With the current situation our country faces of having only one actual political party and one cult running the show, I remembered something terrible that happened in 1978.
Britannica:
Jonestown, (November 18, 1978), location of the mass murder-suicide of members of the California-based Peoples Temple cult at the behest of their charismatic but paranoid leader, Jim Jones, in Jonestown agricultural commune, Guyana. The death toll exceeded 900, including some 300 who were age 17 and under, making the incident one of the largest mass deaths in American history.
Is this the fate of the MAGA cult?
While the Peoples Temple was active in humanitarian causes in its communities, Jones’s treatment of his followers was often less than humane. Temple members were regularly humiliated, beaten, and blackmailed, and many were coerced or brainwashed into signing over their possessions—including their homes—to the church. Black members and members of other minority groups were convinced that if they left the Peoples Temple they would be rounded up into government-run concentration camps. Family members were kept apart and encouraged to inform on one another. In 1977, after members of the press began to ask questions about Jones’s operation, he moved with several hundred of his followers to Jonestown, a compound that he had been building in Guyana for some three to four years.
The phrase “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” became a cultural symbol of being brain washed.
Open thread away, and drink ice tea instead.
