Branding the Red Pill
The praxeology of the Red Pill needs a new voice.
The past three weeks have taught me many valuable lessons. After my now-infamous “vasectomy” tweet, I’ve weathered more than my share of deliberate misunderstanding at the hands of my detractors. Generally, I see haters as a good thing. My tongue-in-cheek mission statement has been, “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” for a while now. However, the comfortable don’t take kindly to that affliction, especially when their sense of self (not to mention their revenue) depends on their comfort.
The tweet read as follows:
The quickest path to becoming a high-value man:
1. Do not get married
2. Avoid family creation
3. Vasectomy in your 20s
4. Lift consistently
5. Eliminate all sedations
6. Learn Game & Networking
7. Play to your strengths, build wealth
8. Resist easing up on your focus
In less than 24 hours, the tweet went super-viral (6.5M views), with the likes of Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Lauren Chen retweeting it with a conservative variation of their own list or some over-the-top distortion of their interpretation of the list. And those were just the A-listers of The Daily Wire (or their PR representatives) who began the chorus of haters and detractors — all of whom have decided it’s time to abandon a Red Pill / Manosphere “movement” that they’ve been more than happy to co-opt,… so long as the engagement numbers were steady.
Now is when the real crazy comes out of the Red Pill carpetbaggers who have the foresight to see the Culture War® narrative as the next hot pivot for the 2024 election cycle. Red Pill? We never knew ye!
On December 31st, 2022, I made this prediction on the year-end show of Rule Zero; “By mid-August of next year, you won’t even recognize the Manosphere we know now.” If anything, I was premature. The pivot is in full swing now, and we’re just getting into June. The grifter diaspora from the Manosphere is already happening. I just gave it the push everyone was waiting for with this tweet. You’re welcome, hustlers. Now you have the plausible deniability you needed to exit the sphere and pretend you were always about the “Save the West!” and “Hard times create strong men” narratives. Good riddance. You won’t be missed. Remember, I’ll mock you just as ruthlessly when you try to come back to the sphere in January 2025.
I can finally be honest now that the fervor of “A vasectomy-is-Trans Surgery” has died down, and TradCon crusaders have the enemy they wanted in me. I knew the tweet would provoke. In my defense, it exploded faster and stronger than I’d hoped, but once I realized it had some staying power after the second week (most tweets die in 36 hours), I started working out a longer game.
Feign weakness where you are strong to draw your opponents to the battlefield of your choosing – The Art of War.
I was never going to draw Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh into anything. In all likelihood, their PR people at the Daily Wire were the ones boosting Ben and Matt’s virtue signals. But I could trap some bush-league influencers if they thought they smelled blood in the water. Although I had one quick Q&A about the tweet on the Adam and Sitch show, Pearly Things was the first to show her true colors by ambushing me with an unannounced panel, including Nick Fuentes (his 4th appearance on her show) and Save the West for Jesus cultists, Isabella Moody and Bryson. Once she revealed the trap, I made sure there were liberal usages of “Nazi,” “Jew,” “Hitler,” and a few other words YouTube will ban your channel for using. Notice to all you disingenuous shill-casts: I will default to every word you can’t say on YouTube if you try to play me like this on your podcast. No viral clips for you; only hate speech strikes.
I’d made an honest effort to mend fences with Pearl for about five weeks before this panel. I even offered some public contrition on my show. This was a mistake. I had to relearn an old lesson: When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Either Pearl is malicious or ignorant. Either way, Pearl is a shit person and the worst representative of the Red Pill amongst the current crop of Entertainers / Reactors.
Next up was Destiny and Sneako. I had tried to get on Fresh & Fit for a call-in segment during the week that the tweet went viral, but the show was in a flow state, and I got turned down. Sneako was in the middle of a live interview with Jedediah Bila when he first mentioned how irresponsible I was for giving my Mano-cult followers their latest papal bull of life prescriptions. Haram! Binary extremism mixes well with the Prodigal Son narrative becoming more popular among the new wave of Red Pill deniers. False premises fuel a great deal of hate. Concocting convenient scenarios, imagining the worst of your enemies, and reinterpreting their successes are a salve for the burned ego. Thin-skinned resentment will never be my moral crisis. But it’s not even a hater’s moral crisis. Appeals to moral authority are an appeal to the emotionalism of the masses. If emotionalism is a religion, these guys are the pastors of the new church.
