“Don’t drink the Kool-Aid”
“Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” is a phrase commonly-used to warn against blindly following people and/or ideas that dangerously coax us astray from reality and our values. The phrase originates from the mass-suicide massacre of over 900 US citizens who followed Reverend Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple from San Francisco to his wilderness “Jonestown” settlement in Guyana, South America where they drank cyanide-laced powdered drink mix on November 18, 1978. A third of the victims were age 17 and under. Less than 100 survived.
In 2016, Donald Trump falsely and arrogantly proclaimed that “I alone can fix it” when it comes to America’s problems. Four years later, when he failed in his bid for reelection, he did try to “fix it” by inciting the storming of the US Capital to stop the certification of the Biden victory and attempting to insert fake delegate votes from numerous states, including Wisconsin, to create another fraudulent narrative to proclaim Trump the “winner”. (The Wisconsin Republicans who participated in the scheme have since acknowledged that they were duped into the con.)
It’s been four years now of “The election was stolen.” “The election was rigged.” “Trump won.” All void of fact, just in-your-face angry rhetoric.
In the years since Trump’s tumultuous four years in office, the courts, the congress, and certainly the media and the people of America have tried to sift through all that has transpired to make some sense of it. However, as the saying goes: “Don’t confuse me with the facts. My mind is already made up.”
How much longer can America withstand this onslaught of misinformation, disinformation and outright lies that become falsely legitimized simply by their incessant repetition? The tactic is simple: wear people down, get them to tune out, intimidate them to join in… and drink the Kool-Aid.
