I previously said that the 2016 Trump election was my red pill moment, but what really caused my red-pilling was cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. It often happens when your expectations and assumptions do not align with reality, at which point you have two options: 1) Try to rationalize and explain away why reality is not conforming to your expectations and assumptions, or 2) Reassess your prior expectations and assumptions in order to fit reality. One tries to warp reality to fit into their worldview, while the other forms their worldview based on reality.
The cognitive dissonance I and millions of others faced in 2016 was: Trump is obviously an insane racist idiot and no one could possibly vote for him, yet Trump just won the presidency of the United States. How does someone square those two pegs? One way is to say that Trump could not have fairly won the election. And the other way is to reconsider that maybe Trump was not as insane/racist/dumb as you thought.
Many people simply ignore cognitive dissonance and double down on their contradictory ideas by trying to rationalize their previous assumptions. In the case of Trump winning in 2016, it must have been Russian collusion and election interference, not people with different values sincerely voting for whom they viewed as a superior candidate. Progressives have to believe that progressivism is the one and only way forward, and conservatism is not just wrong but evil. They cannot believe that good people would have voted for Donald Trump. Hence Democrats came up with myriad convoluted conspiracy theories to try to explain to themselves how Trump won.
I was right there with them in 2016 leading up to the election. I was a default shit-lib who followed Stephen Colbert, Jon Oliver, and Sam Harris. But when I encountered the cognitive dissonance of Trump winning the election, I could not ignore my cognitive dissonance. Unlike Colbert, Oliver, and Harris, I reassessed my previous assumptions, which led me down a rabbit hole of self-discovery, studying political philosophy, libertarianism, and dropping many red pills along the way.
So now I understand how and why Trump won in 2016—not because of Russian interference—but because all the media I had been consuming before and taking for granted was at best, heavily biased and at worst, flat out wrong and lying. So I no longer trusted those news sources and found alternative sources that better-explained reality.
It was a real red pill moment for me watching Colbert in the months after Trump won. I used to love his show and he was part of the reason I was so anti-Trump leading up to the election. Then to see Colbert confront his own cognitive dissonance by going into all those crazy conspiracies about Russian collusion and the “pee tape”—essentially doing all the partisan hysteria that he mocked Republicans for doing during Obama’s presidency—was not funny anymore. It was just sad.
But can you really blame him? Colbert had to double down on his prior assumptions about Trump because he built his entire career at CBS on being the most anti-Trump late night host. Likewise, many of his fans built their entire social lives around the Cathedral’s deranged idea of Trump. So Colbert comforted their cognitive dissonance as well by doubling down and coming up with conspiratorial explanations to explain how Trump won. I could have been one of the NPCs in his audience had I not confronted my cognitive dissonance and embarked on an intellectual truth-seeking journey to remedy it.
