In the 1970s James Jones, a charismatic minister from San Francisco, led a group of followers to a newly established commune in Guyana, South America. By 1977 nearly 1,000 Americans had moved to his supposed “Promised Land” of liberty and justice. Jones turned out to be a megalomaniac with delusional fantasies of his own power, relevance, omnipotence and inflated self-esteem. With the dream collapsing a mass murder/suicide event occurred on Nov. 18, 1978, wiping out almost the entire community of men, women and children. Some were shot. Most drank a lethal Kool-Aid concoction.
When I look at what is going on in the Republican Party, I wonder if something similar isn’t happening: They’re drinking the Kool-Aid. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando a gold statue of Donald Trump is rolled around the venue. In Pennsylvania, Washington County GOP chair Dave Ball says of U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, who voted to impeach Donald Trump after the U.S. Capitol riots: “We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing.” A similar fate (censure) befell Clark County’s own U.S. congresswoman, Jaime Herrera Beutler, over her vote of conscience.
They’re drinking the Kool-Aid.
