918. I want you to sip at that number for a second.
918. It's a number that feels so abstract, almost
like a statistic from a history book, you know?
It just doesn't feel real. It doesn't. But if
you try to visualize it, I mean, that is a small
town. That is a completely packed high school
gymnasium. That's a line of people stretching
for blocks and blocks. And on November 18th in
1978, every single one of those lives was just
extinguished. It remains to this day the largest
loss of American civilian life in a a non -natural
disaster, with the sole exception of September
11th. And yet and this is the thing that really
drove me crazy while we were prepping for this
deep dive. Culturally, we have reduced this massive,
complex tragedy to a punch line. A meme. Oh,
absolutely. We've all heard it. I'm sure we've
all probably said it at some point in a business
meeting or a political argument. Oh, don't drink
the Kool -Aid. It's just become shorthand, hasn't
it? It means don't blindly follow a bad idea
or watch out for corporate groupthink. Exactly.
But when you actually open the files on the People's
Temple Agricultural Project, which is the official
name for Jonestown, you realize that phrase isn't
just. It isn't just disrespectful. It's actually
a complete lie. It completely rewrites history.
It does. And look, let's just get the pedantic
fact check out of the way right now so we don't
have to dwell on it. Right. It wasn't Kool -Aid.
The forensic evidence from the scene, the, you
know, the. empty boxes littering the pavilion,
they were for flavor aid, a cheaper off -brand
competitor. Trivial detail, really. It is. But
the much more important correction, and this
is the one we are going to spend the next hour
unpacking, is the idea that this was a mass suicide.
Right. Because that word suicide. It implies
a choice, doesn't it? It implies willingness.
And what we're going to see, what the evidence
just overwhelmingly shows, is that for a huge
percentage of those 918 people, the babies, the
toddlers, the seniors, and the people staring
down the barrel of a rifle, choice had absolutely
nothing to do with it. That's the mission today.
We need to dismantle that myth, the myth of their
crazy cult that killed themselves, and instead
look at the machinery of how this happened. Because
Jonestown didn't just appear out of thin air
in a jungle in Guyana. No. It didn't start with
crazy people. It started in the heart of the
American political establishment. That's the
part that just completely blew my mind in the
research. The question I kept writing in the
margins of all these notes was just how. How
do you go from being this politically connected,
progressive, racially integrated church group
in San Francisco? I mean, these people were dining
with vice presidents. How do you go from that
to dead in the mud in South America? It is a
terrifying slide and it's not a straight line.
It's not one single event. It's a study in isolation,
in political radicalism and the slow creeping
psychology of total control. So let's start there.
Let's start not in the jungle, but in the city,
because I think most people have this image of
Jim Jones as this. This fringe lunatic. You know,
a guy in sunglasses shouting on a street corner
somewhere. Right, a classic cult leader architect.
But the source material, it paints a completely
different picture of him in the mid -1970s. Oh,
completely. If you were living in San Francisco
in, say, 1975 or 1976, Jim Jones wasn't a fringe
lunatic. He was a power broker. He was in many
ways the establishment. So the People's Temple,
it started in Indiana back in the 50s, but they
moved to California in 65. Is that when they
started gaining this political influence? That's
when it really ramped up. When they established
themselves in San Francisco, they became a machine,
a political machine. Let's drill down into that
machine aspect because our notes say he was instrumental
in the mayoral election of George Moscone. How
does a preacher become instrumental in a major
city's mayoral race? It comes down to one thing.
The People's Temple didn't just have a congregation.
They had a mobilized, incredibly disciplined
voting bloc. Jones could snap his fingers and
have thousands of volunteers walking precincts
handing out flyers. Getting out the vote. Getting
out the vote, which is the most important thing.
And a tight local election, which that one was,
that is pure gold. Moscone won that election
by a very, very slim margin. And he knew who
to thank. He knew exactly who tipped the scales.
And he was grateful. He knew it enough to give
Jones a job. And we're not talking about some,
you know, ceremonial thank you position. No,
no. This was a serious appointment. This was
real power. Mayor Moscone appointed Jim Jones
as the chairman of the San Francisco Housing
Authority. Stop and think about that for a second.
