Jane Fonda plans to protest rather than celebrate the president’s birthday.
On Sunday, she hosts, Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment. It features fellow senior citizens Bette Midler and Patti Smith, obligatory gay guy Rufus Wainwright, and the obligatory black friend, Joy Reid (does she sing out or merely rise up?).
“What’s happening now in this country is much more grave, much more serious than what was happening back in the late ’40s and early ’50s,” Fonda told The Washington Post. “Everything is different now, because the rules of democracy, the laws that we, I’m afraid to say, maybe took for granted … are being taken away.”
More grave than what was happening back in the late 1970s?
The Washington Post informed: “Fonda’s activism is the stuff of legend … Fonda has protested everything from the need to address climate change to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to civil rights issues.”
The Post mentions her work on behalf of the North Vietnamese Communists but remains silent about her work on behalf of the Peoples Temple Communists.
She publicly acted as a booster for cult leader Jim Jones in California when he came under scrutiny in the press by signing a public statement in the summer of 1977 that praised him for “a high standard of ethics and morality.”
Privately, Fonda joined Jim Jones’s cult. The evidence for this comes from a handwritten note on her stationery that she sent to Jones after attending one of his services. She informed him of her commitment “as an active full participant” of the People’s Temple. (RELATED: Before She Won SAG Honor, Jane Fonda Honored Jim Jones)
She wrote Jones “how deeply moved I was by the experience that Sunday, the atmosphere, the obvious need you have so remarkably filled in thousands of lives, how humanly, passionately and articulately you have redefined the role of church, Christ, religion — I also recommit myself to your congregation as an active full participant — not only for myself, but because I want my two children to have the experience.”
Thankfully, her children never received the full Peoples Temple “experience.” But 276 children did. Jim Jones, his witch harem, and his armed henchmen forced them to ingest cyanide before their parents did, in part to sap the adults of their will to live.
A hundred steps preceded that part of the scheme. Jane Fonda served as a pawn in one important part of this master plan that resulted in Jones thrusting death upon more than 900 people in the Guyanese jungle on Nov. 18, 1978, as part of a harebrained communistic strike on the capitalistic world that he called “revolutionary suicide,” a phrase he borrowed from Black Panther Huey Newton. The aspect of the plan that involved Fonda pertained to the recruitment of celebrity progressives dumb enough to wave off any act of evil so long as the evil-doer’s political commitments roughly matched their own. Fonda and other bigshots made Jones seem cool and signaled that powerful, wealthy, and celebrated figures celebrated Jones. He was in with the “in” crowd.
In writing Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco, I was perpetually stunned by the number and prominence of progressives willing to tout this cult leader’s greatness. This included a who’s-who of the 1970s American Left: Harvey Milk, Angela Davis, Charles Garry, Willie Brown, George Moscone, Huey Newton, Mark Lane, Tom Hayden, and, yes, Jane Fonda. They were his get-out-of-jail-free card.
Why did The Washington Post not ask Fonda about why she pledged her commitment to Peoples Temple as an “active and full participant” and why she ran interference by lending her name for Jones’s benefit before he killed more than 900 people who were disproportionately poor, disproportionately children, disproportionately black.
Rather than look upon the carnage and say, “I’m going to shut up now and reflect on my stupidity,” Jane Fonda carried on unabated. She won an Oscar, made millions on workout videos, and doubled down on lecturing the rest of us on politics and morality.
“I’m the proudest of what I’m doing right now,” Fonda told the Post. “We’re changing things. We’re actually moving the needle.”
In Jonestown, she did not move the needle. Jim Jones’s lackeys did that — straight into the bodies of those skittish about revolutionary suicide.
What type of person celebrates an anti-birthday party for the president of the United States? The same type of person who tells you a mass murderer embodies “a high standard of ethics and morality.”
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