This is Eli Lake, and today's re-education is about the red pill.

My guest is Canada for Congress in New York City, Maude Maren.

This is your last chance.

After this, there is no turning back. 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.

Remember, all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more.

This is, of course, a seminal scene from the 1999 movie The Matrix.

For Gen Xers like me, it's a classic.

Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is given a choice.

He can take the blue pill and continue to live in a computer-generated dreamland,

or he can take the red pill and choose to learn a terrible truth. Human beings are now grown like crops and harvested by super intelligent machines for their energy. They are kept

in a permanent state of delusion, believing they are living a normal life on planet Earth while

wasting away in a cocoon sucked dry of their life-forced, plugged into the matrix.

Now, this is a concept, at least, that goes back a really long way in human culture.

It's a painful truth that upends a comfortable lie. Think of Eve's conversation with the serpent in the Garden of Eden,

or Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. Marxists used to talk about false consciousness

to explain how a segment of the working class does not understand the nature of their exploitation.

Neoconservatives would talk about being mugged by

reality, when an otherwise well-meaning liberal would learn that progressive policies had led to

mayhem and anarchy. Today, the red pill is a persistent metaphor in our politics, and it means a kind of conversion,

someone who once subscribed to a pleasant consensus, but now understands that much of it was a pack

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