Syphilis

The Disease That Often Escapes Diagnosis

Syphilis often hides while damage advances through the central nervous system and cardiovascular system. By the time symptoms force recognition, years of injury may have impaired memory, judgment, impulse control, gait, equilibrium, and personality. The disease can fuel paranoia, delusions of grandeur, cognitive decline, dementia, and profound danger.

Théodore Géricault, The Monomaniac of Envy (c. 1822–1823). Painted as physicians began studying mental illness through observation, Géricault’s portrait captures a mind trapped within its own convictions. Suspicion, fixation, and grandiosity appear etched across the subject’s face. The painting captures the moment conviction severs the relationship with evidence.

Resist the beginnings; remedies come too late when problems have grown strong through delay.— Ovid

Before Jonestown became a mass grave, Jim Jones built a community that increasingly reflected his fears, grievances, and grandiosity. The settlement bore his name, turning the community into a monument to his own self-importance.

Historians, psychiatrists, and physicians continue confronting the same question. Did unchecked power alone produce the behavior witnessed at Jonestown, or did neurological disease accelerate a collapse already consuming judgment, perception, and reality testing?

The enduring appeal of the Jim Jones neurosyphilis hypothesis reveals a deeper problem than diagnosis. The question extends beyond Jones himself. Why do observers repeatedly suspect neurological disease when grandiosity converges with persecution?

Few diseases haunted physicians like untreated syphilis. The disease often hid for years while neurological and cardiovascular damage advanced unchecked. By the time symptoms forced recognition, injury had often already impaired memory, judgment, equilibrium, personality, vision, hearing, and perception.

Psychiatry has long documented the fusion of grandiosity and persecution. Exaggerated self-importance demands extraordinary enemies because extraordinary enemies justify an inflated sense of importance. The individual becomes savior and victim, ruler and martyr, persecutor and persecuted.

Long before modern neuroscience, physicians observed the same psychological structure among patients suffering from general paresis, a neurological consequence of untreated syphilis. Many displayed grandiose beliefs alongside paranoia, suspicion, and perceived enemies.

Modern neuroscience explains why. Damage to frontal regulatory systems weakens reality testing and self-correction. Implausible beliefs survive scrutiny, ordinary disagreement becomes persecution, confidence swells into grandiosity, and suspicion acquires the authority of fact.

The question gained particular attention in relation to Jim Jones and Jonestown, the agricultural commune established in Guyana during the 1970s. Jones moved followers to the remote settlement in 1977 and tightened control through isolation. More than 900 people died on November 18, 1978. Jonestown stood less as a community than as a monument to Jones’s ego. The settlement bore his name and elevated his authority.

Jones built the community upon obedience, fear, and dependence. His nonstop grievances, demands, and ambitions for complete domination shaped daily life. The settlement’s final months produced behavior that later fueled speculation about advanced neurosyphilis and neurological decline.

Available records never resolved the diagnosis.

Yet the hypothesis persists because Jones exhibited a psychological structure that closely resembled historical descriptions of general paresis. He treated criticism as sabotage, disagreement as disloyalty, and opposition as conspiracy. Jones saturated daily life with habitual lies, surveillance, propaganda, threats, and loyalty tests designed to suppress dissent.

Grandiosity expanded alongside an escalating sense of persecution. Jones elevated himself above the movement while portraying critics, defectors, journalists, and government officials as looming threats. Loudspeakers blasted across Jonestown for hours, carrying accusations, warnings, and demands into nearly every waking hour. The broadcasts reinforced narrative control and restricted competing interpretations of reality.

Jones built life inside Jonestown upon deception, fabricated dangers, and manufactured crises. Distorted accounts of conditions inside and outside the compound shaped how followers understood the world around them. He warned followers of violence, imprisonment, catastrophe, and hostile forces supposedly gathering beyond its borders.

Fear strengthened Jones’s authority by making dependence appear necessary. Dissent fed his persecution narrative, and constant alarms converted anxiety into obedience.

The persistence of the Jones hypothesis reveals a recurring problem in historical interpretation. Neurological disease, psychiatric pathology, and concentrated authority can converge upon nearly identical psychological structures. At that point, diagnosis matters less than the damage already consuming lives.

When neurological disease erodes judgment and reality testing, the damage can spread far beyond the patient and consume entire communities.

Annual membership remains the strongest value at a quarter per day for those who keep Glass Empires working. To continue, your support is indispensable and greatly appreciated.

A half century later, a paranoid, impulsive president threatens to bomb nations, blasts boat crews into the water, and waves a dementia test as proof of genius. Like Jones, Trump has not been diagnosed with Syphilis, and the president’s physicians are on record saying Trump is in perfect health.

