Drinking the Kool-Aid: What do Jonestown, Masada and Joe Pisarcik have to do with Trump’s Election Sabotage?
Trump’s proposed election "reforms" show that he has no faith that his followers will continue to follow his agenda voluntarily. It's an admission that for MAGA to win, the game has to be rigged.
With the Big Bad Bill behind us, the next battle will be over election subversion, what Trump calls “reform.” Gird your loins, folks, because this is IT. If Trump’s Project 2025-based proposals are enacted, the American Experiment will be over, 250 years after it began. And the extreme, illiberal nature of those plans proves that Trump has no faith that his followers will continue to follow his agenda voluntarily. It's an admission that for MAGA to win, the game has to be rigged. We’ve seen in Congress, the media, courts, universities, law firms and just about everywhere else, that intimidation is the name of the game. If MAGA wins, it can only be at gunpoint.
But I’m getting ahead of myself…
My YouTube algorithm did something very strange this week. I happen to love watching vintage sports, so my feed will routinely suggest classic games from decades ago. Readers of this Substack will not be surprised to know that, aside from vintage sports, I also enjoy exploring historic news coverage. Well, what YouTube sent my way this week brought me two all-time epochal moments, one from sports and the other from news, all wrapped up in a single, brief, otherwise-innocuous 1978 halftime report from CBS.
This clip is historic in a number of ways. At about 5:15 in, you’ll see what was voted the 4th most famous gaffe in NFL history, the “Miracle in the Meadowlands.” With the New York Giants leading and Philadelphia out of time outs, Giants quarterback Joe Pisarcik inexplicably tried to hand the football off to running back Larry Csonka. Had he simply taken a knee, the game would have ended in a Giants’ win. But Pisarcik fumbled and Eagles cornerback Herman Edwards returned it for a touchdown. On this clip you can see Brent Musburger and Jayne Kennedy trying to make heads or tails out of that all-time bonehead decision.1
Sometimes the human mind just befuddles us with its capacity for stupidity - and for an entire group to follow their leader blindly into an abyss. The play was called in the huddle and no one questioned it, neither in the huddle nor on the sidelines. No one spoke up and said, “Hey, Joe, we just need to take a knee.” It was idiocy, but more significantly it was premeditated idiocy. It was one person’s brain-fart that consumed an entire team.
Similarly irrational herd behavior was also the subject of the Breaking News that cuts in 2 minutes into the program, an initial report out of Guyana of what would become known as the Jonestown Massacre, an event even more famous - and perplexing - than Pisarcik’s fumble. At the time of this report - again, this is real-time - the first killings had occurred, of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan and four from his entourage, coming to investigate Jim Jones’ “People’s Temple” cult. The mass poisoning had yet to be discovered but was likely already in process. A total of 918 would die at Jonestown, including the shooting victims at the airstrip and Jim Jones himself.
Here’s how History.com describes what happened after the killings at the airstrip (italics mine).
“Back in Jonestown, Jones commanded everyone to gather in the main pavilion and commit what he termed a “revolutionary act.” The youngest members of the People’s Temple were the first to die, as parents and nurses used syringes to drop a potent mix of cyanide, sedatives and powdered fruit juice into children’s throats. Adults then lined up to drink the poison-laced concoction while armed guards surrounded the pavilion.
When Guyanese officials arrived at the Jonestown compound the next day, they found it carpeted with hundreds of bodies. Many people had perished with their arms around each other. A few residents managed to escape into the jungle as the suicides took place, while at least several dozen more Peoples Temple members, including several of Jones’ sons, survived because they were in another part of Guyana at the time.
This incident is the origin of the expression “drinking the Kool-Aid.”2
But the pertinent question is whether those who drank the Kool-Aid did so because they were so taken in by the cult that they willingly followed Jones over the cliff - or were they held at gunpoint (both metaphorical and literal) as kidnap victims and forced to “choose” death when most would have preferred to have lived.
Coincidentally (or not, given the peculiar omniscience of YouTube algorithms), Jonestown is in the news this week. The New York Times reported on a controversy about plans to turn the People’s Temple encampment into a site for tourism3. The report adds an interesting detail in filling in the details of the massacre.
On Nov. 17, 1978, Mr. Ryan, a California congressman, went to Jonestown after relatives of people in the settlement reported claims of abuse. The next day, as he and several group members attempted to leave, followers of Mr. Jones opened fire at the Port Kaituma airstrip, killing Mr. Ryan, three journalists and a Peoples Temple member.
That afternoon, anticipating that the killing of a U.S. congressman would mean the end of Jonestown, Mr. Jones orchestrated a mass murder-suicide, commanding followers to drink cyanide-laced punch under threat from armed guards. Some were forcibly given poison with syringes. Mr. Jones died alongside them.
That’s a subtle but clear change from the History.com description quoted above, where the armed guards “surrounded the pavilion,” presumably to shield it from outsiders. In the Times’ description, the guards’ purpose is not to threaten intruders, but to coerce cult members themselves. To force them to choose death.
Like MAGA-reps patrolling 2026 polling sites in your neighborhood, they were giving even their own supporters an “offer they couldn’t refuse.”
Other accounts paint a more nuanced picture of cult members resisting, escaping and succumbing. Those who fell for Jones’ con were people with brains, with agency, with the capacity to resist. But in the end, they were all victims of a concerted campaign of intimidation and abuse.4 Jonestown wasn’t suicide. It was mass murder. For some it was brainwashing. What it wasn’t was voluntary.