The man who would later orchestrate the Jonestown
massacre was the chairman of the Housing Authority
for a major American city. He was in charge of
public housing. He was leading public meetings.
He was deciding the fate of tenants and multi
-million dollar budgets. And if you look at the
records from those meetings, he was already practicing
his methods of control, wasn't he? It was pure
theater. Jones would pack the meeting room with
hundreds of temple members. If he made a motion,
the room would erupt in cheers. If someone dared
to oppose him, the room would boo them into silence.
He was basically road testing his control tactics
on a municipal level. And his network, it went
way beyond the mayor's office. I'm looking at
some of the names here in the source material.
Well, they're icons of the Democratic Party.
Walter Mondale, Rosalind Carter. It's absolutely
true. In September of 1976, there was this massive
testimonial dinner held in Jones's honor. The
guest list was a who's who of California and
national politics. Who was there? Governor Jerry
Brown was there. Assemblyman Willie Brown, who
was arguably the most powerful politician in
the entire state. He was there, and he famously
compared Jones to Martin Luther King Jr. and
Mahatma Gandhi. Wow. Alter Mondale, who was running
for vice president at the time, said a glowing
endorsement that was read aloud. Rosalind Carter,
the future first lady, actively campaigned with
him. She shared a stage with him. Why? I mean,
looking back now with the benefit of hindsight,
it seems completely insane. Did they not see
the cracks? Were there no warning signs? You
have to look at what Jones was selling on the
surface. He wasn't selling, come join my crazy
cult. Racial integration and social justice.
The optics were good. The optics were fantastic.
The People's Temple was one of the few truly
integrated organizations at the time. You had
young white college kids sitting next to elderly
African -American women. You had professionals,
laborers all together. To a progressive politician
in the 70s, that looked like the Dream Coalition.
Jones was a master at hiding the abuse behind
this shield of progressive politics. He had a
whole PR team, right? The notes mention public
relations women. Yes. He had a dedicated team
within the temple whose entire job was to polish
the image and manage the narrative. They courted
the press. They courted politicians. They made
sure that whenever any dignitaries visited one
of their facilities, all they saw were happy
children singing and a vibrant, productive community.
They were incredibly aggressive about managing
the narrative. Okay, so he's the king of San
Francisco. He's got the mayor on speed dial.
He's got the future first lady singing his praises.
Which brings us back to that central question.
why leave? Why pack up a thousand people and
move them to a remote, undeveloped jungle in
Guyana? It's that classic push and pull dynamic.
The pull was that Jones was a malignant narcissist
who wanted total, absolute dominion. In San Francisco,
for all his power, he still had to deal with
laws. He had to deal with the press, with critics,
with defectors. He wanted a kingdom where his
word was the only law. Guyana offered that possibility.
Why Guyana specifically, though? Was it just
a random spot on the map? Not at all. It was
very, very calculated. The source material breaks
down the reasoning really clearly. First, it's
English speaking. That's huge. It's huge if you're
moving hundreds of Americans, you don't have
to deal with an immediate language barrier. Second,
Guyana had a socialist government at the time,
led by Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. Jones could
pitch his project as a sort of socialist fellow
traveler experiment. So he's speaking their language
politically. Exactly. And third, and this was
absolutely crucial for his followers, Guyana
had a predominantly black leadership. Right,
because the demographics of the temple were,
what, about 70 percent African -American? Yeah.
Roughly 70 percent of Jonestown's population
was black. And Jones sold Guyana to them as a
sanctuary. He hammered this message home constantly.
The U .S. is racist. The U .S. is going to put
you in concentration camps. A race war is coming.
In Guyana, a black -led socialist country, you
will finally be free. It's a powerful pitch.
It's an incredibly powerful pitch if you've experienced
racism in America. But he was also pitching the
Guyanese government, right? He had to get their
permission to bring a thousand Americans into
their country and set up shop. And that's where
his manipulative genius comes in again. He didn't
just go to them and say, we want to start a farm.
He looked at the map. He was clever. He was.
