In Guyana, Jones began meeting with KGB agents at the Soviet embassy, hoping to move the commune to Russia. In anticipation of the move, Jones instituted mandatory Russian-language classes at Jonestown, refusing to let people eat—even the elderly—unless they spoke in Russian.28 In Guyana, he also began the suicide drills, which he called “White Nights.”29
After the cult’s departure to Guyana, ex-members and relatives of members began kicking up a fuss, warning in interviews, newspaper articles, and letters to President Carter and the State Department that Jones was insane and was planning a mass suicide. Carter’s State Department investigated and concluded that it had no basis for action.30
In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman, Leo Ryan, went on a fact-finding mission to Guyana. As he and his entourage were about to board their plane for home, Jones’s followers sprayed them with machine-gun fire, killing Ryan and NBC correspondent Dan Harris. In all, five people were killed and ten wounded.
Back at the socialist paradise, Jones ordered his followers to commit “revolutionary suicide” to protest “the conditions of an inhumane world.” Several cult members asked what happened to the plane to Russia. Jones told them Russia wasn’t going to happen and tried to get on with the mass suicide. But they kept pestering him about Russia, until Jones assured them that “I’m right now making a call to Russia.” But minutes later, he began exhorting them to take the grape drink and die “quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly.…Good knowing you!”
As hundreds died in front of him, Jones never mentioned God, but rather harangued his followers to stop their hysterics because “this is not the way for people who are Socialists or Communists to die.…I call on you to stop this now if you have any respect at all. Are we black, proud, and Socialist, or what are we?”31
More than nine hundred men, women and children died, most of them black. The majority died by drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid grape drink, an act memorialized in popular culture as “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Cyanide poison causes death after several painful minutes of writhing, screaming and foaming at the mouth.32 Some were apparently murdered with injections of the poison. Jones died of a gunshot wound to the head.
His wife, Marceline, left a will bequeathing all her money to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, specifically directing that her daughter, Suzanne Jones Cartmell, was to receive nothing. Three members who escaped the mass suicide said that during the massacre, Jones’s mistress, Maria Katsaris, gave them a heavy box, instructing them to take it to the Soviet embassy. The box, which never made it to the embassy, had half a million dollars in it.
Jones’s only religion was communism and a strange multicultural bisexualism—in other words, he was a mainstream Democrat. Even Jones’s lawyers were part of the fabric of liberal America. One was attorney Charles Garry, white lawyer to the Black Panthers, who had defended Bobby Seale in the Chicago Seven trial. Garry pleaded the Fifth Amendment when called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Just one year before the Guyana massacre, Garry returned from a visit to Jonestown, proclaiming to the U.S. press, “I have been to paradise!”33 Garry was visiting Jonestown again when Representative Ryan’s party was shot. He bravely ran into the woods to escape.34
Jones’s other lawyer was left-wing conspiracy theorist Mark Lane. Apart from his antiwar organizing with Vietnam Veterans Against the War—where it was proposed that the group assassinate conservative members of Congress35—and participation with the “Winter Soldier Investigation” (an event in which fraudulent non-soldiers “testified” to atrocities committed by American troops) Lane spent most of his life trying to prove a right-wing conspiracy was responsible for JFK’s assassination. Sadly for him, the lone assassin was a fellow communist, Lee Harvey Oswald.
To hide the blinding fact that Jones was part of the mainstream Democratic elite in America, liberals instantly went to work reinventing him as a born-again preacher selling that old-time religion. Time magazine’s article on Jones in the wake of the massacres began: “The sad story of a boy and his Bible.”36
More recently, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called Jones “a minister from a small town in Indiana”—which is on the order of calling Charles Manson a petty thief from Cincinnati. They both hit it big in spaced-out, left-wing, New Age California.
Tellingly, Maddow introduced the story on Jonestown by saying, “Now, for a story that is off our normally trod track of politics.”37 If Jerry Falwell, with as close an association with the Republican Party as Jones had to the Democratic Party, had led the students at Liberty University to assassinate a congressman and commit mass suicide, wouldn’t that be a story about politics?
