A version of the following article was originally published in IM-1776 #4 (Winter 2023), under the title “Rejecting the Revolutionary Red Pill”. It appears here, in a somewhat revised form, for the first time in digital format.

For a decade and a half, the red pill has remained one of the defining tropes of online political discourse. Often generically associated with a sharp rightward shift in one’s fundamental worldview, the red pill meme has often been breathlessly connected to dangerous extremism by the usual suspects of establishment media and left-wing activists. “In extremist terms, being redpilled means you have bought into at least one of the antisemitic, racist and conspiratorial tropes of the far-right movement,” the ADL warns, solemnly adding that, “For many, it is the first tentative step down the rabbit hole toward radicalization.”

Within contexts in which the trope has positive connotations, taking the red pill represents the intellectual and moral courage of those rare few willing to sacrifice everything for Truth. The foil of the red pill is the blue pill, which represents the blindness and cowardice of the rest, who willingly dwell in a false reality constructed for them by unseen controllers. From the blue and the red have spun off a host of other memetic pills—the black pill, white pill, clear pill, etc.—that dot the landscape of internet politics.

While referring to one’s ideological opponents as “gnostic” has become a somewhat overused and superficial tactic, the genuinely gnostic character of the red pill is without question. It is well known that the trope goes back to The Matrix (1999), to the scene where Morpheus offers Neo the choice either to return to his old life and forget that he lives in a computer simulation (the blue pill), or to break out of it and confront the terror and adventure of Reality (the red pill). In other words, Morpheus is peddling knowledge or gnosis. It comes in the form of a red pill in reference to the popular depiction of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge as a red apple.

What fewer people know is that the red pill trope, in substantially the same form as it appears in The Matrix, dates back at least a decade earlier, to Geraldo Rivera’s 1988 interview with Charles Manson. The reference in question occurs about a minute into the interview, as Manson is trying to get the point across to Geraldo that crime and violence are deliberately manufactured by society.

“Why are there 20,000 murders a year now?” Geraldo asks. “Because you’re selling it. You’re buying and selling it,” replies Manson.

“Be a little more specific.”

“Well, when you take and you put up an image, and you put this image up and you say, ‘Here kids, don’t be like that; don’t take them red pills, kids.’ They didn’t know there was red pills until you said – ‘now you can say no, you can say no’—'[but until you said I could say][i] no, I didn’t know I could say yes.’”

The media makes crime and violence alluring, implies Manson, by portraying them as dangerous andforbidden. Geraldo and Manson’s televised ego duel inspired the interview scene near the climax of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), a film which purports to critique the feedback loop between media and spectacular violence but which went on to inspire a series of new psycho-killers, including the Columbine shooters. Some of Manson’s lines from the Geraldo interview, like the one above about “buying and selling” violence, are quoted almost verbatim by Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson).

What Manson is describing is essentially the application of reverse psychology on a mass scale. This same technique, where certain behaviors are promoted by presenting them as edgy and taboo, is commonplace in marketing (“Banned in 12 countries!”), and it’s been a standard tactic employed by post-1960s Hollywood to promote the sexual revolution and the drug culture. Hence, the red apple has been a longstanding signifier of both in popular media, often at an esoteric or pseudo-subliminal level. Manson was very much situated at the intersection of Hollywood, the music industry, and MKUltra, and these associations are likely how he picked up on the technique and its symbolic resonance.

In any case, the mechanism of reverse psychology that defines red pill programming, as we call it, relates closely to the theological reference to the fall inherent in the symbol of the red pill. As St. Paul explains, the law which God revealed to the Israelites to instruct men in righteousness paradoxically aroused “sinful passions” in those living in bondage to it (Romans 7). This is because human nature was corrupted by the fall, such that we have a propensity to sin, not merely through callousness or selfishness but out of a perverse spirit of rebellion against God. Such inclination to sin resulted from a transgression born out of a desire not inherently sinful, namely, the desire for knowledge, represented by the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

It’s important to underscore that this is a lie: far from jealously withholding the gift of divinity, it has always been God’s will, as Orthodox theology teaches, for us to “become by grace what God is by nature,” to undergo theosis. Exploiting the spiritual immaturity of the first humans, Satan offers a counterfeit divinization in an attempt to deprive them of true godhood. Doing so, he set the pattern by which Gnostic and neo-gnostic heresies have exploited the spiritual ignorance of endless countercultural victims ever since. 

Hollywood filmmaking has, of course, become thoroughly gnosticized in the decades since Keanu/Neo became the prototypical Hollywood false messiah. But The Matrix was only the most popular of a spate of neo-gnostic movies released in the last two years of the 1990s, movies like The Truman Show, Dark City, Existenz, The 13^th Floor, Pleasantville, and Stigmata. 

The gnostic turn in Hollywood actually goes back still earlier. Indeed, the red pill trope appears, fully fledged, in a huge, gnostic-themed blockbuster released nine years before The Matrix and two years after the Manson interview. Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, Total Recall (1990) stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Quaid, a construction worker in a futuristic world whose mind is tinkered with by a company called Rekall, which peddles false memories as a form of recreation. Following his visit to Rekall, Quaid believes himself to be a renegade secret agent whose memory has been wiped. He comes to suspect, however, that he might actually be trapped in a delusional hallucination resulting from a botched memory implant.

In the scene in question, Quaid is confronted by Dr. Edgemar of Rekall, who tries to convince him to take a red pill in order to return to reality and avert permanent psychosis. The red pill, he explains, “is a symbol of your desire to return to reality.” This statement is the key to the entire red pill trope, the meaning of which clearly emerges by comparing this scene with the aforementioned scene from The Matrix. Whereas Morpheus and his red pill are unambiguous vehicles of gnostic liberation from a predatory false reality, Dr. Edgemar is an enemy agent, according to the diegesis of the film, and his red pill is actually a sedative.

Dr. Edgemar is playing to Quaid’s justified suspicion that he’s trapped in a false reality in order to gain control over him. Thus, a more suspicious reading of The Matrix would see Morpheus as a programmer and Neo as a mind control victim on the ultimate “ego trip,” as it’s called in Total Recall. Quaid eventually learns that his own ego trip has been programmed by the man he thought he was rebelling against, the tyrannical ruler of the Mars colony. 

The red pill becomes a political factor when enough people begin to doubt conventional narratives, that is, when they begin to suspect that their sociopolitical reality is a fabrication. The danger is that the very fabricators of that false reality, ever one step ahead, anticipate this suspicion and use it to shunt them into yet another false reality, one that is appealing precisely because it negates the previous false reality. Jasun Horsley calls this a “Second Matrix,” a deeper level of the dream disguising itself as a gnostic awakening.

Dissidents attuned to the breakdown of conventional narratives are the ones most likely to go down rabbit holesin search of buried truth. It’s worth remembering, then, that the association between Alice in Wonderland (falling down the rabbit hole) and the red pill also derives from The Matrix—and that Alice’s fall does not lead her to gnosis but to a bewildering, topsy-turvy inner world. To understand the mechanism by which they are shunted into these diversionary rabbit holes or Second Matrices, recall Manson’s explanation of the red pill as reverse psychology: information presented as forbidden and dangerous will be alluring to people in proportion to their alienation from conventional narratives.

The Establishment or the deep state can make psyops highly appealing by packaging them within red pills. These pills direct dissident groups away from information that is actually threatening, while getting them to transmit a certain proportion of nonsense that inadvertently advances Establishment agendas, functioning thereby as a classical disinfo tactic.

Manson himself was an avatar of the very red pill programming he so aptly described to Geraldo. His pop-image as a mysterious, spontaneous manifestation of anti-civilizational evil obscures the truth that he and the official narrative surrounding him were synthetic products of cultural engineering. The same nexus of domestic psychological warfare that gave birth to the Manson-op simultaneously manufactured a phony “counterculture,” using red pill reverse psychology to promote drug culture, utopian ideology, and the sexual revolution. These false forms of awakening, attempts to gain liberation through gnosis, were effective weapons in the long-term campaign to dissolve Christian traditionalism and induct society into globalism-friendly, MKUltra-influenced monoculture.

Campaigns of red pill programming were once largely aimed at the cultural left, back when leftist politics still aspired to cloak itself in anti-Establishment garb. Now the supposed boundary between progressive radicalism and systemic power has faded entirely, with corporate America, the Democratic Party, elite academia, and far-left protestors transparently promoting the same agenda. So, it is no great wonder that these cultural factions disdain the red pill as a trope associated with dangerous and backwards right-wing deplorables.

Non-coincidentally, vehicles of cultural engineering such as Hollywood sci-fi have become increasingly open about the implications of their red pill. Between 1999’s The Matrix and 2021’s The Matrix Resurrections, directors Larry and Andy Wachowski decided to forge new identities as Lana and Lilly, the red pill pushers having partaken themselves of the forbidden fruit offered by the sexual revolution. Is it any surprise then that Resurrections ends with heroes Neo and Trinity gaining control over the Matrix and deciding to remake it in their own image? The franchise most associated with the red pill image began with a disempowered man at the end of history becoming a superhuman who escapes technological slavery. But the same franchise is eventually revealed as the vision of wealthy transgender culture creators, openly promoting immersion into technological simulation.

With leftist pop culture largely acting as open propaganda for the elite worldview, red pill psyops are now often aimed at the right. A low-hanging example of this is QAnon, which took aim at increasing awareness of conspiratorial realities involving elite pedophilia. Many within the MAGA-set who were beginning to reject the widespread coverup of such dark truths were redirected toward detached fantasies of a coming “Storm,” endless labyrinths of conspiratainment, and a spiritual disposition toward humanity’s imminent “Great Awakening”—the same New Age drivel that was common to leftist counterculture, now repackaged for conservatives.

A subtler campaign of red pill programming can be seen in what we have elsewhere identified as “the Joker cycle.” Media designed to appeal to alienated young men is produced by the same cultural engineering apparatus that worked tirelessly to subvert Christian patriarchal social structures and thus caused their alienation in the first place. The hysterical woke media warnings, connecting such media to incel-terrorists and toxic masculinity, serve to dress up major Hollywood productions as a kind of forbidden fruit. Young men are then lured into the trap of viewing portrayals of social fracture, revolutionary destruction, and psychosis as transgressively empowering, rather than as a descent into a Second Matrix.

The Establishment wishes to entrap us within webs of delusion and impotent empowerment fantasies, distracting us from the necessity of both our personal salvific battles against sin and the unrelenting pursuit of concrete political victories. When ostensibly right-wing factions follow in the example of cultural engineers and promote anti-Christian moral and spiritual norms, we can reasonably suspect that red pill programming is afoot. To combat the red pill project, we must sever the false link between necessary truths and the thrill of moral transgression. The binary between docile complicity and self-divinizing liberation is the enemy’s framing, not ours.

We reject the Satanic lie that the divinely ordained moral order is a trick played upon humanity to keep us imprisoned. True liberation means spitting out the red pill and recognizing our mission to become the individuals and the civilization that God always intended us to be.

We reject the Satanic lie that the divinely ordained moral order is a trick played upon humanity to keep us imprisoned. True liberation means spitting out the red pill and recognizing our mission to become the individuals and the civilization that God always intended us to be.

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[i] This part of the recording is somewhat unintelligible. The bracketed words capture the sense.