Dunno man, I got curious about what was going on over there and watched various threads progress leading up to and after election night. The /pol/ folks running around trying to shitpost a meme into office were actually just discussing trying to grab some of the "Bernout" crowd who weren't really dems and could be given the whole Matrix "awakening" if they could be convinced to take the red pill, whereupon they would see how the various outgroups are trying to "keep the white man down" and be able to help them turn the SJW crowd against the minority crowd to leave the dems in ruins.
They're convinced that everyone would be part of their conservative-ethnonationalist-white-male-countries-ruled-by-white-males-again if they weren't so dumb/blind/manipulated/worried about hurting feelings/wussies. They're cheering on Brexit as a success at doing this, they're cheering on Trump for the same reason, same folks are rooting on Le Pen I think?
Sounds much more like r/The_Donald than /pol/, as the former are much more excessive in their overuse of stale memes, whilst the latter almost exclusively talks in a cryptolexis whilst churning out vast piles of OC, despite politically being very similar, it is the structural differences in their website mediums that causes this difference in behaviour. Whilst I cannot speak, nor wish to speak, for reddit, the term 'red pill' and 'woke' are different in usage and context by their respective ergh... Communities.
Consider the urban dictionary definitions of 'woke'. The first is:
1. Being Woke means being aware.. Knowing whats going on in the community
(Relating to Racism and Social Injustice)
The third is:
3. A state of perceived intellectual superiority one gains by reading The Huffington Post.
Red pill on the other hand is most popularly used and recognized by reddit users, most commonly of reddit MRAs (it stands for Male Rights Activist, their origins are in wizard chan where a group of male virgins collectively came to the conclusion that their lives were ruined by feminists "the red pill" truth being that everything is the fault of feminists). With reddit, ideological purity and narrative control is a lot more possible, and self-policing, largely because of the moderation, user attitude and upvote system. Meanings tend to remain the same for longer, hence why "stay woke" still means "there are different realities in the USA, that only some progressives are aware of - all others sleep." On the contrary a single phrase or meme will simply not survive for the same time as it would on reddit or even popular vernacular, much in the same way that r/Donald uses an archaic form of red pill whilst esoteric /pol/s long sinced changed its meaning, rejected its meaning or mutated it.
The meaning of 'Red pill' you provide is easy to explain, but not the one they use - and it's fallen out of favour, long ago (long by internet standards, which are ludicrously fast). It is taken from the matrix from Morpheus's dialogue, where he gives a speech about how there are alternate realities, where you can take the blue pill and wake up the next day as if all is normal but if you take the red pill, you see the truth which comes with some great burden, work and peril. It then entered cyberculture just through random forums that were fans of cyberpunk and dystopia, its first entry into 4chan was with the board /x/. The board /x/ back then (and to a lower degree of quality today) discussed paranormal stuff. So think your conspiracy theories, unusual sightings, classified war footage, horrifying stuff, ghosts, occultism e.t.c., some of the more famous stuff that has its origins there are a hell of a lot of creepypastas and slenderman for example. They picked up red pill to signify Morpheus's usage in opposition to the "blue pilled" (synonymous with what /b/ back then called NORPS, which now today are called normies, i.e. normal functioning people who contribute to society). They also innovated with the phrase red pill by turning it into a verb, a signal - as in 'red pill me on [unknown subject].
/pol/ and /x/ had a lot of crossboard influence, (crossboard refers to users who frequently converse and use boards of different topics), and this crossboard influence allowed for cross pollination of ideas and terms. A more famous example would be creepy pastas spreading from /x/ to /tg/ (traditional games board). This influence would get kicked into overdrive when one of the mods on /x/ went nuts and started banning everyone, delivering a blow to the small board of /x/ that it never really recovered from, as most of its content creators went to other boards, forums or just became productive members of society. Thus whilst its userbase recovered, it became stale. Lots of the content creators however went to boards like /pol/, and so brought with them its memes (and most importantly, its content creators).
