Time is short. The cult is deep, and its leader is relentless.
Posted by Skye on July 13, 2025, 12:57 pm Valued Poster
"Jim Jones didn’t start out plotting mass suicide. He got there one lie, one power grab, one act of cruelty at a time. Trump’s path is no different. His first term tested the boundaries. His second is breaking them.
Already, Trump openly promised dictatorship “on day one.” He’s already pursuing “retribution,” purging the government, and rounding up immigrants into camps. He’s gutted the civil service, weaponized the justice department, and is today using the military for domestic crackdowns.
This isn’t hyperbole. It’s all on the record. And it’s what happens when a cult leader gains the reins of state power, as the world has seen repeatedly throughout history.
We don’t have to follow Trump into the abyss. We can refuse the poison. We can choose the hard work of repairing our democracy, telling the truth, and holding this would-be strongman accountable.
But time is short. The cult is deep, and its leader is relentless.
History tells us where this path ends. Jonestown. Berlin 1933. Rome in 1922. Moscow in 2020. The question is whether we have the courage to change course before it’s too late.
Trump may not have led us into a jungle, but he has led millions into a psychological wilderness, where lies are truth, enemies are everywhere, and only he can lead the way out. Jim Jones led his people to destruction, all in the name of salvation. Trump is leading America down the same road.
We must say no. We must tell the truth. And we must do it now."
The BBB will make ICE the sixth best funded military on earth.
Evidence and allegations exist that ICE already arrested and incarcerated US citizens. The Abrego Garcia case exposed numerous ICE and DoJ lies, and if they're untrue about one thing, they're untrue about everything.
People in these camps are denied basic rights. They are exposed to torturous health conditions which imitates a "final solution" of natural causes for which the felon and his mob can't be blamed. Alligator Alzatraz' method of disposing of escapees is digestion by alligator, crocodile, and python. Cruel? Bet you they dispose of dead in their camp the same way. Toss 'em into the water and destruction of evidence is more complete than any oven or incinerator.
Meanwhile the MAGA cult is unhappy about the felon's failure to release the Epstein files more than anything. We have a military police loyal to the president, an archipelago of concentration camps already built and filling up quick, ICE raids onegoing everywhere, and MAGA is upset because the felon may have illicitly sexed young girls with his friend Epstein?
MAGA's misplaced understanding and priorities could not be more upside down. You can look away from a painting, but you can't listen away from a symphony
is more people need to speak out against all the illegalities, lies and immoralities this administration is doing... especially those who are high profile reporters, or those who might be a target for retribution such as naturalized citizens that he is now threatening. People need to speak the truth and what is on their mind, loudly, for all to hear... so that if or when they are targeted for retribution, people will know about it. It will be on the news.
Actually, those people who do speak out truthfully and loudly will probably be MORE protected than those who resist quietly... because they are on the news already... or on the radar. If they disappeared or were prosecuted, people would notice, and high profile lawyers would come to their defense.
Bring it on. Let it play out for all to see.
How could MAGA not know about the decades of dt sex crimes?
Furthermore sex crimes pale before the nature of crimes committed by ICE and Homan, under authority of the felon, and quotas of Miller.
The American people need to act sooner and faster. The felon and his mob remove freedoms every day without notice. The fact any US citizen is held by ICE in a camp should illicit vigorous response and protest. You can look away from a painting, but you can't listen away from a symphony
I started thinking about dt's remark referring to Epstein as "a guy who never dies"... and it occurred to me that it sounds like maybe dt is the guy who had the other guy killed (who was in prison during dt's first term in office... something about a one minute delay in camera footage??) to prevent any incriminating files or evidence on himself from coming out. So then I found this...
"Years after his apparent suicide in a Manhattan federal lockup, the notorious sex offender and financial manipulator Jeffrey Epstein has returned from the dead to haunt Donald Trump and instigate a massive rupture in Trump's government and MAGA movement.
Having long encouraged the proliferation of conspiracy theories on the right -- from the racist birther myth about Barack Obama to the QAnon mania over alleged pedophilia among Democratic politicians and Hollywood figures -- Trump now stands accused of concealing proof of his own perfidy in the "Epstein files." Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed to have those files on her desk, promised to release them, and yet now tells the MAGA faithful that they will not be released.
The reaction has been volcanic.
The most sedulous and servile Trump supporters in the right-wing media complex, from Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, are castigating not just Bondi but the Trump administration. The far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich posted a direct blast at the president on X: "No one is believing the Epstein coverup, @realDonaldTrump. This will be part of your legacy. There's still time to change it!" On Bannon's livestream show, he taunted Posobiec as a "sap" for ever believing that Trump would release the Epstein files.
