Flipping the World Upside Down: My Red Pill Story
The day I red-pilled my world flipped upside down. I never thought it was possible. It’s actually difficult to articulate. I’ve been hiding my beliefs for so long due to the extreme judgment I’ve received from people on the left, that when I discuss these beliefs, I feel vulnerable, like the crowd is going to come for me and burn me at the stake, not for drinking or cussing or dancing under the moon but for daring to question the status quo.
Some back story is in order. Before my life turned upside down, and I realized I could no longer ignore the contradictions, poor logic, and excessive pathos of my knee-jerk beliefs, I was an extremely self-righteous liberal. I thought of myself as both a Wiccan and a punk rocker, but anarchist political theory and all of the ideas that went with it coalesced into my secular religion (no exaggeration). I believed in it unfailingly. I preached it. I wanted to educate people about it. It was the best and highest good. It was a bit ridiculous, but I grew up poor, not having what other people had and not fitting in, so as an outsider, I felt like I could see things other people ignored. Having experienced the judgment of others who were, I assumed, more privileged, I thought myself more compassionate toward suffering than others, and I became determined to enlighten others.
I wasn’t raised an anarchist punk rocker. I was actually a sickly child, a nerd, and later as my feet started crossing the threshold into adolescence, I loved grunge and 70s music. Once a teenager, some of my friends introduced me to underground anarchist punk rock, and I was completely smitten. I had found an interest, a purpose, something to belong to, and at any show, I could expect to socialize with a large group of similar minded (and similar dressed) friends — no more being the odd one out. The early punk rock of my youth was influenced by oi, a style of music born in the U.K. from the commingling of sounds derived from the ska style tunes of “rude boy” Caribbean immigrant workers and the rock of the British working class. Ever on the lookout for new music, it wasn’t long until I discovered anarchist peace punk and crust punk in all of its varieties. The rage, compassion, and determination the music conveyed stirred my heart and mind. The teenage years are almost always a time of rebellion, and the fun, loud, aggressive, and defiant sounds I had found became the anthem of my rejection of all the things I had formerly valued: the national spirit, being fashionable, traditional religion, traditional family, and so on. Much of the peace punk/crust seemed drenched in propaganda, but it was supposed to be ironic propaganda, the kind that revealed the hypocrisy and cruelty of the modern world. The thinking was that if society didn’t like pictures of bombing victims or tortured farm animals on our band t-shirts, then how could they tolerate the wars their taxes supported or factory farming subsidies. It’s no lie that things aren’t perfect, but what the simplistic imagery lacks is complexity and counter-arguments. Nevertheless, because of the compassionate message beneath the (ironic) propaganda, I bought into the rhetoric. Still, I wasn’t incredibly self-righteous when I first got into punk rock. I hung out with various drunk punks and street kids. It was more about the music and going to shows than anything else, but with the shows comes the ideology in lesser or greater doses. I learned about anarchism, class war, “direct action,” Howard Zinn’s now debunked history, and critical race theory at these shows whether through music lyrics, discussions, zines, books, or workshops. The culture of the scene combined imagery of Molotov cocktails with more positive elements like D.I.Y. gardens and crossed out bombs. The contradictions and utopianism of the scene gave it an unreal quality while motivating those who congregated at shows to try to change the world in real life; the paradox offered the hopeless something to live for, a remedy for modern despair. Workshop organizers recommended that those with an anarchist spirit should infiltrate society by picking up teaching and government jobs. This mishmash of far-fetched idealism and chaotic subversion had a sound track of energetic, hard music and captured the imagination with photocopied zines that taught people everything from how to steal electricity and illegally squat to brewing beer and how to practice protest self-defense. Some of the ideas floating around were more humanitarian or activist in nature, but at the same time, the education presented only narrowly focused perspectives while any opposition was made out to be incredibly ignorant. The fun and useful elements of the anarchist scene went hand in hand with some of the more extreme ideas, making for an odd blending of virtue and bias with the imagery of street resistance; the imagery was meant to inspire and give the people in the scene a sense of purpose and a feeling of self-satisfied virtue, but it didn’t deliver on critical thinking skills. Asking questions loudly and only researching one side of any given issue aren’t enough when examining complex social issues, after all. That being said, I was one of the loudest, thinking myself one of the brightest, my heart aflame with zeal. When I was a child, I was brought up to admire the nation and its values, but once adolescence struck, I started noticing terrible things going on in the world. I couldn’t understand how so much suffering could take place in the “best country on earth.” To find other people who questioned business as usual was a beautiful thing at the time, and we were determined to change the world. We thought anarchist revolution was worth the cost, that then people would truly be free.
