As I wrote earlier, one of the very few useful lessons from my expensive school – when I was about 12 the teacher brought in Left & Right-wing newspaper clippings covering the same event, and helped us analyse the bias, the lie-by-language. Two decades later I remember Peter Hitchens somewhere covering a riot in Pakistan, the adherents of the Religion of Peace rising up and attacking British embassies with identical, brand-new hammers and burning hundreds of identical, brand-new Union Jacks. He asked, from where exactly did they procure the flags? Is there a British shop selling literally hundreds of Union Jacks in Lahore or Karachi?

Most of the news is, to some degree, Fake News. After a while you start to notice, and then you ask, what is happening behind the scenes here? It can ruin simple pleasures, for example I was watching the video for Sharon Van Etten’s ‘Seventeen’ and, as she is standing on a stepladder in a lake

screaming at the camera,

I immediately thought of her likely response when the director told her “okay, next scene you’re on a ladder, in a lake, screaming”, the first few dozen takes as she shivered, looked pissed off, started laughing, stumbled and nearly fell into the water, everything behind the few seconds of her at 2:55 standing on a stepladder and rather declaiming:

I know what you’re going to be

I know that you’re going to be

You’re crumbling up just to see

Afraid that you’ll be just like me.

The Red Pill can become something of a meta-red-pill. I first heard it in relation to MGTOW, with men like Sandman having realised the nature of female behaviour, or at least the kind of women he meets & is drawn to & draws; then in about 2015 it came to describe the dissident Right, who are often strongly opposed to MGTOW.

At its essence, the Red Pill is the peeling-off of illusions, usually through painful disenchantment & betrayal (there would be no dissident Right if mainstream Conservatism actually conserved anything). A side effect is the habit of scrutinising all that glitters; so I was unsurprised by Milo’s accusations regarding Lauren Southern’s thottery (ably covered by Morgoth).

Glitter is the danger sign. Glitter and the implausible, e.g. an obscure Canadian Psychology professor suddenly giving speeches to the Trilateral Commission, a Rothschild banker appearing out of nowhere as an independent candidate for the French presidency, hundreds of Pakistan rioters with identical, brand-new Union Jack flags. It is all theatricality & deception. The meta-Red Pill is a sidelong wary glance towards such things, a distrust of anything that looks too good.

The deception works on many, but then initiation is always highly restricted.