by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:

A quarter-century ago in 1999 The Matrix entered our theaters and became an instant film classic as well as a colossal blockbuster, earning nearly $500 million at the box office. There were also interesting epistemological implications to the notion that our own world was merely the illusion created within a computer simulation, hiding the grim reality behind it. The word “redpilling” —breaking through those illusions into the underlying true existence—soon entered our popular political lexicon, with a Google search revealing that “redpill” and its variations appear on well over 5 million webpages, and the term has even inspired the somewhat related notions of “blackpilling” and “whitepilling,” respectively inducing despair and hope.