The Phrase

Where “drinking the Kool-Aid” really comes from.

You have said it. You have heard it in a meeting. Somebody at Thanksgiving said it about somebody else's politics. Here is what the phrase actually carries — and why this book put it on the cover anyway.

What people mean today

Say a coworker “drank the Kool-Aid” and everybody understands: they bought in all the way. No questions, no daylight, no doubt. It gets used for companies, diets, teams, gurus — and most of all for politics, where each side is certain it is only the other side's cup.

It rolls off the tongue like a joke. It did not start as one.

What it actually refers to

On November 18, 1978, at a settlement called Jonestown in Guyana, more than nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple — an American church led by Jim Jones — died after drinking a grape drink mixed with cyanide, because the man they had trusted with their lives told them it was time. About three hundred were children. It went to the babies first.

That is the glass the phrase is holding. Every time. The full story is told, with sources, here.

Was it even Kool-Aid?

Here is the trivia answer people love to correct each other with: investigators at the site found packets of Flavor Aid — a cheaper powdered drink — and some accounts mention both brands. So technically, the phrase probably should have been “drinking the Flavor Aid.”

And baby, if that correction is the thing you walked away with, you missed it. The brand on the packet is the least important fact of November 18, 1978. Arguing about the label while ignoring what was in the cup — that is not just missing the point. That is the point. That is exactly how the Kool-Aid works.

One more footnote for the history-minded: a decade before Jonestown, Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test had already attached the brand name to the idea of a group all partaking together. But the phrase as we use it now — blind loyalty, swallowed whole — was seared into the language by Jonestown, and everyone who says it is quoting that day whether they know it or not.

[ Godfrey Translation: The Label Problem ]

If you will argue about the name on the packet but not about the poison in the cup, the poison has already done its work on you.

How a massacre became a punchline

Within a generation, “drank the Kool-Aid” migrated from news copy into boardrooms and ball games. By the 2000s it was resume slang — people bragged about drinking the company Kool-Aid. The distance did what distance does: it sanded a mass grave down into a figure of speech.

Survivors and the families of the dead have said plainly how much that stings. They are right. Roughly three hundred children never chose anything. Elderly saints who had marched for civil rights never chose the ending they got. A joke that blames the victims lets the real culprit — the machinery of engineered loyalty — walk free.

So why is it on the cover of this book?

Because the question — who's drinking the Kool-Aid? — is the one question the punchline never asks of the person telling it. Everybody deploys the phrase at the other side. Nobody checks their own cup.

This book uses the phrase the only way it should be used: as a warning, aimed first at the mirror. It does not mock the dead of Jonestown. It takes them seriously enough to ask what they would want us to learn: that loyalty without question is control; that doubt is not disloyalty; that thinking is not betrayal. Red cup and blue cup, weighed on one scale.

Pre-Order Now Read the Full History →

Kool-Aid is a registered trademark of its owner. This page and this book are commentary on a historical event and a figure of speech; they are not affiliated with or endorsed by any beverage company.