Women Are Drinking the Kool-Aid

The Jonestown Tragedy, Orwell’s 1984, and Trump’s Presidency

On November 18, 1978, in Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones, a charismatic cult leader of the People’s Temple, talked almost a thousand people into the largest mass suicide in modern history. He gave them a Kool-Aid-like beverage laced with cyanide poison. Mothers and fathers gave the poisoned beverage to 200 innocent children. According to the people who escaped, the compound was a miserable place where people worked long hours, endured abuse, and were malnourished.

Today, “drinking the Kool-Aid” means accepting ideas without questioning or critical thinking. It can suggest that someone blindly follows a leader, even when that leader is taking them over a cliff.

How is it that a charismatic leader can gain such influence and control over beliefs, thoughts, and actions? How is it that people don’t see behind self-serving totalitarian authority and evil, destructive manipulation? How do leaders gain such obedience and loyalty that the follower submits their own will to death? Why do otherwise good people follow leaders who don't share their moral and ethical values? How does a leader weaponize, or induce fear and anxiety, in a target population to meet political objectives?

Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo was a professor emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. He died on October 14, 2024. He researched the Jonestown tragedy over many years and drew ties to the current global sociopolitical context.

In his research, Dr. Zimbardo outlines the strategies and tactics of destructive, authoritarian leaders to build support and loyalty. He examines the mind control techniques outlined in George Orwell’s novel 1984 and gives examples of how they were used by Jim Jones as well as other dangerous leaders. In 2020, he warned in his article, How Orwell’s 1984 Has Influenced Rev. Jim Jones to Dominate and Then Destroy His Followers: With Extensions to Current Political Leaders. In this article, he lists Trump as one of the authoritarian, populist dictators. His list includes Brazil’s Javier Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan.

Although Trump in 2025 is much worse than when he wrote his 2020 article, he points out the concerning characteristics of Trump’s behaviors including challenging the truth reported by traditional media as “fake news.” He observes that, just like Jim Jones, Trump replaces truth with outrageous claims, fantasies, and lies. He projects his illusions and presents them as factual reality.

As I reviewed Dr. Zimbardo’s work, I came to think that just like Jim Jones, Trump has most likely read Orwell’s 1984. He appears to be operating from the totalitarian leader playbook depicted in this once-fictional novel.

In a matter of just weeks, Trump’s administration is destroying our diplomatic relations with the free world. Americans with means, and a desire for freedom, seek residency in other countries. We are a country in shock. Yet this shock has not stopped our resolve. We are doing what we can. We are protesting. The news is just not giving the protests adequate reporting. I hear Orwell’s words play in the background of my mind, “The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city . . . it does not matter that war is actually happening. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist” (Orwell p. 158)

The algorithm is the equivalent of Orwell’s “Big Brother” with its telescreen surveillance. Toxic leaders use spying and surveillance and inflame paranoia. Orwell’s 1984 had a Ministry of Truth, and Jones had the Department of Diversion, charged with finding embarrassing data on politicians to cement cooperation under the threat of exposure. Jones punished dissidents publicly and rewarded informers. We can see that today’s informers are the tech broligarchy that agreed to support the administration. I wonder if Trump has something on these poster children for greed and toxic masculinity.

Speaking of greed, eggs and Medicaid that feeds poor children, we continue our comparative analysis. In Jonestown, food was scarce and a rice-like food was the staple. There was almost no protein and fruits and vegetables were limited. In the meantime, Jones was sending money to secret offshore bank accounts. Just a small amount of these funds could have kept the group well-fed. Of course, he shamed the complainers by saying it is better to be slim than a fat ass. He also shifted the reality saying that the sacrifices of his followers were a rejection of capitalistic values.

Dangerous leaders distort both the reality of the past and the perception of the present. They seek to rewrite history. Heather Cox Richardson, in her March 17, 2025, Substack newsletter, Letters from An American reports how the history of Indigenous, Black, Hispanic, and female veterans is being erased from U.S. military websites with broken URLs, labeled “DEI,” an abbreviation for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Richardson names it as it appears to be “…an attempt to elevate white men as the sole actors in our history.” This follows the administration’s elimination of Black History Month and Women’s History Month. Orwell’s words ring, “Day by day and almost minute by minute, the past was brought up to date.” (Orwell p. 36) And Orwell’s party slogan, “who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past.” Jim Jones posted a sign, “Those who do not remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.” The almost words of George Santayana on the holocaust memorial outside Munich, with the original sentence ending in “… relive it.”