Things started taking a more complicated bent in college. I took a critical thinking class early on and was alarmed to discover massive logical fallacies in the thinking and organizations I supported. I was shocked to find myself agreeing with writers more on the right side of the spectrum in class. It was confusing, and so I chose not to think about it too much. Surely, it was some blip happening in my brain and not a problem with my beloved anarchist/leftist scene, the one that was trying to cure all the hatred of the world, the one that gave all the “freaks” a home, a place where they could belong. However, my natural intelligence and true beliefs operated under the surface, and in conversations that sometimes occurred with young people on the right, I found myself agreeing with them more often than I liked. I ignored the strange incongruity between my zeal and my own judgment because “the information on the left had to be right.” I thought to myself that the anarchists and leftists were so caring and so real, that there was no possible way that any of them could be lying, misinformed, illogical, or wrong. I would tell myself this even as I saw the contradictions in the scene: lots of preaching about what people should be doing and giving up and then most of those people would turn around and buy/support companies they claimed were creating toxic pollution or using sweatshops. Many of them, self-proclaimed anarchist and leftist alike, would criticize the government and claim they wanted less of it but then support candidates/policies that aim to increase the role of the government in people’s lives.
Still, they were “my people,” and I went to as many shows as I could as well as anarchist conferences and protests. At one of the last L.A. anarchist workshop type shows I went to, I even found ISIS pamphlets with all the zines. When I talked to the organizer, a dogmatic straight edge peace punk, he explained how those poor Muslims were exploited and victims of racism, that we had to give them freedom of speech, that their enemy was our enemy: the government. When I reminded him about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he still tried to defend ISIS. I compared them to Nazis because of the dogmatism, and he explained that Nazis were the only ones who couldn’t have freedom of speech because they were hateful exploiters. When he walked off, I threw his ISIS flyers in the trash because they promoted terrorism. I was deeply disturbed and confused because I support free speech, but the flyers were dangerous. I couldn’t understand why the anarchists in that space wanted to ally with ISIS, a group with terrifying human rights violations, or even give them space for their propaganda. To be fair, this was one organizer at one show, but anarchist music and culture aims to educate people about how to rebel against the state, even if that rebellion includes illegal actions, and the local anarchists were already making alliances with other fringe groups, like pro-revolution communists, anti-police groups, the black panthers, and other malcontents. After all, to take down the government, the supposed root of all evil, you need friends.
After that, I didn’t go to as many shows; I still loved the music, but I was becoming disenchanted. At the same time, I was working hard on my degree. I had been in college for some years, the recipient of state funded grants, and I hoped to one day become a professor in a public institution. That way I could help people suffering from existential despair and ignorance. If I could finish my degree, I imagined that I could spread compassionate and critical thinking, helping the oppressed liberate themselves from despair. I realized there was a contradiction. I started thinking about how much I loved the public education I received, albeit I did feel like it wasn’t the best quality from an early age since the schools I went to seemed to teach the same information year after year in the driest, most lifeless way possible, often excluding important elements of Western history, philosophy, and literature as well as instruction on life skills, such as farming, construction, and enjoyable exercise. At the same time, I was grateful for what I could get, and none of it would have been possible without the government funding. Moreover, I took the bus to school on public transit on public roads that were regulated by street lights and stop signs put in place by the government. I even had the privilege of drinking clean water out of pipes maintained by the government. The more I thought about it the more it became clear that I was not an actual anarchist. Instead, I believed in less government. I decided to think about all of these elements and leave it at that since I didn’t want to “sell out” and become a “yuppie,” which is the type of rhetoric used in the scene to try to keep people on their side even though it discourages personal growth and expansion. I also came to the conclusion that I would eventually buy and use some of the technology that I viewed as wasteful or toxic. What seemed more useful to me was learning about what I was buying and from whom and then making more conscious choices. I found myself rejecting the extreme ideas of a scene that really didn’t live up to its own idealism but definitely wanted to direct the trajectory of the future.
