“No one is forced to take red pills. We take red pills. The question is why.”

I first heard Bari Weiss’ voice in November 2024, a week after the U.S. presidential election. My friend had sent me an episode of Weiss’ podcast “Honestly,” and as I was doing chores around the house, I popped in my Airpods with some skepticism.  

“She makes it clear why Trump got elected,” my friend texted. “Idk, it just makes you feel better.”

As a lifelong progressive, I was wary. And yet, I wanted to feel better, because I felt awful. The conditions were pretty ripe for an escape. Maybe, a pill?

How does one get red-pilled? I’m not sure that’s the right question. I don’t believe anyone “gets” red-pilled. No one is forced to take red pills. We take red pills. The question is why.

Being red-pilled is experiencing an “awakening” that causes an individual to move away from liberal values and adopt conservatism, far-right beliefs, or even conspiracy theories.

I never expected this to happen to me. I have been a liberal for as long as I can remember. I can still recall my parents bemoaning the election of George W. Bush over drinks on someone’s patio in 2000 when I was 7, and I filed their words away in my head.

In high school I started calling myself a feminist — a choice that felt organic, almost involuntary. At the posh Chicago private school where I was a faculty kid, the boys rated the girls from 1-10, and we fretted over our rankings. 

Us girls watched vigilantly for food babies in our American Apparel bodycon dresses. We were competitive, secretive and insecure. I knew these behaviors didn’t occur naturally — they came from somewhere, and that somewhere was societal and cultural (aka the patriarchy). 

I was one of three girls in my AP U.S. history class, and I loved to challenge my male classmates, golden boys destined for Princeton and Goldman Sachs. I envied how assured they seemed of their bright futures. I took an independent study in feminist theory and filled a quiver with Simone de Beauvoir quotes. My arrows blackened the sky. 

I was never sure where I stood. The boys mocked me as a “bra burner” but seemed to kind of respect my audacity. The girls gave me sympathetic looks. My fire and rage were embarrassing, but I learned that could be mitigated. Being young, pretty and articulate seemed to protect me from the uncoolness of liberalism ― otherwise you’re just a shrill, unfuckable Karen wearing an embarrassing pink knit hat. 

I moved to Boulder, Colorado, where I still live, in 2018. Political ambivalence seems to be in the drinking water here. Voting is frequently dismissed as participation in a corrupt system where both parties are equally bad. When I first arrived, I was dubious of this politically checked-out crowd, but I was also intrigued by their “it’s-all-one” breeziness. I wondered what it would feel like to be happier — less rattled — like so many people here seemed to be. I’ll have what they’re having, I thought as my fellow Boulderites loosed primal yells at my first ecstatic dance class. I embraced healing modalities, too — therapy, meditation, prayer — that have helped me tremendously in my life.

What does this all have to do with Bari Weiss? Everything. As the calendar crept toward the 2024 election, the progressive platform began to feel like an endless slog toward doom. Fascism. Climate collapse. The rollback of hard-won civil rights. All of it was horrifying, and no one around me seemed to care; caring too much about politics was so uncool. I argued with anyone who’d listen that Kamala Harris was the best candidate, but my cheeks burned with self-consciousness. One friend told me I’m “just a person who causes friction,” and her words ran through my head like caution tape every time I got heated about MAGA.

After Trump won I was distraught. I started asking myself, What was all of that anxiety and energy for? Where had it gotten me, or any of us? I began to wonder if my friend had been right. How would it feel to be frictionless? I thought. The world had always told me this was the better way to be, and I was starting to believe it. Crave it.

That’s where I was in my life when I hit play on an episode of Weiss’ podcast titled, Why Trump Won.

Her voice filled my ears: “If you were only watching cable news, you’d be shocked by this election’s outcome,” she asserted. “But, I deign to say, if you were reading the Free Press, you probably weren’t surprised.” 

Her tone was both cool and urgent, professional and intimate.

Who was this woman? I wondered. I warmed to her immediately, charmed by her infamous charisma.

By the time I heard Weiss’ closing lines at the end of the episode, I felt like a 100-pound weight had been lifted from my shoulders: “If this episode comforted you, maybe a little, if you woke up broken-hearted, then share it with your friends…” 

It takes two seconds to swallow a pill. It took me years to get to the place where I wanted it. 

Bari Weiss at a Free Press Book Club event in New York City in November 2024.

