When you take the “red pill,” you realize that what is presented to you as truth in the media and at school is actually a carefully constructed narrative. My red pill moment wasn’t actually a single moment, like in The Matrix, where you instantly see the true nature of reality after swallowing a single pill. My red-pilling was much more gradual, like unwinding a thread, inch by inch, until it was completely unwoven. The process should take time, given a lifetime of indoctrination through the education system and corporate media.
Though I can pinpoint one moment that started the unwinding process, or the deprogramming. It was election night 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Before that, I was fully blue-pilled, stuck inside a liberal bubble, buying into everything the media was saying about how Trump was a joke and a horrible human being and there was no way he was going to win because he was a racist fascist white nationalist.
Then, despite everything they said, Trump won. That was a red pill moment for me in itself because I realized everything the media says is not always right. They said he could never win, but he did. That began my journey of searching for answers, to find out why the media was so wrong and how Trump won.
The second red pill was watching Jonathan Haidt’s TED Talks and reading his book The Righteous Mind, which taught me about the evolutionary psychology of liberals and conservatives—how they have different morals and how both types of people are needed for society. Jordan Peterson, who I first discovered on Joe Rogan’s podcast, presented similar ideas. This was in opposition to the hyper-partisan media which paints one side of the political spectrum as good and the other evil. I started to dismiss and ignore any news that did that, which was pretty much all corporate media.
Another red pill dispenser was Scott Adams, who was the first (and then only) highly intelligent person I found with any kind of positive take on Trump. Before the election, I was skeptical of Adams’ claims that Trump was a master persuader and would win the election. After Trump won, I reconsidered Adams’ takes as he was one of the few who correctly predicted the election. Adams was clearly seeing something most of the media was not, and what he saw lined up with reality while the media’s narrative did not.
From there, it was a continuing of the unwinding and deprogramming. I spent time unlearning the lies I was told and learning for the first time things I was never taught: about history, economics, and political philosophy. Throughout that intellectual journey, I’ve become a libertarian and anarcho-capitalist. I am not a Trump supporter as he is not libertarian enough, but he is not nearly as bad as the left makes him out to be. He’s done some good and some bad, and in terms of many of his policies, Trump is more like Obama than both Democrats and Republicans would like to admit.
Many of the people (comedians, podcasters, writers, late-night hosts) I used to enjoy have become intolerable now because they remain fully blue-pilled. It’s easy to forget that others have not gone on the same intellectual journey of deprogramming that I went through. I thought the mere election of Trump should have been somewhat of a red pill moment to make everyone reconsider their assumptions of him and his voters, but it was not. Instead they doubled down on their initial assumptions of racism, sexism, and fascism, and came up with endless conspiracy theories (Russian collusion) to explain his election rather than deal with their cognitive dissonance.
I wish I could give these people a giant red pill, to help them see the reality of Trump and the media more clearly, but no such pill exists. It would be like overdosing—their bodies would reject the information and vomit it from their brains. For most blue-pilled people, the only way to break through their brainwashing is by taking a series of small red pills over time (as I did). Though even that won’t work for everyone. There are some people on the polar extremes that will be impossible to red-pill. They will never see the truth of reality because their biased worldviews and assumptions are held too closely.
This especially applies to blue-pilled media members. Their entire careers and reputations are built around their narrative-driven blue-pill beliefs. The entire business model of most media on the left and right is built around maintaining the blue-pill facade of reality, playing the blame game of good vs. evil, where their side is always right and the other is always—not just wrong, but evil. The partisan journalists have no hope—as Michael Malice (a Morpheus in our Matrix) says, “the corporate press is the enemy of the people.” The media are a public enemy because they are desperately trying to keep the public blue-pilled. Fortunately, for regular people closer to the center, they can find those red pills—if they search for them—and finally see the Matrix for what it is.