Things really changed, however, when someone close to me red pilled. Upon the news, I flipped out in a classic liberal moment of excess pathos driven intolerance. I accused him of being a brain washed traitor who was supporting greedy, bomb dropping squares who were basically brain dead because of their stupid religion and who thrived on bullying people and controlling everything. Basically, I stereotyped him as I stereotyped other people on the right. I cried; I screamed; I pled. I didn’t want to lose this person, but I couldn’t handle the idea of being so close to someone on the opposing side. He was shocked since he knew I had been educated in fallacies. Suddenly, he revealed he knew the names of the fallacies and how they worked. I found a side of him I didn’t know was there. He told me that if I was so open minded and free thinking, then I should watch some documentaries with him and talk about things like a rational adult. If my deeply held beliefs were correct, then hearing an opposing argument wouldn’t harm my position after all. I thought about my critical thinking instruction, and I knew he was right. I agreed, and that’s what led to my life forever changing.
We watched a documentary by Ezra Levant discussing oil fracking in Canada and how it isn’t as dangerous and environmentally problematic as people claim it is. A point that stuck with me is how domestic oil production reduces dependence on foreign oil, which often comes from countries with terrible human rights violations and very little liberty, countries that have large amounts of people who hate the West for religious differences to say the very least. Another thing that blew my mind was that these oil factors pay people to protest in order to defeat the competition. The foreign oil companies literally find and pay people who will protest and raise a big fuss (without really caring or understanding the issue), so anti-fracking ideology would spread and thus people would be more willing to continue purchasing foreign oil. After watching the documentary, I remember looking into some of the details and finding that he wasn’t distorting the information. Next, I watched a Thomas Sowell lecture explaining how much better the African American community was doing before being wrapped into a welfare culture. He offered statistics showing higher marriage rates, higher education success rates, and lower crime rates before all of the welfare reforms that occurred. As a passionate anti-racist, hearing that “helpful” liberal policies offering aid to African American communities actually ended up encouraging men to impregnate women and then not marry them because single mothers get more welfare was sickening, especially because it resulted in many of these men abandoning the women for other women, or not taking on jobs because they could get state assistance without having to work. Sowell discusses so much more than that, and it’s very complex. I remember being blown away. His logic was impeccable, and he had facts to support his points. After watching those documentaries and some others, I needed a few days to process. I remember staying in bed most of the time and crying because I realized I had been supporting ideas that weren’t really helping people. The information I had been receiving in my friendly anarchist scene was distorted, biased, and ignorant beyond even my misgivings. It hurt because I knew that my friends at the time genuinely cared about humanity. They sounded so wise with their Howard Zinn and Emma Goldman quotes, but they saw what they wanted to see. They presented one side of the story and despite their claims of inclusivity and free thinking, they never presented alternative perspectives. They wanted to paint everyone as oppressed in one way or another: for having a vagina, for being given an example of masculinity, for skin shade, or for not waking up and being a billionaire. Their compassion was so intense they couldn’t see how people benefited from the government in very real and relevant ways. They also seemed to be unable to see how much Western society has improved over the years. It is true that mistakes have happened in the past, but to not see the hard work society has put into living up to the ideals within the Constitution strikes me as willful blindness. I realized that the literal message of many of the bands and the speakers was ultimately tied to revolution, revolution that would dismantle the stability and safety of millions of Americans. If the anarcho-primitivist got his way, the trees would swallow up the cities, and the people dying of whatever illness would just have to make do and die as the electricity went out. The peace punk who argued that anarchism could be achieved without violence was vapid, and many of them admitted that if push came to shove, they would ultimately support the downfall of the state by whatever means necessary. Their reasoning was humanitarian but the implications of their political philosophy if put into action would be massive, wide spread death, chaos, and starvation to say the least. Despite their utopian vision or perhaps because of it, they failed to see the reality. My eyes puffy with hours of shed tears, I also realized how their intolerance of others’ beliefs led to them promoting distorted information rather than positive social change and growth, yet they always argued that with anarchism, everyone would have a say no matter what.
