The ideas and the imagery of The Matrix run through internet culture like an aquifer—seeping almost undetectably through everything, and then bursting to the surface in unexpected ways. "I know kung-fu." "There is no spoon." But one of those concepts, written by the Wachowskis and delivered by Laurence Fishburne, pooled at just the right place to be lapped up and internalized as a self-valorizing metaphor by the dark, toxic wilds of the proto-alt-right internet: the red pill.

That sprawling, diffuse community isn't united by much, but in every corner its members have adopted the idea as their own. They've turned it into a verb, and spread it so successfully that to be “red-pilled” is now widely understood shorthand for having your eyes opened to a certain kind of “conservatism”—generally nationalistic, often white-supremacist, and nearly always suffused with violent misogyny.

And most recently, that verb has taken hold of Kanye West—who, after a long social media hiatus, embarked on a long pro-Trump tweeting spree. this week. It’s not just 4chan or the dark parts of Reddit who claim West is red-pilled— it’s spread to Fox News and even, in even subtle ways, West himself. This marks an enormous success for the fringe ideologies that first popularized the red pill meme, and perhaps the end of our ability to think of those ideas as fringe in the first place. For internet extremists, Kanye West has become an entirely new, and unreservedly welcomed, conduit for recruitment.

From Sci-Fi to White Supremacy

In its original context, the red pill was a handy, handheld metaphor. If you haven’t seen The Matrix, then brace yourself for its central conceit (and really, if you haven't seen The Matrix, you may want to remedy that): nearly all humans on the planet been enslaved in suspended animation by malignant AI, experiencing what they think are their lives in a persistent, all-encompassing simulated reality. A small group of rebels fighting against the AI have found a way to awaken some of these people, and—after hauling them out of a tub of life-sustaining goop—present them with a choice. "This is your last chance," rebel leader Morpheus (Fishburne) tells Neo (Keanu Reeves), holding a colored pill in each hand. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

It’s easy to see why it caught on. “That metaphor is so resonant because it has an empowering tenor,” says Ryan Milner, who teaches communications at the College of Charleston and co-authored The Ambivalent Internet, a book about digital culture. “You’re being awakened, unlocking your power, bending spoons and seeing into code.” And for people like men’s rights activists, who felt besieged by the whole world telling them they were wrong, it allowed them to dismiss everyone else as a passive ideological sheep. “I kind of rolled my eyes at it when I saw it in 2011,” Milner says. “It was an overly simplistic metaphor based on an obscure 12-year-old reference. It was the most niche of the nichest of memes.”

The meme blew out of its niche, though, when Gamergate—the widespread sexist harassment campaign against female game developers—happened. “The red-pill memes on 4chan and elsewhere were about dosing people with a piece of information that would shake their fundamental beliefs and awaken them to the ‘conspiracies’ of feminism,” says Joan Donovan, the media manipulation research lead at New York City research institute Data & Society.