“Drinking the Kool-Aid” is an idiom referring to Jim Jones’ cult committing mass suicide in South America. Jones’ modus operandi seems to have been flushed down the memory hole, for obvious reasons. A condensed biography from left-leaning Wikipedia:
James Warren “Jim” Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was the founder of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 death of over 900 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the deaths of nine other people at a nearby airstrip and in Georgetown.
In 1951, Jones became a member of the Communist Party USA, and began attending meetings and rallies in Indianapolis.[11] Jones became flustered with harassment he received during the McCarthy Hearings,[11] particularly regarding meetings between Jones and his mother with Paul Robeson.[12] He also became frustrated with what he perceived to be ostracism of open communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.[13] This frustration, among other things, provoked a seminal moment for Jones in which he asked himself “how can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church.”[12][11]
Jones’ interest in religion began during his childhood, primarily because he found making friends difficult, though initially he vacillated on his church of choice.[3] Jones was surprised when a Methodist superintendent helped Jones to get a start in the church even though he knew Jones to be a communist and Jones did not meet him through the American Communist Party.[13] In 1952, Jones became a student pastor in Sommerset Southside Methodist Church, but left that church because its leaders barred him from integrating blacks into his congregation.[11] Around this time, Jones witnessed a faith-healing service at the Seventh Day Baptist Church.[11] He observed that it attracted people and their money and concluded that, with financial resources from such healings, he could help accomplish his social goals.[11]
In 1960, Indianapolis Democratic Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones as a director of the Human Rights Commission.[15] Jones ignored Boswell’s advice to keep a low profile, finding new outlets for his views on local radio and television programs.[15] When the mayor and other commissioners asked Jones to curtail his public actions, Jones resisted and was wildly cheered at a meeting of the NAACP and Urban League when he yelled for his audience to be more militant, and climaxed with “Let my people go!”[16]
During this time, Jones also helped to integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the police department, a theater, an amusement park, and the Methodist Hospital.[11] After swastikas were painted on the homes of two African American families, Jones personally walked the neighborhood comforting African Americans and counseling white families not to move, in order to prevent white flight.[17] Jones set up stings to catch restaurants refusing to serve African American customers.[17] Jones wrote American Nazi leaders and then leaked their responses to the media.[18] When Jones was accidentally placed in the black ward of a hospital after a collapse in 1961, Jones refused to be moved and began to make the beds, and empty the bed pans, of black patients.[19] Political pressures resulting from Jones’ actions caused hospital officials to desegregate the wards.[19]
Jones received considerable criticism in Indiana for his integrationist views.[11] White owned businesses and locals were critical of him.[17] A swastika was placed on the Temple, a stick of dynamite was left in a Temple coal pile and a dead cat was thrown at Jones’ house after a threatening phone call.[18] Other incidents occurred, though some suspect that Jones himself may have been involved in at least some of them.[18]
Jim and Marceline Jones adopted several children of at least partial non-Caucasian ancestry; he referred to the clan as his “rainbow family,”[20] and stated: “Integration is a more personal thing with me now. It’s a question of my son’s future.”[21] That comported with Jones’ portrayal of the Temple overall as a “rainbow family.”
