One particular thread on Reddit, /r/TheRedPill, was one of the first alt-right communities that gained significant traction on the Internet. Created in 2012 and now a “quarantined” community on Reddit for its dedication to “shocking or highly offensive” content, it started as a thread with only a few followers. Within a year the thread had over 15,000 followers.
The “red pill” is a reference to the movie The Matrix, specifically, to a scene where Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus) presents two options to Keanu Reeves (Neo): “you take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” The people who have “swallowed” the red pill believe that women “women run the world without taking responsibility for it, and that their male victims are not permitted to complain.” Their “manifesto” is called the Misandry Bubble. They argue that men have been socially disenfranchised but they “become too meek to stand up to their women.” In it, users spewed a “mix of virulent misogyny and retrograde dating advice.”[vii] As one red-piller wrote in the forum, “Women are, by nature, manipulative, attention-seeking, inconsistent, emotional, and hypergamous. Accept this truth. Once you do, you can game women for what they are … not what you want them to be.”
Users of /r/TheRedPill have a specific set of vocabulary within the forum, while, at the same time, the thread has popularized some of the alt-right’s most-used terminology. In discussions, they use terms such as “the wall,” or the point at which a woman’s “ego and self-assessed view of her sexual market value exceed her actual sexual market value; the beginning of the decline.” Another term is MGTOW – the acronym for “men going their own way.” This group of people is committed to shunning relationships of all kinds with women. One term that has reached the public sphere is cuck, the short version of cuckold. The word “cuckold” comes from the old French word for a cuckoo (“cucu”) bird. In some species of cuckoo, the females lay eggs in other nests and leave the eggs for another bird to raise. The word transformed to become the word “cuckold” in the Middle Ages, which was the word for a husband with an errant wife. Many of Shakespeare’s characters believed they had become a “cuckold,” and many others used insults such as, “crooked-pated old cuckoldy ram.” For the alt-right, they first used the word to describe an emasculated man, and it turned into the insult for conservatives who were “weak on immigration, or just weak.”
While not all members of the alt-right are also misogynists, these sentiments regarding women are a large part of many alt-righters’ belief systems. The tie between misogyny and the alt-right is strong, as one of the main beliefs of the alt-right is modern society’s mistreatment of white men. Because members of the alt-right score higher on social dominance orientation and believe in the superiority of the white man, they are more likely to act on their beliefs that society should return to a world where women are much less powerful than men.
The phrase that once only applied to people who are victims of a society run by women has come to apply to all people who believe in the alt-right movement. Today, “taking the red pill” or “being red-pilled” is another way to say you subscribe to the beliefs of the alt-right. In November 2016, Vice author Mike Pearl wrote an article entitled “How to Tell if Your Alt-Right Relative Is Trying to Redpill You at Thanksgiving” full of warnings about conversation topics regarding the 2016 election and points that your “racist uncle” would probably make. One of the alt-right’s most popular phrases had now entered popular vernacular, thanks to the election of Donald Trump.