Jim Jones was a socialist cult leader in the 70’s. Harkening back to Karl Marx, he preached that “those who remain drugged with the opiate of religion have to be brought to enlightenment – socialism.”
He hobnobbed with politicians like Walter Mondale, Rosalyn Carter and Jerry Brown. To pursue socialism, he set up a commune in the jungle of a South American banana republic. He was in charge, naturally, and named it “Jonestown.” Assisted by endorsements from his politician friends, he persuaded some 900 American followers to emigrate to there.
He imported not just his followers to Jonestown, but also drugs. He replaced the opiate of religion with the opiate of socialism and the opiate of opiate. One of those drugs was cyanide.
The residents got high and watched Soviet propaganda films about America. Jones ranted over loudspeakers day and night about imperialism and capitalism. Much of the money for Jones’ anti-Americanism came from American taxpayers. The residents signed their welfare and Social Security checks over to him.
They obsessed over plans for mass suicide. When their utopia came crumbling down for the usual reasons, they put their plans to work. Over 900 people including 300 children drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and died agonizing deaths, some at gunpoint. Jones shot himself in the head.
Fast forward 42 years.
The opiate of the masses is still socialism, along with pot and, of course, opiates. When they’re not physiologically high, they’re emotionally high on promises of “equity” and “social justice,” self-medicating themselves into a delirium that sounds good in theory (once you swallow the big bitter pill that people deserve something different than what they earn) but never works in practice.
For the first time, in America anyway, the pushers of this druggy dream almost won this year. They almost nominated an avowed socialist for president. This guy admired the Castro regime and honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Like Jim Jones, he ranted about American capitalism and imperialism.
He didn’t win the nomination, but by his own account he pushed the Democrats far leftward toward socialism. If you’ll just lean far over that cliff to your left, he suggested, you can see the socialist utopia. Lean just a little farther. Don’t worry about falling, Big Government has your hand.
Like Jones, he promised to live communally – alone with his wife in his multiple houses – for economic, social and racial equality, with himself in charge. This time it would work. (I stand corrected. He never uses that word “work.”)
Who could oppose that? The Orange Man, that’s who. What a throwback. This swashbuckling Orange Man is more Groucho Marx than Karl. He has to go.
They almost had him so many times, with frivolous recounts, rogue Electoral College voters, Ukrainian witch hunts, pussy hats, Mitt Romney, fake pee-pee dossiers bought with laundered money from Hillary’s campaign, depictions of his beheading, imaginary Russian collusion and permanent impeachment investigations.
But he Houdini’d them every time.
Now the Orange Man looks to spoil the socialists’ utopian plans by getting re-elected. By those deplorable, gap-toothed, gun-toting, Chardonnay-disdaining, beer-guzzling, pickup-driving, empties-tossing, red-necking, tobacco-chewing rodents in that useless, miserable, unwashed, flyover wasteland between San Fran and New York that they call Middle America.
Now facing failure, the utopians want to do what failed utopians always want to do: Drink the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. And as in Jonestown, force everyone else to drink it too.
Coincidentally, there’s an ample supply. Sort of.
It’s the Coronavirus. At first, it looked like the virus itself could be the cyanide. Media projections of a few million deaths looked promising. But America proved too strong. The projected deaths were slashed to a quarter million, then trimmed to a hundred thousand and then trimmed yet again.
Now, it looks to be about the same as a bad flu season, except that the typical patient is an obese 83-year-old man with underlying medical problems. Feverish utopians prayed for pestilence, hail, locusts and darkness on America. What America got instead was a bad case of the hiccups.
There’s one last hope. Call it suicide by shutdown.
Close the country, they say. Not the border, which of course they’ll leave open, but the economy. Drive unemployment to 30%. Imprison people in their houses and take their jobs away.
The closers want to do to groceries what was done to toilet paper. (On the plus side, if we have no groceries then at least we won’t need toilet paper.)
The reality, of course, is that people could go back to work. We could redouble our efforts to protect the few people who are especially vulnerable to the virus (and we should) while allowing the rest of the nation to work, play and live again.
