Further Reading For Jonestown
The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn
Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People by Tim Reiterman
Info
Jonestown is the name assigned to The People’s Temple Agricultural Project, Jim Jones’s attempt at a socialist Utopia built in the jungles of French Guyana in 1976 at the behest of People’s Temple cult leader and door-to-door monkey salesman, Jim Jones. The compound is best known as the site where 909 members of The People’s Temple either willingly chose to end their lives or were straight up murdered by Jones’s zealots when they were (force)fed plastic syringes filled with cyanide and flavor aid fruit drink. Jones, paranoid and fried out of his mind on methamphetamine was among the last to die by self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Jones’s compound was the tragic logical ending to America in the 1970’s, a society adrift in the wake of Vietnam and economic failure. Jones leveraged the fast talk of a conman, the vaguest handle on Christian scripture and the rising appeal of an American socialist economic system to lure vulnerable Americans looking for some way out of the nightmare that the country had become into joining his cause, a barely masked cash grab that ultimately painted itself into a corner.
Following a visit by American congressman, Leo Ryan, investigating the compound on behalf of his constituents that were worried about the whereabouts and quality of life of family members taken in by The People’s Temple, Jones reacted by ordering the death of Ryan and his entourage before sounding the alarm for his cult members to commit suicide. Obnoxious Last Podcast listeners spare no opportunity to remind people that People’s Temple members did not, in fact drink Kool Aid.
Episodes: 300 – 304
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