Kool-Aid


    [from a kid's sugar-enriched drink in fruity flavors] When someone who
    should know better succumbs to marketing influences and actually begins to
    believe the propaganda being dished out by a vendor, they are said to have
    drunk the Kool-Aid. Usually the decortication process is slow and almost
    unnoticeable until one day the victim emerges as a True Believer and begins
    spreading the faith himself. The term originates in the suicide of 914
    followers of Jim Jones's People's Temple cult in Guyana in 1978 (there are
    also resonances with Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests from the
    1960s). What the Jonestown victims actually drank was cyanide-laced
    Flavor-Aid, a cheap knockoff, rather than Kool-Aid itself. There is a FAQ
    on this topic.

    This has live variants. When a suit is blithering on about their latest
    technology and how it will save the world, that's ?pouring Kool-Aid?. When
    the suit does not violate the laws of physics, doesn't make impossible
    claims, and in fact says something reasonable and believable, that's
    pouring good Kool-Aid, usually used in the sentence ?He pours good
    Kool-Aid, doesn't he?? This connotes that the speaker might be about to
    drink same.