At that point, I knew my mind was changed, but I kept the change a secret for a while. At first, I called myself “a Libertarian” because I couldn’t see myself as a Republican after so many years of malediction. The problem was that when I closely researched the Libertarian views, I recognized that they were far too liberal for me. Their political leanings were too close to the anarchists it seemed and thus socially irresponsible. Still, as a person who followed pagan spirituality, liked hard music, didn’t mind some drug use, and liked alternative clothing, I was having a difficult time grappling with the reality that the majority of my deeply held beliefs coincided more with Republican thinking, especially after years of partying with self-absorbed liberals who devoted themselves to hedonism, thinking it was freedom. Not all liberals live that type of lifestyle, but it is part of the Zeitgeist. After seeing and living the problems that arise from excessive decadence, I realized that excess liberalism poses a problematic path. It was mind bending to realize the truth. However, as time passed, I came to a place of peace because I knew that the things the Republican party argued made more sense long-term and assured more liberty in concordance with the American Constitution than what the other American political philosophers were arguing.
I came to the conclusion that my resistance to reality was petty and immature because it was clear to me that the fate of the country and all the people who lived in it was hanging in the balance. I contemplated how the Bill of Rights offers the liberty that so many people want, yet people were and are trying to modify it in the name of compassion under the lens of shoddy logic that would break apart when analyzed closely. I went ahead and officially registered to vote as a Republican, secretly still, and started observing what my friends would say when I put forward more right leaning arguments. By this time, I wasn’t really going to shows anymore, and I was hanging out with liberals of a more Democratic persuasion rather than self-proclaimed anarchists. What I discovered is that a lot of times, after a couple of counter-arguments, people seemed to see my logic and agree with me completely or at least partially. Later, once they discovered that I was a registered Republican, things went downhill swiftly.
They didn’t reject me simply because I was Republican, but whatever other human failings I have became intolerable once they realized I was, according to them, on the other team. I watched this happen time and time again with various friends and even colleagues. The animosity people directed at me was shocking. The liberal people I had always known to be caring and brainy turned out to be more dogmatic, close minded, and judgmental than I realized. I could see the secular religious zeal at work in them as it had been in me. With a heart forward and trusting attitude, they accept the views of people on their side while vehemently and sometimes blindly attacking the ideas of those they perceive as enemies, other Americans with different opinions. It breaks my heart to hear them say Republicans are idiot racists who lack compassion while the left supports policy that makes things more difficult for American citizens and diminishes our constitution granted civil rights. It strikes me as rather ideologically problematic that the people who always decried discrimination turn around and often yield illogically hateful and ignorant attitudes towards people on the right based on distorted information; for example, I have known plenty of leftists who shaped their opinions about the right from Facebook memes and heavily edited video clips from biased new sources. I feel dismay every time I think about some of the excellent intellectual work being done on the right that could potentially help so many people, but it’s rejected simply because of assumption. The right has been caricatured as the dumb, bomb dropping, Nazi group so much, despite the American fight against Nazis in World War II and the diversity in the right today, that the thinkers on that side of the political spectrum have been denied their individuality by mainstream media and the misinformed left. What each right leaning person says doesn’t matter because what I’ve observed is the participants in Woke culture won’t recognize what they hear. They’ll drown out the words with stereotyping and feel like the hero instead even if they don’t truly understand the viewpoints of the opposition.