'Red pill' maintained its usage as /x/ used it for a while, as it delved into conspiracy theories that once were covered almost exclusively by /x/ on such things like the JFK assassination, 9/11, historical false flags, PSYOPS, friendly fire incidents e.t.c., and it's worth noting that at this time /pol/ largely escaped public scrutiny (and scrutiny by sections of the online public like tumblrites), as all focus was firmly laid on its more (in)famous brother board /b/. Very quickly the red pill adapted to /pol/ culture (basically, replace 'red pill me on [unknown subject]' with 'red pill me on jews'), and its popularity increased. Its usage was never used to refer to the self, so there was no one calling themselves the 'red pilled,' however 'blue pilled' was used pejoratively for normal people with normal views. I think it's worth pointing out back then they very much considered anyone who subscribed to the notion of a right/left wing paradigm at all as blue pilled, as they were still in their Ron Paul 2012 phase (around the time 'IT'S HAPPENING' was born, as a result of doom paul pastas - another meme that has become accepted mainstream culture today, despite its origins in /pol/). I think blue pilled has more longevity than red pilled, although blue pilled has had trouble competing with 'flouride stare', 'goyim,' and 'cuck.' That's another discussion entirely though.
As the popularity of the term 'red pilled' increased, a backlash began to form around its usage. It is important to understand that whilst that was occurring, due to the attention in mainstream media that /b/ was attracting, 4chan as a whole began to dramatically increase in usage. /b/tards felt as if their board was dying and being replaced by newf*gs, and their general impression was that their culture was being destroyed by a sudden massive influx of edgy children (they coined the term 'Summer' as referring to new users who flooded their boards in school holidays with shitposts and regurgitations, taking it to be proof that underage children were killing their board), and even began formulating plans and tests to determine who was an 'oldf*g' and 'newf*g'. Like the Huns displacing the Goths into Rome, many fled to other boards - the main receptacles being the porn boards, /v/ & /pol/. The consecutive influx into /pol/ triggered much the same backlash and sparked an identity crisis, with many arguing for what '/pol/ stood for.' Naturally in a decentralized community of anonymous individuals, no consensus could be reached until several people made resonant memes with epic gets, even so, no ideological purity could be enforced. That's not so important here though, as what's important is that the influx of new people introduced a new usage of 'Red pill' - a suppository of knowledge. Depository of knowledge is the more accurate term, but I like the idea of shoving knowledge up your arse for it is funnier.
This new definition, as a depository of knowledge (the collection itself, usually an archived info dump or stickied thread with a shitload of infographics, stats, reading materials, quotes e.t.c., stuff that would make Goebbels erect), would define a new protocol for dealing with newcomers, overcoming a flaw that /b/ possessed. /b/ grew weaker, staler and diluted as newcomers arrived in unprecedented numbers, whilst /pol/ developed ways to at worst tolerate newcomers and at best indoctrinate and seek out even more newcomers. I think this is the seed of what would eventually mark /pol/ usurping /b/ in the media limelight, as /b/ wanted to be a sekrit club yet in the spotlight as a hive of villainy, whilst /pol/ didn't care one bit about its media image and celebrated its disproportionate influence. To summarize; /b/ was apolitical damage upon society for lulz, then lels, /pol/ was becoming political damage upon society for top keks - then Kek.
By the time 'red pill' achieved its third definition, its original definitions had entirely lost favour or else fallen into the realm of irony, sheer endless levels of irony. The things that affected this were in order of obviousness:
*The catalogue was flooded with threads that started with 'Red pill me on Italians, are they white?' or 'Red pill me on Asians, can you fuck them?' e.t.c., so much so that the rate of topics drew up accusations that the board was being targeted by shills and astroturfers trying to shut down /pol/. I suspect the users were just being trolled by themselves, but whatever the reason, anything with 'Red pill me on' got the user banned and the topic deleted.
*Red pill itself became too popular, and 4chan culture as a whole (present in all boards, excepting perhaps a few of the porn boards where showing off expertise is a sign of an elite degenerate) resents the popular, as what is popular is for normies (I expect the term normies will itself come out of fashion, but there has always been a term they used to separate themselves from mainstream society, whatever the board or epoch. The eternal normie, the eternal neet). As a result of red pill being too popular (most damningly, reddit was using it), its primary and secondary meanings began to get ridiculed with memes and irony.
Surprisingly enough its death knell would come from /fit/, which is the board dedicated to fitness and exercise. One of their anons created the meme of the 'Iron Pill', in which one who takes it guards their pineal gland from fluorinated water, does not eat GMO foods, is on a paleo diet, exercises regularly to a strict training regime, mastered esoteric Evolan, Romuvan, Druidic, Gregorian, /x/-tier philosophy e.t.c., basically doing whatever made one better - in such a way that most normal people couldn't replicate. Even whilst being productive, Anons must be productive individuals, not productive members of society. Once the iron pill spread around 4chan everyone started making their own templates and variations, like the black pill nihilists who supported the voluntary extinction of humanity through suicide as all life was pointless (it died and was resurrected as the grey pill), to the point where 'Red pilled' was seen as a term used to describe someone on the same level as 'Blue pilled,' only worse - someone who thought they had awakened to 'truth,' but had managed to dig themselves into a deeper delusion. Around this time Anon culture across 4chan was having a really adverse reaction to how the public was
celebrating their culture, which is why around this time when normal people were marching around wearing Guy Fawkes masks, the face of Anons reverted to a green man with a question mark wearing a suit. As red pilled was of mainstream culture, it lost more popularity.
