Darryl Cooper has pioneered a new form of historical research project. It’s like an audiobook, but there is no underlying book to sell. Instead, it’s his Martyr Made podcast, available here.
I became aware of his podcast via the Tucker Carlson podcast, and that interaction is, by itself, quite a development which I wrote about here. Tucker had the benefit of TV to launch his podcast efforts, but Cooper didn’t. Cooper’s history podcasts reach huge audiences because they are interesting, and while he often mentions his own sources, typically books he’s read, there is no other vetting or appendix to his work. He just talks. Cooper is a self-taught historian. He is a guy who reads, understands, and explains, exactly as other historians are meant to do with books. He just uses his voice and distributes via the internet and on his Substack website. His sources are other more traditional historians.
I like and value Cooper’s work, and really don’t care that he isn’t trained in the standard methods. How much value did Harvard or Stanford trained professional historians provide anyway? I certainly never followed up on the information provided by any of the historian grandees put forward, and it was assumed that because they were Harvard educated or in the faculty at Stanford they could be trusted. Was that ever true? Can it be true now, certainly post-Covid? I think not. If I don’t think Cooper is factual, I can check on things myself, but not all histories are based on original historical research. Often, they are just recounting stories and presenting original ideas.
For example, Cooper did a short series on human sacrifice and cannibalism. He posited that, since organisms have been eating each other since the beginning of life on earth, and that sacrifice of the innocent was built into many early religions, it would be expected that the two ideas, sacrifice and cannibalism, have changed forms but are still with us. And then he noted that on Sunday, millions of Christians will go to church and hear about a human sacrifice of an innocent, and then be asked to partake in the symbolism of drinking the blood and eating the flesh of that same sacrificial lamb. This was, for me, quite an interesting insight and I took it from Cooper, not someone in the mainstream media or any of the popular atheists. Cooper can make connections between events and ideas. That’s what I want from historical research. It is the main point of studying history.
And so, I’ve concluded that Cooper adds value, full stop. His long series about Jim Jones is a spectacular tour through one of the most interesting Americans of the second half of the 20th Century, and his placement of Jones within the framework of the times is a tremendous service to the understanding of American history as well as the story of the deaths at Jonestown.
From his birth to his death, Jones inhabited a world, physical, mental and political, which combined some of the most troublesome aspects of American life. Jones was an ugly person with many great impulses who took everything too far. He was born into abuse and poverty, and died in mental darkness, taking hundreds of others with him. Here are the traits and positions that characterized his time on earth:
Cult Leader – Jim Jones led a cult that referred to him as ‘father’ and viewed his words and actions as unquestionable. When he told them to die, they died.
Socialist Enabler – Jim Jones was a committed socialist who thought that US society as irredeemably fascist and racist and he rejected all forms of capitalism except for the money he made doing and selling things related to Temple activities. He sometimes worked as a teacher, but never owned a business. No matter who wanted to join the People’s Temple, they were let in, so, when pedophiles joined the Temple and molested children, Jones didn’t use the American system of justice to stop the problem or punish the transgressors. He relied on ‘revolutionary justice’ which often meant the abuse continued.
Civil Rights Pioneer– As Cooper points out, had Jim Jones died in the late sixties, he might be remembered as a Civil Rights pioneer. He did, in fact, radically believe that black Americans were mistreated, and he pulled many poor black members into his church and treated them better than they ever had been treated. But, in the end, the leadership of the People’s Temple was all white, and his black followers followed him to Jonestown, into the jungle, where they were induced to commit suicide. Jones and his civil rights commitment led black people to their death.
Sexual Predator – Jones claimed many of the young, female, and white women as his sexual property, even if they were married.
Faith Healer – Sometimes Jones would mock the ‘sky God’ and all traditional religion, but he also had a very good show he put on based on faith healing. It was a scam, but he knew the tricks of that trade and used them to tremendous effect. He was good. Jim Jones could work a crowd.
Social Entrepreneur – Jones and the People’s Temple did, in fact, provide homes and shelter to many people, often the poor and old, and black, but he did so by commandeering their resources often in the form of Social Security checks.
Political Power Broker – Because Jones would order his People’s Temple members to show up places, and form a mob or protest group, or even have them pose as supports of a cause, he was able to influence politicians in California, mostly in San Francisco, to seek his support, which they did.
Codependent Abuser – Jones was faithful to his wife for a long time, but when the church moved from Indiana to California, and finally down to San Francisco, in the hippie Summer of Love era, he was seduced into many relationships with women that were abusive, exploitative, and to use the jargon, codependent. They provided him with sex, drugs, and information, and he gave them power in the organization. Having sex with Jones was the quickest way to rise in the People’s Temple. He had similar relationship with some men.
Murderer – In the end, Jones directed his followers to commit a ‘revolutionary act of suicide’ which led over 900 people, including many children, to drink poison and die. No Jim Jones, no mass suicide. It was an insidious form of murder, for which he is culpable.
In Cooper’s series, he attempts to place Jim Jones within the context of the times in which Jones was an active participant. Jones was active during the early Civil Right period in the 1950s, and then during the counterculture period of the 1960s, and he met his spectacular end just like all the other extreme organizations, such as the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the short lived Symbiose Liberation Army. In 1977, the People’s Temple was the last organization of a similar nature still functioning, and the walls were clearly closing in as Jim, like so many other activists from the period, succumbed to drugs, sex, and then paranoia.
It was a terrible time, and the consequences of those times are still with us. It was the founders of the Weather Underground that launched the Barack Obama presidency, and I am writing this just a few days before the election where Obama’s VP, Joe Biden, cleared the path for Kamala Harris, who made her political name in the same San Francisco political scene as Jim Jones. Disorder, crime, perversity, and a sour poverty of ideas are still with us, and it was incubated in the same period in which Jim Jones was powerful and before his ideas led to mass death.
We’re fortunate to have Darryl Cooper available to us to point this out.
TomRoushOnline 