Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, is one of the wealthiest zip codes in America, and also one of the most politically connected. The town is intimately connected to America’s Military-Medical-Industrial complex, home to defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and the primary government biomedical research facility the National Institutes of Health. The children of multiple Presidents have attended a Bethesda day school established in the 19th Century by a radical religious sect, Sidwell Friends, and the town includes multiple radical, activist churches as well as many openly Zionist, pro-apartheid synagogues.

Although a visitor may simply see high-end retails shops like Apple and Amazon, along with expensive, upscale restaurants and taverns, the town’s long history of religious fanaticism came into view this week with a highly publicized public cult ritual.

Anyone familiar with evangelical religious movements and the practices of radical cults would recognize what happened in Bethesda this week. Hundreds of people, including an overwhelming number of children, sat on the ground, their hands raised in prayer, repeating, as if in a trance, chants prompted by the ritual leader. The cult acolytes promised to dedicate their lives to proselytizing a radical, fundamentalist ideology that is sweeping the very heights of American imperial power.

In Houston, Texas, a branch of the cult conducted similar rituals, when a crowd of white people knelt before a group of black people to beg forgiveness for what they call their “original sin.”

In New York City, cult proselytizers are accosting young women on the street and threatening them with public defamation unless they literally kneel in the street and repeat cult phrases.

This cult movement – which is not new – is a modern development of the People’s Temple cult of San Francisco. Founded in 1955 by James Warren Jones, almost certainly at the prompting of his childhood friend, one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most notorious torture specialists, Dan Mitrione, the People’s Temple cult movement was centered around what they called “anti-racism.” The cult rhetoric originally used Christian language – in fact, the original name was “The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ.” But over time, the Christian language was gradually phased out and replaced with a racially charged evangelical version of quasi-Marxism, itself a variation of the pseudo-Catholic “liberation theology” movement popular in Central and South America, which was itself eventually declared a heresy by Pope John Paul II.

The People’s Temple eventually established a cult compound in Guyana Essequibo, a disputed territory in northwestern Guyana claimed by Venezuela. Surrounded by barbed-wire, under the constant watch of guards armed with semi-automatic rifles and police batons, cult members were forced to do agriculture and industrial labor from sun up to sun down. Cult members were forced-drugged daily, and the cult leader broadcast over loudspeakers propaganda and chants at times twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Americans who had lost family members to the cult became increasingly concerned, prompting an investigation and a visit to “Jonestown” by US Congressman Leo Ryan. Some cult members had been able to secretly pass notes to Ryan, begging him to help them escape. But upon their attempts to escape back to the United States, Congressman Ryan and the cult members attempting to escape were ambushed by cult enforces and murdered.

Then, to prevent the reality of the cult brainwashing, forced drugging, and slave labor, cult enforces began murdering members before they could escape, and some of the more dedicated members began to commit suicide. Children were induced to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. Altogether, 918 cult members were murdered or suicided.

The People’s Temple started as a “Black Lives Matter” movement, promoting an agenda of “anti-racism” and a purposeful strategy of “integrating” whites and blacks, with whites in the position of “racist” “sinners” that needed to “atone” to blacks. Eventually, the cult’s rhetoric became more and more radical, and some cult members had become so dedicated they refused to leave when given a chance.

But by the end of it, anyone who had not escaped earlier than November 18, 1978, wound up dead.

In 2020, a similar cult movement – also promoted by the American Empire’s military and intelligence agencies, and now due to the Coronavirus pandemic, merging with the Medical-Vaccine complex, is proselytizing all over America, with the willing participation of the mass media, television, and social media internet corporations.

Virtually every Fortune 500 company has been promoting this cult over the last week with “black outs” on their social media profiles.

It’s hard to say what the cult will do next, but this writer can only give one piece of advice:

Don’t Drink The Kool-Aid.