But as Daniel J. Flynn warned at Front Page back in 2008, “Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid:”

On November 17, 1978, Jim Jones was a hero to American leftists. On November 18, 1978, Jones orchestrated the killings of 918 people and strangely morphed in the eyes of American leftists into an evangelical Christian fanatic. An unfortunately well-worn narrative, playing out contemporaneously in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, of socialist dreams ending in ghoulish nightmares, then, conveniently shifted to one about the dangers of organized religion. But as The Nation magazine reported at the time, “The temple was as much a left-wing political crusade as a church. In the course of the 1970s, its social program grew steadily more disaffiliated from what Jim Jones came to regard as ‘Fascist America’ and drifted rapidly toward outspoken Communist sympathies.” So much so that the last will and testament of the Peoples Temple, and its individual members who left notes, bequeathed millions of dollars in assets to the Soviet Union. As Jones expressed to a Soviet diplomat upon upon his visit to Jonestown the month before the smiling suicides took place, “For many years, we have let our sympathies be quite publicly known, that the United States government was not our mother, but that the Soviet Union was our spiritual motherland.”

Jim Jones was an evangelical communist who became a minister to infiltrate the church with the gospel according to Marx and Lenin. He was an atheist missionary bringing his message of socialist redemption to the Christian heathen. “I decided, how can I demonstrate my Marxism?,” remembered Jones of his days in 1950s Indiana. “The thought was, infiltrate the church.” So in the forms of Pentecostal ritual, Jones smuggled socialism into the minds of true believers–who gradually became true believers of a different sort. Unless one counts his drug-induced bouts with self-messianism, Jones didn’t believe in God. Get it–a Peoples Temple. He shocked his parishioners, many of whom certainly did believe in God, by dramatically tossing the Bible onto the ground during a sermon. “Nobody’s going to come out of the sky!,” an excited Jones had once informed his flock. “There’s no heaven up there! We’ll have to have heaven down here!” Like so many efforts to usher in the millenium before it, Jones’s Guyanese road to heaven on earth detoured to a hotter afterlife destination.

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The horrific scene in a Guyanese jungle clearing could have been avoided. Thousands of miles north, for years leading up to Jonestown, San Francisco officials and journalists had looked the other way while Jones acted as a law unto himself. So what if he abused children, sodomized a follower, tortured and held temple members at gun point, and defrauded the government and people of welfare and social security checks? He believes in socialism and so do we. That was the ends-justifies-the-means attitude that enabled Jim Jones to commit criminal acts in San Francisco with impunity. The people who should have stopped him instead encouraged him.

Mayor George Moscone, who would be assassinated days after the Jonestown tragedy, appointed Jones to the city’s Housing Authority in 1975. Jones quickly became chairman, which proved beneficial to the enlargement of the pastor’s flock–and his coffers, as Jones seized welfare checks from new members. One of the Peoples Temple’s top officials becoming an assistant district attorney, a man so thoroughly indoctrinated in the cult that he falsely signed an affidavit (ultimately his child’s death warrant) disavowing paternity to his own son and ascribed paternity to Jones, similarly enhanced the cult’s power base within the city. How, one wonders, did victimized Peoples Temple members feel about going to the law in a city where Jones’s henchman was the law?

The ability to instantly pivot 180 degrees — in some cases employing plenty of conscious or subconscious doublethink — has been a hallmark of the MSM for decades.  Jonestown going from Marxist cult to religious cult when it made the 6:30 nightly news sounds eerily similar to how a pair of great tragedies, one from early 1960s, and one from last year were spun. In “Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up,” James Pierson’s lengthy 2006 article in Commentary that preceded his book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution (available in both Kindle and dead tree editions) the following year, Piereson noted how the media’s narrative for President Kennedy’s murder was essentially complete even as the facts behind his assassin’s motives were being made clear — and in the case of the New York Times, sometimes in the same newspaper. As Piereson noted, the cognitive dissonance between Lee Harvey’s Oswald’s Marxist worldview and the narrative that was rushed into production immediately after Kennedy’s death would have enormous ramifications to the state of the liberalism in the 1960s. It began the decade as a relatively sober ideology dedicated to fighting the Cold War and advancing democracy throughout the globe; it ended the decade an infinitely more confused and cynical worldview.

The MSM’s displacement in ’63 would be replayed all too many times up to the present day. (See also: Paul Krugman of the New York Times and others on the left instantly attempting to blame the Tea Party for the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the death of Bush #41-appointed Federal Judge John Roll, and others in the Tuscon Massacre one year ago.)