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Tesla Owners Try to Make Sense of Elon Musks Red Pill Moment
A liberal status symbol now has a founder who is moving to the right.

By Nellie Bowles

• May 19, 2020

Owning a Tesla, the luxurious electric car, is a major liberal status symbol. It signals nothing more than good taste the perfect balance of wealth with care for fossil fuels. But the man behind the brand is crafting a very different persona online that may now prove to be a challenge for his fans.
Elon Musk, the bombastic head of Tesla and SpaceX, exhorted his 34 million Twitter followers on Sunday to take the red pill. The comment was quickly embraced by his followers, including Ivanka Trump, President Trumps elder daughter, who announced that she had taken the pill already.
The exchange referred to a scene from The Matrix, the 1999 science fiction action film. But the meaning of red pill, and the idea of taking it, have since percolated in online forums and become a deeply political metaphor. And with Mr. Musk and Ms. Trump, the phrase is now lodged more fully into the mainstream.

So Tesla owners are having to grapple with a car that carries a few new connotations.
Honestly, Musk is becoming a liability and the Tesla board needs to seriously consider ousting him, wrote Markos Moulitsas, author of The Resistance Handbook: 45 Ways to Fight Trump. And I say that as a proud owner of a Tesla and a SpaceX fanatic who truly appreciates what hes built.

So what is the red pill?
In The Matrix, the movies hero, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is given the option to take a pill that lets him see the truth.
The world he thinks is real turns out to be an entertaining lie; his body is actually trapped in a farm where people are being used as human batteries. Taking the blue pill would let him return to living in the ignorant but blissful lie, while taking the red pill would launch him into an arduous journey through a brutal but fulfilling reality.
The idea of taking the red pill later grew to mean waking up to societys grand lies. It was embraced by the right, especially by members of its youngest cohort who organized and spent their time in online forums like Reddit and 4chan.

The truth to be woken up to varied, but it ended up usually being about gender. To be red-pilled meant you discovered that feminism was a scam that ruined the lives of boys and girls. In this view, for a male to refuse the red pill was to be weak.
Red Pill forums were often filled with deeply misogynistic and often racist diatribes. The more extreme elements splintered into groups like involuntary celibates (incels) or
male separatists (Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOWs). Conferences like the 21 Convention and its sister convention, Make Women Great Again, sprang up to gather red-pilled men. Being red-pilled became a sort of umbrella term for all of it.
As these conversations seeped into the mainstream, pulled along by a host of other internet language from message boards to establishment Republican conversations on sites like Breitbart, the meaning broadened and got watered down. To be red-pilled can now mean being broadly skeptical of experts, to be distrustful of the mainstream press or to see hypocrisy in social liberalism.
Whats going on with Elon Musk?
Mr. Musk has been pretty wild online for years now, which has made him a major internet celebrity with devoted fans who call themselves Musketeers. There are fan pages like Musk Memes with nearly 100,000 followers, and a Reddit page with 200,000 members in constant, extremely active conversation.

Most recently, Mr. Musk has been a prominent skeptic online of the coronavirus, calling the response to it a panic and dumb and wrongly predicting close to zero new cases by the end of April. As of Tuesday, there were more than 90,000 deaths from the virus and more than 1.5 million cases in the United States alone.

Ivanka Trump replied to Mr. Musk that she had already taken the red pill.
The night before Teslas earnings were released last month, Mr. Musk tweeted an anti-lockdown rallying cry: FREE AMERICA NOW. He had a showdown with local lawmakers, threatening to move Tesla headquarters out of California and deciding to reopen a Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., despite the local countys restrictions to prevent the virus from spreading. When State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez objected on May 9 with an obscene tweet, Mr. Musk responded, Message received.

Defending his reopening of the Tesla factory, Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter that he would be on the factory floor and offered himself up to authorities. I will be on the line with everyone else, he posted on May 11. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.


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