The spot they chose was in the deep interior,
in the northwest of the country, right near the
border with Venezuela. Now, Guyana and Venezuela
have had this longstanding, very contentious
border dispute for over a century. Venezuela
claims that entire chunk of territory. So Jones
saw a geopolitical angle. He did. He went to
Prime Minister Forbes Burnham and basically said,
let me put a thousand American citizens right
on your disputed border. We will be a human buffer
zone. Venezuela will never dare to invade if
they know they have to run over American citizens
to do it. That is just, it's chilling. He's literally
using his own followers as human shields, as
a bargaining chip to get land. They were always
just tools to him. He used them as a voting bloc
in San Francisco, and he used them as a geopolitical
buffer in Guyana. They were pawns. So that's
the pull, the allure of a private kingdom. What
was the push? Because the move wasn't a slow,
organized trickle. At a certain point, it turned
into a panic. The push was the press. Despite
all his political connections, all his PR work,
rumors were leaking out. Defectors were starting
to talk to journalists about the beatings, about
the forced confessions, about financial fraud.
And in the summer of 1977, a publication called
New West Magazine was preparing to publish a
massive expose. This is the Marshall Kilduff
article. That's the one. And back then, there
was sometimes this professional courtesy where
editors would read the article. To the subject
before publication, you know, for fact checking.
A courtesy that doesn't exist anymore. Not so
much. An editor from the magazine read the article
to Jones over the phone. Jones listened to all
these detailed allegations of physical abuse,
of financial crimes. He hung up the phone and
he decided to run. He fled to Guyana that very
night. Just like that. Gone. And the great exodus
began. Hundreds of his followers were ordered
to follow him over the next few months. They
left their jobs. They sold their homes. They
signed over their life savings to the temple,
said goodbye to their families, and they flew
to South America. They thought they were building
a socialist paradise. They did. That was a promise.
So let's talk about that paradise. Because the
brochure, I'm sure, was beautiful. The People's
Temple Agricultural Project. It sounds noble.
It sounds like a Peace Corps mission. But the
reality, let's unpack the reality of day -to
-day life inside Jonestown. It was a bait -and
-switch operation. of the absolute highest order.
The brochure promised a tropical utopia, self
-sufficiency, brotherhood, racial harmony. The
reality was a poorly run, overcrowded labor camp.
Let's start with the physical conditions. What
are we talking about? Well, start with the environment
itself. It's the jungle. It is incredibly hot.
It is relentlessly humid. And the soil is terrible.
This is something that often gets overlooked
in the story. They're an agricultural project.
The soil is kind of important. You would think.
But the soil in that region is a low fertility
clay. It's just not meant for the kind of intensive
agriculture they were attempting. They couldn't
grow enough food. They were never going to be
self -sufficient. So they were hungry. They were
starving. We have menus and survivor accounts
that are just heartbreaking. The average diet
was rice, rice for breakfast, maybe some rice
water for lunch, and then rice with some boiled
greens or beans for dinner. If you are extremely
lucky, you might get an egg. And on this diet,
they were working. How long? 11 plus hour days.
6 .30 in the morning to 6 .00 at night, six days
a week. Chopping wood, clearing fields in that
sweltering heat, all on a massive calorie deficit.
People were fainting in the fields from malnutrition.
But not everyone was starving, right? I remember
reading a very specific detail about Jim Jones'
personal cottage. No, the king was not starving.
Jones lived in a cottage that looked modest from
the outside, but inside he had a refrigerator.
And that refrigerator was stocked with soda,
with meat, with eggs. So while his followers
are literally collapsing from hunger, he's in
his air -conditioned room drinking a cold Coke
and eating a steak. That hypocrisy is just infuriating.
But it also serves a purpose in the control system,
doesn't it? It establishes him as a different
species. He's the leader. He deserves the protein.
You are the worker. You deserve the rice. It
reinforces the hierarchy perfectly, but the physical
hardship, the hunger, the exhaustion, that was
just one layer of the control. The psychological
control was arguably even more intense. We have
to talk about the loudspeaker. The tower. The
tower. Jones installed this massive PA system
that covered the entire settlement, every cabin,
every field. And he was on it. Constantly. Survivors
talk about this with genuine trauma in their
voices. You'd wake up to his voice. You'd work
all day to his voice. You'd eat your meager dinner
to his voice. He would be ranting, reading the
news, giving orders, sometimes rambling incoherently
deep into the night. You could never escape it.