For all the friction, I do, in fact, like Sneako quite a bit. But Sneako isn’t the first convenient moralist to question my intentions. His is the latest in a long list of names I’ve outlasted since 2007. Anyone who’s read my work knows I’ve never written about my status, cathartically or otherwise. I just work here. I speak the truth about the world as it is. When I advise at all, it’s about things that have worked for me and many other men. People offended by that decide I must be revealing some inner neuroses or obsessions. When you can’t argue with the reasoning, a bad debater always questions character.
The scary part is how many people will take me in the most literal, face-value sense possible to promote their impression of me for themselves and anyone they hope to wave off from ever rereading my pseudonym.
“Just admit it, Rollo, take the L and say you’re sorry for duping us.” gets mixed in with, “Oh no, you don’t, Rollo! You can’t say it was just a troll! We know you were 100% serious when you proscribed the impressionable young men of today to get a vasectomy!”
One thing Social Justice Warriors taught me over the years is Never apologize for anything. This has been repeated ad infinitum since 2015 by the same TradCons demanding I apologize for misguiding young men. Do you guys even read your own tweets?
My female haters imagine that because I write about women’s nature, it must mean I strictly counsel avoiding long-term loving relationships in favor of purely physical short-term flings. These critics are wrong. But they know that. Then they discover (for the first time) that I’m coming up on 27 years of a healthy, mutually loving marriage founded on genuine desire. This is why they can’t process the dissonance of weighing my 20+ years of work with my great marriage. I must be a hypocrite! It’s the only explanation. Hypocrisy is an easy dismissal because the only other road is the one where a prosperous guy in a great marriage explains how the way we do marriage today sucks for men. That message doesn’t sell their “Bless God” hoodies very well.
Finally, we come to Destiny. I look at Destiny much like the characters from the 2018 wave of MGTOW Life Coaches. Around 2018 there was an influx of “How to get rich being an online influencer” guys from outside the Manosphere who saw #MGTOW was trending. They chose ‘men’s issues’ and ‘dating’ as their niche templates, then started on the landing pages for their marketing funnels. Of the dozens of these guys, only three notable names still linger, and two renounced the Red Pill this year. Nearly all of them have videos titled “Why I’m leaving the Manosphere” that they published 18 months ago but still continue to produce “red pill reaction” videos. Hell, even Dr. David Buss made a failed attempt at a dating program in 2020. Don’t bother signing up for the presale stuff. I’m pretty sure he abandoned it in 2021.
But like the MGTOW flood of 2018, there’s been a recent influx of Twitch-stream Gamer Kids wandering into the Manosphere for fun and profit. Destiny and Sneako are just the most visible, if not the most onerous. I could add the very likable game streamer, BunnyFufu, to the list of guys who made a good transition. But sometime in 2022, the Zoomers of Twitch found the Manosphere as fertile ground for mockery streams that made for great (if ignorant) content while playing League of Legends for 6 hours straight. A handful of this set made a successful pivot into the YouTube Manosphere. Enter Destiny and Sneako. Their production value is low-poly at best, but their followership is more interested in YouTube bloodsports and shit talk than fixed-prime lens video. To his credit, Destiny makes a good stab at coherent arguments, but his reputation as a “good debater” of everything is based on Woke sophistry and polemics. I do actually agree with him on some of his takes (education in particular), but when it comes to the Red Pill, he covers his blatant ignorance of the Red Pill with straw-man arguments and filibustering run-ons.
Honest debate in this country died around the mid-80s, replaced by Advertainment trash-talking exchanges on daytime talk shows and mainstream media-moderated presidential debates. In 2023, online ‘debate’ lies somewhere between shit-piece reaction videos and “Surprise, muthafuckah!” YouTube Bloodsport ambush setups. In the middle of that is what I call the Dueling Research Study debate, and this is where the more autistic Twitchstreamers excel.