After the rainbow of pill colours and mock philosophies subsided, in their wake esotericism began to take hold. I suspect this was mostly because the exodus happened, and Anons left 4chan /pol/ for boards that were unlisted on google search, as the paranoid individuals did not trust whoever had bought out moot, and themselves considered moot to be the prime cuck - the Judas to their Jesus. This is when 'luggage lad,' 'do it for free,' 'hotpockets' and 'cuck' really take off. As these groups disappeared off of normal 4chan culture, they managed to maintain for the first time a semblance of ideological purity. Easily the largest of the post-exodus /pol/'s is infinite chan's one, where for example its left-wing Anons splitted off into /leftypol/, the first time left wing and right wing /pol/lacks did not regularly share the same board. In the original /pol/ board, the userbase was large and diverse enough, with enough newcomers arriving in daily, that the ironic esotericism remained an in joke from which no one could get that there was nothing to understand. With the large collection of Anons fractured and divided into small enough communities, the in jokes were repeated enough that the majority of Anons actually came to understand the philosophies behind the jokes, and in turn use that understanding as a greater joke. By the time they banded together this created the third generation of Anons to become active in the public:
*First /b/ amorally struck the public whenever cos it was funny - selecting for lolcows and people who abuse cats
*Then /pol/ politically raided the public whenever it was funny - selecting for political targets and very important persons
*Then the alt-right affected the public whenever it was profitable - attempting to fulfill their agenda with a myriad array of tactics
The first wave died and has had many groups claim to be its successor, the second group died in name but its successors live on (think Byzantium outliving Rome), the third group is alive but confused, and not at all even Anons because they don't use anonymity (they are however, a successor of Anon culture). This confusion mainly stems from a struggle for its intellectual development (that is to say, not its historical sources, but its contemporary ones), particularly stemming from a large number of its prominent advocates and intellectuals being homosexual. Most (in)famous of them is Milo Yiannopolous, whom is seen as a fabulous ally to some, or as an insider enemy to be killed by others. As far as I can tell the former won over the label of 'alt-right' whilst the latter simply abandoned the label 'alt-right', having for the moment adopted temporary esoteric labels and signs (the Kekolytes of the Egyptian frog God being the largest. I never imagined in my childhood that the future of internet memes would be fought between jihadis in the name of ISIS versus shitposters in the name of Kek, Egyptian gods truly are part of the World Civilization's consciousness).
I think Red Pill will still be around for a long time, but its popularity may never come back again largely due to its adoption in normal culture.
Pepe is a notable exception - it's the first time Anons of any board permanently
reversed public adoption of an Anon meme, /b/ succeeded with rage guy only temporarily and was the closest anyone else got to it.
Perfect example of its usage in the 2nd and 3rd definition from recent. It's still around, just in its twilight age.
The stuff /pol/lacks did in regards to Bernouts I don't think had much of an impact. It was mainly doing stuff like linking to black twitter reddits by Bernies who were being racist to black voters in their reddits, ahem, "low information voters" and so on. Most significant action was before the election campaigns started when there was a twitter raid to lend vocal support to black feminists who felt white women didn't represent their struggles one bit; once the twitter tag trended it was self-fueling and I think represented a great flaw in how social activists operated, as they could very easily become the momentum to their own implosion. Most significant action during the election campaign has to be #OpAnon which was a collaborative affair between /b/ and /pol/, because it was to do with the image of Anonymous. The image of Anon is the green Anon, and now the red Anon too, both adoptees utterly inimical to the corporate family friendly image of the Guy Fawkes anonymous. They went to twitter and flooded an Anon march with photoshopped Nazi Anon masks, created sock puppets pretending the march was about supporting white supremacy e.t.c., the result ended up in white progressives wearing the mask being attacked by black progressives who thought they were nazis. Other than that they didn't do much that involved Bernies, simply because it was one of those things that was self-fueling, they were more focused on mobilizing the number of white voters who weren't registered to vote at all, since that was what granted the greatest competitive edge. Effectively, consider Soviet ideological subversion as done by the KGB, only applied by shitposters.