I think of the horrible treatment of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in the white house when I read that even with the poor living conditions of his compound, and diets leaving his followers near starvation, Jim Jones expected his followers to say thank you. You can say thank you, or complain and be labeled a traitor. If you were to show how you feel by taking your Kool-Aid and throwing it back in their face, you might just be taken away without even hearing your Miranda rights.

One standard tactic in the authoritarian leader playbook is to shift the message to position what we have formerly considered evil or bad as now good. Jim Jones was bold in his lies and message-shifting backflips. One bizarre lie he repeated to followers was that in Jonestown there was no sickness, illness or death, despite the obvious evidence. When Jones was accused of creating a totalitarian state, he would say, “That’s exactly the point!”

Trump’s Kool-Aid may have been spiked with Everclear on January 6, what Trump calls a “day of love.” Destructive leaders intentionally create conflict and depict people in other groups, and in the wider world, as “evil” or “bad” or “defective.” Dr. Zimbardo shares how this strategy encourages prejudice, discrimination, and violence, inciting hostility. Jones also got people to do things that were against their previous values. Jim Jones' followers tore and discarded their Bibles because he told them he had found and exposed lies and errors in the New Testament.

Just as each day of Trump’s presidency presents a new horror, Jim Jones bombarded his followers with day and night broadcasts of sermons, speeches, and attacks on the “enemies.” The aim of undermining and overwhelming our state of being, and the weaponization of fear and anxiety serve the sociopathic plan. Jim Jones also played fear. He reminded his followers that things could be worse and regularly played Nazi horror films, including Night and Fog. Orwell’s Torture Room 101, Jonestown's The Blue-Eyed Monster, and Bigfoot “punishments” bring me to the threat of Guantanamo.

The number of alleged sexual assaults perpetrated by Trump and his followers must be unprecedented in presidential history. This is no surprise because we know that sexual assault is not about sex, it is about power and control. The control his administration seeks over people’s gender and reproductive health reeks of Jonestown. Jones was a sexual abuse perpetrator, while at the same time seeking to control, limit, and dominate the sexual activity of his followers. He separated married followers allowing them to have intimacy only with permission. He accused men of homosexual acts with him and then publicly ridiculed and punished them. He abused women with coercive sex, then reversed blame, accusing them of forcing him to perform sex.

In another article, State Terror and State-Sanctioned Terrorism: Models of Mind and Behavior Control in Orwell’s 1984, as Operationalized by Jim Jones in the Peoples Temple Mass Suicide/Murders Dr. Zimbardo shares more from the world of social psychology.

Dr. Zimbardo quotes 1984 to highlight a core strategy of Orwellian control, “to crush the core of humanness so that no person is ‘capable of ordinary human feeling” (Orwell p. 211) This makes me think of Elon Musk saying, 'The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.' The forces of inhumane totalitarian control are an attack on our human spirit. Dissidents, people with the ability to maintain autonomy, individuality, critical thought, a spirit of independence, and those with compassion for our fellow beings threaten the system. So, according to those seeking power and control, we must be broken. This invites another bitter gulp of Kool-Aid.

I think of the attack on our education system when I read the goal in 1984, “to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought” (Orwell p. 159) I think of the attack on the First Amendment when I read the intention, “to eliminate the conditions that enable even one ‘erroneous thought’ to exist anywhere in the world.” (Orwell p. 210) Book bans, and Trump’s flagged list of words to limit or avoid, parallel Orwellian Newspeak meant to limit language and our range of thought, making it difficult to dissent. Orwell wrote, “Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller” (Orwell p. 46). Another drop of poison in the Kool-Aid.

Why? We scream from our mouths, attached to our minds, sober from Kool-Aid since before the 2016 election, able to see reality, capable of critical thinking, yet still unable to understand. Dr. Zimbardo offers some potential answers from the perspective of social psychology to explain the malleability of people within situational forces.

Dr. Zimbardo shares we don’t understand because of the principle of the Fundamental Attribution Error. We overestimate individual strength and character and underestimate the forces of the social situation. In addition, the power of groups demonstrated with the “Asch effect” in a 1951 study is also a factor. This study found that alone, participants' perception of the relative size of lines was correct. When in groups, their perceptions were very distorted. So we can understand the power of the news you watch, the social group, and the beliefs of the people around you. In these findings of social psychology, we see why the blue or red status of the state you live in, is a big factor.

Dr. Zimbardo notes that people are particularly vulnerable to authoritarian manipulation when lonely and disconnected. Did COVID prime us for this attack on our democracy? Another vulnerability factor is believing “it can’t happen to me” and with this belief, we lose our vigilance in protecting our democracy. At 56 years, I will be the first to say that I never thought this would happen in my lifetime. I thought the system of American democracy was well established and protected by our constitution.