Amusing as it is to observe the MAGA weirdos chewing on each other, and to mock them as paranoia overwhelms their usual sycophancy, their suspicions are not ill founded. It was very strange indeed when Bondi -- as well as Trump's FBI director, Kash Patel, and deputy director, Dan Bongino, both professional conspiracy-mongers -- so abruptly decided to bury the Epstein evidence after all their vows of "transparency."
Most Americans interested in Epstein and Trump have seen the old video of them together at a party, whispering and leering at young women. Most have seen quotes from Trump in magazine profiles praising his pal Epstein, who "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." But if you listen to Michael Wolff, the bestselling Trump biographer and National Magazine Award-winning writer, there is far more to their relationship than a few words and images.
Wolff knows Trump well and knew Epstein very well -- and what he has to say about them points in a very troubling direction. Last month he discussed both subjects and their connections on "The Court of History," a MeidasTouch podcast hosted by journalist Sidney Blumenthal and historian Sean Wilentz.
While Trump has repeatedly tried to minimize his ties to Epstein, whom he now calls a "creep," Wolff said "Epstein and Trump had been the best of friends for almost 15 years. ... They were instrumental in each other's rise." The pair "hunted women together," according to Wolff, but fell out, as very rich men do, over real estate. Trump went behind Epstein's back to outbid him on a Palm Beach property that both coveted. Epstein believed that Trump was actually laundering money for a Russian oligarch and threatened to expose him. And then, according to Wolff's recollection of what Epstein told him, Trump "dropped a dime" on his friend's trafficking of young girls to the Palm Beach Police Department. (Which, as Wolff notes, indicates that Trump had long known of the crimes perpetrated at Epstein's house.)
By the time of Trump's ascent to the presidency, Epstein was ready to "drop a dime" of his own. Wolff told Blumenthal and Wilentz how, after Trump's election in 2016, "I was sitting talking to Epstein and he said, 'Wait a minute, I've gotta show you something.'" According to Wolff, Epstein "went into his safe, and he came out with photographs. They were Polaroids, I think, and he kind of spread them out like playing cards. ... It was Trump with girls of an uncertain age, at Epstein's Palm Beach house, where all of the things that (Epstein) would ultimately be accused of took place." He places the date of those pictures around 1999 or 2000.
"And I remember very vividly three of them," Wolff continued. "There are two in which the girls, topless girls, are sitting on Trump's lap. And then a third in which he has a stain on the front of his pants, and the girls are kind of pointing at it, sort of bent over, laughing ... three or four girls." Wolff also said he assumes those photographs were in Epstein's safe when the FBI raided his house and seized every item of potential evidence.
The crimes and coverup demand a Congressional investigation -- and perhaps this time, Democrats and a few courageous Republicans will dare to demand the truth from Trump."
The man is a convicted felon for a reason. He would be a 100x convicted felon instead of a 34x convicted felon if Merrick Garland did his job.
MAGA is rotting apart in demand for accountability over promised release of Epstein files that went the way of all felon promises. He lies either to cause trouble for somebody else, or get himself out of trouble.
Just give him rope. Tell Schumer and Jeffries to sit down, shut up, and let it happen. Schumer had his chance. He's a man like Garland. Jeffries can't complete a ..... thought ..... when speaking, all while staring .... ahead..... glassy eyed....... like....... a ...deer in.....headlights.
He can't sell toilet paper in a diarreha ward.
Let Raskin or Crocket address it. You can look away from a painting, but you can't listen away from a symphony
Maybe they draw the line at abusing little kids? Still, how could they not know that Epstein and Trump were buddies... and that Epstein was jailed and died in prison during Trump's first term... and that if there was a list of client names, it should have turned up then, unless Trump didn't want it to...
I saw this:
"ICE agents are raiding L.A. in masks without badges, names, or accountability. They ignore city and state leaders. They answer only to Trump, Stephen Miller, and Kristi Noem.
So the Save America Movement is launching Liberty Vans: mobile response teams with cameras, chaplains, lawyers and veterans. They are going to follow ICE raids in real time, film them, and show the world what's happening in our communities.
This is radical transparency in action. It'll cost $500,000 to launch this operation in L.A. and expand nationwide. Will you chip in to help us make holding Trump and ICE accountable a reality?"
if there are collateral ICE arrests, deaths and incarcerations. Homan has already admitted to that. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to get rid of the undesirables.
They probably don't even mind losing a few pretty little girls to a flood, as long as they don't raise their taxes. But sex crimes...? That cannot be tolerated, especially if it doesn't implicate the right people.
"A cult leader shows how Trump is taking America to a very dark place
Former FBI agent Michael Fienberg has gone public, pointing out that the agency, under the leadership of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, is purging itself of people who are not members of the Trump cult (my phrase, not his).
