Young people in 2025 know that when someone "has drunk the Kool-Aid," it means they have bought into someone else's worldview, no matter how bizarre. But they might not know where the saying came from. The phrase originated after the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, when 900 followers of paranoid cult leader Jim Jones drank poison and died in the jungles of Guyana. And it wasn't even in Kool-Aid, but a generic knockoff drink.
The horrifying mass suicide came about after Congressman Leo Ryan went to Guyana to investigate the People's Temple. Ryan and four others were shot and killed trying to leave the cult compound, and Jones knew that the murders meant the end of the People's Temple. He had been preparing for such an event for years. Read about Jim Jones, how his cult began, and how more than a thousand followers ended up in Guyana, most of them for the rest of their lives, at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Federal Bureau of Investigation)
It's a disturbing listen, and not for the faint of heart.