Dem Rep. Speier, a Jonestown survivor, likens Trump to Jim Jones: Social media ‘only difference’

A far-left California congresswoman claims that equivalency exists between President Donald Trump and deranged cult leader Jim Jones. “Both of them are merchants of deceit,” U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) claimed on CNN.

“The only difference between Jim Jones and Donald Trump is the fact that we now have social media,” the San Francisco-area lawmaker insisted, while lamenting that many Americans, including her colleagues across the aisle, believe in a cult-like way in the so-called Big Lie that Election 2020 was stolen from Trump. The subtext also seems perhaps to be a call for censorship.

While accompanying her then boss, Congressman Leo Ryan, to the Jonestown People’s Temple compound in Guyana, in November 1978, on a fact-finding mission, Speier was shot multiple times but fortunately survived. Ryan and other members of the delegation were assassinated by Peoples Temple gunmen.

About 900 of Jones’ followers, as well as Jones himself (a leftist who became politically influential in San Francisco before the move to South America), died in what is described as a mass-murder-suicide.

Rep. Speier put forth her outlandish allegations that Trump and Jones are a lot alike on CNN’s misnamed and ratings-challenged Reliable Sources program.

The show, hosted by self-unaware, Biden apologist Brian Stelter, operates as a reliably Fox News-bashing, Trump-obsessed platform in the guise of covering the media industry generally. Stelter also wrote a book about his favorite targets, Fox News and Trump, that hardly anyone read, let alone bought.

Stelter teed up the segment (embedded below in two parts) with an obviously made-up story about how people from around the world are emailing him about classifying the “Trump phenomenon” and Trump “fandom” as a cult, especially given the “mass delusion” about vote fraud and the January 6 peaceful protest that devolved into a riot on the part of a relatively small group of wrongdoers among the many thousands at the U.S. Capitol.

Speier took over from there, in a pre-recorded, condescending interview which you can review and draw your own conclusions.

“There is no question that you could compare Jim Jones as a charismatic leader who would bring his congregation together, force them to do things that were illegal, and then took 900 of them into the jungles of Guyana, where over the course of time, he then convinced them that they should die. I’ve never been able to say they committed suicide because I don’t think they were in control of their faculties…,” Speier said.

“So you look at Donald Trump, a charismatic leader, who was able to continue to talk in terms that appealed to those who are disaffected, disillusioned, and who were looking for something, much like those who became part of Jim Jones’ congregation, the Peoples Temple. They were lost souls, and the only difference between Jim Jones and Donald Trump is the fact that we now have social media. So all these people can find themselves in ways that they couldn’t find themselves before.

“So he basically was a merchant of deceit. Both of them merchants of deceit. Both of them making people not look at facts, not think independently, and sowed a story for them that was indeed destructive,” she continued.

As liberals often do, Stelter and Speier are engaging in a form of projection. It does seem a bit much for conspiracy-mongering Democrats — who present themselves as the party of “science,” who promoted a Russia collusion hoax, who pursued two failed impeachments, insist there was no widespread (whatever that means) fraud in the election, and have enthusiastically adopted the manta that producing a driver’s license is Jim Crow 2.0, among other things — to accuse political opponents of having the hallmarks of a cult.

Democrats are the same never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste party that doesn’t want to actually get to the bottom of what happened on January 6 despite all the hoopla, including an investigate committee.

Speier claimed that the alleged parallel between Trump and Jones repeatedly came up during a book tour two years ago that “forced” her to think about it.

“And then we saw what happened on January 6. How can you not recognize that that was an illegal act, that you were being asked by this charismatic leader to go do something that was going to be destructive, and you went and did it anyway?”

She then threw shade on Republicans in Congress for embracing the Big Lie about the election. “They know that the election was not stolen. They know that it was held properly. They know that there was not massive fraud, and yet they will continue to mouth those words because their leader, Donald Trump, wants to hear them…if they cannot think independently anymore, if they cannot look at the truth and speak the truth, they are, I think, exhibiting cult-like behavior.”

Without evidence she then claimed that some voters in the cult of Trump “were looking to assassinate” VP Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on January 6.

Speier threw a bone to Trump supporters by acknowledging they are “on all different levels.”

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