The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, today known as the Peoples Temple, was a U.S. new religious movement organization existing between its founding in 1955 until its dissolution in 1978. Founded by Jim Jones in Indianapolis, Indiana, the Peoples Temple spread a message combining elements of Christianity with egalitarian politics.

Through the years, Jones tightened his control over the group, first by requiring members to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas together as a Temple “family” rather than with blood relatives. He then demanded that members turn over all their material possessions to the Temple in exchange for the promise that the Temple would meet all their needs.

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Jones had a vision in 1961 that Indianapolis and most of the Midwest would be destroyed by a nuclear bomb attack. By this time, he had begun taking illicit drugs, which further increased his paranoia. He eventually convinced his parishioners to move to South America where he had read in an Esquire magazine article was less likely to suffer the consequences of a nuclear invasion.

In 1974, Jones signed a lease and moved to a parcel of land in Guyana, and Temple members moved there to a community established as the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, informally dubbed “Jonestown.” The population of the community grew to approximately 1,000 by the end of 1978.

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Jones became increasingly controlling over the members in Guyana. He forbade them from leaving the compound or withdrawing from the community. He determined who could marry and he began requiring sexual favors from some of the women, even those who were married. Jones also raped several male members.

If members rebelled against Jones’s authority, he punished them with reduced food rations, harsher work schedules, public ridicule and humiliations, and at times with physical violence. U.S. news agencies began investigating reports of abuse within the Temple.

U.S. House of Representatives, Leo Ryan Jr. (D-CA), visited Jonestown on November 18, 1978 to determine whether the claims of abuse were valid. While on the local airstrip at Port Kaituma, he was met by a few Temple members who expressed interest in leaving with him on his plane back to the U.S.   

There they were intercepted by Temple security guards who opened fire on the group, killing Ryan, three journalists, and one of the defectors as well as injuring nine others, including Ryan’s aide, Jackie Speier.

That evening, in the Jonestown compound, Jim Jones ordered his congregation to commit “revolutionary suicide” by drinking a mixture of a sedative and cyanide-laced, grape-flavored Flavor Aid, a powdered non-carbonated beverage. A total of 918 people died, including 276 children. Jones was found dead of what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

From this event we get the phrase to “drink the Kool-Aid,” referring to a person who foolishly has faith in a possibly doomed or dangerous idea, cause, or leader stemming from promises or potentially high rewards.  

The MAGA Death Cult

We find many parallels between the death cults of The Peoples Temple and the MAGA movements: Both were led by a charismatic leader who offered unfounded promises and downright lies for people to “drink the Kool-Aid,” which left many people literally dead in MAGA’s wake, or members figuratively dead in soul by the promises and their expectations of high rewards.

Placing deaths on ICE

Reviewing a sampling of the literal death incidents show that during Donald Trump’s first term as president (2017-2021), the American Civil Liberties Union  (ACLU) reported 52 deaths of people interned under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with 95% as “preventable or possibly preventable.” This far exceeds the total number of deaths under ICE detention during the Biden administration’s full four years in office.

Early into Trump’s second term, 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, with another six deaths so far in 2026.

Most ICE incarcerated deaths are due to harsh treatment of people who suffered from heart attack, stroke, respiratory failure, or from flu viruses.

By early 2026, ICE officers had shot at 13 people and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 7. She was a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three. Federal immigration agents also killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, who was also 37 years old and a U.S. citizen. Alex was an ICU nurse for the Minnesota Veterans Administration. Federal officers shot and killed him on January 24.

Killing the poorest

President Donald Trump’s closure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2025 has been linked to an estimated 1,400,000 to 1,600,000 lives needlessly lost, with projections as high as 14 million additional deaths by 2030. Roughly two-thirds of the fatalities in the first year alone are estimated to be children, with more than 500,000 children under five dying from HIV infection, malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, or starvation.

These deaths are due to the suspension of funding for critical programs for health, nutrition, and development assistance to some of the poorest countries on the planet.

Deaths by the snorter of cocaine on toilet seats  

“I’m not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats,” admitted the United States Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under the second Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a recorded February 12 interview.

