The Auto Industry In Jonestown

May 05, 2023Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

The notorious events in Jonestown took place so long ago that most readers probably don’t have personal memory of them. In November 1978, in the jungles of Guyana, under the powerful spell of a religious cult with a charismatic leader, and of an all-embracing groupthink, some 900 people somehow agreed to participate in a mass suicide. It was a shocking instance of the kind of collective insanity to which humans can be susceptible.

You might think that the Jonestown massacre was a uniquely extreme example of such a mass psychosis, perhaps attributable largely to unusually susceptible subjects or to the isolated location. Surely our best and brightest leaders of government and business would never fall prey to such collective craziness.

If you think that, then perhaps you should look at what is currently going on in the automotive sector of the economy, under the spell of the climate cult and of government functionaries demanding fealty to anti-carbon doctrines.

On April 12, 2023 the EPA released its most recent proposed regulation of automobile emissions. The document is titled “Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light- Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles.” It is 262 pages long in the standard Federal Register single-spaced three-column format, thus designed to be virtually impossible to read for anyone who is not getting paid to do it. But the heart of the proposed new rule is that, over a period of a few years, it is to become difficult-to-impossible for automobile manufacturers to continue to sell any significant number of internal combustion engine vehicles. Of course EPA never states that explicitly, and makes the game as difficult as possible for any layman to decipher. But try this language from page 29,196 (12 pages into the document and still in the early part of the Executive Summary):

GHG Emissions Standards. . . . The proposed standards are projected to result in an industry-wide average target for the light-duty fleet of 82 grams/mile (g/mile) of CO2 in MY 2032, representing a 56 percent reduction in projected fleet average GHG emissions target levels from the existing MY 2026 standards.

As I understand it, no internal-combustion car can meet this 82 g/mile CO2 emission standard on its own, so the standard effectively means that a manufacturer can only sell IC cars if it can also make and sell enough “zero-emission” cars to get an average down to this level. Thus does EPA deviously announce its intention to force manufacturers to make, and consumers to buy, all or almost all electric vehicles.

Now, at this point this is only a proposed rule. Currently, despite wide availability of electric vehicles, they have only about a 7% market share in the U.S. They also have many disadvantages as against combustion vehicles, including higher price, difficulty to repair when damaged, poor resale value, limited range, long time to recharge, and so forth. And all those are before you get to the most important problem with EVs, which is that the government geniuses are simultaneously working to destroy the electrical grid that is supposed to be the source of the energy for these things.

Might you think that the auto makers would be pushing back on behalf of themselves and their customers to keep combustion vehicles available? You would be wrong. From all appearances, the manufacturers are falling all over themselves to get on the electric car bandwagon. The EPA document itself contains a long list of industry announcements (from page 12,190 - 12,191):

A proliferation of announcements by automakers in the past two years signals a rapidly growing shift in product development focus among automakers away from internal-combustion technologies and toward electrification. For example, in January 2021, General Motors announced plans to become carbon neutral by 2040, including an effort to shift its light-duty vehicles entirely to zero-emissions by 2035. 

In March 2021, Volvo announced plans to make only electric cars by 2030, and Volkswagen announced that it expects half of its U.S. sales will be all-electric by 2030. In April 2021, Honda announced a full electrification plan to take effect by 2040, with 40 percent of North American sales expected to be fully electric or fuel cell vehicles by 2030, 80 percent by 2035 and 100 percent by 2040. In May 2021, Ford announced that they expect 40 percent of their global sales will be all-electric by 2030. 

In June 2021, Fiat announced a move to all electric vehicles by 2030, and in July 2021 its parent corporation Stellantis announced an intensified focus on electrification across all of its brands. Also in July 2021, Mercedes-Benz announced that all of its new architectures would be electric-only from 2025, with plans to become ready to go all-electric by 2030 where possible.

But as with the transformation of the electrical grid — where we forge ahead without ever having gotten a demonstration of feasibility or cost — the automakers are also forging ahead en masse into EVs with no demonstration that electric cars can become a successful mass product that fulfills all the functions that IC cars can fulfill. Tesla seems recently to have turned the corner into profitability, but with an expensive niche product that only the wealthy can afford and which is almost always a second (or third or fourth) car.

How is it going with other manufacturers? The Wall Street Journal had an editorial on May 3 summarizing the results so far for a collection of EV startups. There’s Lordstown:

Lordstown had manufactured only 31 vehicles by late February 2023—most of which had to be recalled. Losing patience, Foxconn on April 21 threatened to withdraw its investment, triggering Lordstown’s bankruptcy warning.

And Rivian:

Rivian commanded a $153.3 billion market capitalization. Now it’s worth less than $12 billion.

The WSJ summarizes stock trends of other EV startups:

[O]ther EV startups have crashed from their pandemic highs, including Canoo (down 96%), Nikola (99%), Faraday Future Intelligent Electric (99%), Rivian (90%), Lucid (87%) and Fisker(81%).