The couple adopted three children of Korean-American ancestry: Lew, Suzanne and Stephanie. Jones had been encouraging Temple members to adopt orphans from war ravaged Korea.[22] Jones had long been critical of the United States’ opposition to communist leader Kim Il-Sung’s 1950 invasion of South Korea, calling it the “war of liberation” and stating that “the south is a living example of all that socialism in the north has overcome.”[23] In 1954, he and his wife also adopted Agnes Jones, who was partly of Native American descent.[21][24] Agnes was 11 at the time of her adoption.[25] Suzanne Jones was adopted at the age of six in 1959.[25] In June 1959, the couple had their only biological child, Stephan Gandhi Jones.[24]
Two years later, in 1961, the Joneses became the first white couple in Indiana to adopt an African American child, James Warren Jones, Jr.[26] Marceline was once spat upon while she carried Jim Jr. [18]
The couple also adopted another son, who was white, named Tim.[24] Tim Jones, whose birth mother was a member of the Peoples Temple, was originally named Timothy Glen Tupper.[21]
After Jones’ return to Indiana from Brazil, in 1965, Jones claimed that the world would be engulfed in a nuclear war on July 15, 1967, that would then create a new socialist Eden on earth, and that the Temple must move to Northern California for safety.[35][11] Accordingly, the Temple began moving to Redwood Valley, California.[11]
While Jones always spoke of the social gospel’s virtues, before the late 1960s Jones chose to conceal that his gospel was actually communism.[11] By the late 1960s, Jones began at least partially openly revealing in Temple sermons his “Apostolic Socialism” concept.[11] Specifically, “those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment — socialism.”[36] Jones often mixed those concepts, such as preaching that “If you’re born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you’re born in sin. But if you’re born in socialism, you’re not born in sin.”[37]
By the early 1970s, Jones began deriding traditional Christianity as “fly away religion,” rejecting the Bible as being white men’s’ justification to subordinate women and subjugate people of color and stating that it spoke of a “Sky God” who was no God at all.[11] Jones authored a booklet titled “The Letter Killeth,” criticizing the Bible.[38]
By the Spring of 1976, Jones began openly admitting even to outsiders that he was an atheist.[39] Despite the Temple’s fear that the IRS was investigating its religious tax exemption, by 1977 Marceline Jones admitted to the New York Times that, as early as age 18 when he watched his then idol Mao Zedong overthrow the Chinese government, Jim Jones realized that the way to achieve social change through Marxism in the United States was to mobilize people through religion.[35] She stated that “Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion,” and had slammed the Bible on the table yelling “I’ve got to destroy this paper idol!” [35]
The Marxist is an environmental determinist, someone who believes inequality is explained by economic exploitation, not natural differences in ability. When American civic life accepted the lie of equality, it gave the Marxists a toehold to critique our way of life. Deliberately suppressing truth, even (or especially) truth we would rather ignore, has the effect of searing the conscience, making us tolerate great evil that perpetuates the lie we want to believe.
This is why people like Rick Warren are getting behind Obama: they ought to know better, but they want to believe in this post-racial fantasy so badly that they ignore all evidence to the contrary.
Men once had a similar idea:
Genesis 11
1And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
Part of this can be chalked up to an insufficient appreciation of the depravity of man. I have enough trouble loving my own wife as I should; she is the mother of my children, and our interests are perfectly aligned, but it will take a lifetime of sanctification to improve this relationship, which is consistent with nature.
How much harder, then, will it be to make men of different cultures and backgrounds, who often have legitimate conflicts of interest (e.g. affirmative action, which imposes costs on whites and Asians to benefit favored minority groups), get along well enough to sustain a functional civilization?
A fun activity when I was a boy was to take a shovel to a large antpile and carry a huge chunk of it to another antpile. The ants would provide entertainment as they attempted to repel their invaders.
Jim Jones liked to stir up antpiles, those natural divisions of human life that, like firebreaks in a forest, served to prevent evil from infecting the whole lump of humanity. He probably even saw this explicitly, as Communists in the early 20th century came to the conclusion that national pride and identity was the major impediment to bringing the proletariat and intellectuals into worldwide alliance. And so the program was adopted and applied to the present.
The present economic crisis is going to tear this lie wide open. The world’s oldest democracy, Iceland, a land where everyone is more-or-less third cousins, witnessed riots last week as their Parliament attempted to meet. The government here will eventually run out of financial duct tape. If Iceland riots, what will happen here?
When Jones’ utopia experiment didn’t work, his followers were willing to kill themselves rather than admit they were living a lie. Such is the power of this lie, of the brotherhood of man, like the original lie, that we should be as gods. For what else do you call it when we war against the ordained order of things? I pray that our own government, when its foundations of sand are exposed, goes out with a whimper instead of a suicidal act against the American people.
The Obama infatuation is of the same spirit of Jim Jones; a leader whose flaws are suppressed and who is trusted implicitly to erase the practical difficulties of constructing our modern-day Babel.
What is the alternative? Peaceful co-existence, akin to the old Swiss model. A nation of one people, peaceful in commerce and trade, neutral in war, and an acceptance that we cannot remake the rest of the world in our image.
Kipling said it best:
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.
The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.
The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.
This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
Ding, Dong, the (Feminist) Witch is Dead:
Obama Sends a Shout-Out to His Homeboy Pastor Rick:
Huckabee Is Finished:
Nightline Report on the "Quiver Full" Movement:
This Warms My Heart: