Imagine what a state can do with the immense amount of data it has on its citizens. China is already using face detection technology to identify and arrest people. And here’s the tragedy: we’re building this infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism merely to get people to click on ads. And this won’t be Orwell’s authoritarianism. This isn’t 1984. Now, if authoritarianism is using overt fear to terrorize us, we’ll all be scared, but we’ll know it, we’ll hate it and we’ll resist it.
But if the people in power are using these algorithms to quietly watch us, to judge us and to nudge us, to predict and identify the troublemakers and the rebels, to deploy persuasion architectures at scale and to manipulate individuals one by one using their personal, individual weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and if they’re doing it at scale through our private screens so that we don’t even know what our fellow citizens and neighbors are seeing, that authoritarianism will envelop us like a spider’s web and we may not even know we’re in it.—Zeynep Tufekci1
Now, when most of us hear the term or think about authoritarianism, we usually do so in the context of the leaders throughout history who have headed up authoritarian regimes—everyone from Napoleon to Hitler and Stalin to any number of petty banana republic dictators. But that’s not what actually makes authoritarianism work, or at least it’s not the whole story.
No authoritarian regime has ever existed without a substantial percentage of the population it rules actively supporting and preferring it. They all have large armies of followers who sustain them in power. So to understand authoritarianism, it’s essential first to understand the distinctive personality types that are attracted to it and support it.
Grappling with the human dimensions of this phenomenon has occupied a number of psychologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists since World War II. At times it has been analyzed as totalitarianism or totalism; in more recent years, authoritarianism has become the preferred term in part because it has a broader sweep.2 Some of the more recent work by psychologist Robert Altemeyer of the University of Ontario and American political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler has been especially useful.3 As their studies have explored, most people have some level of authoritarian tendencies, but these are often leveled out by such factors as personal empathy and critical thinking skills, which tend to lead to a less black-and-white view of the world.
Nor is authoritarianism relegated just to the right side of the political aisle. There are also left-wing authoritarians, as any survivor of Stalinist Russia can attest. Theirs is a variation wherein the desired utopian rule becomes the objective.
Current Fox overblown propaganda about the dread specter of “antifa” notwithstanding, these authoritarian tendencies on the left nevertheless have been comparatively muted in twenty-first-century American society, at least among mainstream liberals. Average Democrats generally fall well into the zone of personality types that are resistant to authoritarianism, even if they underestimate it.
I say “comparatively” mainly because we are currently awash in a flood tide of right-wing authoritarianism that has fully reached mainstream conservatism and overwhelmed it—the presidency of Donald Trump being only the most obvious and powerful manifestation of it. However, this authoritarianism began infecting the Republican Party long before Trump ascended to the party’s nomination; it will maintain its toxic gravitational pull on the nation’s politics long after he departs the scene. And the main factor enabling this authoritarian toxicity all along has been conspiracism.
Are right-wing authoritarians born or made? Probably a combination of both, though it’s clear that people’s authoritarian tendencies increase the more fearful they are. Identifying a threat and forming a focus on it are essential to shaping these personalities. Some are wired this way from birth. Early theories on authoritarian personalities, now largely discredited, argued for a Freudian model in which harsh rearing environments and personal traumas produced people inclined to insist on a world in which strong authorities produce order and peace.
Most analysis today finds that it usually depends on circumstances. Because it is innate to human personalities, it can remain latent during periods when people do not perceive a threat and increase when they do. Authoritarianism significantly rose in the United States after 9/11. Periods of intense social change also can produce authoritarian backlash, as such changes are often perceived by some personalities as a kind of threat. This is why civil rights advances, such as Black Lives Matter, have so often been perceived as an attack on whites. It’s why white nationalists argue that multiculturalism is a genocidal assault on the white race.4
Right-wing authoritarian (RWA) personalities are built around three behavioral and attitudinal clusters, which are closely related groups of human psychology that essentially shape our worldviews.
These three clusters interact in myriad ways and produce a long list of identifiable traits. Altemeyer in particular has identified about a dozen such traits.
Authoritarianism as a worldview always creates a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, a feeling of unreality, because it runs smack into the complex nature of the modern world. The authoritarian worldview attempts to impose its simplified, black-and-white explanation of reality onto a factual reality that contradicts and undermines it at every turn.
People with authoritarian personalities willingly slip into the alternative universe created by their distorted, if not deranged, epistemology because it helps soothe this dissonance, allowing its occupants to glide over inconvenient facts because they participate in a larger “truth.” This bubble, as a creation of right-wing authoritarians, has always played a key role: a refuge for people who reject factual reality, a place where they can convene and reassure one another in the facticity of their fabricated version of how the world works.
So conspiracism is especially appealing to people with these personality traits—the people who tell pollsters they “don’t recognize their country anymore” and are discomfited and bewildered by the brown faces and strange languages that have been filling up their cultural landscapes in places where they never used to be.
One study found that conspiracy theories seem to be more compelling to “those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large.” They often long for a 1950s-style America with lawns and cul-de-sacs and are angry that the world no longer works that way. Whereas the mainstream media simply present the world as it is, conspiracy theories offer narratives that explain to them why the country is no longer what they wish it to be, why it has that alien shape. And so in their minds, the theories—because they never believe just one conspiracy theory but rather an interconnected web of them—represent a deeper truth about their world while repeatedly reinforcing their long-held prejudices and enable them to ignore the real, factual (and often uncomfortable) nature of the changes the world is undergoing.7
Simply put, the assembled narrative provides a clear, self-reinforcing answer to the source of their personal disempowerment. It also has the advantage of telling believers that they are the solo, go-it-alone action heroes in the movies of their own lives.
The deep irony in all this, as we have seen, is that the larger psychological and even political effect of conspiracy theories is that they are profoundly dis-empowering in and of themselves. Conspiracists disconnect from the rest of the world, whom they either hold in paranoid suspicion or contempt. The narrative arc of the conspiracy universe begins with the adrenaline rush of empowerment and ends with isolation, anger, and potentially even violence.
There can even be outright cognitive effects, sort of a hardened variation of the old Upton Sinclair adage: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when the entire worldview around which his emotional life revolves depends on his not understanding it.”8 People who are “red-pilled” see themselves as utterly disattached from their communities, fighting a desperate battle with only the help of their fellow conspiracists against truly dark and evil forces. It’s this heroic self-conception that really holds people inside these worlds, but in the real world it rarely, if ever, works out well.
Alex Jones continually refers to his targets as “demonic.” It’s not just a bleak world, it’s one in which people can become overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness and anger in the face of existential evil. So out of this universe proceeds a steady trickle of people who have decided it is time to act—usually out of a desperation fueled by rage over their sense of deep disempowerment, all of it a product of a belief in conspiracy theories.
The violence committed by these domestic terrorists serves the purposes of authoritarians in profound ways, because it ratchets up the levels of fear in society generally, and resorting to the false security of authoritarianism is a common psychological response.
This is where the role played by authoritarian leaders is key. Because rather than ease people’s fears, as a normative democratic leader would do, authoritarians immediately reach for the panic button. Keeping the populace in a fearful state is a cornerstone of their rule. Just ask Donald Trump.
________
While the rest of the world mourned the fifty lives lost in the March 15, 2019, attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the far right and its trolls were celebrating. From Breitbart News to Infowars to the sewers of 4chan, 8chan, and the Daily Stormer, extremists were unequivocal in reveling in the massacre.9
“This is a good start,” wrote one commenter at Breitbart, beneath a headlined story detailing the mass murders. “That man is a goddam hero,” wrote another, as E. J. Gibney documented on Twitter. “[A] real feel good story!” added yet another.
Someone writing as “White Pride” chimed in: “payback is a bitch! Gun control and bans are futile!!! He is giving them another taste of their own medicine by fighting fire with fire! An eye for an eye, Tit for Tat, quid pro quo!!!”
“Armed Infidel” chimed in: “The rag heads could easily avoid this by not infesting the rest of the world with their presence.” Another commenter added: “I’ve thought about it and decided. . . . I don’t care. It’s not as though there was any humans involved.”
Stewart Rhodes, leader of the neo-militia organization Oath Keepers, went on Alex Jones’s Infowars program and told listeners that the terrorist’s motives were legitimate:
When a guy who’s worried about or concerned about mass immigration of Muslims into Europe goes crazy and kills people, then they’re gonna blame all the rest of us who have the same concern. That’s how it’s gonna be used. And this is why we have to just fight back and say, “You know what, that doesn’t erase the fact that this is a problem. This is what drove this guy over the edge.”
Conspiracy theorist Matt Bracken also went on Jones’s show and appeared to urge others to follow in the terrorist’s footsteps. “The globalists want to keep the borders open and keep flooding America and the West with unassimilable Third-Worlders for as long as they can before there’s a rupture,” Bracken told Jones. “What the guy . . . did in New Zealand was try to speed it up so that the cataclysm happens sooner rather than later.”
Other white nationalists whined that the attacks made them look bad. “Can you imagine always being blamed for things that you have absolutely no control over? Can you imagine always being asked to apologize for these things?” noted anti-Semite Mike Peinovich wrote on Twitter. “Can you imagine being hated whether or not you do apologize? This is what being a White person in America today feels like.”
The man who perpetrated the massacre left behind a manifesto crediting Donald Trump as among his inspirations: “Trump is a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Trump sent out a defensive tweet: “The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one. So Ridiculous!”10
In a press gaggle later, Trump opined that he didn’t see white nationalism as a problem: “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. It’s certainly a terrible thing.”11
________
Authoritarian leaders have a personality type quite distinct from their followers. It is called social dominance orientation (SDO), which is essentially a form of narcissism on steroids.12
SDOs are far more interested in the personal acquisition of power than are RWAs, who by nature are more inclined to march on someone else’s behalf. They also have different reasoning capacities and are far more calculating and manipulative.13
What they have in common, more than anything else, is a shared dismissive view of equality as an important social value. They both believe that inequality is the natural state of the world and that any attempts to tamper with it are doomed to fail and screw everything up. Like Jordan Peterson, the “intellectual dark web” psychologist associated with far-right “traditionalists,” described this in a new foreword for Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago:
Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity—even among plants, and cities—even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world.14
This simultaneous contempt for attempts to overcome inequality and for the democratic institutions intended to give ordinary people the political power to do so is a thread that runs throughout authoritarian discourse, among both the angry foot soldiers and their narcissistic leaders. They both believe that there is a natural hierarchy of the gifted and the less so.15 It’s just that SDOs tend to see themselves among the former, while RWAs are more likely to view themselves among the latter but harbor ambitions to rise to that other station, along the lines of the aphorism attributed to Steinbeck: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”16
Given its innate preference for autocratic rule, authoritarianism is also toxic for any kind of democratic society. The alt-right’s express hostility to democracy and its institutions makes its rise as a political phenomenon a concern not just in the United States, but around the world—especially as conspiracism begets more and more violence.
We also run the very real risk of an era of scripted violence: the phenomenon that occurs when a major cultural figure uses his position and the media to call for violence against a targeted minority group and his fanatical followers carry it out.
________
For Cesar Sayoc, becoming a follower of Donald Trump was “like my newfound drug.” He saw himself as a warrior “on the front lines of war between right and left.” He believed leftists had tried to kill him by tampering with his van’s electrical wiring and blamed it on “liberal left leaders” who “encourage attacks and violence.”17
In retaliation, he sent pipe bombs to sixteen different recipients in October 2018, all of them targets of Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. Among them: former president Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, George Soros, actor Robert De Niro, CNN, and the Washington Post.
The #MAGAbomber, as Sayoc, fifty-six, became known, was instantly identified upon his arrest with his Trump sticker–festooned van. Social media posts quickly revealed him as a steroid-abusing bodybuilder from the Miami area who wore the red ball caps, traveled to Trump rallies, and was a rabid fan of the president. In April 2019, he pleaded guilty to an array of domestic terrorism charges.18
The bombing scare (the devices were incapable of harming anyone) quickly vanished down the public memory hole. But the episode remains a stark reminder that America has entered a new age of scripted violence—also known as stochastic terrorism, a scenario in which “a leader need not directly exhort violence to create a constituency that hears a call to take action against the named enemy”—in which the president himself is writing the scripts for others to follow and enact violence.19
A letter that Sayoc wrote to the judge in his case, released after he entered his guilty plea, underscored the extent to which the right-wing authoritarian cult around the president is likely to act out violently. In it, Sayoc described attending a Trump rally in Chicago in which he was attacked by leftist counter-protesters, whose presence he blamed on Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Yet the string of targets—all of them verbally targeted by Trump—made the source of his inspiration unmistakable.20
There really has been little question, in fact, that Trump’s hatemongering fueled not just the #MAGAbomber rampage, but a number of other acts of terroristic violence: the synagogue massacre by white nationalist Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh; the mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand; and a stymied domestic terrorism plot in Illinois. Similarly, the sudden sharp increase in hate crimes of the past three years is increasingly tied to Trump’s rhetoric, especially since a large portion of the crimes are now accompanied by references to Trump. This was notably the case in places where Trump held rallies, which saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.21
Trump has a history of encouraging violence explicitly—as when he told rally audiences that he’d like to punch protesters, just before members of the audiences sometimes did—as well as implicitly by rationalizing the behavior as excusable. When two Boston men in 2015 brutally beat and urinated on a Latino man and then credited Trump as inspiration, he made excuses for them: “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate. I will say that, and everybody here has reported it.”22
How does scripted violence work? Analyst Chip Berlet explains:
The potential for violence in a society increases when the mass media carries rhetorical vilification by high profile and respected figures who scapegoat a named “Other.” This dangerous “constitutive rhetoric” can build an actual constituency of persons feeling threatened or displaced. Or to put it another way, when rhetorical fecal matter hits the spinning verbal blades of a bigoted demagogue’s exhortations, bad stuff happens.
The resulting violence can incite a mob, a mass movement, a war, or an individual actor. Individual actors who engage in violence can emerge in three ways. They can be assigned the task of violence by an existing organizational leadership; they can be members or participants in an existing organization, yet decide to act on their own; or they can be unconnected to an existing organization and act on their own. According to the US government definition, a “Lone Wolf” is a person who engages in political violence and is not known by law enforcement agencies to have any current or previous ties to an organization under surveillance as potential lawbreakers. The person committing the violence may expect or even welcome martyrdom, or may plan for a successful escape to carry on being a political soldier in a hoped-for insurgency. Either way, the hope is that “a little spark can cause a prairie fire.” Revolution is seldom the result, but violence and death remains as a legacy.23
This plays a key role in how violence created by a tide of young men radicalized online by far-right ideologues and conspiracy theories is spread. Having a figure like Trump both normalizing their extremism and encouraging violence in support of it means that it is being spread throughout American society.
The way this finds expression is with men like Cesar Sayoc, who see themselves as “warriors” in a larger fight against evil itself, which in their view is embodied by liberals and leftists. This is why so many right-wing Trump supporters speak so eagerly of launching a “civil war” against urban liberals.24
Trump himself indulges in this “warrior” mentality. A 2017 New York Times piece explained Trump’s worldview somewhat nonchalantly in an article exploring why the president attacked NFL players:
In private, the president and his top aides freely admit that he is engaged in a culture war on behalf of his white, working-class base, a New York billionaire waging war against “politically correct” coastal elites on behalf of his supporters in the South and in the Midwest. He believes the war was foisted upon him by former President Barack Obama and other Democrats—and he is determined to win, current and former aides said.25
Trump thus continually justified the violence inflicted by his supporters, suggesting that the victims have it coming. Infamously, after Heather Heyer was killed and multiple people injured by neo-Nazi James Fields in the August 11–12, 2017, “Unite the Right” protests, Trump insisted that there were “some very fine people” among the polo-shirted men marching with their tiki torches.26
The bigger problem is that Trump himself doesn’t need to identify the targets, since there is a long history of domestic terrorists motivated by ideology,rather than the authoritarian defense of a political leader. Sometimes the two are mixed.
