Don’t Drink the Kool Aid on Harvey Milk

How could Gus Van Sant have made a movie about Harvey Milk without casting an actor to play Jim Jones? The biggest story out of San Francisco in November 1978 was not the murder of Mayor George Moscone and City Councilman Harvey Milk by a crazed Dan White. It was the murder of more than 900 people, most of them former denizens of the Bay area, orchestrated in the jungles of Guyana by Jim Jones, a political ally of Milk and Moscone. Jones provided his robot-like followers as volunteers to San Francisco politicians sharing his left-wing views. In return, they allowed him to conduct his criminal ministry with impunity. Moscone, in fact, had appointed Jones chairman of the city’s housing authority. Milk aided and abetted the communist psychopath by describing Jim Jones to President Jimmy Carter as “a man of the highest character” who had “undertaken constructive remedies for social problems which have been amazing in their scope and effectiveness.” Though Hollywood would rather forget, it is worth remembering that Harvey Milk, before being martyred by Dan White and canonized by Penn’s biopic, shamelessly promoted one of modern American history’s great villains.