But that wouldn’t be much of an apocalypse, would it? To get apocalyptic, they need to get apoplectic. It helps if they control the media, and they do. For a Jonestown apocalypse now, they need to terrify people. Censor people. Bully people. Arrest people. So they do. Besides, they enjoy doing those things anyway.
I doubt their murder/suicide pact will succeed, at least not without a fight. Do they expect to arrest 300 million of us?
On the other hand, who would have thought that Jim Jones could bully and drug 900 failed utopians into drinking cyanide?
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the Aspen beat 
This article is so incredibly accurate, it’s actually excruciating to read. I predicted this whole BS coronavirus lockdown 8 weeks ago, and I told evryone I knew that the better things got, the more the Democrats would begin to blame Trump for the whole thing. I have a background in science, and I knew coronaviruses are not generally dangerous at all, but that this would be used by the Democrats to destroy America and Trump. The lockdowns are unprecedented, thoroughly unconstitutional, and totally unwarranted. This virus is just basically a superflu. The young, fit, and otherwise normal among us should have been allowed to go about our lives, and, if we were to be infected, so be it. We’re not going to die from this, or suffer any sort of permanent damage. It’s not important how many people get this virus, either, but the numbers can be used to scare people. What is important is who gets it, and how badly.
Everyone is lying about this virus. Everyone. This entire thing is a political situation, not medical. Notice how the worst and most draconian lockdown policies are found in potential swing states that are run by Democrats, and which do not have a huge number of cases. Pennsylvania and Michigan come to mind, as well as Kentucky and Wisconsin.
Agreed!
Except that there are blood clotting/stroke risks that have nothing to do with underlying disease states – in young patients as well -causing “blood derangement” and sudden death. This is definitely a MEDICAL thing. Politics are a huge factor in getting beyond – and hopefully this will be a wake-up call for CDC, FDA, NIH and the bureaucrats who have run them into the ground for decades.
If clotting and strokes are such a big problem, why isn’t the mortality rate higher? The number of people allegedly killed by this virus worldwide is not large. The flu kills up to 650,000 people each year. We’re nowhere near that number with COVID-19, and this virus has been out there for at least 6 months. I do not believe coronaviruses directly cause clotting on their own, and I’m inclined to think it’s just more hysterical nonsense. The newsmedia publishing stories about what is apparently a very rare occurrence is just more of the same thing they’ve been doing for months. This is all political.
Authoritarianism, principle of blind submission to authority, as opposed to individual freedom of thought and action. In government, authoritarianism denotes any political system that concentrates power in the hands of a leader or a small elite that is not constitutionally responsible to the body of the people. Authoritarian leaders often exercise power arbitrarily and without regard to existing bodies of law, and they usually cannot be replaced by citizens choosing freely among various competitors in elections. The freedom to create opposition political parties or other alternative political groupings with which to compete for power with the ruling group is either limited or nonexistent in authoritarian regimes.
Well said!
Well done, Glenn!
Glenn,
Never let a good crisis go to waste has been used and attributed to many, and continues to be truth in politics. Time will tell how this crisis lines up with many crisises our politicians have used to their advantage. Yes, quarantine, social distance, and shut down plus the daily death count are akin to your comparison to arsenic in Jonestown. As with in Jonestown, something is blatantly missing. HIM with whom we have to do! Our Creator! Is there any sense of correction, of seeking His mercy, of asking Him where we go from here? Of why we find ourselves here? Is there a bigger picture than selfish man’s wrangling? Has HE been caught by surprise? Has this been allowed for a purpose? Has man snuffed out the eternity that God placed in his heart? Ecclesiasted 3:11
Powerful thoughts, Robert. Thanks.
I think about that too – God is giving us a warning and an opportunity.
All that our Catholic bishops seem capable of doing is shutting down parishes (and the sacraments) faster and more completely than state governments can.
Santa Fe, New Mexico largest hospital has only treated eight patients for COVID-19, and five of them have been discharged.