I was Weiss’ broken-hearted target audience, and I fell in love with her almost instantly. She seemed just like me: skeptical of mainstream politicians, critical of lame Democrats, essentially seeking a third way for disaffected liberals. Weiss was not some blustery dude talking out of his ass like Alex Jones or Joe Rogan. She was a former Wall Street Journal and New York Times editor ― and a gay woman. And she was telling me the blame for my country’s problems lay with the left, and maybe it was a good thing that Trump won. 

I followed her advice and sent her podcast to everyone I knew. 

“Great listen,” I texted the family group chat. I felt naughty sending it to my NPR-loyal parents, which gave me a rebellious thrill. My parents and siblings offered polite and supportive responses to my first share — “Interesting!” “Good to consider the other side!” — but my subsequent evangelizing of “Honestly” was met with crickets.

My husband was not spared, either. I tried to play him an episode in the car and he hit pause five minutes in.

“Pretty… Zionist, huh?” he said, eyebrows raised. 

I waved his concerns away, high on a good feeling, and willing to give Weiss endless grace. 

My primary mode of engagement with Weiss’ content was through her podcast, rather than her newsletter, the Free Press, and I almost never felt embarrassed sharing her work. I actually thought myself enlightened — I believed I was finally seeing through the liberal BS and nobly engaging with views from across the aisle.

It’s well-documented that progressive women are exhausted. We consume a daily fire hose of horrors, and we care a lot. We are the demographic most likely to show up for protests. We’ve been called the MAGA movement’s punching bag: “White liberal women are a cancer on the nation,” writes Vincent Oshana on X. 

By the time I encountered Honestly, I was truly tired. I’d spent years canvassing, phonebanking, brandishing megaphones at marches — activities that had started to feel like bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon. I wanted relief, and Weiss provided it.  

The show became my preferred podcast and, like a glass of wine, it left both a sense of lightness and sedation in its wake. This medium likely swayed me more quickly to her camp. It turns out trust and intimacy are built quickly through podcasts, a fact that appears to have meaningfully influenced the 2024 election.

On a steady diet of Honestly, I noticed many interactions in my life became easier.

Discussing the election at a networking event, I noted, “At least Trump stood for something. Kamala has no real platform,” and got approving nods from older men — as though Harris’ impossibly tough position meant it was only right that the country had elected a 79-year-old accused of being a serial sexual predator. But I digress.

For every issue that tugged at my heart, Honestly had a tidy rebuttal that smoothed the edges: The war in Gaza is a horrific humanitarian crisis? Nope, the famine is overhyped, and Weiss has a sympathetic interview with a Mossad agent.

A woman hugs her child among the tents at a makeshift camp for displaced Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, on April 1, 2026. Most of Gaza's 2.4 million residents have been displaced, many of them multiple times, during the war that began after Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, with concerns growing over conditions in the tented camps. 

Yikes, DJT is looking pretty authoritarian! Actually, Weiss says that’s Trump Derangement Syndrome, you silly little NYT-reading girl.

Weiss asserted that aspirations to attend Harvard and Yale poison young peoples’ minds, and we should instead be “inculcating them with love of family and country.” In a Free Press op-ed, she argued that DEI undermines the central mission of institutions of higher learning. “It’s time to end DEI for good,” she wrote. Could it be that my rigorous college education, despite its intellectually diverse faculty and curricula, did not teach me critical thinking but instead brainwashed me with wokeism? 

In Why Trump Won, Weiss described the 2024 election as the “NYT-MSBC industrial complex,” versus “the Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan renegade types,” lauding the latter as “dissidents from within the elite class.” Maybe these influential figures I saw as dangerous were in fact courageous mavericks?

I stopped listening to Pod Save America and Democracy Now. The more ick I caught for my former progressive fervor, the less fiery I felt. I began to go gently into that good night.

I didn’t immediately buy all of Weiss’ takes — some of them set off faint alarm bells in the back of my mind. But part of the “Honestly” appeal is that a lot of it makes sense. Progressive rhetoric can be self-righteous. Democrats have appeared spineless and disorganized. With Weiss as my ally, I could condemn the whole mess as a lost cause, and part of me really wanted what she said to be true. Wouldn’t reality be easier to stomach that way? Conservative activist Christopher Rufo has described the Free Press, “a beautiful off-ramp” for center-left Democrats, and so it was for me.

While many white women participate in progressive causes, we’re also susceptible to the allure of what feminist theory calls vicarious power: gaining privilege via proximity to powerful men. White women have been doing this for centuries. Meanwhile, other marginalized groups, in particular Black women, have shown up time and time again for progressive causes with their politics rooted in an intersectional understanding of oppression. So while white progressive women might feel tired, we have the luxury of retreating into the privilege of our whiteness — and relationships with white men — whenever we choose (hello, Phyllis Schlafly!).