You couldn't turn it off. There was no off switch.
Yeah. It's a classic brainwashing technique.
If you bombard the human brain with constant
noise and information and you couple that with
sleep deprivation and malnutrition, it becomes
nearly impossible to form an independent thought.
You are just a vessel for the leader's voice.
And the information he was feeding them through
that speaker was, well, let's call it curated.
It was terrifyingly curated. You have to remember,
they have no TV, no radio from the outside world,
no newspapers. Their mail is completely censored,
both outgoing and incoming, so Jim Jones is their
only window to the world. And he painted the
world outside as a complete and utter hellscape.
What kind of stuff was he telling them? He would
read news reports, but they were often from Soviet
outlets like DSS or from Radio Havana. He would
spin everything. He told them that the Ku Klux
Klan was marching openly in the streets of every
American city. He told them the U .S. government
had finally started rounding up African Americans
and putting them in concentration camps. Which
was a fear he'd been stoking for years. For years.
He told them that society back home had collapsed
into fascism. So if you're sitting in the jungle,
you're exhausted, you're hungry, and the only
voice you ever hear is telling you that your
home is burning to the ground, you believe it.
You have no way to fact -check any of it. It
creates that perfect siege mentality. We can't
go back. Because there is nothing to go back
to. This jungle is the only safe place left on
Earth. Precisely. And to reinforce that paranoia,
they had movie nights. But they weren't watching
comedies. No. Jones curated the film selection
very carefully. They watched The Parallax View.
They watched the Casa Gavras film, Z. They watched
The Day of the Jackal. These are all dents. paranoid
political thrillers about assassinations, government
conspiracies, shadowy cabals. Exactly. He was
using popular entertainment to validate his paranoid
worldview. He'd say, see, even the movies admit
it. The government is out to get us. The CIA
is everywhere. So you're exhausted. You're terrified
of the outside world. You're constantly listening
to his voice. But what if you still stepped out
of line? What if you complained about the food
or fell asleep during one of his late night rants?
Then you would meet the discipline system. There
was no jail in Jonestown. They had something
far worse. They had the box. Can you describe
the box? It was a plywood container. Roughly
six feet long by four feet wide by three feet
high. Barely big enough for a person to cram
themselves into. It was buried partially underground
to keep it stable. If you misbehaved, you were
locked inside. It's basically a coffin. It's
a coffin. And in the tropical heat, it would
become an oven. Total darkness, sensory deprivation,
heat exhaustion, insects. People were kept in
there for hours, sometimes days. And that was
for the adults. The notes mentioned something
even more disturbing called the well for children.
This is one of the hardest things to even read
about. If children misbehaved, and misbehaved
could mean anything from stealing a cookie to
not paying attention, they would sometimes be
taken to the settlement's main well in the middle
of the night. And what happened there? They would
be dangled by a rope down into the dark shaft,
sometimes upside down. Imagine the absolute terror
of a child spinning in the dark, thinking they
are going to be dropped into the water below.
It's just it's pure psychological torture. It
is. There's no other word for it. It's systemic
torture designed to break the will. It is. And
for the people who couldn't be broken by the
box or the ones who kept resisting, there was
the extended care unit. Which sounds so benign.
It sounds like a hospital wing. It was sedation
ward. Yeah. The medical team in Jonestown, which,
and this is important, included actual doctors
and nurses who had been radicalized by Jones,
used powerful psychiatric drugs as weapons. Thorazine,
sodium pentothal, Demerol. What would they do
with them? If someone was a problem case or was
caught talking about wanting to leave, they would
be forcibly injected and drugged into a stupor.
They called it giving them special care. But
it was a chemical lobotomy. It was a way to silence
dissent. without leaving marks. So we have the
physical control, the information control, and
the punishment. But this brings us to the most
famous, or maybe the most infamous, part of the
Jonestown mythology. The rehearsals. The white
knights. This is where the story pivots. It shifts
from a dystopian labor camp into an active death
cult. And it seems to correspond with Jones'
own decline. His health was failing. He was abusing
drugs himself. A cocktail of uppers to preach
for hours and downers to sleep. He was claiming
he had lung cancer, which the autopsy later proved
was a complete lie. And his paranoia was just
spiraling. Completely off the charts. He was
utterly convinced the CIA was coming, that mercenaries
hired by his enemies were hiding in the trees
waiting to attack. So he started the drills.