Now that I'm talking about Bernie Sanders phenomenon and the Sanders-Trump switch,
have some people who talk about the real world who explain how real world people work. Hillary was a nasty candidate and when the wikileaks emails came out detailing how the DNC rigged the primaries against Bernie, the Bernouts went on the warpath and everyone else (/pol/ included) got to watch the fireworks. The best battleground for this by far has to be the Young Turks youtube news channel, which started off ardent in favour of Bernie, then switched to Clinton - immediately driving a stake and wedge between its viewers and producers, who believed the latter were sellouts. That they lambasted Hillary as being corrupt, power hungry and rigging the primary against Bernie then switched into supporting her wholeheartedly did not dispel accusations that they were selling out.
On a psychological note of /pol/ is that they do not operate under the basis that outgroups are undermining them, hence why it is unsurprising that the alt-right is racially diverse, or indeed that /pol/ is racially diverse. It does however operate on the basis that one group is undermining them: Jews, rather notably the news network Breitbart had a schism (Breitbart is one of the notable instances where the online community called the alt-right influenced the real world directly) after Ben Shapiro (himself of Jewish heritage) criticized the alt-right's antisemitism, upon which point he received antisemitic memes and tweets, and ultimately opposed Trump for this reason. Through 2015 to early 2016 they also believed Trump was controlled opposition because much of his family married into Judaism and Trump is friendly to Israel and Jewish colleagues, but by late 2016 they rationalized their anti-semitism in favour of their God Emperor being able to do whatever. Oh yeah, and he's become referred to as God Emperor, largely because they found an old cartoon from 1993 (Dilbert one IIRC) that referred to Donald Trump being America's god, meme magic and so on naturally evolved into Trump ironically being the God Emperor. I'll give it till 2017 before it's no longer ironic and there are shrines to Trump, that's about how long it took for Ebola-Chan occultism to stop being ironic.
Also they do not refer to "conservative-ethnonationalist-white-male-countries-ruled-by-white-males-again," they refer to "whites." The whole smorgasbord of labels is a construct of intersectional progressivism that draws lines of oppression for different classes, with the white man being the most oppressive class. /pol/ for example does not like conservatives, because /pol/ is largely divided between libertarians (who want the smallest government possible), socialists (not the Scandinavian kind, the Stalinist kind that puts useless and dissident workers in gulags), alt-right (a loose collective of ideologues that due to the young lifespan of its movement is still wet clay, roughly united by what ranges from reactionary to secularist fascists), fascists (who hate the label alt-right because it's not fascist enough) and then the esotericists and various nationalist subgroups which are too many to name. None of them except the some of the socialists and most of /leftypol/ use the dialectics of marxism, and referring to "
white males" unironically is an instant tell that one is progressive there.
They cheered on Brexit and Le Pen, for much the same reason: anti-globalism, heralds the rise of Trump and makes their ethnostates more possible. There are some quibbles which halted full enthusiasm for both, namely in that Brit/pol/ is too civic for them and too shitposty even for them (it got banned from inf/pol/ proper) and Le Pen is not a fascist like her father, but they take a pragmatic view on their agenda of progressive change towards an ethnostate. I think ethnonationalist is a very good descriptor for them, as it's the most common trait in their political beliefs which are otherwise diverse, as some for example believe that socialism works in a homogenous society.
They are easily far from the core group whereas liberals are smug to the core, even if you purged all SJWs from their ranks they would be despised by the majority of people for their insufferable attitude that they know what's best for everyone else in the entire world. CTR was not a counter-insurgency on /pol/,
it was a targeted astroturfing campaign against millions of normal people on social media. The problem with CTR was that it was designed to appear normal and organic, but it was headed by a woman whose public relations are inhuman and whose workers were despised by their managers, versus the tech savvy milennials of Bernie who believed in what they fought for
with their friends and the tech savvy anons of Trump who believed they were anointed by doubles who did the same with people they studied and imitated years before the campaign started. CTR was running the same operation with thousands less manpower, with less expertise, with demoralized shills who didn't understand their targets. They came across as Clinton sponsored bullies exploiting loopholes to have her own personal shill force super PAC. That they did this at the time when the internet was furious over people not disclosing their financial connections with companies seems bizarre - unless they did no research prior, beyond believing they had to neutralize Bernie's millennials and that converting them was impossible.
