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Welcome to the Eric Mataxis Show!

Ladies and gentlemen, I will make this brief. My dear mother once said to me

If you don't have something nice to say about someone, then don't say anything.

So here he is. Eric Mataxis

Thank you, Todd. I appreciate your, uh, your self-restraint.

Very judicious of you. Hey folks, 40 years ago, this is really huge. Listen carefully.

40 years ago, uh, I remember it well. Uh, something unprecedentedly horrible happened.

It was November 1978, 40 years ago. Uh, the Reverend Jim Jones.

Um, some of you now know what I'm talking about. Uh, he orchestrated the murders and suicides of almost a thousand people

At a remote jungle outpost in South America.

Um, it's just something that when it happened, the pictures, the whole thing, it was, it was mind blowing.

He was somehow portrayed as a fundamentalist Christian guru.

Um, but 40 years later, a book has come out that tells us, no, that is not only not the case.

Uh, it's dramatically opposite to the actual case. Uh, the book, I'm holding in my hand, it's called Cult City.

C-U-L-T, Cult City. Jim Jones. Harvey Milk and Ten Days, the Chook San Francisco, the author Daniel Flynn is on the line. Daniel, welcome to the program.

Hey, thank you for having me. This is a staggering story. Absolutely staggering. Uh, give my audience the guts of it so they know what we're going to be talking about in the next hour.

Well, in, uh, 1977, Jim Jones, uh, the world started crumbling in on him.

There were a number of media reports that he had been orchestrating fake faith healing, you know, pressuring members to turn over their assets, their property, that he was involved in these organ, you know, beating members of his, his flock, all sorts of just nasty activity.

And so he, he was really a darling of the political establishment of San Francisco. And then very quickly, he had scondered to South America and he had about a thousand people follow him down there from San Francisco.

And this, you know, they had set up a commune down there in the mid seventies and very few people live there at that point. But then, all of a sudden, there's this inflex of about a thousand people in their living in the middle of the jungle.

And in South America, one of the persons that he took was a six year old boy by the name of John Victor Stone and his parents were in the United States and they wanted him back. And so this, this set up kind of a custody case. And there was a court order to bring this kid back to the United States.

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