The arc of a good story often starts off with the main protagonist leading a normal life.
Fate, however, has other ideas. She intervenes. She calls him. But he either doesn’t listen or can’t hear.
While noticing something odd, he tries to go back to his life before the call.
But she persists until he answers. He then faces his destiny with a cold realisation. Whatever the cost, victorious or defeated, he will have to go all in.
Sound familiar? This is the journey that Neo, played by Keanu Reeves in the 1999 blockbuster The Matrixtakes when given the choice to take either a blue or red pill by Morpheus – the mysterious leader of the rebellion against the machine, after being confronted by the faceless Agent Smith and his minions.
The red pill reveals the truth about the Matrix – a simulation engineered by artificial intelligence to keep humanity enslaved – and the blue one makes Neo forget, allowing him to revert to the status quo ante of blissful ignorance.
Neo chooses the hero’s path – the red pill. From there, the path ahead is treacherous but things are clear.
The only option is to fight. The truth, as Morpheus tells him, sets you free.
Freedom, though, comes at a price.
The Republican victory over the Democrats on November 5 was a story of the masses choosing the red pill of reality to the blue pill of anesthetised fiction.
However, there’s a plot twist: the historic Republican victory was mainly led by Democratic Party escapees.
Where they were once at home, these brave souls were gradually shunned, harassed and pushed out because they clung to the old-fashioned view that America was a good country, peopled by good and honest folk, that could do better.
Rejecting the fashionable self-righteousness and self-loathing increasingly alive in Democratic circles and still wanting to bestow lovingly on their grandchildren the country they inherited from their grandparents, they sought an alternative one.
In a two-party system, this was the Republican Party.
These Democratic absconders dismantled the image of the old gentlemen’s club-dwelling East Coast Republicans and turned it into a blue-collar movement. In so doing, they appealed to a broad swathe of the electorate.
The four architects of this tectonic shift are Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Elon Musk and Donald Trump himself.
Each in their own way, at different times, found they no longer fitted into a party they would have previously gladly represented, called their own, voted for or donated to.
They took the red pill and had no intention of returning to their former lives.
Gabbard was a Democratic member of Congress from 2013 to 2021 and vice chairman of the DNC.
Her experience of war on the front line in a field medical unit and the material and human cost made her question America’s never-ending imperial escapades.
The money made by large corporates and politicians, such as KBR Halliburton and Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheyne respectively, while American boys maimed or killed riled her to her core.
Deep State corruption and what Gabbard calls the “warmongers in Washington” would need to be fought. It became her raison d’être, for which she was denounced as a Russian asset and traitor by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic grande dame.
No longer at home in the Democratic Party, she left because it was “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness”, she said in a video announcement posted to Twitter. She joined the Trump campaign in August 2024.
Robert F. Kennedy Junior, from Democratic royalty, whose father Robert and uncle and late President John F. Kennedy were murdered, fought against big corporations as well as bureaucratic and political corruption all his professional life.
Few sectors have escaped his attention. Big polluters found themselves regularly in the sharpshooter’s crosshair. He sought accountability.
“We catch the cheaters, the polluters, and we force you to internalize your costs, the same way you internalize your profits,” Kennedy told a rapturous audience at the SXSW Eco environment conference almost a decade ago. He has not diluted his message ever since.
Jolted into action by the visible collapse of the health of America’s children, he trained his legal sights on Big Pharma and the health bureaucracy.
He once said “the greatest crisis that America faces today is the chronic disease epidemic in America’s children”.
The authoritarian government pandemic over-reach and suspected back scratching links between Big Pharma and government agencies only crystalised his determination.
His book “The Real Anthony Fauci”, which exposes the business of Health, made him a marked man, to be branded forever as a conspiracy theorist and, deceitfully, an anti-vaccine merchant. He wants Big Pharma, currently immune, to be liable for the harm their vaccines might cause – a perfectly sensible position to hold.
Motivated by the cause, the Democratic rebel joined the Trump campaign in August 2024 with his sights trained on Big Pharma and health administration nexus.
Elon Musk, entrepreneur extraordinaire and owner of more successful companies than my spouse has shoes, was a long-standing democrat voter.
He said during an interview with Tucker Carlson, a discerning American journalist, in April 2023, that he had supported Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.
While Biden’s nihilistic open border policies along with the acceptance of intolerable levels of crime among other things played a part in his decision to support Trump, it is the “evil” of transgenderism that ultimately swayed the tech entrepreneur’s decision.
He claims in an interview with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian guru and inspirer to millions, that his son was chemically castrated.
Having been tricked into signing documents during the Covid state-sponsored confusion, he alleges his son was administered puberty blockers to fight depression.
“It wasn’t explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilisation drugs”, he told Peterson, adding: “I lost my son essentially.”
When Trump was shot, Elon went all in. The aim and goal of his crusade was clear: “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus”, he told Peterson: “People that have been promoting thisshould go to prison”.
Trump, a businessman from New York, switched between Republicans and Democrats. He left the Republican party in 1999. During a CNN interview, the anti-war entrepreneur explained why he stood by the Democrats. “It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans”, he explained.
As Jeb Bush, the former Governor of Florida reminded his Republican audience in 2015, “Mr. Trump doesn’t have a proven conservative record”, adding that he was “a tax-hiking Democrat”. Trump, even then replied: “I identify with some things as a Democrat.”
Endless wars, the outsourcing of manufacturing, and the evaporation of law and order, along with Obama’s very public humiliation of Trump at the White House Correspondents dinner in 2011, provided him with his life’s defining goal: to rescue America from decline and dissection. To do this, he would have to leave the Democratic Party and find a new home.
With the accelerating spread of the politics of biology, masquerading as compassion in the shape of race and gender, the urgency of raising the standard of common sense, meant total dedication to rescuing America from the destructive hands of the all-powerful and morally bankrupt woke Matrix.
Having been rejected by a Maoist Democratic Party machine, which demands slogans to be bleated goat-like and cleaving tight to their destructive orthodoxy, these run-aways took over the Republican party and turned it into an Arch of All-Talents.
All four experienced the Matrix’s sharp lashes. They were force-fed Morpheus’ Red Pill.
United by their convictions, they, as former Democrats, have won a terrific battle. Stunned for a moment, the Matrix will no doubt retaliate, principles free, with the huge resources at its disposal.
Gabbard, Kennedy, Musk and Trump himself, Democrats rejected the Democrats and in so doing have given hope to all and sundry.
It is now, as they say, morning again in America.