The following analogy has just occurred to me:
"Woke" is to the left as "red-pilled" is to the far right.
When used unironically, "woke" and "red-pilled" both mean, essentially, "enlightened," without directly specifying the content of what a person is alleged to be enlightened about. Both terms have also been used in an ironic sense by adversaries of groups using them unironically.
The term "red pill" is derived from the movie The Matrix, which came out in 1999.
As soon as that movie came out, the term "red pill" began to be used in all sorts of subcultures, not just right wing ones, to refer to the process of arriving at a belief different from the norm.
For example, on at least one atheist message board that I was on at the time, ex-Christian atheists described the process of giving up their religion as "taking the red pill," whereas Christians were "blue-pilled." (See this page for an example of this usage, as recently as 2015.)
Also, in 2012 to 2015, my partner and I were using the term "red pill" in the context of computer technology, to refer to anything that would enable a virtual machine to be "aware" that it is a virtual machine and not an actual physical machine. (For computer security purposes, it is best that a virtual machine NOT have any "red pills." See this page for an example of this usage.)
Then, in 2016, when almost everyone in the mainstream mass media was shocked by Trump's successes, there began to be a number of mass media articles about various right wing subcultures that previously had been almost completely ignored by the mainstream mass media.
And thus the term "red pill" came to be identified with its use within the "Manosphere."
Almost everyone else who had been using the term "red pill" (unironically) to refer to anything else stopped using it -- except for far-right groups even more stigmatized than the "Manosphere," such as neo-Nazis. (Also, the computer technology sense of the term is still around, perhaps because "red pills" in that sense are undesirable. But this article would not have been written after 2016.)
What has NOT happened, however, is left-wingers using the term "red pill" as an ironic slur against all right wingers, in the same way that a lot of right wing commentators have used "woke" as an ironic slur against anyone and anything even vaguely left wing.
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