I’m not a “Matrix” fan. There are a few reasons for this, but I mostly blame the mixed metaphor of all mixed metaphors – choosing between the red and blue pills and potentially taking a trip down the rabbit hole.
If you haven’t seen this movie and you’ve missed the alt-right claim to this irritating metaphor, let me break it down for you. In “The Matrix,” Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) is a guy on the cusp of discovering the entire architecture of his whole life is a goddamn lie. Or not! Because he can make a choice to either accept the lie as reality by swallowing the blue pill, or he can take the red pill and have his mind totally blown with wayward truth bombs.
Morpheus, the pill proprietor played by Laurence Fishburne, puts it this way: “You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
What bothers me is that the pill thing depends on this other metaphor lifted from “Alice in Wonderland,” where Alice follows a rabbit into his hole and winds up in a demented place, the rules for which can only be explained by massive doses of psychedelics. But it bugs me that both of these things were roped in together and that the writers couldn’t come up with their own terminology for this alternative world of objective truth.
Which is why it’s especially canny that this already-shitty metaphor for getting woke has been claimed, appropriated and repurposed in succession by Gamergate dudes, a subreddit that hates/admires women depending on who you ask, white supremacists (who rebranded themselves as the alt-right), and finally, with much aplomb, by mainstream conservatives.
For each group, taking a red pill means something completely different, because the new reality they’ve been exposed to is completely different. That, in itself, is proof that Americans do not live in a shared reality, if we ever did, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.
For white supremacists, taking the red pill means the discovery that white people are superior to all other races, which should be segregated from one another. In Gamergate and for dudes who call themselves men’s rights activists, red pills are the revelation that, to be blunt, feminism is bull shit, the patriarchy doesn’t exist and people who advocate for equality are social justice warriors who should not be tolerated.
Given these conservatives’ penchant for the red pill concept, perhaps the greatest irony is that one of its creators, Lana Wachowski, is a trans woman. Wachowski wrote “The Matrix” and other successful movies with her brother Andy, and she came out as trans in 2012 after a gender identity struggle that lasted a decade.
So, years after men’s rights dudes and white supremacists started “redpilling” (it’s a verb now!) and 20 years after Neo swallowed his own reality-inducing red pill, this concept has crawled from one online fringe community to another before winding up in the conservative mainstream.
Evidence for this comes in the form of this Fox News opinion piece by Elizabeth Ames, where she runs through five Youtube videos that contain supposed red pill moments. Ames described the Youtubers as former liberals who had “personal awakenings that have caused them to reject leftist narratives” and to also reject political correctness.
“Not all their videos would pass muster with Reagan conservatives or even libertarians,” Ames wrote. “But, taken together, they give hope to those worried about the future of capitalism and free speech in America.”
But right off the bat, Ames misrepresented the content of these videos. Out of the five “red pill moment” videos, only two contain even vague “red pill moments” where they transitioned from liberal to conservative thought. And those moments didn’t involve becoming conservative because their worldview was shaken. Instead, their videos suggested the red pill moment was when they were bashed after expressing anti-feminist thoughts on Facebook. They felt attacked and like outsiders for their opinions – opinions that they already had to begin with.
Those aren’t actual red pill moments. Discovering that your friends or strangers disagree with you on the Internet or that people think you’re sexist is not even close to realizing that the very architecture of your world, all of your assumptions about how it works and your role in it, is a complete lie.
It’s not clear from her content that one of the Youtubers had been a Democrat before becoming a Republican, and another disputed on Twitter that she had ever been liberal. Instead, she said that she was a Trump supporter and that Fox News got her age wrong.
The fifth Youtuber mentioned by Ames is the most successful – Laci Green, who has made immensely popular videos about sex and gender. Many of her videos get hundreds of thousands of views, and the video Ames cited in her piece has almost 1.7 million views.
Although I found a Tweet where Green said she “leans left,” it’s not clear from the video that Ames claimed described a “red pill moment” if Green is conservative or liberal or if she has recently become a Republican. A quick Google search made it obvious she’s been attacked by the right for being a liberal feminist social justice warrior, but she’s also been attacked by people on the left for a lot of reasons. Although this may be shocking to some, you can be both a feminist and a Republican at the same time, so I’m not comfortable putting Green into any kind of political box.
Which is why Ames shouldn’t have, either. If it’s not completely obvious that Green has had a conservative revelation, then it’s harmful to make that assumption and even worse for Ames to use it to bolster her claim that Youtubers are coming to their senses in droves and joining the GOP.
But Fox News choosing to link to some of these videos, essentially endorsing them, shows us just how far the idea of the red pill has drifted from the Wachowskis’ original concept.
“I used to call people racist,” says one Youtuber, as images of Pepe the Frog float in the background. “… I was such a fucking cuck.”
Contact Mollie Bryant at bryant@bigiftrue.org or 405-990-0988.