I was living in San Francisco at the time, and Jim Jones had been known as a radical leftist for years. He was the darling of the left in SF, because he had started off as a Pentecostal-type preacher in a black area and had developed a large congregation, mostly of poor, uneducated blacks, but then began to direct his activities to “social justice” causes. Mostly, that consisted of getting government monies for his various endeavors. He was always being honored by left-wing people and organizations in SF.
He picked up whites of the “seeker” type, similar to those who died a few years later in that mass suicide in LA with quarters in their pockets so that they could make phone calls from space when the aliens carried them off. SF at that time was full of them - older women who were divorced and lonely, young mothers without husbands, etc. He seems to have slept with as many of his female followers as he could, and I recall that people commented on this even while he and his cult were still in SF. But that was pretty common for your average guru and was one of the perks, I guess. He built a truly scary cult of personality.
Jim Jones used to publish a newspaper or newsletter that was given out on the streets and contained his ravings, which were exceedingly left wing and more or less in the Reverend Wright mold when they mentioned God at all. But he was wildly popular with all the “progressivists” in the area because he shared all their objectives and could be counted upon to turn out, with his horde of mindless followers, for their causes.
Not too long before the Jones Town thing occurred, Jim Jones was travelling through the south, putting ads in local papers advertising “evangelistic church meetings” where he would give a little talk, like Obama, saying nothing, pass the collection plate and sell tapes. My MIL, who was into the whole charismatic thing back then, and I went to one of his meetings in Franklin, TN at one of the mainline churches there. My main impression of him was one of a paranoid person. I just remember him going on about his having been involved in a wreck where the devil had tried to kill him. He didn’t talk communism, nor religion either. Just a lot of mumbo jumbo the best I can remember. I think he was just doing the “evangelistic meetings” to finance their expenses. In retrospect, his meetings must have been routinely scheduled during the week when women would come to them. Ha. Evidently my MIL and I didn’t fit the leftist profile.