The white knights. It would happen at any time,
usually deep in the night. The sirens would start
wailing across the compound. Alert! Alert! Alert!
The entire community. All 900 people, from the
toddlers to the elderly, would have to wake up
immediately, run to the Central Pavilion, and
line up. And armed guards were there. This wasn't
a fire drill. No. The Red Brigade, which was
his personal security force, would surround the
pavilion with rifles and crossbows. Jones would
get on the microphone and tell them that the
mercenaries were in the trees. He would paint
this terrifying picture. They're coming to kill
us. They're coming to torture the babies. And
he gave them choices, right? The outline says
it wasn't always suicide immediately. In the
early drills, he usually offered four options.
Option one, fleeing to the Soviet Union. which
was a logistical fantasy, but it sounds like
a plan. Option two, stay and fight to the death.
Option three, flee into the jungle, which everyone
knew meant certain death by snake bite or exposure.
Or option four, revolutionary suicide. And they
practiced it. They actually went through the
motions. They did. Yeah. We have these chilling
accounts from defectors like Deborah Layton.
Jones would have his staff bring out a vat of
liquid. He would get on the mic and announce,
this is poison. Tonight is the night we will
die with dignity. He would tell them they had
45 minutes to live, and then everyone would be
ordered to line up and drink it. Can you imagine
that psychological space? Believing you have
just willingly drunk poison, holding your child,
and just counting down the minutes to your own
death. And then when 45 minutes had passed and
no one had died, Jones would laugh. He would
get back on the microphone and say, this was
a loyalty test. I needed to see if you were ready
to lay down your lives for our cause. It's not
just a test, though. It's conditioning, isn't
it? It's absolutely conditioning. It's desensitization.
If you go through a mock execution 10 times,
by the 11th time, you are numb to it. You've
already accepted the concept of your own death.
You stop fighting the idea. There was one particular
siege, though, that was more than just a drill.
It lasted for days. The Six Day Siege. That's
right. This was in September of 1977. It was
sparked by a custody battle back in the U .S.
over a young boy named John Victor Stone. Jones
claimed he was the biological father. The mother
and her estranged husband wanted the child back.
Jones was terrified the Guyanese courts would
side with the parents and force him to hand the
boy over. So he manufactured a crisis to prevent
that? He manufactured a full -blown crisis. He
had one of his loyalists fire a rifle in the
jungle, and then he claimed it was a sniper attack
on him. He announced that mercenaries hired by
the Stone family were surrounding the camp. For
six days and six nights, the entire community
was on lockdown. People armed with machetes and
farm tools patrolled the perimeter, staring into
the dark jungle, waiting for an enemy that didn't
exist. It just cements that us versus them narrative.
The world wants to destroy us, so we must be
ready to die for our beliefs. Exactly. But there's
this weird subplot here that I honestly didn't
know much about until we really dug into these
sources. The Soviet connection. They weren't
just looking at the jungle for enemies. They
were looking east to Russia. It's one of those
bizarre aspects of the whole story. But yes,
the People's Temple was actively and seriously
negotiating with the Soviet Union to move the
entire community, all 900 people, to Russia.
He was pivoting his whole ideology. He was. He
went from Guyana is our socialist paradise to
Guyana is unsafe. The imperialists have found
us. Our true spiritual motherland is the USSR.
And they were actually learning Russian. In the
middle of the jungle. They were. There were mandatory
Russian language classes in Jonestown. They studied
the Soviet Constitution. They had actual visits
from Soviet diplomats. Fyodor Timofeev, who was
the Soviet consul in Guyana, came to Jonestown
in October 1978, just a month before the end.