I wonder how many people are like my younger self, recognizing the flawed logic at work but sticking with it because they want to be the so-called good guy, and someone else has told them who that good guy is. I contemplate how many people won’t even listen to someone else’s opinion because it dares to differ from what is popular. As I wander the path of my musings, I think about how many young people adopt extreme leftist ideas because that is all they hear, and they are terrified of being labeled racist or ignorant. They want to fit in, have friends, and express themselves in a way that makes them feel “cool” or compassionate, but when they hear arguments and evidence, however logical, that shakes up their understanding, they sweep it under the rug. Information that challenges their understanding of the world is a threat to the Woke identity and even if that information is ultimately something meant to prevent mishap or disaster, there are so many people who will simply reject it. One case in point is rejecting compelled speech. Arguing that the state shouldn’t tell people what to say is of the utmost importance because it sets up a legal precedent. If the government can tell you what pronouns to use, they can also tell you to say other things, things you may actually reject. Nevertheless, at least in California, most people think compelled speech is reasonable if it follows the Woke agenda. If someone wants to use a transgender pronoun, fine, but forcing people to use them can cause problems. It can create situations where someone gets fired for using the wrong pronoun by accident or because they simply don’t understand the situation. It also makes it difficult for newer immigrants who are grappling with the language to communicate. They can be hurt by a compelled speech policy haphazardly. Luckily the Third Appellate District Court of California recently struck down compelled speech on the basis of it violating our constitutional right to free speech, but there are still droves of people who aren’t loyal to the values of the United States. They reject liberty in action while saying that is their utmost goal.
I became a teacher to help people. I believe deeply in helping people, but ideological dogmatism helps no one. It forces people to hide who they truly are and what they truly think. It creates a culture of fear and aggression where people who have victim syndrome can get widespread support in tearing down other human beings, other Americans, based on distorted and exaggerated information simply because they are part of the team. It’s tribalism on a massive scale, which makes it do dangerous. The vigilante justice mobs of yesteryear have had a population boom, and they seem to be attacking the law and our nation’s culture with reckless abandon. It doesn’t help that our schools have adopted the Woke viewpoint and limit or dismiss opposing views. While schools are supposed to honor and teach critical thinking, fair discourse, and diversity of belief, most schools are only delivering one narrative about reality and supporting those who want to frame opposing voices in the worst possible light. This is problematic since students will be entering an adult world fraught with tension and arbitrary cancellations, a world that is becoming increasingly dogmatic, where many people think it is socially acceptable to destroy the opposition rather than to listen, learn, teach, and accept. Inclusivity only goes so far as the views expressed mirror leftist ideology. Those who disagree will find themselves far from included.
Writing all of this has been so difficult. To be transparent, I still like some punk rock, and not all punk rock is leftist. Whatever my music tastes have been, or are, I am at heart an introvert, a free thinker, and an obscurity enthusiast. In the past, in social situations outside of work, I tended to stay quiet, letting people think they were correct when presenting illogical arguments rather than risking conflict. However, the popularity of anarchist/ far leftist rhetoric is going too far, and this is not only serious but dangerous for all of us. Today’s young person is entering the adult world, one where posting or saying the wrong thing can and will be held against them long term, potentially hurting their careers, relationships, and mental health. It is common today for young people to have some sort of online association with extreme left groups, and because it makes them fast friends and seems fun, they are often willing to follow along without question. Although not friends with my old group, I do know some classical liberals that agree that the social climate has gone too far in the direction of intolerance. Although we disagree about various issues, I respect them and listen to them as they do me. This type of exchange, however, is increasingly rare. People can’t freely express ideas without the constant fear of someone making their own feelings somebody else’s responsibility. What often comes up by mainstream leftists is that the only ones who have to be afraid of expressing their views are Nazis; however, with so many people being falsely accused of racism thanks to the anarchist/ communist favorite of critical race theory, which emphasizes cultural difference rather than shared values and argues that everyone is racist (guilty with no chance of being proven innocent), it turns out all of us have something to fear.
Edited for spelling 11/6/2021
