Do you remember that time the entire Democratic Party in California behaved like cultists, enraptured by Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones?
If you lived through the bizarre suicides of 918 people in Guyana on Nov. 18, 1978, it’s hard not to remember where you were when you heard the news. It would be like forgetting about the Challenger explosion or Sept. 11.
But collective amnesia over just who aided and abetted Jim Jones is much easier to explain. The same influence used on Jones’s behalf during his life helped after his death to erase the causes and candidates he supported.
“Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Harvey Milk gushed. Yes, that Harvey Milk.
Willie Brown, later speaker of the California assembly and mayor of San Francisco, compared Jim Jones to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Dianne Feinstein joined the rest of the San Francisco board of supervisors in honoring Jones “in recognition of his guidance and inspiration” in furthering “humanitarian programs.”
Jerry Brown, California governor then as now, actually spoke at Peoples Temple. George Moscone, who owed his position as mayor of San Francisco to Jones, appointed Jones to San Francisco’s Housing Authority Commission, where he quickly became chairman.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/how-san-franciscos-democrats-made-jim-jones-and-then-made-his-memory-vanish