Jones gave speeches declaring the USSR their
spiritual motherland. It adds this strange layer
of almost hope, doesn't it? Like maybe some of
the people there thought, OK, this is hell, but
if we just hold on a little longer, we're going
to Moscow. I think it absolutely served that
purpose. It kept people compliant. Just endure
this a little longer and we'll be safe behind
the Iron Curtain. But time ran out because in
November of 1978, the outside world finally came
knocking on the door. Under Congressman Leo Ryan.
Leo Ryan, a Democrat from California representing
a district near San Francisco. He was a real
maverick. He was the kind of guy who, when he
wanted to investigate prison conditions, he had
himself secretly locked up in Folsom Prison for
a week. He didn't rely on reports. He went to
the source. He wanted to see things with his
own eyes. And he had been hearing from this group
called the Concerned Relatives. Right. This was
a group of families back in the Bay Area who
were terrified for their loved ones. They were
getting these censored letters or no letters
at all. They were hearing stories from the few
who had managed to escape. They showed him the
affidavits, the letters, everything. And Ryan
decided he was going to Guyana to investigate.
And he didn't go quietly. This wasn't some secret
fact -finding mission. No, he brought the heat.
He brought reporters from NBC, from The Washington
Post, from the San Francisco Examiner, and he
brought some of the concerned relatives with
him. His plan was to shine a massive spotlight
on Jonestown. So November 17th, 1978, they land
at the small airstrip in Port Kytuma, which is
the closest town. Jones, through his lawyers,
initially tries to block them. But eventually,
he realizes he has to let them in. What happens
when the congressman finally walks into Jonestown?
At first, it's a party. Jones knows he has to
play the game. He puts on a big show. That evening,
there's a musical performance in the pavilion.
The Jonestown Express, their house band, plays.
People are singing, dancing. The guests are given
the best meal anyone in Jonestown had seen in
months. So on the surface, it looks like the
paradise he always promised. On the surface,
yes. But the reporters, they were trained observers.
They noticed things. They noticed that people's
eyes looked glazed. They noticed that whenever
they tried to ask someone a question, the person
would kind of glance over at Jones before answering.
And Jones himself. He was unraveling. He was.
There are audio recordings of his interviews
with the press that night. He's sweating profusely.
He's slurring his words. He's going off on these
long rambling rants about conspiracies. He looks
and sounds like a man on the absolute edge of
a cliff. And then the next day, the entire facade
just cracks wide open. And it happens with a
simple note. It does. A temple member named Vern
Gosney. He sees his chance. He discreetly tries
to pass a small, crumpled piece of paper to Don
Harris, the NBC reporter. A huge risk. A life
or death risk. The note has two names on it,
Vern Gosney and Monica Bagby. And the message
is simple and desperate. Please help us get out
of Jonestown. That's the smoking gun. That proves
it. It proves that people are being held against
their will. Jackie Spire, who was a young aide
to Congressman Ryan at the time and who survived
the attack and went on to become a congresswoman
herself, she said the entire mood shifted instantly.
They knew at that moment that something was very,
very wrong. So Ryan confronts Jones. He says,
people here want to leave with me. And surprisingly,
Jones tries to bluff his way through it. He says,
fine, anyone who wants to go can go. He probably
thought no one would dare. But then. People start
standing up, the Parks family, the Bogue family.
They start grabbing their children and walking
toward the congressman's truck. In total, about
16 people decide to leave. And Jones is just
watching this happen, watching his authority
crumble in real time. He's watching his control
evaporate before his very eyes. And to a malignant
narcissist like him, this is the ultimate death.
He's sitting there in the pavilion and witnesses
heard him muttering, I have failed. All is lost.
He views a dozen people leaving as the total
and complete destruction of his entire world.
And if his world ends, then everyone's world
has to end. So the group leaves. They get on
the tracks to head back to the airstrip. Ryan,
the journalists, the defectors, they must have
thought they'd made it. They must have felt such
relief. But Johns had already given the order.
He sends the Red Brigade, his most loyal security
team, after them on a tractor trailer. And he
plays one last devastating trick. He sends a
mole, a man named Larry Layton. Larry Layton
pretends to be a defector. He begs to go with
them, and he gets on one of the planes. So now
we are at the airstrip in Port Kytuma. It's late
afternoon. There are two planes waiting on the
tarmac, a small six -seat Cessna and a larger
19 -seat Twin Otter. The group is rushing to
board. Larry Layton gets into the Cessna. As
the engine starts to rev, he pulls out a handgun
that he had hidden and starts shooting the passengers
inside that small plane. And at the exact same
time, the tractor arrives at the other plane.
