Wednesday, August 17, 2022

On the Power of History, Pills, Brouhahas & Waking Up

"One of the reasons I love history so much is that it's so ruthlessly revealing. Nothing better separates fact from fiction than the passing of time. Things that were once hopelessly opaque become crystal clear, because when compared to the present, the past demands perspective. It's this inescapable process in which facts are made manifest and the truth is exposed that gives history its enduring power and the capacity to shed light on the contemporary."  from Brad Neaton, on Why We Should Question the FBI's Narrative, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers?

On Red and Blue Pills from the wiki:  "The terms "red pill" and "blue pill" refer to a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in contented ignorance with the blue pill. The terms refer to a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix." 

From Sasha Stone's substack article/podcast, The Raid that Red-Pilled America, The FBI Gets Political and Goes Too Far : "The Democrats, the media, and the blue-checks on Twitter have no idea how many people have been red-pilled over the past three years.

No one who watches Joe and Mika or Rachel Maddow or reads the New York Times will ever be red-pilled. They simply believe that is the only reality. How could it not be if every high-status person in America is going along with it? If your friends and family go along with it, if your social media feed confirms it every day with links. If it’s in the media, it must be true, right? How do you not trust it if it’s on NBC News or the Washington Post?

Waking up to the media’s near-total collapse during the Trump years is a big part of being red-pilled. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The only way to escape the media’s hold on the narrative is to cut it out completely, at least until you can see that there is another reality, and very often, the actual truth.

If they hadn’t already given up on the “establishment” watching them crush Bernie Sanders like a bug in 2016, 2020 would do it. The response to COVID was a big one. Dividing the country the way it did into the compliant and the non-compliant. What it did to businesses, to the minds of children, to everyone who was locked down and locked in - unable to attend funerals, weddings, and death beds.

But the raid on Mar-a-Lago very likely has red-pilled Americans even more, especially when you put it together with the authoritarianism during COVID, the suppression of speech, the silencing of dissent, and the dehumanization we all live with every day.

To watch our Department of Justice raid a former president’s home months before the midterms, where the Democrats were expected to do very badly, looks suspect to anyone. If they were trying to create distrust in our institutions, they succeeded. Most Americans have seen, maybe for the first time, that our government has become too powerful, too punitive, and too authoritarian in crushing dissenting voices and outsiders who challenge that authority. We call that being red pilled."

With this conclusion: "...I never thought anything could shake my faith and loyalty to the Democratic Party. I trusted them. I believed in them. That doesn’t mean I think the Republican Party is any better, but they don’t control everything as the Democrats do.

They will probably indict Trump. That will mark the last gasp of their collapsing empire. The red pills will be eaten like candy. No American will ever see them the same way again.

I am not MAGA. I am not a Conservative. My friends and family do not understand why I care about Trump and his supporters. They want me to join them in their hatred. They want me to be inside the same group hysteria as they are. I know where they’re coming from. I used to be among them. I did everything they’re doing now.

But the red pill is a powerful one. Once you find your way out of the bubble of hysteria on the Left, it feels more like normal life. People are people again. And that, my friends, is worth waking up for."

2 comments:

edutcher said...

Something of a skeptic, life has been one long revelation.

It's always fun in the wellness tests, when they ask when the Civil War ended, to see the look on their faces when you tell them 6/2/65.

MamaM said...

I'll go with life as one long revelation. I also believe history has the capacity to shed light on the contemporary. It's another one of those both/and deals, which accounts for my appreciation of the cartoon person taking in purple powder as a mix of red and blue pills.