The Katherine Massey Book Club @ The C.O.W.S. hosts the 8th study session on Michael Meiers' Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment. This infamous mass murder has countless parallels to our recent literary selections - Columbine, Michael Swango, and The Hart murder-suicide. The Rev. Jim Jones, a White man born in a Racially Restricted Region of Indiana, took a thousand people from California to Guyana, South America. On November 18th, 1978, Jones killed nearly all 1,000 of his mostly black followers and orchestrated the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan. Some were shot, but most were poisoned with cyanide, just like "Double-0 Swango." For nearly half a century, this event has been conventionally understood as a bunch of brainwashed black loons following a White charlatan to their demise in the jungle. Meiers' work suggests something far more nefarious. Last week, we learned about the assassination of the first black superintendent of any major California jurisdiction, Dr. Marcus Foster. Shot with cyanide bullets in November of 1973 (5 years before the November 1978 Jonestown massacre), the Symboinese Liberation Army (SLA) claimed credit for the slaughter and proceeded to kidnap Patricia Hearst, White daughter of publishing titan Randolph Hearst. Meiers suggests that the SLA was a CIA creation and their harebrained kidnapping may have been an elaborate distraction to keep North Americans from paying more attention to the concurrent COINTELPRO and Watergate scandals involving state-sanctioned corruption. Meiers also suggests Rev. Jones was connected to the SLA and may have contracted them to eliminate Dr. Foster, who opposed Jones' unfettered access to Oakland's poor black children. #COINTELPRO #TheCOWS15Years INVEST in The COWS – http://paypal.me/TheCOWS Cash App: https://cash.app/$TheCOWS CALL IN NUMBER: 605.313.5164 CODE: 564943#