Rafe Fletcher: Just as wokery poisoned the Left, ‘red pill’ thinking will poison the Right

Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG Speakers.

Have you been ‘red pilled’? The Matrix reference is important alternative media slang. Adam explains it to his policeman father in Adolescence. “The red pill is like, I see the truth”.

The show portrays it as another troubling part of incel culture. But it’s far more nuanced than an incel call to arms. It justifiably argues that the establishment has peddled a lot of bollocks in recent years. Top of this list are woke and Covid.

The tide looks to have turned against the former; multinationals are suddenly realising DEI schemes aren’t as integral to their purpose as they once professed. Meanwhile the Supreme Court’s ruling that gender refers to biological sex will hasten the end of self-identification and preferred pronouns.

Covid hasn’t unravelled as visibly. Mass participation in the lunacy of lockdowns and masking, and the pretence that this would all be hunky dory for the economy, causes too much collective embarrassment to face those years head on.

But there’s an implicit acknowledgement that the experts didn’t nail that one, compounded by the lab leak theory that Douglas Murray confronts on a recent episode of Joe Rogan. Once dismissed as a racist conspiracy, most Western intelligence agencies now accept it’s probably true.

But what lessons should we take from the failures of the expert class? It’s here that Murray diverges from Rogan and his guest, the libertarian comic Dave Smith.

Murray argues it’s irresponsible to declare open season on all authority. He takes Rogan to task on some of his previous guests. He amicably accuses him of giving uninterrupted airtime to cranks ranting about the malign foreign policy of America and its allies.

Darryl Cooper is first in Murray’s firing line. Cooper claims Winston Churchill is the “chief villain” of World War Two for overreacting to Hitler’s straightforward shooting weekend in Poland.

Cooper’s interview with Tucker Carlson last year catapulted him from obscure amateur revisionist historian to a hero of a subset of the online right. Rogan and Smith have both welcomed him on their respective podcasts.

That’s the problem with the red pill. It’s a rabbit hole and not everyone gets out in time. In the shallow end, it’s a healthy scepticism of ideology, rather than truth, driving agendas. It sees the epidemiologists who used Covid as a cover for state overreach. Or those who tried to make policy out of obscure gender theory.

But go deeper and it descends into total cynicism. If the government lied about Covid, it’s probably lying about Russia and Ukraine too, right? Is Putin really such a bad guy? Soon, you start welcoming grifters, like Cooper, who apply this logic historically. Maybe Hitler was just trying to right the wrongs of Versailles. The West boxed him in, and provoked an unnecessary war.

Unfortunately, this revisionism can capture young men with its parallels. Hitler, Putin and Hamas (Smith et al see Israel as part of pernicious Western policy) are all fighters against a status quo that slighted them. Ironically, it mirrors the victim mentality of the wokeism they oppose. It’s why Konstantin Kisin has labelled it the “woke right”.

By defining things in terms of conspiratorial oppression, these figures diminish the positive message of agency found elsewhere. Young men flock to Jordan Peterson because his self-reliant stoicism offers something better than relentless navel-gazing. Yet Peterson, at times, gets sucked into the quagmire. Instead of genuine insights, you’re now just as likely to find him on a boorish rant about the World Economic Forum

It feeds into Janan Ganesh’s theory of politics as vibes, where commentators signal tribal allegiance rather than thinking independently on a policy-by-policy basis. Among large parts of the right, speculative talk of globalist conspiracies has become one such marker.

The right is having a strong global moment, however much Sir Keir Starmer may blunt that feeling in the UK. These wins are driven in part by alternative media platforms that have broken through a mainstream press recycling banal groupthink.

But that power entails some responsibility. As Murray points out to Rogan, the answer isn’t to avoid hosting guests with fringe views but to challenge them. Give a platform to all perspectives and seek truth in a marketplace of ideas. But don’t let conspiracy theories go unchecked under the guise of “just asking questions” – and don’t play performative games of pretending these podcasts are fringe platforms bravely defying censorship.

Cooper reached a far wider audience through Carlson and Rogan than he ever would on the BBC. Claiming outsider status rings as hollow as those mental health advocates who still insist no-one talks about mental health when literally everybody does.

Dismissing opinions as “red-pilled” can be a lazy slur for a floundering left to shut down dissent, the colloquial version of ‘misinformation’. The suggestion that we should blindly trust the expert class runs counter to conservative instincts and experience. But the alternative shouldn’t be a nihilistic free for all.

Murray’s defence of expertise provoked plenty of opposition among the online right. He was caricatured as some kind of Platonic guardian, insisting only a select few are qualified to speak.

But if we totally abandon the notion of expertise, we’re also undermining the conservative principle of merit, the same one MAGA claims to champion in its shutdown of DEI. If a random internet sleuth’s take on Churchill carries the same weight as Andrew Roberts’, then why can’t John next door fly your plane after skimming a few training manuals?

Once we dismiss expertise, all narratives are equally valid and suspicious. Conspiracy theories no longer map neatly onto political tribes. Previously, if someone claimed JFK was assassinated by the CIA, that Russia is the good guy in Eastern Europe, and that 9/11 was an inside job, you’d be confident they were on the far left.

Now, it’s a coin toss. Just watch Republican Representative Curt Weldon’s recent appearance on Tucker Carlson, where both openly embraced 9/11 trutherism.

If the West is always the villain and its institutions irredeemably corrupt, what exactly are we trying to preserve? Why not tear it all down? Why not embrace the rule of foreign autocrats who, conveniently, are never held to the same standard of scrutiny? You’ll notice Tucker et al always emphasise Ukraine’s corruption but never ponder how Putin became one of the world’s richest men.

So Murray is right to check this element of the post-truth right. Red-pilling is a much-needed check on groupthink and against the miring of ideology and truth. But plumb its depths and it feeds paranoia and permanent opposition.

The right now has a genuine opportunity. It can fix the failures of the old establishment and exercise real power. To do that, it must avoid the endless introspection and self-criticism that once defined the left.