A common characteristic of Twitchstream children is a semi-autistic obsessive-compulsive disorder for conflating single data point studies with dynamic defining importance. This is a protection mechanic for their ego investments in a childlike understanding of their professed ideologies. But it’s also an easy dismissal of ideas they’re unprepared to consider. If the data doesn’t exist, bootstrapping some related work will suffice as well.
The Red Pill Brand
If all of these shenanigans sound juvenile and stupid now, wait until we get into the 2024 election cycle proper. After four years of a phantom presidency (of a dementia-addled Joe Biden), the Neo-TradCon side of the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) generation (i.e., TradZoomers) are foaming at the mouth for the Culture War® unrest they expect is coming next year. As in 2016, the Red Pill Brand is now being co-opted and appropriated to be synonymous with right-wing, ethnographic-nationalist extremism. The FBI (fed by the Southern Poverty Law Center) has already declared words like Incel, Woke, Based, Chad, Stacy, Alpha Male, and Red Pill to be code terms for misogyny and hate speech.
When asked if I thought the Red Pill was going mainstream in March of 2021, the words I spoke to Myron and Fresh are still ringing in my ears today — “I hope not because, at some point, the Red Pill will have a PR crisis and the people who took it mainstream, the people who were supposed to be an authority on it aren’t necessarily the people who ought to be representing it. The Red Pill will be appropriated to meaning whatever pet ideology that authority wants to prop up as truth.” And here we are. We’ve come to the point I expected two years later.
What the Red Pill needs at this critical time is an authentic brand identity if we’re to save the praxeology from the PR crisis created by disingenuous Hustlers, Entertainers, Reactors, and Moralists who’ve turned it into the monster they depend on to exist at all. The Red Pill needs a new tone and voice. One that separates it from the blathering of grifters taking its name in vain.
The brand tone and voice of the Red Pill can be characterized as follows:
Tone:
Assertive
Confident
No-nonsense
Unapologetic
Straightforward
Empirical
Logical
Critical
Voice:
Masculine
Authoritative
Educative
Insightful
Provocative
Unconventional
Analytical
Informative
To ensure future content follows these guidelines, here are some key points to consider if you presume to represent the praxeology of the Red Pill in the mainstream:
1. Be Assertive and Confident
Avoid using language that is vague or uncertain. Only a strong knowledge of the material will give you anything like the confidence you’ll need to be accurate. Use strong, straightforward language to make your point. Call out the language of emotionalism while insisting on using the language of empiricism.
2. Be No-nonsense and Unapologetic
Don't shy away from controversial topics or opinions. Be willing to challenge conventional wisdom and take a stand. Know that virtually any emotionalist perspective is ruined by stoic, apparent realism.
3. Be Straightforward and Empirical
Use facts and evidence to support your arguments. Avoid using overly emotional or subjective language.
4. Be Logical and Critical
Use reason and critical thinking to analyze issues and arguments. Avoid relying on assumptions or unsupported claims.
5. Be Masculine and Authoritative
Speak with confidence and authority on issues related to masculinity and male-female relationships. Refuse any conciliatory half-measures in your debates. There is no meeting halfway or conceding an inaccurate point to make a more significant one. Speak the whole truth, ugly as it is, or don’t speak it at all.
6. Be Educative and Insightful
Give your audience valuable information and insights on masculinity, male-female relationships, and intersexual dynamics. Debating a disingenuous host or hater is never about changing their mind. Your goal should be outreach to an audience whose minds and lives you can change.
7. Be Provocative and Unconventional
Don't be afraid to challenge traditional wisdom and push boundaries. Ask uncomfortable questions and provoke unflattering answers.
8. Be Analytical and Informative
Provide the audience with in-depth analysis and information on topics related to intersexual dynamics. This requires you to have a genuine interest in being informed yourself. Read a lot, even material you know is inaccurate, to develop a sense of logic flow. Being analytical in representing the Red Pill requires being analytical when you’re off-camera.