Trump brandishes a test question as proof of genius, and he brags that he aced the dementia exam three times. The first question asks which animal is the bear, and milk sharpens his mind, he insists.

Now read his month as a charge sheet. Trump waves the test like a trophy, bolts his face onto Mount Rushmore, blasts boats apart at sea, and threatens five nations in a weekend. One man, one month: a brag, a monument, a body count, a menace.

One Saturday Trump fired fifty posts in seven hours. He rules by loudspeaker. His feed floods the country with raw impulse, hour after hour, and the filter is gone. He bolts his face onto Rushmore beside four carved presidents. He crowns himself over Washington, and aims warships at the sea beneath his feet.

Washington ranked the office above the man. Trump reverses the creed. He weighs the nation against himself and calls it short one monument.

Every prior president ducked the exam, he claims, and Obama would not pass, he sneers. The exam, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, screens for dementia, never genius.

Raskin demands he retake it under oath. The threats triggered the alarm.

I track the pattern without diagnosing the man. Doctors have never named any cognitive condition. I will not manufacture a verdict. The conduct convicts him.

Now the body count.

Saturday delivered another strike, three more bodies in the eastern Pacific. Southern Command cried narco-trafficking and waved a strike video as proof. Since September his forces have blasted more than sixty vessels, killing roughly 205 people across two oceans. United Nations experts brand the killings extrajudicial executions.

Trump bragged the strikes cut seaborne drug trafficking by 97 percent, yet his own numbers undermine the claim. Fentanyl seizures declined before the first strike. The boats still burn, the dead never face charges, and the killings rest upon the word of a habitual liar.

The punishment spares the powerful. A pardon freed Juan Orlando Hernández, a Honduran president convicted of cocaine trafficking, while missiles still target deckhands. Trump frees the kingpin and burns the crew.

January brought a new escalation. U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro after strikes in Venezuela, and Trump boasted that a secret weapon called the Discombobulator crippled Venezuelan defenses. Within days, he widened the target list to Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, and Iran. Cartels run Mexico, he claimed. An invasion remained on the table.

Five Senate Republicans finally moved to restrain the president.

The force turns inward. The Justice Department seeks voter records, Social Security numbers, license numbers, and birth dates, building a federal database that flags naturalized citizens and purges voter rolls. The same hand that bombs the deckhand files on the voter.

One hand drove it all: the granite face, the dead at sea, the threats against nations, and the file on the voter. Personal rule concentrates power, feeds vanity, and turns the nation into an altar. Washington stepped down to prove the office outlasts the man. Two centuries later, a successor carves his image beside the granite Washington earned.

The delusions of grandeur drive the threats, the threats feed the compulsion, and the compulsion floods the feed each night. A man who needs the mountain will always need the next target. The grandeur drives the slaughter.

We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Wendy

Paid subscribers reach my inbox by email or DM, and join the patrons who keep this work alive.

Five free guides already operate in the field: a Domestic Violence Survivor’s Blueprint, a Trump-Proof Your Life Manual, the Master Emergency Voter Documentation Guide, an Emergency Legal Guide for Families, and a Stay Independent at Home Guide. The Civic Saturation Field Guide joins them soon, with Surviving the Coming Fall close behind.

Use and share the free guides. Sustain the work: Fund Future Guides

Every coffee in the jar keeps another guide free for the next reader joining the fight. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Thank you for your generosity.

Sources

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Neurosyphilis, Ocular Syphilis, & Otosyphilis.
https://www.cdc.gov/syphilis/hcp/neurosyphilis-ocular-syphilis-otosyphilis/index.html

The Intercept, on the boat-strike campaign and the 97 percent claim: https://theintercept.com/2026/05/04/trump-boat-strikes-fentanyl-cocaine-drug-supply/

NPR, on Saturday’s strike and the death toll at sea: https://www.npr.org/2026/05/31/nx-s1-5841876/us-strike-drug-boat-kills-3-pacific-ocean

The Daily Beast, on the cognitive-test boasting and the bear question: https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-79-flexes-cognitive-skills-with-bonkers-bear-brag/

ACLU, on the effort to obtain non-public state voter data and build a federal voter database: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-blocks-documentary-proof-of-citizenship-provision-in-voting-executive-order

The Intercept, on the widening list of threatened nations and Iran: https://theintercept.com/2026/01/06/trump-wars-venezuela-colombia-cuba-iran/

CNBC, on the Mexico land-strike threat and the Senate vote: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/09/trump-us-military-cartels-mexico-land.html

National Library of Medicine (StatPearls). Ha T, Tadi P, Dubensky L. Neurosyphilis. Updated 2024.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK540979/

World Health Organization. Syphilis Fact Sheet. Updated May 29, 2025.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/syphilis

Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People.
https://archive.org/details/ravenuntoldstory00reit