________
We’ll never know for certain whether accused domestic-terrorist-in-the-making Christopher Hasson ever would have acted on the desire to spark a racial civil war for white supremacy by committing the assassinations and mass killing for which he had so thoroughly prepared and about which he endlessly fantasized. We do know, however, exactly what might have been the spark to send the fortynine-year-old coastguardsman from Baltimore on a killing rampage, though: the impeachment of President Trump.27
Buried in Hasson’s deleted emails, along with correspondence to neo-Nazi leaders and ruminations on his admiration for Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, were his working notes for events around which he was planning actions,notably: “what if trump illegally impeached” and “civil war if trump impeached.”28
It’s not difficult to find where Hasson might have obtained the belief that civil war would erupt if President Trump were to face impeachment: after 2017,the possibility of the outbreak of a civil war became a frequent talking point and source of speculation among right-wing pundits. The same week Hasson’s arrest was announced, longtime Republican operative Joseph diGenova went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show and warned:
We are in a civil war in this country. There’s two standards of justice,one for Democrats, one for Republicans. The press is all Democrat,all liberal, all progressive, all left—they hate Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future in this country is over. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends,I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.29
This seemingly hysterical pronouncement, in fact, is fast becoming a commonplace among right-wing pundits. It has been circulating on the right for a long while and is now being whipped up to new heights—notably, into the mainstream of conservative movement discourse.30
After Trump’s election, the radical right’s focus turned to his rabid defense,vowing to protect him from any kind of attempt to impeach or otherwise remove him from office with force of arms. Moreover, this meant characterizing organized antifascism—relabeled “antifa” to make it seem less than benign—as an insidious, evil force that was the face of a Communist plot to remove Trump—and of course, right from Trump’s inauguration, small groups of anti-Trump protesters became the embodiment of this paranoid fear.31 Leading the paranoia parade, as always, was Alex Jones, who leveraged his considerable history of promoting the idea of civil war into a remarkable yearlong run pushing the idea after Trump was elected and who is still doing so today.32 So was Michael Savage, who warned in the summer of 2017 that impeachment would mean civil war.
Jones became especially frantic in the fall of 2017, first warning after the Las Vegas massacre that Democrats were going to begin mowing down Republicans soon, then hyping a nonsensical claim that, just like at Inauguration Day, evil antifa/Communist/satanic Mars colony pedophilia forces were plotting a nationwide strike that would paralyze the country and create the opportunity for a coup on November 4, 2017. As with all of his previous completely bizarre failed predictions, Jones never acknowledged that such a coup attempt never even came close to manifesting itself in the real world.33
Maybe, all along, the whole thing was just projection.
________
What did Michael Cohen mean by this?
Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power, and this is why I agreed to appear before you today.34
The pre-prison testimony by Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney in February 2019 before the House Oversight Committee—which described the president as being like a mob boss, speaking in cryptic code that communicates an ongoing thuglike criminal intent—was shocking at times and deeply disturbing most of all. But reflecting that Trump might try to cling to office even after defeat at the polls was like looking into the abyss.
It’s one thing for someone outside of Trump’s circle, particularly anyone who’s opposed Trump, to say such a thing. However, we’re talking about the man who was Donald Trump’s legal fixer for ten years. A man who once said he’d take a bullet for Trump. But a man who now believes the person to whom he gave his loyalty is in fact a “racist, a con man, and a cheat.”
Cohen’s closing note, before he shuffled off to prison for lying to the FBI during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—which felt something like a cryptic warning—came as he put the finishing touches on describing the president he knows as a conniving charlatan who gets his way the same way any mob boss does: by demanding undying fealty from his underlings, by being an absolute authoritarian.
Cohen provided a little more context by noting that he had long been party to Trump’s wrongdoings but that he could no longer bear “silence and complicity in the face of the daily destruction of our basic norms and civility to one another” as a consequence. Among the most longstanding of those norms, of course, has been the peaceful handover of power by American politicians when they lose elections.
Yet Trump himself raised the specter of an American president who refused to leave office even before winning election in 2016 when he adamantly refused to say whether or not he would concede the election to Hillary Clinton if he were to lose, telling a debate audience coyly, “I’ll tell you at the time. . . . I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?”35 He set the stage to never concede the election if he chose not to. “This whole election is being rigged,” Trump would tell his roaring crowds. “The whole thing is one big fix. One big ugly lie. It’s one big fix.”36
At a press conference held to announce whether he would concede, Trump told reporters:
I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters, and to all of the people of the United States, that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election . . . if I win.37
The outcome negated any need to test Trump’s willingness to ignore precedent, of course.
