What Ivanka Trump 'taking the red pill' says about the White House

On Sunday afternoon, just days after the birth of his seventh child, billionaire technology entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted to his audience of 34 million followers: “Take the red pill.”

The term is popular in internet communities such as the alt-right and the manosphere, and refers to the scene in the film The Matrix in which the protagonist, Neo, is offered the choice between a blue pill that will allow him to remain safely deluded, or a red pill, which will allow him to discover the underlying truth about reality.

The phrase has come to mean rejecting widely accepted truths – particularly those that relate to equality between races, genders and social groups – and choosing an alternative narrative about society. Such narratives lean, in many cases, towards racism, misogyny and other highly controversial beliefs.

While this is not true of every single person who would consider themselves “red-pilled”, the members of pretty much every alt-right group you might have heard of – incels, neo-Nazis, eco-fascists – will often consider themselves to have awakened in this way to their fringe theories and socially unacceptable beliefs.

For Musk’s followers, or indeed anyone aware of him, this tweet would have been little more than regular programming from an eccentric billionaire for whom unpredictability is an inextricable part of a valuable personal brand. Musk often tweets memes to garner a reaction online, although whether he does so ironically is not clear.

Just over an hour later, things got more interesting when Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump’s eldest daughter and confidant, quote-tweeted Musk with the word “Taken!” Within minutes, both Musk and Trump began trending globally on Twitter.

At the time of writing, the two tweets have over a cumulative 479,000 likes and 97,000 retweets. Roughly 30 minutes after Ivanka posted her quote tweet, Donald Trump Jr, President Trump’s eldest son, liked Musk’s tweet from his personal Twitter account.

The rapid attention even spurred one of the writers and directors of The Matrix, Lilly Wachowski, to reply to Ivanka Trump: “F--- both of you.” And with the tweet still up almost a day later, it’s safe to presume that it wasn’t a hack.