I'm telling you they're not smug because they're not smug, they're hateful, but of all things not smug. Reminds me about reading a reddit post from a Bernie supporter detailing how they preferred /pol/lacks who honestly stated they wanted to kill them versus CTR that wanted to bombard them into submission and support. There is nothing smug about them because they are self-humbling, they acknowledge that they have nothing to be proud of. They take pride in being useless neets for example, but the clearest one comes from this post (in which I edited out the colloquialisms which are illegal)
>embarass us
you're posting on a board populated largely by people that openly discuss their desire for a mass genocide of every non-white and non-straight human on the planet when not shitposting about their mock religion based around an ancient frog god that speaks his will through repeating numbers. this of course is on a site dedicated to korean wood carvings created by a libertarian pill-popping crippled cuckolld with a penchant for filipino tranny hookers that was removed from his administrative duties after he neglected his responsibilities to make an emoji language based on esperanto. which to be fair he was probably demoralized considering his spine is turning to dust and how the pig farming mason wasted community donations to hire a known autist for a programming gig that fell apart spectacularly because he's shit programmer with an irrational feer of being fed to pigs. how can you embarass that which is born and cultivated in a sea of absurdity?
They know they're stupid, which is why they considered it a great victory when Hillary Clinton declared war on Pepe. Not only did she spit on ordinary milennials who liked Pepe, forever handing it over to /pol/ and the alt-right, but she was ultimately declaring war on useless neets shitposting cartoon frogs on a Tibetan throat singing notary catalogue discussion forum. Against such a foolish enemy, you win no honour in defeating them, no one will believe they are genuinely your threat, and if they defeat you... How were you so incompetent?!!
Consider that the way they address themselves is exclusively in insults, whilst progressives exclusively address themselves with terms of respect and most importantly, political correctness. Liberals, progressives, SJWs and whatever, smug. Lots and lots of smug, smug for the majority of their population. Seems to be that was USA as well as UK. To them, issues you bring up like all the -isms are matters of opinion, not moral absolutes. This is important because whilst /pol/ consists of enough people to make 7,000 posts an hour (I don't know how many unique users that makes), liberals are not a tiny minority of their world faction. They are the faction. Hundreds of millions cocksure in the rightness of their positions that don't stop to examine themselves or hear their opponents criticisms.
This is important because for example, you express the notion that things like white supremacy, misogyny and anti-semitism are not matters of opinion, they are matters of morality. They are all obviously things we can point to to demonstrate what is immoral, and indeed for me to even question this induces fears that I could be seen as endorsing them, especially since in real life my status as foreigner dispels such notions whilst online progressives see me as a white man. Yet it is important, as this is the crux of the issue with the smugness of liberals. Liberals are like those with whom you take issue with - those of religious mandates, certain that their morality is objective and that all those who oppose them are not having a different opinion,
they're wrong. In the UK to even question whether we should limit migration was racist, and as such
morally unacceptable. Lots of ordinary people had their concerns ignored by liberals, their communities mocked by liberals, because they were ignorant and wrong - it wasn't just a matter of taxes, no, as such accusations were employed to eliminate rivals to liberals with ease, to such an extent only the politicians capable of ignoring them remained. Corbyn was not sunk with accusations that he was an anti-semite, Farage was not sunk with accusations that he was a racist, May was not sunk with accusations that she led misogyny e.t.c. every mainstream politician has had to face this ammunition, and it has grown weak from overuse.
Notably Theresa May sparked fears amongst liberals here that she was for Justice, not Social Justice. To her supporters, this was mana from heaven. It is noteworthy one of her speeches implicitly mentioned that Labour would no longer be allowed exclusive claim to morality.
To conclude, /pol/ are hateful people. I don't use 'monsters' anymore as you must know my alma mater holds (or at least, held) the record for home grown islamists who went to fight in Syria for ISIS, and the more I researched on this topic the more it truly seemed that a great deal of the most murderous people on the planet were sinisterly similar to most, uncomfortably so. I don't see it any different here, especially where thousands of unemployed, not in education, useless and utterly despised individuals reside, not even in real life. Some people will always place beliefs over good living conditions, true, but I believe if these people were provided with adequate living conditions and purpose they would stop latching onto extreme beliefs and cease to be a force of any sort at all. Isis and Kek, people turn to idols when they find no purpose in life. The liberal world is helping to create its own monsters, but that's something to shitpost another day about
ps my waifu now is Gabbard, and she is the only time I've ever gotten excited at the thought of someone running for Pres because she rocks, so no u
ur waifu stil a shit
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