Or Flavor-Aid, if you want to be accurate with the Jonestown reference.
On this board Liberals accuse(d) Conservatives of ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’. As a liberal myself, I laughed. Of course it made sense to me that the conservatives bought into the rubbish Rush et al. were spewing. So imagine my surprise when I started reading a board populated by very-Right-wing types, and discovered they were accusing us of ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’!
So here are two questions:
When it comes to political conversations, which group (Left or Right) was the first to accuse the other of ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’?
I just did a quick google search. I found references here at SDMB from 2003 (not in a political context, but with the same meaning). I found a post from 2005 where it was used to describe liberals.
The Peoples Temple was left-leaning, if anything. Jones was the darling of many past and current Democratic politicians. For the record, it was Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid.
I know this doesn’t address your question directly, but it may be helpful anyway. I see “drink the Kool Aid” pretty often in sports contexts. On a baseball message board I visit sometimes, posters frequently accuse each other of drinking the Kool Aid when someone accepts the word of team management that the team is going to be competitive this year or that player X is going to be back after 15 days on the DL or whatever. Maybe the popularity of the phrase has roots in sports rather than politics?
I would just add that in one documentary, I’m pretty sure that Jim Jones or someone else in his compound is shown opening a box that contains many containers of both Kool-Aid and Flavor-Aid. I won’t argue that Flavor-Aid was the suicidal beverage of choice, though.
The first known use of it would be 1991. Rush Limbaugh referred to the Dems as “pouring the Kool-Aid,” not necessarily drinking it.
In the flurry of PT books that emerged after Jonestown, it was oft-repeated that while in Indianapolis, Jim Jones sought ties with local John Birch Society chapters. And that would be the only time the JBS was mentioned in the book. No comment that the JBS’ weekly newsmagazine “The Review of the News” correctly denounced The Peoples Temple & Jones as Communist a couple of years before the Massacre.
As to the OP, I wouldn’t be surprised if it started much earlier in religious contexts. I remember soon after the Massacre, people in the Charismatic inter-church group I attended worrying that people would consider us as similarly cultic.
In my experience, it’s the Libertarian/Ron Paul voters who accuse everyone else of drinking the kool-aid. Apparently, they also want us “sheeple” to “wake up”. And every time they say it, they seem to think that they are the first ones to use those witticisms.