Within two years, the mainstream media in the United States, with very rare and brief exceptions, dropped the words “socialist,” “communist,” “Marxist,” “Russia” and “Soviet Union” from all mentions of Jonestown. There would be no reminders of the Democrats’ close connection to Jones. It was like the spontaneous disappearance of John Edwards from the news in 2008.
Most deceitfully, the chattering class began importing religious phrases into their descriptions of the atheistic, Marxist San Francisco community organizer. Thus, NBC repeatedly referred to Jones’s “flock” and his “church,” while saying his followers took the poison “as if lining up for communion.”38 How about, “as if standing in a Soviet bread line”?
There was certainly no reference to the racial composition of Jonestown or Jones’s imitation of a black preacher and his constant references to himself as black.
The Democrats had mainstreamed insanity. Jones had all the earmarks of a demagogue—the meaningless slogans, the Castro-style stem-winders, and the hatred of the Bible and Christianity. He was a drug addict who enjoyed polymorphous sex and berated his critics as “haters.” As is common in California, he staunchly supported communal living, no private property, the Soviet Union, and finally, death.
It is an arresting fact that more Republicans—to wit, Barry Goldwater and John McCain—have denounced Falwell and Robertson, than Democrats have ever denounced Jones. Then again, Falwell had criticized Teletubbies. All Jones did was murder nine hundred people.
“JOHN AFRICA” AND MOVE
Another black cult, MOVE (meaning unknown, other than, “Honey, I think it’s time we move to the suburbs”), based in Philadelphia, billed itself as antiestablishment and rejected bathing, hygiene, medicine and electricity in order to return to the simplicity of life in Africa. Led by Vincent Leaphart, who called himself John Africa, MOVE’s followers were required to adopt the surname “Africa,” much as black Muslims’ names must include “X,” Communists call one another “comrade,” and French revolutionaries called themselves “citizen.” Totalitarians are obsessed with stamping out human individuality. Thus, MOVE’s minister of information was named “Gerald Ford Africa.”
There was constant friction with the group’s neighbors on account of the hundreds of rats kept by MOVE; their “recycling” methods, which involved throwing trash and excrement onto the front yard; their armed assaults on neighbors; and nightly bullhorn broadcasts of their anarchist ideology. (MOVE’s building was also consistently voted “worst place to trick or treat” by neighborhood children.)
In 1978, what began as a health inspection of MOVE’s house led to a shootout that left one policeman dead. Nine members of the organization were convicted of his murder, but John Africa was acquitted.39 One of the nine, defendant Delbert Orr Africa, accused the court of being “racially prejudiced […] and society is genocidally bent toward destroying us.” He also asked a police cameraman on the witness stand whether he was as “racially prejudiced as Mayor Frank Rizzo.” 40 Naturally, liberal heartthrob Mumia Abu-Jamal was associated with this band of left-wing nuts, even demanding that he be allowed to represent John Africa in court despite his lack of a license to practice law.
A few years later, MOVE was creating the same problems with rats, garbage, terroristic threats and explosives at a different hou
se in another part of town. After evacuating the neighbors, the police staged a predawn raid on the row house and began a deafening shootout with the cult members that lasted nearly two hours. The MOVE activists shot at the police with automatic weapons from a rooftop bunker fitted with peepholes and gun slots. Next, the fire department bombarded the house with water cannons for five hours. Still, the residents refused to leave.
Finally, in what turned out to be a miscalculation, at around 5:30 p.m., a police helicopter dropped explosive material on top of the house in an attempt to destroy the rooftop bunker. Instead, the explosive set off a conflagration that burned down the entire neighborhood, as well as killing eleven MOVE members inside the house.41 MOVE, it turned out, had been storing drums of gasoline on the roof.
This was a major law enforcement screwup, so two grand juries were convened to consider criminal charges against the mayor and police. After a three-year investigation, no criminality was found.
