The red pill became such a popular right-wing meme during the Trump years that people started to hear about it even offline. Taking a red pill still meant opting in to a new worldview, but the worldview in question was now less clearly defined: QAnon believers took red pills, and so did garden-variety misogynists, and so did MAGA diehards who simply loathed and distrusted the media. Leading up to the 2016 election, the red pill exploded in popularity when it hit the once-massive Reddit forum dedicated to then–presidential candidate Donald Trump (before that forum was banned too). Then it made a run through almost every major reactionary space on Reddit: the Gamergate forums, the white-supremacy forums (before they were banned), the incel forums (before they were banned).
It was first popularized in 2013 in a Reddit forum called The Red Pill, which is for men who aspire to seduce women using complicated manipulation the term meant deliberately opening your eyes to the oppression of modern men. Like so many other things that end up confusing millions of people a few years later, red pill, usually written as redpill, sprouted on Reddit. Read: The internet won’t be the same after Trump The power of the MAGA internet is now diminished, and some Americans are ready to have a bit of fun at its expense. Rather, people are taking a classic far-right meme and intentionally twisting it into something insignificant.
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Nobody is really “pilled” on coconut oil or kindness or the Adam Sandler movie about a charming kidnapping.
Pilled was a bad meme, and now it’s become a big joke. Or Opulent Tips–pilled, which is when you’re obsessed with the invite-only email newsletter about fashion. Or fish oil–pilled, which is nice, because fish oil supposedly has many health benefits. If you search pilled on Twitter, you will see people getting playfully radicalized about one thing or another every minute: Rory Gilmore–pilled, an affliction that makes a person want to act like the main character in Gilmore Girls. Now the pill is experiencing new life as a funny little suffix that makes all interests and proclivities sound more dramatic.
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About eight years ago, boys who were spending too much time on the internet-usually on 4chan or Reddit-began to use taking the red pill as code for “choosing to realize that feminism is destroying society and my life.” The phrase was adopted by other far-right political subcultures and slowly came to mean that a person had been radicalized in some way. But unlike lots of memes, this one didn’t start as a neutral joke about a famous movie. The red pill will wake you up to all the horrors of reality, and the blue pill will let you stay clueless and happy in a simulated dreamworld. In the 1999 movie The Matrix, the protagonist is presented with a choice: Take a red pill or a blue pill. Like lots of memes, this one comes from pop culture. Have you inadvertently become entranced by Marxist perspectives on mass media and popular culture? You’re Horkheimer and Adorno–pilled.Īll over the internet, people are claiming to be “pilled” by anything you can imagine. Have you been convinced by a local restaurateur that an imported Italian oil is actually worth the expense? You’re truffle-pilled. On Sunday, May 17, Musk tweeted, "Take the red pill." And Ivanka Trump, upon seeing Musk's tweet, responded, "taken!" Lilly Wachowski, in response to their tweets, posted, "Fuck both of you." In a separate tweet, Musk (who has 34 million followers on Twitter), described "the red pill" as "one of my fav Matrix memes.Have you fallen for a famous great ape, the most lovable star of something called the “MonsterVerse”? You’re Kong-pilled. But when the alt-right adopted the term, they give it a far-right, socially conservative anti-feminist connotation - one in which someone who "takes the red pill" has had an alt-right awakening and rejects liberal or progressive ideology.
In the first "Matrix" film, taking "the red pill" means accepting a dystopian world as it really is. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently used the expression in a tweet that White House Senior Adviser Ivanka Trump forwarded - and Lilly Wachowski is calling them out for it. This article originally appeared on AlterNet.Īlthough the term "the red pill" has come to be identified with far-right anti-feminist websites such as Return of Kings, that's not where it originated: the expression made its debut in sisters Lilly and Lana Wachowski's first of three "Matrix" films.
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