The democrat governor of New Mexico just yesterday extended her lockdown to May 15. The state’s revenue loss forecast is now up to 25% for the fiscal year beginning July 1. You can’t fix stupid.
Am I wrong in thinking this is where the expression “drinking the Kool-aid” comes from? The conglomerate Marxist / globalist television news media are serving up plenty of it, and they have 33 million consumers a day, contrasted with only 5 million people who watch FOX plus those who read columns such as yours on the Internet. Don’t stop, Glenn!
I think this is indeed where “dringking the Kool-Aid” comes from. But the meaning has been twisted a bit. In Jonestown, they were brainwashed BEFORE they drank the Kool-Aid, and then the Kool-Aid was just the death instrument.
Interview with Stephen Jones, son of Jim Jones.
The phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” meaning to follow someone blindly, was born that day in Guyana. Four decades later, Americans often use this phrase in political and business contexts without knowing its origin. (Actually, the deadly beverage that day might have been based on a cheaper imitation, Flavor Aid.)
https://www.haaretz.com/life/.premium.MAGAZINE-four-decades-on-jim-jones-son-tells-how-it-was-at-jonestown-1.6851522
I’d like to comment as an ER physician in the suburbs of New York with 40 years experience. I am a registered Republican and will probably vote Republican in November. This virus is not a fraud and is not a super-flu. While the median age of those dying is approximately 80, we are seeing plenty of people in their 50’s and 60’s who are becoming dreadfully ill and dying. I personally have cared for a number of people in their 20’s and 30’s who were infected and they felt awful, far worse than I have seen with influenza. My estimate is that the mortality rate will turn out to be about .5%, far less than was originally estimated. However, at our hospital, we have had close to 100 patients on ventilators for weeks out of 300 Covid-positive hospitalized patients. I have never seen anything like this with influenza. I think it is a perfectly legitimate question to ask whether the shut-down has gone too far or whether we have done stupid things, like closing parks while doing nothing to protect the elderly in nursing homes. In our community, we have had 70 deaths in a local nursing home, but the governor in New Jersey closed hiking trails. I am convinced that the locus of the epidemic in New York City is the result of crowded subways and buses, something which is fairly uncommon in most of the rest of the US. We need to open up the economy but we need to do it in an intelligent and cautious way using masks and common sense, while protecting those of us most at risk.
Sensible thoughts, Dr. Mandell.
Thank you. From you to Trumps ears.
If I had ever been tempted to live in a large city (rat cage) this disease would surely have driven such an insane thought from my mind.
I grew up in Manhattan (sick about 25% of the time) and certainly concur about the subways and buses. Progressives, of course, hate car culture and are intoxicated with mass transit, but cars are perfect social distancing machines, as long as you’re not car-pooling.
Take care, Doctor, and thank you for your efforts.
Hi Glenn,
It was my pleasure to very briefly meet you, a while back, at one of the Provine luncheons. Your communications are always intriguing.
You, and some of your readers may find the opinions exposed in the video below:
interesting. I agree with the two ER Docs
Fascinating. It seems the nation’s response is being drven not by medicine but by a partisan media with a political agenda. It will eventually crumble but in the meantime a lot of damage will be done. Which is exactly what is intended.
We are all under this seemingly endless lockdown because the only model american politicians consider is New York City. I can’t think of any greater example of social distancing than the San Juan mountains or the Arches National Park.
I’ve asked before on other sites, why aren’t cashiers at Wal Mart, Target, Home Depot, liquor stores and convenience stores dropping like flies if Corona is the modern day black plague?
They are not in the demographic (aged, inform) the virus was engineered to kill?
Can one be a socialist without first being a drug addict, chemical or spiritual, where spiritual addiction means being dominated by urges to criminality? I think not.
“Besides, they enjoy doing those things anyway.” Yeah, at heart socialists are hell-raisers (impulses for criminality), and drugs heighten their enjoyment of doing it.
I think the only proper and useful response to socialists’ proclamations of any kind is, “BS,” spelt out.