This should not be surprising. While some individual suicides can be carefully deliberated, rational decisions, mass suicides are more often than not coerced. Even the most famous mass suicide of all-time, on the remote Dead Sea mountaintop fortress of Masada in the year 73, was mostly a mass murder, according to the 1st-century Jewish-Roman historian Josephus (an account that some modern historians dispute). Some men did indeed kill themselves, but only after they had murdered their families.5
While some mass suicides may be are more voluntary than others, when you dig beneath the surface, there typically is coercion involved. Any leader who would demand that his (and it’s almost always a male) disciples follow him off the proverbial cliff is often so egomaniacal as to be unable to tolerate even the hint of rejection. That’s how Jim Jones was described by those who experienced his leadership. He needed to ensure that his will would be carried out. He could not bear to be viewed by history as a “loser.”
So what does this have to do with the Trump cult? Polls indicate that their fever might be starting to break. The Strength in Numbers Substack compiled all the recent numbers and it’s bad news for Trump and his Big Bad Bill (BBB).
Even when the Fox propaganda machine goes full force before next year’s elections, history tells us that every single morsel of bad news that happens in the U.S. between now and then will be traced by voters back to the party in power, and specifically to this unprecedented bill, which was born in toxicity - and it will be impossible to eliminate the stench of something that unpopular. It will stick to Trump like Afghanistan did to Biden and like Kids, Cages and Caravans upended Trump’s first midterms in 2018.
So I remain optimistic that even Trump-voting Americans will not follow the GOP over the cliff next year, especially when they see friends and loved ones (and themselves) suffering with medical bills, lost jobs and stubborn inflation caused by the BBB.
People are simply not that irrational. Even in Jonestown, in the end, as at Masada, many got it. They would not have drunk the Kool-Aid…. except they were forced.
And there’s the rub. Trump and his strategists know that the only way they survive the 2026 elections is by rigging the game and holding the electorate at proverbial gunpoint.
Trump’s upcoming electoral “reforms,” as described in Project 2025, will be that metaphorical M16.
You can read the plan right here.6 Substack stalwart Lev Parnas shared his educated guess as to what the rollout will include.
He wrote:
For more, see: BREAKING: Trump’s Next Power Grab — “Election Reform” Is Here (Parnas)
This is the gun that is being pointed at American democracy. The BBB was horrific. This “reform” package will be worse. Add to it the BBB “border security” provision that will enable Trump to build an elite secret police force with state-of-the-art surveillance capacity, along with a string of concentration camps on US soil for slave labor.
The bad news is that we can’t trust the Supreme Court to save us. The good news is that American voters can, and so can Congress, as these new voting laws will not be protected in ways that the reconciliation package was. The Senate, for one thing, will be able to filibuster them, assuming the filibuster holds. What goes around comes around, and the same political machinations that subverted the John Lewis voting bill under the Democrats will jeopardize these Jim Crow schemes for Republicans.
I have no faith at all in Republican reps and senators, and it will take an enormous effort to get people out, again and again. to protest.
But I have a feeling that when the details of this proposed electoral coup become known, they will be even more unpopular than the BBB, even among Trump voters, many of whom vote by mail, use drop boxes, vote early and never bought the Big Lie about the 2020 vote.
No question: this will be a titanic struggle. We had best be ready. The gun has been cocked and it’s pointed right at all Americans who cherish freedom.
Is this what will finally break the fever? Or will the cult-members willingly walk our democracy off the cliff? Will the disciples of our Orange Jim Jones continue to drink the Kook-Aid or will they finally, at long last, ignore the intimidation and walk away?
We have one other thing going for us.
Our president is Joe Pisarcik.
For those who are wondering, the #1 blooper of all time took place in almost exactly the same location, the infamous Butt Fumble in 2012. Frankly, had it been named for any other part of the body, this blooper wouldn’t belong on the same list as the Pisarcik fumble, a play that was actually called in the huddle - and no one spoke up and said, “Hey, Joe, we just need to take a knee.” It was premeditated stupidity. The Butt Fumble just happened spontaneously and was forced by a high-pressure Patriots defense.
Drinking the Kool-Aid - "Drinking the Kool-Aid" is an expression used to refer to a person who believes in a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards. The phrase often carries a negative connotation. It can also be used ironically or humorously to refer to accepting an idea or changing a preference due to popularity, peer pressure, or persuasion. In recent years it has evolved further to mean extreme dedication to a cause or purpose, so extreme that one would "drink the Kool-Aid" and die for the cause. The phrase originates from events in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978, in which over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement died. The movement's leader, Jim Jones, called a mass meeting at the Jonestown pavilion after the murder of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan and others in nearby Port Kaituma. Jones proposed "revolutionary suicide" by way of ingesting a powdered drink mix lethally laced with cyanide and other drugs which had been prepared by his aides.
NYT article as it appeared in the Boston Globe on July 4, 2025:
See this video for survivors’ accounts. (17:39 - on Jones’ abuse of discipline, is especially creepy). Also on Jones’ authority - beginning at 11:30 - where Jones compares himself to God, in ways that will sound familiar to us.
See also Masada and Jewish heroism: A new perspective (Jerusalem Report) / Josephus’s description of the siege of Masada is found in The Jewish Wars, Book 7, chapter 9.
All of this is so true and was evident to me before the Presiential election. It is clear that the Feau News Propaganda machine continues to mesmerize too many Americans into believing that the destruction of personal Freedoms would somehow not apply to them because they support the current regime. I was amazed to see Latin American and Muslim supporters of Trump, vocally reveal their views only to be deported shortly thereafter. If ICE is legal, then why do they arrest people while driving unmarked vehicles, masked to hide their identity, no uniform, no ID and no documents.
Welcome the new SS.
Thank you, Rabbi. Disturbing as it is, we need to know.