Totalitarian systems depend on what Orwell calls “True Believers” because they seed the ideology. MAGA republications may fit this description. In contrast, a party conformist goes along but does not believe. This may be the category of many republications that voted for Trump even if they did not believe in his values and questioned his ethical foundation. Maybe they went along because, even if their vote did not serve the greater good, or preserve human rights, they believed they would be better off financially with less taxes or preserved family wealth. Perhaps they perceived that they had something to gain. The key word here is perceived because totalitarian leaders don’t care about their followers and don’t appear to have sincere empathy. Jim Jones offered material security and did not deliver as promised.

America is a strongly individualistic, versus collectivistic society and this may also be a factor. Trump-voting Americans appeared to be willing to sell out their fellow Americans, including the human rights of others, for their gain. Collectivistic cultures emphasis interdependence, cohesion, and duty to their fellow citizens. People from collectivistic societies are more willing to make personal sacrifices for the greater good.

To consider the current status of America, and how we allowed our country to get to a place where our democracy is threatened, we take a closer look at the 2024 election. Voter turnout for all eligible voters for the 2024 election was 63.9%. That is 156,336,693 Americans. This turnout was higher than every other election year since 2004 and lower than the 2020 record of 66.6% when Americans still remembered how bad Trump was in his first term.

Of the eligible voters whose human rights were threatened by a Trump presidency, women were the group that voted against their interests. Women drank the Kool-Aid. By contrast, only 16% of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people voted for Trump.

There was a 10-point gender gap in the 2024 election, with 45% of women and 55% of men voting for Trump. For rich, cis-gendered, heterosexual men, it is almost understandable that they voted to maintain their unearned privilege and to maintain dominance.

Women are a little more than half of the U.S. If we were in solidarity, we would not be under oppressive leadership. However, we are not in solidarity. The majority of white women, 53% to be specific, voted for Trump. Like men’s vote, this can also be understood as a result of these women thinking they have something to gain. Traditional white women receive benefits for submission to and support of white men, who are the dominate group of patriarchy. Let’s give credit where credit is due as only 7% of black women voted for Trump.

Once narrowed down by lack of concern for the greater good, white supremacy, and racism, there were still differences among women. The difference can be seen in levels of education, and religious fundamentalism. For white women without a college education, more than 60% voted for Trump in contrast to the 41% of college-educated white women. Of white, born-again, evangelical women, and women with no religious affiliation, 80% voted for Trump. In contrast, 89% of white Jewish women voted for Harris.

Dr. Zimbardo speaks of the Orwellian strategies of compliance, conformity, and obedience training. When we understand how patriarchy impacts women, we can see that women are living under the Orwellian training strategies of patriarchy. Beginning with pink nurseries, women receive a special form of obedience training designed to limit our freedom of action in a patriarchal society. “Be nice,” “Be a good girl,” “She is so quiet and pleasant.” A good woman, the ideal traditional woman, does not manage her boundaries. A good woman is not assertive. She submits to authority. God forbid she turns out bossy or in the worst-case scenario, a feminist. The traditional marriage vows, to "love, honor, and obey" are weird to a thinking mind. Women are not encouraged to discriminate between just and unjust authority.

The mind control techniques used by patriarchy to manipulate women’s beliefs and actions are so pervasive most women do not even notice. The truth of women’s agency, competency, human rights, worthiness, and value have been replaced by the fantasies and lies of women’s “ideal role” as trad wives, in service to men. Her value is so low that if we need to sacrifice her life for an unborn fetus, then that is the way it should be. Why is it that every single woman in this country does not see that Trump and team are “shoulding” all over us? Why are most women drinking the Kool-Aid?

Women, as a result of living under oppression for millennia, have a great deal of internalized misogyny. It may be easier to understand as internalized patriarchy. Women in America have to a large degree bought into a patriarchal system that is not in our best interest. A core characteristic of any form of internalized oppression is that the oppressor no longer needs to exert as much force to maintain the system because the oppressed begin to oppress their own. Women’s horizontal acts of oppression in the form of not voting for the more qualified candidate, any form of silencing, not listening to other women’s voices, and any form of relational aggression between women support the agenda of patriarchy. Mostly without conscious knowledge of how this harms us collectively, women exert social pressure, and socially correct women back to harmful cultural norms that serve patriarchy.

I end with the words of Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, whose important work, and powerful insights, are included here and to whom I dedicate this article,

“But the social psychologist in me asserts that over and above all these human attributes, to thrive, people need to be part of a society that reasonably and equitably trades off self-interests, rights, and privileges with social obligations that foster the common good. People need other people to create a system of supportive interdependence – a bonded unit that helps each to resist assaults from destructive influences in the physical, social, and political environments.”

---

---

---