The tractor trailer pulls up right beside the
Twin Otter. The men from the Red Brigade jump
off. They have shotguns and rifles, and they
don't hesitate. They just open fire on the group
of people boarding the plane. It is a complete
massacre. Congressman Ryan is killed. He's hit
multiple times. He tries to take cover, but they
walk up to him and execute him, shooting him
more than 20 times. And the journalists. Don
Harris, the NBC correspondent. Bob Brown, his
cameraman. Greg Robinson, a photographer for
the San Francisco Examiner. They were all shot
and killed. Patricia Parks, one of the defectors
who had bravely chosen to leave just an hour
before, is also executed. There is footage of
this, isn't there? Bob Brown's camera captured
the beginning of it. It's some of the most terrifying
footage ever recorded. Bob Brown kept filming
until the moment he was shot and killed. You
see the tractor pull up. You see the men raise
their guns. and then the camera just drops to
the ground. While this is happening at the airstrip
back in Jonestown, Jones calls everyone back
to the pavilion, the final assembly. And this
brings us to what's known as the death tape.
The FBI found a 44 -minute audio recording of
this final meeting. We've both listened to it,
and haunting doesn't even begin to cover it.
It's the sound of a massacre happening in real
time. It is. Jones gets on the mic, and his voice
is eerily calm, almost soothing. He tells them
the congressman is dead and then he lies to them.
He creates this immediate existential threat.
He says the Guyanese army is coming. They're
going to parachute in here. They will torture
our seniors. They will kill our babies. So he's
creating a scenario where death by his hand is
the only merciful option. Death is preferable
to what's coming. He says those exact words.
He says death is a million times preferable to
10 more days of this life. He frames it not as
a defeat, but as a noble act of dignity. A revolutionary
suicide. But, and this is so, so important to
remember, people pushed back. It wasn't just
blind, unanimous acceptance. No. And we absolutely
need to say her name. Christine Miller. She was
a 60 -year -old woman. And on that tape, you
can hear her voice clear as day, rising out of
the crowd. She argues with him. She's surrounded
by armed guards staring down this madman. And
she argues for life. What does she say to him?
She appeals to logic. She says, is it too late
for Russia? Can we still go to Russia? She says,
I feel like as long as there's life, there's
hope. She looks at all the children and she says
they deserve to live. And how does Jones respond?
He talks over her. He uses that calm, patronizing
tone. He says, peace, peace, peace. He completely
gaslights her. He frames her desire to live as
a lack of faith, as a lack of revolutionary consciousness.
And then the crowd. The crowd, whipped up into
this frenzy of fear, starts shouting her down.
You're disrupting us. Sit down. Be quiet. That
just breaks my heart. She's trying to save all
of them and they are shouting her down. Jones
wins the argument through intimidation. Yeah.
And then the vat is brought out. Large metal
tub filled with grape flavor aid. And it's laced
with a cocktail of cyanide, valium, and chloral
hydrate. Then he orders the children to be poisoned
first. This is the part that proves, beyond any
doubt, that it wasn't suicide. He was a monster.
But he was a clever monster. He knew that if
the parents drank first, they might have second
thoughts, and the children would be left behind
as orphans. So he killed the children first to
break the parents' will to live. And the tape
captures it. You can hear. You can hear the crying.
You hear the babies crying. And then, slowly,
the crying stops. And Jones is on the microphone
the whole time saying things like, die with dignity,
lay down your life with dignity, stop this hysterics.
Once the children were gone, the parents had
nothing left to live for. The will to live was
completely gone. Obel Rhodes, one of the survivors,
described people just wandering around in a daze,
waiting their turn to get their cup of poison.
But we have to remember the perimeter. The Red
Brigade was standing there, circling the pavilion.
If you tried to run, you were going to be shot.
So it was death by poison or death by bullet?
That is not a choice. That is not suicide. That
is mass murder. It's a miracle anyone survived
at all. How did it happen? You mentioned Odell
Rhodes. There were a few incredible stories.