How about at the big traditional manufacturers. Robert Bryce at his Substack on May 3 collects some recent information as to Ford:

In March, Ford Motor Company announced that it lost $2.1 billion on its EV business last year. Those losses were double the losses it had on EVs in 2021. As I noted in a video I posted on TikTok on March 23, Ford made 61,575 EVs in 2022. Thus, the company lost about $34,000 on every EV it sold last year. I also noted that the costs of making EVs aren’t falling. Last year, the cost of battery packs for EVs went up by 7%. . . . Indeed, it appears Ford’s 2022 losses were only a warm-up lap. Yesterday afternoon, Ford reported a $722 million loss on its EV business over the first three months of 2023. During that span, Ford sold 10,866 EVs, meaning it lost $66,446 on every EV it sold.

Bryce goes on to quote a JD Power report from May 1: “[M]any new vehicle shoppers are becoming more adamant about their decision to not consider an EV for their next purchase.”

When I last had a post on EVs (February 23), several commenters expressed the opinion that they thought the manufacturers could overcome all the manufacturing problems (cost, battery capacity, charging, etc.) and thus EVs would shortly become the superior product in the marketplace. I suppose that is possible, although if central planning turns out to work in this instance it will be the first time ever anywhere. And further, there is nothing the manufacturers can do to make a country of 200 million or so EVs work when all the reliable generation on the electrical grid has been removed, and home heat has also been electrified. The auto manufacturers seem to be only too willing to go along with a collective suicide, a la Jonestown.

Homeriots The Jonestowning of America The Jonestowning of America

Daniel Greenfield June 21, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog
 

Dave Patrick Underwood, an African-American Federal Protective Service officer, was shot and killed at the Ronald V. Dellums Building during the radical riots in Oakland, California. A building named after Congressman Dellums is burdened with its own weight of historical complicity in leftist atrocities.

"Let me commend your pastor, Jim Jones, for the dedication he is showing to his community and surrounding areas," Congressman Dellums once wrote. "And also for impact he makes on members of his congregation."

At Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery, some distance from the riots, a plaque over a mass grave reads, “In memory of the victims of the Jonestown tragedy". The names on the plaque include that of Jim Jones.

Jones, who called cops “pigs” and posed with Huey Newton of the Black Panthers, told his mostly black followers to die horrifyingly of cyanide poisoning to resist the racism of the United States of America.

The white leftist who claimed to uphold the value of black lives killed hundreds of black people.

Radicals call for a reckoning with America’s history. But they have not reckoned with their own history that played out much more recently than 1619. 1970s Jonestown has become their model for America.

Jonestown is much more relevant to what is going on in America now than the current revisionist history of Jamestown embraced by the radicals. And there is no more obvious barometer for the lost reckoning than the plaque which lists Jones as one of the victims of a tragedy, instead of a mass murderer. Calling the socialist massacre a tragedy suggests that Jonestown, like the USSR, was a noble cause that failed.

Talk to lefties of a certain age about Jonestown and they’ll mumble about CIA mind control experiments and FBI COINTELPRO operations against activists who wanted to bring about social change. The mass grave in Oakland, like the mass graves in Cambodia, the USSR, and Communist China, are uncomfortable realities. And while mainstream media narratives don’t go that far, they erase what Jones stood for.

The mad mob scenes in Oakland and across California with the power of the Democrat establishment behind them, the viral videos of white millennials kneeling and confessing their privilege, are the People's Temple writ large on a nation. Jones, the son of a Klansman, who was inspired by a Communist-allied cult to build a following as a Marxist preacher of interracial brotherhood, joining the California Democrat establishment before going down in flames, has once again become the future.

Jones ran a leftist cult of white leaders who called themselves black and exploited their mostly black congregation, endorsing the Black Panthers and other black nationalist terror groups, while serving as a core political organization for California Democrats, including former Governor Jerry Brown.

The stain of Jim Jones is still all over California. A generation of California Democrat leaders either allied with Jones or were mentored by Jones’ political allies like Willie Brown. That includes both Senator Kamala Harris and Governor Newsom. That’s why, decades later, California is still stuck in Jonestown.

Jim Jones is "what you should see every day when you look in the mirror", Governor Jerry Brown gushed. It's not what we see. But it's what Brown saw. And what so many Democrats see.

"Revisiting Peoples Temple's goals of apostolic socialism and racial reconciliation offer important insights for understanding the group's legacy that can contribute insight into ways of solving ongoing social problems related to poverty and racial inequality in the United State," David Feltmate, an associate professor of Sociology at Auburn University, has argued.

Such calls are not unique. Like lefty histories of the USSR, historians, academics, and even PBS, seek to extract Jones’ good politics from his bad ending while refusing to recognize that they are intertwined.

There are certainly insights in Jones’ methodology of fleecing and humiliating wealthy white lefties, and exploiting elderly African-Americans who thought that the Peoples Temple would take care of them for the rest of their lives, only to be killed when the apostolic socialist cult collapsed under its own abuses.

All of that could have been avoided if the media hadn’t covered it up until one of their own got killed.