Politico’s Jack Shafer reviewed Trump’s options and concluded that the reality is that he doesn’t have many when it comes to clinging to power in the face of an election loss, although postponing the election always remains one of them—and breaking precedent seems less like an obstacle with this president than it does an incentive.38 Yet as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake observed, Trump’s odds of success in any event would be extremely low.39
However, Trump himself has rarely been dissuaded by low odds, if his history as a politician is anything to judge by. Moreover, there is one possibility that neither Shafer nor Blake pays much attention to but which happens to be the scenario a classic populist authoritarian might deploy: an appeal to a popular uprising to prevent his removal. In other words, green-lighting the civil war his followers have begun discussing with fevered rhetoric.
The problem is that this scenario becomes more likely as Trump himself becomes increasingly authoritarian when his power is challenged. And the army of authoritarian followers has made it explicit in multiple online rants and Twitter threats that they dream of a day when they can take up arms on behalf of the president. This is a running current through the QAnon movement.
Conspiracism creates a toxic mindset, a worldview in which the world is actually being run by secretive, powerful schemers intent on suppressing the believers, against whose immense power an ordinary individual is almost entirely powerless. Even their neighbors are suspect. The people who are “red-pilled” have been primed not just to hate their liberal neighbors, but to prepare to eliminate them. And they have a leader who appears inclined not only to let them, but to encourage, perhaps even empower, them.
This is the real-life manifestation of Altemeyer’s “lethal union” of right-wing authoritarian followers with a social dominance–oriented authoritarian leader: that moment, as Altemeyer says, when “the two can then become locked in a cyclonic death spiral that can take a whole nation down with them.”
________
In the end, the question everyone should ask themselves is: what happens if I take this red pill?
It promises being awakened to “the way things really are,” like in The Matrix. Except . . . The Matrix is fiction. And so is any “red-pilled” version of reality comprised of the thin gruel of conspiracy theories and conjecture: fictions, when examined with any rigor, created by a cluster of self-described “antiglobalists” whose concocted universe becomes a conduit for white nationalist extremism.
People who sell the “red pill”—usually desperate for fellows in the increasingly isolated worlds they inhabit—want you to believe that you are freeing yourself from a worldview created by a nefarious cabal of Jewish scholars or perhaps moneygrubbing bankers, something along the traditional lines.
What they’re not telling you is that when you take it, you are submitting yourself wholly to a universe created by a weird agglomeration of paranoid personalities and white nationalist bigots. They don’t tell you that, once you swallow the pill and are inside the universe, there really isn’t any dissent regarding what is real or not. And what is real is what the leading voices of the theories—Alex Jones, or Q, or the alpha dogs of the online communities where conspiracies and “evidence” are produced and regurgitated endlessly—tell everyone it is. It’s a reality constructed and ordered by people claiming that reality is constructed and ordered by someone else: an endless hall of mirrors.
And if you’ve taken it, it’s worth wondering what you’ve done to yourself. Eventually your example—depending on how far along the narrative arc you are—will stand as a warning to anyone considering swallowing the red pill.
Sure, at first it was empowering and exciting. It was more than an adrenaline rush—it became positively addictive, especially a participatory conspiracy theory like QAnon. But as time wore on, the seamy side of this world—the scams, the easy and loose relation with facts, the willingness to backstab—began to wear thin.
Pretty soon, you’re isolated. Your family won’t talk with you, and your old friendships have mostly died away. You’re alienated from your colleagues, and you don’t know whom to trust. Even your neighbors are suspects. The only friends you have are people inside the “red-pilled” world, and as time wears on, there are increasing problems with them, too. If you go to a traditional or even evangelical church, you eventually find that you can no longer trust them, either.
You no longer vote; you no longer participate in the political process at all, because you’ve come to believe democracy is a joke. So you also have zero political power. After a while the isolation and frustration and anger become intense.
That’s what red-pilling actually does: it promises freedom, and it eventually binds you in cords that creep around you in your sleep.
So let’s consider a blue pill: an antidote to this bizarre epistemological pill promising to awaken you but that actually puts you to sleep. A pill that would honestly awaken people to an embrace of traditional reality and normative versions of factuality and reason.
What would that look like?