybel!
Yes, yes, YES!!! SUCH an underrated and extremely enlightening documentary!!! I actually paid to rent it on Prime several years ago before it was on Hulu 🤦🏼♀️ But it was worth it!!! There is so much information in that one that you don’t get anywhere else!!
It's very difficult. There are a few still around from the 60s 70s, but very few. I would say get involved in your already existing community. Volunteer. Get involved in local politics.
By the way. The Royal Caribbean International sponsors my football team in the UK for last season I have seen the new cruise ship, I think it's called called icon of the seas which was advertised a lot at my ground
LOL, I'm in a women's ministry, thankfully I reached out to the leader and got a scholarship. We're reading through Psalms right now for the summer, and we're not meeting as much because of summer. We meet on Zoom. I totally trust the leader and am friends with a lot of the members.
So glad you're covering Jim Jones. Jonestown has always concerned me in how one man could control hundreds of people. I found out about him in 2006 when there was a rapper named Jim Jones, and I was looking up the rapper and found about the cult leader. Apparently, there's a recording of the last moments of Jonestown but I don't have the stomach for it.
Yes it’s very difficult to listen to. Look into Heavens Gate as well if you haven’t already. It had the same ending that Jonestown did but with less people
I've had a fascination with cults for years but a few point you forgot to mention: * jones was caught in a custody battle over a child he had in Jonestown * he regularly had sex with his members (men & women) * he stomped on the bible and stopped using it & his "church" was run on socialism * he was obsessed with religion, death and read biographies of Hitler and other leaders * in the death tape (it's on RU-vid) he forced them to drink the poison or else they'd be forced in via a needle