Cries of racism were only slightly tempered by the fact that it was MOVE’s black neighbors who had demanded action in the first place and also that the rooftop bomb had been approved by Philadelphia’s first black mayor, W. Wilson Goode.
But that didn’t slow down Al Sharpton and attorney Alton Maddox. Fresh from their Tawana Brawley triumph, the two called for Mayor Goode’s arrest. Standing with John Africa’s sisters, Sharpton denounced “the same grand jury system that has plagued us in New York and rendered a very racist and Nazi-like verdict in the Tawana Brawley case has even more so returned a ruthless verdict” in the MOVE case.42
How did MOVE’s friends and family become martyrs? MOVE’s neighbors had a right to be ticked off. Their houses were burned down, too, and they weren’t the ones who had filled their homes with rats, garbage and explosives and then fired machine guns at the police. They were the true victims of both MOVE and a law enforcement screwup.
When did it become required for black leaders to automatically defend black criminals, while ignoring peaceable black people?
David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound was not bothering the neighbors when the ATF staged a military assault on his house. The only emergency the ATF was responding to was the threat of having its funding cut. As enraged as a lot of people were about the pointless, grandstanding government raid in Waco, Texas that left more than two hundred Americans dead, white people felt no obligation to sing Koresh’s praises or carry on his message.
By contrast, John Africa has become a heroic figure in some quarters. In the mixed-up world where all that matters is race, in 2000, MOVE member Ramona Africa appeared on stage at the Harvard symposium “Race, Police and the Community” along with Abner Louima, an actual victim of police brutality in New York City.43 Louima, a Haitian immigrant, had been arrested in a fracas at a nightclub, and then was viciously sodomized with a broomstick by a white police officer, Justin Volpe. who thought he had been sucker-punched by Louima. The attack was monstrous, but not racist: Volpe’s most vociferous defender was his black girlfriend.
But what does a law enforcement mistake during a five-hour siege of a criminal nuthouse have to do with a psychotic policeman committing an assault on an innocent black man?
Celebrity cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal still concludes his speeches and radio broadcasts with: “On the move. Long live John Africa. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.” An article in the Village Voice includes MOVE in a list of black victims of racism, such as Emmett Till.44 Earth First! hailed MOVE as a civic-minded group that “fed poor children natural food and helped to uplift the community.”45
MOVE was responsible for the deaths of more African Americans in the last four decades than the Klan. It’s gotten quite a bit less bad press.
JEREMIAH WRIGHT
For a long time after these experiments with radical black cults, all was quiet on the western front. Dead and maimed cops in a Harlem mosque, nearly a thousand dead bodies in Guyana, a burned down neighborhood, eleven dead MOVE members and a murdered cop in Philadelphia—it was almost as if liberals could learn after being repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer.
And then the Obama era ushered in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
If a white pastor had said what Obama’s preacher had said—not about black people, but literally, the exact same words—people might have noticed that he’s crazier than the love child of David Duke and Ward Churchill (America-hating fake Indian). Both Churchill and the Reverend Wright, incidentally, referred to the attacks of 9/11 as the chickens coming “home to roost.”
Imagine a white pastor calling Condoleezza Rice, “Condoskeeza Rice.”
Imagine a white pastor saying, “Racism is the American way. Racism is how this country was founded…We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority. And believe it more than we believe in God.”
Imagine a white pastor saying: “No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people! God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human! God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme!”
These taped comments of Wright’s were defended in many media outlets as mere snippets, “culled” as Andrew Sullivan said, by dat ol’ debbil, Sean Hannity, to the disadvantage of poor Senator Obama.46 Ah, yes, the time-honored “taken out of context” ploy. But in fact, the outrageous quotes had been selected by Wright’s own congregants for prominent display in videotapes sold by his church for promotional purposes. Apparently, those who knew Wright best—his own congregants—didn’t feel these were careless pop-offs, but stand-alone gems that should be displayed to the public.