Odell Rhodes, he saw an opening. He told one
of the nurses he was going to get a stethoscope
for the doctor, and he just kept walking into
the dark and hid under a building. An elderly
man named Grover Davis laid down in a ditch and
just pretended to be dead for hours. Another
senior. Hyacinth Thrash actually slept through
the entire thing in her cottage. She was hard
of hearing. She woke up the next morning, walked
outside, and saw the bodies. And there was that
group with the suitcase, right? A final mission?
Yes. Just before the end, Jones gave a final
mission to three men. Tim Carter, his brother
Mike Carter, and Mike Prokes. He gave them a
suitcase containing over half a million dollars
in cash. $550 ,000. In a suitcase. The temple
was rich. They had millions stashed away. Jones
told them to run the suitcase to the Soviet embassy
in Georgetown. But they didn't make it. They
took the suitcase. They ran into the jungle as
ordered. Yeah. And then at some point, they realized
the absolute absurdity of it all. They dumped
the money and just ran for their lives. And speaking
of money, the will. After the Guyanese army arrived
and found the bodies, they found letters on the
bodies of Marceline Jones and Carolyn Leighton.
Who did they leave all the temple's assets to?
The Communist Party of the USSR. There were millions
of dollars in offshore bank accounts in Panama,
in the Bahamas. They've accreted it all to the
Soviet Union. It just shows how deep that delusion
went. Even in their final moments, they thought
they were soldiers for the Soviet cause. In the
aftermath, people just couldn't process this.
So, of course, the conspiracy theory started
almost immediately. We still hear them today.
It was the CIA. It was a government mind control
experiment like EmCulture. It's a comforting
thought in a very weird way, isn't it? It's easier
to believe that some shadowy, evil government
agency used mind control rays than it is to believe
that a charismatic preacher from Indiana could
talk 900 people into their own deaths. Was there
ever any credible evidence for those theories?
The House Select Committee on Intelligence investigated
it thoroughly. They found zero evidence of any
CIA involvement. But Jones did use brainwashing
techniques. He studied them. He studied North
Korean indoctrination methods. He studied Maoist
struggle sessions. He didn't need the CIA. He
was a self -taught master of psychological manipulation
and terror. What happened to the site, to Jonestown,
the place itself? The jungle took it back very
quickly. Locals from Port Kaituma looted the
buildings for wood and corrugated tin. Then a
fire in the 1980s destroyed most of what was
left. For 40 years, it was just vines and overgrowth,
completely reclaimed by nature. But recently...
I read something about plans for tourism. Yeah,
this is a very recent and a very controversial
development. In late 2024, the Guyanese government
announced plans to turn the site into a dark
tourism attraction. They want to clear the paths,
maybe put up some signs and open it to visitors.
Selling tickets to a massacre site. It's causing
a lot of pain and anger for the families and
survivors. Is it a way to create a memorial and
educate people? Or is it just exploitation? It's
a very, very tough line to walk. As we wrap this
up, I want to go back to Christine Miller and
I want to go back to those armed guards. I think
that's the most important takeaway from all of
this. We look at those horrifying aerial photos
of the bodies face down, often with their arms
linked, and it can look strangely peaceful or
orderly, but it wasn't. It was chaos, then terror,
then silence. The question that just haunts me,
the one that's impossible to answer is, if the
guards hadn't been there. If the crossbows and
the rifles hadn't been blocking the only road
out. How many would have walked away? How many
would have just run into the jungle? I think
the vast majority. I think if they had a real
genuine choice with no guns pointed at them,
they would have chosen life. They drank that
poison because they look at the guns and realize
they had absolutely nowhere else to go. So let's
just retire the phrase drinking the Kool -Aid.
It's not just wrong on the facts. It insults
the victims. It erases the coercion. It erases
the guns. Agreed. Remember the 918? Remember
they were teachers and nurses and social workers
and hundreds of children. They wanted to build
a better world and they were betrayed and murdered
by the man they trusted to build it for them.
This has been a heavy one, but thank you for
taking this deep dive with us. Always. Take care
of yourselves out there. We'll see you next time.