In modern Internet culture, references to “drinking the Kool-Aid” have become a rather common idiomatic expression to derogatorily describe anyone whose dedication to a cause or ideology is complete and unquestioning.
Most people know that this is a reference to the terrible 1978 mass-murder/suicide of over 900 American expatriates in Jonestown Guyana, including 276 children. Under the influence of “Reverend” Jim Jones, whom they had followed from California to Guyana, they ingested a Kool-Aid style drink laced with sedatives and lethal amounts of cyanide.
Jones was the founder of a movement known as The People’s Temple. Many people who use the reference simply assume that Jones and his group were some kind of right-wing fundamentalist Christian cult (after all he is referred to as “Reverend Jim Jones”). We have been conditioned by our news and entertainment media to think of cults only in terms of conservative, conspiracy-theory-prone, fundamentalist Christians. Cults are supposed to be “irrational” and so Hollywood assumes they must be right-wing Christian religionists, which they wrongly assume are irrational, and most people just accept that assumption uncritically. In the movies a left-wing, atheist, Marxist cult is more elusive than Big Foot.
But reality is far more interesting: Contrary to suppositions, The People’s Temple was in fact a deadly left-wing, atheist, Marxist cult and Jonestown was a Socialist commune.
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