My Red Pill Experience

I recently listened to Stefan Molyneux talking about his first experience of being red pilled and asking others about their experience. It was really odd for me when I first realized I’d been red pilled. I’m 65 years old and spent most of my life believing I was a liberal, and not just a liberal but a fairly extreme liberal right up to the moment that Donald Trump became president of the U.S. and then my world flipped upside down.

It wasn’t exactly instantaneous but almost. The first jolt I had was hearing how people in the online groups I belonged to were talking about the president the day he got elected which was the first time I actually paid attention. I was frankly shocked. It wasn’t just negative talk about his policies but outright attacks on him as a person and people denouncing him as president. People making actual claims that he was a liar and that every word out of his mouth was a lie and claims about fascism and his desire to be a dictator.

I didn’t know much about Trump and I had given up on politics long ago believing that the majority of government officials were basically corrupt so that there was little difference between the right or the left, they were all in it for the money and to hell with our country and our constitution. I don’t really watch TV and I didn’t vote let alone pay attention to the presidential race thinking it would be rigged from the beginning. But from what little I did know about Donald Trump from watching his show a couple of times and reading a couple of articles I never had the impression that he was a liar or that he had the desire to be a dictator or was a misogynist or racist or any of the other nasty names they were calling him. That just didn’t match what I had seen. My thoughts of him were mostly just that he was a clown like most TV personalities and not to be taken seriously. But that doesn’t make him a liar or a despot so what was all of this uproar about?

I decided it was time to do some research and see what they were talking about. And of course that’s when I got red pilled. It was quite obvious from the first so called “lie” I checked out that they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. The more research I did and the more I listened to what people were saying the more I began to realize . . . . . I’m not really a liberal at all, my basic beliefs and values matched what Donald Trump and the people who support him were saying. It was a real shock to me but at the same time it was also a relief.

What became clear to me in that moment of realization was that the culture war that I had always been aware of existing under the surface of “polite” society had finally bubbled to the surface and exploded onto the world in a very dramatic way in the form of Donald J. Trump. I felt like exclaiming “haleleujia!” It’s finally out in the open. At the same time it was a real shock to me to find out that all these people who were claiming to be so honest and fair and compassionate were actually full blown elitists. All of that politeness was just a mask to cover up their prejudice and how they actually wanted to rid the world of anyone who didn’t endorse their particular ideas and points of view by using more and more laws and censorship to force them into line. And that’s what really got me, the hypocrisy of what they were saying. It’s incredible.

When I realized that Trump was really sincere in his beliefs and support of the principles of freedom and sovereignty this country was founded on along with the financial freedom to be uncorruptable and the desire to drain the swamp I became a full blown Trump fan. The fact that he wanted to enforce equal justice and lock Hillary up was an added bonus.

The interesting part for me was that in the past I had found myself holding conflicting feelings about my relationships with people quite often. Discovering these basic differences in left and right resolved all of the conflicts for me. Knowing that I fall squarely on the right side of things has given me a clarity and sense of confidence I never had before.

That’s not to say that I agree with everything Trump is advocating or everything that people on the right believe in. I don’t. I’m strongly against guns and war and I don’t see the issue of abortion as being such a big deal. I’m also not religious and don’t believe in god per se while at the same time I am not a materialist. But what I do believe is that everyone has the right to their own opinions regardless of what their opinions are and not only have the right to voice their opinions but that it’s important for everyone to express them no matter what they are. That’s what diversity is all about and nature shows us the world can’t exist without diversity. It’s important and valuable. Culture and Nationalism is also another important and valuable form of diversity.

I also strongly believe in the foundation of our constitution which is that the purpose of the government is to protect the natural rights of freely born and sovereign people. Any time the government is used to try to force people to be or act a particular way to control them that is an abuse of power and an extreme form of anti-Americanism that comes close to treason.

I think most of us on the right are aware of the amount of diversity of thoughts, ideas, and beliefs we hold regardless of the left’s desire to throw us all into one basket of deplorables. But what seems to hold us all together is our belief in the freedom of the individual as an inherent right as long as we do not intentionally harm another and our willingness to support each other in that belief. We are willing not only to support but to celebrate our differences and our freedom to express those differences along with a government that protects our right to do so and protects the self interests of it’s people according to their right to govern themselves. We are soundly against a government that tries to control us through legal force. We believe in a government and government officials that work for us not against us.