The Jonestown model is also the model for the Democrat Party which, like Jones, lures in upscale whites by playing on their idealism and guilt, humiliating them to keep them from seeing that the whole thing is a scam, and using the black people it lured in with promises of a social safety net to claim moral superiority. Add in a streak of terror and thuggery to keep everyone in line, along with a dash of sexual sadism to compromise and destroy the moral integrity of core cult members, and you have utopia.

Exploiting racism was central to the appeal of the Peoples Temple as it is to the Democrats.

The Peoples Temple used the moral drama of racism to create a racial conflict, playing on the guilt of white people and the fears of black people to divide them, threatening apocalypse and offering redemption through socialism. Racism was the source of Jones’ power. It was the primal sin and fear that he held over the heads of his followers to incite them to commit horrible crimes against each other.

And to stay silent while he committed even worse atrocities.

There is no meaningful reckoning that Americans can make with 1619, but it is vitally important that there be a reckoning with the seventies as Jonestown is becoming a statewide and nationwide model.

The latter-day Joneses promise redemption through socialism and twist America around the axis of race. Using the weight of racism, they are able to justify any crime and any abolition of rights in its name.

The ultimate victims of Jonestown were largely black. That’s also true of the Democrat Party.

Jim Jones was the first to turn racism into a religion. The end of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown are instructive now that racism has become the national religion of Jones’ Democrat Party. The cult leader had told his followers that God was socialism and that a man was as godly as he embodied socialism. And Jones was the ultimate divinity because he was the embodiment of the Principle of Socialism which alone could reconcile the races and all of humanity to paradise by becoming the gods of socialism.

“God was a liar. The snake told the truth,” Jones told his followers.

God told the truth. It’s the socialist snakes who always lie. Jim Jones promised his followers utopia, but he couldn’t deliver paradise. The people ate the poisonous apples, but never became as gods. Instead they tortured and killed, engaged in sexual debauchery of every variety, blackmailed and assassinated each other, and then died in terrible pain after first poisoning the elderly and then the children.

Also known as fighting for social justice, sexual liberation, euthanasia and abortion.

The Democrats and their media are telling the nation that burning and looting cities is the path to utopia. As Attorney General Maura Healey of Massachusetts said, “America is burning, but that’s how forests grow." Jones would beat and sexually humiliate his followers during services and tell them that they were better people for it. But the only leaders who want to beat and burn aren’t going to utopia. They are ushering in the familiar hell on earth in whose cruel flames every utopian experiment ends.

A month before the mass deaths, a Soviet diplomat visited Jonestown and listened to the men, women, and children who would soon be dead serenade him with a rendition of, “I’m a socialist today, and I’m glad." Jonestown, like the Soviet Union, Venezuela, or Cuba, was doomed even if no outside forces had intervened. It was a failed experiment in utopianism that could only end one way.

The same is becoming increasingly true of the Democrat enclaves, including in California where Jones had the most success and enjoyed the political protection of top Democrats and every major paper.

The Jonestowning of America is an act of brutal power by the Joneses and of despair by their followers.

Like Jim Jones, the Democrats have no vision or hope to offer. Utopia has been replaced with pain and death. The screams of hate and the wrecked blocks in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are the nation’s Jonestowns. The country’s biggest cities have become failed experiments in social justice where the socialist cant is preached all the louder even as things only get worse.

As the end approached, Jones took refuge in paranoid delusions and apocalyptic conflicts, inventing enemies and lashing out at them to evade responsibility for his corruption and crimes. All the radicalized Democrats have to offer are apocalyptic visions of environmental armageddons and perpetual racial atonement in a country that was irredeemably evil even over a century before its birth. Hope. Change.

The arc of history points not to progress, but to Jonestown. The Joneses are torturing their followers with pandemic lockdowns, rioting, economic destruction, environmental impoverishment, and cultural collapse to sate their own sadistic impulses and to divert attention from the failures of their ideas.

All that’s left now is the grim death march through the opening of prisons, the normalization of crime, the Green New Deal, socialized medicine, and the random crises met with tyranny on the way to utopia. At the end, the men and women who had followed Jones realized that the promise of a socialist kingdom of heaven on earth was a lie. There was no food. Bibles were being torn up for toilet paper. The only escape from the misery was death. That is also the great leftist vision for western civilization.

When our civilization lies in ruin and daily life is a miserable horror, they expect us to be ready to die. Kill the elderly in the nursing homes. And then the children. Then everyone has to drink the Kool-Aid.

The progressive leaders will say that it’s an act of mercy and courageous idealism.

"There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wondered.

The Democrats have perfected Jones’ trick of using racial guilt to empower a white elite to carry out the socialist schemes that make them feel like gods even as they impoverish, enslave, and destroy. But, just like in Jonestown, all anyone has to do is look at the carnage and ask, “Is this progress? Where’s utopia?” Are the burning cities, the kneeling mobs, and the terrorized people really leading to utopia?

Jim Jones was the socialist son of a Klansman who exploited and killed hundreds of black people. The Democrats are the socialist party of the Klan who exploited and killed hundreds of thousands of black people. When the Democrats claim to care about black lives, they take them in horrifying numbers.


Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.