Red-pilled: Memetic truthiness, sticky stories, and anthropology’s unruly heritage of epistemic contingency

Abstract

This article contributes to anthropological scholarship on the politics of (post-)truth by linking anthropology’s legacy of epistemic contingency to the memetic truth practices of far-right digital culture. Drawing on fourteen months of digital ethnography among German far-right activists on Discord, 4chan, Twitch, and X (2021–2023), I analyze “red-pill stories” as performances of truthiness—affective narratives of awakening that consolidate community through stickiness rather than factual verification. Reading these stories as “deep stories” in Hochschild’s sense, I show that red-pilling is a form of secondary enculturation. In the second part of the article, I use my field encounters with a would-be red-piller as a lens to examine how far-right actors exploit anthropological concepts—epistemic contingency, partial truths, ontological difference—to demand legitimacy, thereby forcing anthropologists to confront the unruly heritage of their own epistemology.