Similar cult-like behavior is on vivid display with the White House press secretary, the head of DHS, and the head of the Department of Justice — among numerous other administration officials and elected Republicans — regularly spouting lies and half-truths that target women, immigrants, and Democrats.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is implying that the children who died in the Texas floods were the victims of a nefarious plot — presumably by Democrats or Jews who operate space lasers — to modify the weather, completely ignoring the fact that Republican-aligned fossil fuel billionaires have been engaged in a half-century-long scheme to sabotage our atmosphere with their carbon dioxide emissions in exchange for trillions of dollars in profits. Some of which, no doubt, have been shared with Greene or her campaign.
Multiple administration officials, elected Republicans, and rightwing media cult leaders on platforms like Fox “News” have been amplifying the racist, antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory,” that wealthy Jews are paying to “replace” white people in America with Blacks, Mexicans, and other people of color. This has led to ICE becoming the largest police force in America, with a budget larger than that of the entire Russian military, soon to be sweeping a neighborhood near you in their never-ending hunt for brown-skinned people.
Donald Trump didn’t need to lure his followers into a remote jungle, like Jim Jones did in Guyana. He didn’t need to physically isolate them from the rest of the world. Instead, Trump built his Jonestown right here at home, within the boundaries of our republic, brick by brick. He did it using over 30,000 documented lies, fear, rage, and the intoxicating promise of belonging.
Today, tens of millions of Americans are trapped inside Trump’s reality-warping cult. And just as Jones’ followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid believing it was salvation, Trump’s followers have swallowed his Big Lies and are now willing to sacrifice our Constitution, our democracy, and our future on the altar of one man’s insatiable ego.
This is an old story in new packaging.
Jim Jones wasn’t always a madman. In the beginning, he offered something people desperately wanted: community, belonging, equality. He drew in the lonely, the marginalized, the disillusioned. He offered them meaning, dignity, and the hope of a better world. But slowly, he twisted that hope into a tool of control, weaponizing his followers’ trust for his own wealth, power, and self-aggrandizement.
Donald Trump followed a similar cult leader’s path.
He didn’t invent the grievances he exploited. For decades, America’s middle class was gutted by Reaganomics and neoliberal trade policies. Jobs were shipped overseas. Unions were crushed. Wages stagnated while billionaires like Trump amassed obscene wealth.
Trump didn’t cause that pain, but he channeled it. He told working-class Americans that he alone could restore their lost greatness. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, he bellowed: “I alone can fix it.”
That wasn’t a campaign promise. It was a cult leader’s declaration. Like Jones, Trump positioned himself not as a servant of the people, but as their savior, the one indispensable man without whom all hope would be lost.
All cults, whether religious or political, thrive on division and a sense of victimhood. Jim Jones taught his followers that outsiders were out to destroy them, that they were surrounded by enemies, traitors, and saboteurs. He warned that the CIA, the media, and shadowy conspirators would annihilate Jonestown unless his people followed him without question.
Trump operates from the same playbook.
His enemies list is long: immigrants, Black voters, Muslims, women, Democrats, journalists, scientists, the “deep state,” election officials, even members of his own party who dare to tell the truth. He has spent years feeding his followers a steady diet of paranoia, victimhood, and grievance, convincing them that the only thing standing between them and ruin is him.
And just as Jones’ followers were taught to see dissent as treason, Trump’s followers are conditioned to see any criticism of him as an attack on themselves. They’ve surrendered their own personal identities to him and his cult. When he tells them that an election they lost was stolen, they believe it; not because the evidence says so, but because Trump says so. And in a cult, the cult leader’s word is truth.
Jones kept his followers in a physical jungle, cut off from the outside world. Trump does the same psychologically with the help of billionaire-backed media. His repeated attacks on the press as “the enemy of the people” are no accident: they are a deliberate strategy to isolate his followers in an information silo, where only his voice matters.
Fox “News,” Truth Social, MAGA podcasts, and a network of social media influencers form the walls of this new Jonestown. Alternative facts replace real ones. And when reality intrudes — when courts reject Trump’s lawsuits, when audits confirm his losses — his followers simply double down. “That’s just what the enemy wants us to believe.”
It’s classic cult behavior. And it’s why millions remain convinced that Trump won in 2020, that the COVID vaccine was a hoax or a plot, that January 6th was “legitimate political discourse.” Like Jones, Trump has taught his followers to see the world not as it is, but as he tells them it is.
When Jones’ utopia began to crumble — when defections and investigations threatened his power and a congressional delegation arrived to expose his lies and manipulations — he led his followers into mass suicide. Over 900 men, women, and children perished, drinking poisoned Kool-Aid to prove their loyalty.