Two months before Wright was launched into the public consciousness, he was Obama’s close confidant, friend, mentor, the man who married him and his wife, baptized his children and gave him the title of his best-selling book, The Audacity of Hope. But the moment America got a gander at this loon, he became just some “crazy uncle” Obama barely knew.
Nonetheless, Obama tried to justify Wright’s deranged rants by explaining that “legalized discrimination” is the “reality in which Reverend Wright and other African Americans of his generation grew up.”
That may accurately describe the libretto of Porgy and Bess, but it had no connection to reality. By Wright’s own account, he was twelve years old and attending an integrated school in Philadelphia when Brown v. Board of Education was announced. When he was six years old, Jackie Robinson was admitted to major league baseball and Nat King Cole was the second most popular American in the country, after Bing Crosby. Wright’s childhood was more like The Jeffersons than The Confessions Of Nat Turner.
Apart from the fact that Reverend Wright’s world wasn’t segregated, what about Wright’s anti-Semitism? The anti-Semitic tone of his sermons was almost as clear as his rage against the United States. He called Israel a “dirty word” and a “racist country.” He blamed Israel for 9/11, denounced Zionism and called for divestment from Israel. In addition to videos of Wright’s sermons, Obama’s church also offered for sale sermons by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whom Wright joined on a visit to Libya’s Muammar al-Qadaffi in 1984. The church awarded Farrakhan the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award in 2007, saying Farrakhan “truly epitomized greatness.”
Why did crazy “uncle” Wright dislike Jews? But, again, who knows in what context this remark was made? Maybe they were trying to say that Farrakhan isn’t great. Who knows? We weren’t there. It’s just a snippet.
In Obama’s “conversation” on race (after his minister’s tapes were publicized), he suggested that white Americans rise above anger with the likes of Reverend Wright—as if he represented all of black America—because his tantrums required “understanding.” The media heralded Obama’s speech as “eloquent,” a “profile in courage,” “rising above traditional divides,”47 “honor[ing] the human dimension of his relationship with his politically threatening ‘old uncle,’ as he calls [Wright],”48 and evidencing a “frankness about race,” that “traced the roots of b
lack church preaching deep into ‘the bitterness and bias’ of the black experience.”49 (And that’s just from the New York Times.)
But Obama’s oh-so-civil prescription—deeply admired in liberal quarters—bears, unfortunately, a strong resemblance to the patience that most adults reflexively extend to children. The problem is that black Americans, including Wright, are not our children, but our fellow citizens.
CHAPTER 6
PEOPLE IN DOORMAN BUILDINGS SHOULDN’T THROW STONES
It wasn’t ordinary black people throwing rocks at the police and dropping cinderblocks on people’s heads. Those were common criminals.
It wasn’t ordinary blacks searching the world over for a single white person who would use the N-word—those were self-aggrandizing journalists.
It wasn’t ordinary black people defending violent black cults and black cop killers, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, John Africa’s MOVE, Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, and the Black Panthers—that was the Democratic establishment.
It wasn’t ordinary black people begging Jesse Jackson to be their leader. He was the black leader for white people. As black writer John McWhorter put it, Jackson’s “self-aggrandizing machinations have left behind not a single successful project that would improve black lives beyond the boardrooms of his friends.”1
It wasn’t ordinary black people depicting every suspect ever shot by the cops as a victim of racism, every riot as the police’s fault, every hoax hate crime as absolutely true, Al Sharpton as a respected spokesman for the black community, all cops as redneck racists. That was Jim Dwyer, the New York Times, Anna Quindlen, Hollywood scriptwriters, and John Lindsay.
Not only journalists, but the legal community did its part wreaking havoc in the black community. Starting in the sixties, ordinary people, black and white, watched in stupefaction as liberal social reformers came in and jettisoned thousands of years of human knowledge to rewrite criminal laws and government welfare policies. Liberals living in monochromatically white suburbs or doorman buildings in the cities said, Let’s try these new ideas that sound really cool, like school busing and deemphasizing prison!