Well, don’t you all feel really safe and secure with this man serving as our country’s leading health advisor? If you do, though, you need to think again.

Under his tenure and with his background of health conspiracies and anti-vaccine stands, we are not seeing what he claims will Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). Instead, Kennedy has succeeded in Making Childhood Diseases Infecting Again. We are now seeing outbreaks of measles and other childhood infections throughout the country that we thought we had virtually eliminated not so long ago.

Kennedy has cancelled $500 million in mRNA vaccine research, rolled back $11 billion in COVID-era grants to local health departments even despite previous assurances to Congress that he wouldn’t do so. He has fired the CDC chief and replaced members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with individuals skeptical of some vaccines. Basically, he has dismantled the public health system of the United States, placing all of us at risk for developing preventable diseases and unnecessary deaths.

Killing the environment (and us along with it)

Donald Trump’s campaign slogan of “drill baby drill” has resulted in his 007-style license to kill people by carelessly and needlessly murdering our planet with toxic pollutants.

In addition to the over 70 environmental regulatory rollbacks under Trump’s first administration according to New York Times research, the Polluter-In-Chief gave a stunning announcement February 12, 2026 that he has further loosened the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from protecting the environment leaving the country now with a government-mandated new agency that can be titled the Pollution Rollbacks Of Fossil Fuels Increasing Toxicity Substantially (PROFFITS).

This agency has revoked “both the Obama-era 2009 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Endangerment Finding and all subsequent federal GHG emission standards for all vehicles and engines of model years 2012 to 2027 and beyond,” states the official government announcement.

Specific items of the administration’s agenda include loosening standards for vehicle tailpipe emissions, weakening rules regulating power plant emissions, defunding research and implementation of renewable energy sources, increased drilling and fracking of fossil fuels, eliminating financial incentives for consumers to purchase electric vehicles, and revocation of other climate polluting directives.  

This furthers the Trump administration’s anti-science bias by forgoing conclusive scientific evidence that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have impaled our planet by placing all living species on the endangered list.

The death of the soul: Hate mail

Those who have drunk the MAGA-concocted Kool-Aid have suffered a spiritual death of the soul by accepting Donald Trump’s vision of a monocultural, monoracial, monoethnic, monolinguistic, patriarchal heteronational Christian white supremacist Disunited States of America. In so doing, they have favored an autocratic totalitarian state while rejecting what the founders of the United States had hoped would be a continuing and ever perfecting democratic republic.

As a clear sign of the death of the soul, I include reader comments of two of my recent commentaries. The first is in response to my commentary on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s path of death and destruction in Minneapolis. I believe this reader’s comment can be seen as a threat.

A reader named Mert M wrote, “ICE agents have taken oaths to enforce US law, suppress insurrections and repel invasions. For your own safety, stay out of their way and let them do their jobs.”

My response: “My grandfather lost his family to the Nazis. I was named after his father, my great-grandfather Wolf Mahler who was shot to death in the Krosno, Poland ghetto. My writing is my small attempt to fulfill the promise of ‘Never Again.’ I will not allow threats by anyone to deter me from that. Best, Warren.”

The next comment is a response to my commentary on Trump’s racist meme depicting the Obamas as apes. I must, however, give you a trigger warning on the content:

Reader Donovan E. wrote, “Get real f**. Barack Obama lives rent free [in] Donald Trump’s mind? Yeah I’m thinking nothing could be further than the truth you d**k sucker, the sitting president is probably horribly worried about a washed up f**got n**ger but keep telling yourself that homo, by the way did you see the funny video Trump put out depicting Michael and Barack as apes that was some funny s**t, anyways people like you are despicable hopefully you get HIV and die of AIDS.”

My response: “Okay, Donovan, I will use your quote in my article about the MAGA followers who drank the racist and homophobic Kool-Aid concocted by the worst president of all times, Donald John Trump. Have a great day, Warren B.”

Donovan E’s response: “The difference between my Kool-Aid and yours is mine doesn’t have fentanyl in it you delusional f**k.”

And the cult-related literal and spiritual deaths continue. We the People, through our non-violent activism and resistance, can make it stop.

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