Trump, faced with the reality of defeat in 2020, incited his followers to violence rather than admit loss. January 6th was America’s political Jonestown: a desperate, delusional last stand to keep their messiah in power. Trump didn’t just sit back as the Capitol was attacked. He watched with satisfaction, refusing to act for hours, while the very heart of our democracy was desecrated in his name.
And to this day, he defends that insurrection, calling those convicted of violent crimes “hostages,” giving pardons, and encouraging more violence if he’s indicted or loses again. Jones destroyed his followers; Trump is willing to destroy our nation.
I wrote about this back in the summer of 2023 in an article titled, “Will America Face “Narcissistic Collapse” as Trump Descends into Legal Hell?” Narcissistic collapse is what happens when psychopathic narcissists face defeat and humiliation and strike out against the world around them.
Think Hitler in his bunker when my old friend Armin Lehmann, then a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, handed him the news that the war was lost. Armin wrote a book about his experience, In Hitler’s Bunker: A Boy Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer’s Last Days, which we discussed extensively when he was writing it and during the three years we traveled the world together, lecturing mostly across Europe and the Far East.
Hitler, in those final weeks — Armin told me and the historical record verifies — actually welcomed the destruction of Germany by American and Soviet bombs and tanks.
He hadn’t failed: his narcissism and the cult he had created and surrounded himself with wouldn’t let him confront that.
Instead, in his mind, the German people had failed, his generals had failed, his soldiers had failed. They had failed Germany, but, more importantly they had failed him and his cult — and he wanted them punished for failing him.
When he was finally pushed into full-blown narcissistic collapse — those final days that Armin spent with him — he succumbed to the fate of many severe narcissists who experience a failure so undeniable that it provokes full-blown narcissistic collapse: he killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself.
In the final stages of narcissistic collapse, long before suicide becomes an option, first comes the blaming and the attempts to punish others.
We see this now with Trump blaming the media, the courts, and the Democrats he now openly brags that he “hates” and encourages his cult followers to hate as well.
Historians and political scientists have long warned us about men like Trump. In Strongmen and on her Lucid Substack newsletter, Ruth Ben-Ghiat traces the path of authoritarians like Mussolini, Putin, and Trump: they all consistently cultivate a cult of personality, demonize opponents, destroy the press, capture the courts, collaborate with oligarchs, and use violence as a political tool.
Trump has followed that playbook to the letter.
Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works and on his Forward Substack, identifies Trump’s tactics: appeals to a mythic past, relentless lying, glorification of violence, and the creation of a “victim” identity for the dominant group. Steven Hassan, one of America’s foremost experts on cults, calls Trumpism a “destructive political cult” in his book The Cult of Trump and on his Substack newsletter Freedom of Mind.
These aren’t wild theories. They’re the sober assessments of professional scholars and historians who’ve studied how democracies fall and how cults rise.
It’s easy to see Jones’ Kool-Aid as the symbol of his evil, but let’s not forget: Trump’s lies have already cost real lives.
His downplaying of COVID, his undermining of vaccines and masks, his promotion of quack cures like hydroxychloroquine and bleach weren’t just irresponsible: they were deadly. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive today if Trump hadn’t turned public health into a culture war battlefield.
And now, his Big Lies about the election and the “deep state” are poisoning faith in our democracy itself. In poll after poll, a majority of Republicans say they believe Trump won in 2020. They believe it so deeply that they’re passing laws to suppress votes, installing loyalists to oversee elections, and preparing to reject any future result that doesn’t favor their Dear Leader. The poison is spreading and fast.
So what comes next?
Jim Jones didn’t start out plotting mass suicide. He got there one lie, one power grab, one act of cruelty at a time. Trump’s path is no different. His first term tested the boundaries. His second is breaking them.
Already, Trump openly promised dictatorship “on day one.” He’s already pursuing “retribution,” purging the government, and rounding up immigrants into camps. He’s gutted the civil service, weaponized the justice department, and is today using the military for domestic crackdowns.
This isn’t hyperbole. It’s all on the record. And it’s what happens when a cult leader gains the reins of state power, as the world has seen repeatedly throughout history.
We don’t have to follow Trump into the abyss. We can refuse the poison. We can choose the hard work of repairing our democracy, telling the truth, and holding this would-be strongman accountable.
But time is short. The cult is deep, and its leader is relentless.
History tells us where this path ends. Jonestown. Berlin 1933. Rome in 1922. Moscow in 2020. The question is whether we have the courage to change course before it’s too late.
Trump may not have led us into a jungle, but he has led millions into a psychological wilderness, where lies are truth, enemies are everywhere, and only he can lead the way out. Jim Jones led his people to destruction, all in the name of salvation. Trump is leading America down the same road.
We must say no. We must tell the truth. And we must do it now."
on July 13, 2025, 12:57 pm