I now see Weiss’ moves as being straight out of Schlafly’s playbook: disseminating conservative ideology to her audience, and then collecting power and money from rich guys who stand to benefit from her creations. Weiss once joked in a speech at the Federalist Society that it’s OK that the people in the room don’t think her marriage to her wife should be legal “because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”

Still, I did not initially see any of this as a red flag. As David Klion wrote for the Guardian, “Trump could never operate in the kinds of spaces where Weiss has been able to flourish… Liberal institutions produced Bari Weiss.” Liberal institutions produced me, too, and so it seemed she and I spoke a shared language — or at least she wanted me to think so.

I’m not sure if it was her seemingly blind support for Israel, her deep dive on the Los Angeles fires that never mentioned climate change, or her pandering CBS town hall with Erika Kirk, but eventually a few cracks began to appear in Weiss’ facade.

Then I watched John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight takedown of Weiss and I laughed cathartically. This is REAL! my gut told me. Like my early turn toward feminism, this realization was less of an intellectual process and more my body orienting toward the truth, like a compass needle. Where is North? I asked myself. In which direction is my dignity, integrity, wholeness? What natural features do I see around me that I can match to the map in my hands?

It was once easy for me to dismiss people who I perceive to have been red-pilled, but my experience with Bari taught me that most of us don’t take the red pill because we’re fools. We’re overstimulated, persuadable and illogical creatures. We make the choice to reach for what seems to be a cure for what ails us, and all too soon our brains are rewired.

When I took Weiss’ red pill, I was actually self-medicating my own intolerance for U.S. politics as they currently stand, and my mind’s desperate attempts to fix them. The competing thoughts of We’re fucked, and I’m not doing enough, can wear a person down. I’ve realized these thought patterns are loudest for me when I spend too much time on left-leaning social media, where dystopian clips leave me pessimistic and paralyzed. This is a kind of pill too — one that revs the nervous system with a stimulant cocktail of panic and outrage, and it renders me just as ineffective as a red pill.

We have a vast spectrum of choices for staying informed about what’s happening in our country, from compulsive doomscrolling (which might only make us feel informed) to intentionally choosing how and when we engage with the news.

Since moving away from Weiss, I’ve been more conscious of my media consumption. I read and listen to NPR, BBC or Pod Save America, but I’m doing my best to balance all of that with real-world action, connection, and checking in with my values. Another hot, dry January day in Colorado tells me climate action matters. When I see U.S. citizens gunned down in the streets, my anger tells me that justice matters. My heart breaks at photos of detained children, and I am reminded that compassion matters.

The author at a recent ICE protest in Boulder, Colorado.

When I look back at the exhaustion that led me to Weiss’ red pill, I now roll my eyes at the “pity party” (to quote my mom) I threw for myself. You feel like the modern feminist movement is bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon? Babe, the suffrage movement took hundreds of years. As did Emancipation and Civil Rights and queer rights. It’s been less than 50 years since Indigenous people in this country finally received legal protection for their traditional ceremonies. Movements take time, and their uncertainties or losses don’t make them less worthy of our participation.

What’s more, despite the gains many of these groups have made, systemic oppression still exists and, I believe, if this current administration has its way, it will only grow stronger and more dangerous for marginalized people — and in turn, all of us. The struggle for equality and equity is by no means over. These fights continue, and no matter how admittedly messy or disappointing the progressive movement’s approach can sometimes be, I want to be a part of it. This requires I keep faith, use my voice and commit to action when possible — practices that are, in my experience, much more stabilizing than a pill.

I’m embarrassed and disappointed that Weiss fooled me. I now see her crusade as decidedly insidious and harmful, particularly now that she has more power — and eyes on her — in her role as editor in chief at CBS. I believe, at best, she is dedicated to driving a wedge between centrists and progressives, and at worst, she is spreading straight up propaganda. While I occasionally relish reading Weiss takedowns, I now want to focus my energy on helping to fortify the movement that she claims is broken. And when I inevitably grow frustrated with some progressive ideology, language or strategies, I hope I can voice my concerns while keeping my eye on the big picture. When I want to throw up my hands and say, “We’re screwed,” I hope I can remember who actually benefits from my apathy and despair — and what is at stake if we give up fighting. 

Emily Graf is a writer, poet, and editor living in Colorado. She is the acquiring editor at Sentient Publications, and her work has been featured most recently in New Feathers Anthology. Find more original essays on her Substack at emilygraf.substack.com.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost in March 2026.