Daily Archives: December 22, 2021

President Joe BidenJoe BidenFederal class action lawsuit filed over treatment of Haitian migrants Staffer who had contact with Biden tests positive for COVID-19 Overnight Defense & National Security New rules try to tackle extremism in the ranks MORE recently assembled the leaders of more than 100 democracies worldwide for a virtual Summit for Democracy. Not surprisingly, the gathering drew the ire of China and Russia, whose ambassadors penned a joint op-ed castigating it a vestige of Cold War mentality and calling on countries to stop using "value-based diplomacy" to provoke division and confrontation.

The summit was useful to begin conversations on how to confront the daunting challenges facing the free world. But it is not sufficient. The time has come to establish an Alliance of Democracies that would bring together the United States and its allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, and other willing democracies worldwide that share common interests and values and are prepared to act.

As Biden underscored in his introductory remarks, democracy is facing alarming and sustained challenges, including from autocrats, who seek to advance their own power and export and expand their influence around the world.China and Russia, in particular, have become more assertive in challenging key tenets of the rules-based global order, Democracies are on the defensive as they contend with these and other global threats. To succeed in this fundamental struggle between democracy and autocracy, democracies must strengthen cooperation.

An Alliance of Democracies would provide a highly visible platform for fostering solidarity in the face of common threats and challenges. The leading democracies in North America, Europe and the Indo-Pacific make up roughly three-quarters of global gross domestic product. In combination with the European Union, the transatlantic partnership provides nearly 80 percent of official developmental aid worldwide. And the 20 highest scoring countries in terms of soft-power influence are all democracies. These assets provide the United States and its allies with an enormous source of leverage in addressing global challenges.

But the Alliance of Democracies must be more than symbolic. Instead, its members must be prepared to take meaningful action to address the three defining challenges facing the democratic world. The first is the increasing assertiveness by China and Russia to make the world safer from autocracy. Moscow and Beijing are using diplomatic and economic coercion including military threats, cyber operations, malign finance and other wolf warrior diplomacy tactics to pressure smaller governments and global corporations to accommodate their interests.

In response, the alliance could facilitate coordinated sanctions and other measures to deter such behavior, and provide a mechanism to provide joint assistance to targeted democracies. It could also help make democracies less vulnerable to economic coercion, including, for example, by facilitating alternative supply chains for sensitive technologies and critical energy supplies.

The second is backsliding within established democracies. Whether through the acquiescence of their electorate or manipulation of electoral processes, populist leaders in many democracies have been using their authority to undermine democratic norms. The alliance can serve as a mechanism to hold states accountable for their democratic practices at home. Building on the loose pledge system for leaders interventions at the Summit for Democracy, countries could be asked to make specific commitments to advance democratic renewal at home as part of their alliance membership obligations.

The third is the rise of emerging and potentially disruptive technologies. Such technologies including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, genetic engineering and 5G are developing rapidly and will significantly shape the future of geopolitics. While these innovations promise great benefits, they also carry serious risks, including security challenges. If China or other autocratic nations succeed in developing these technologies ahead of the democratic world, they could gain significant economic and military advantages. To counter this, the alliance should set common standards for advanced technologies that are consistent with liberal norms. The goal is to ensure that the democratic world and fundamental values prevail in the technological race.

Support for closer alignments among democracies is building. In hosting the Group of Seven (G7) summit earlier this year, British Prime Minister Boris JohnsonBoris JohnsonQueen cancels British royal family's Christmas gathering: report It's time for an alliance of democracies The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by National Industries for the Blind - Manchin says no; White House fires back MORE sought to advance the idea of a D-10 club of democracies. Lawmakers in Britain and Canada have expressed support for new coalitions of democracies, and the traffic light coalition making up the new government in Germany called for the creation of an Alliance of Democracies in a recent policy paper. In the United States, proposals for closer cooperation among democracies have drawn bipartisan support among lawmakers in Congress.

That China and Russia have spoken out so vehemently about the Summit for Democracy indicates a level of concern as to where this initiative might lead. Nevertheless, it would not serve the interests of the United States or its allies to provoke a new Cold War dynamic that could lead to escalating tensions or even direct confrontation. The reality is, however, that competition between democratic and autocratic powers is now an established feature of the current global system. The key question is how democracies will choose to respond. To minimize the risks of polarization, leading democracies should embrace a two-tracked approach: engaging with Beijing and Moscow though the United Nations, G20, and other venues in areas where cooperation may be feasible, and, at the same time, working through an Alliance of Democracies to uphold shared values and interests.

Bidens call to action with his Summit for Democracy could help propel the idea of an alliance forward. The administrations plan for a follow up summit next December could provide the building block for a sustainable cooperative network of democracies. The administration has rightly framed the current era as a historic inflection point between autocracy and democracy. An Alliance of Democracies would provide a signature initiative that is directly responsive to this challenge one that demonstrates leadership and can help align the democratic world in a common direction for will likely be a multi-decade era of strategic competition.

Ash Jain is director for democratic drder at the Atlantic Council.

Jonas Parello-Plesner is executive director of the Copenhagen-based Alliance of Democracies Foundation.

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It's time for an alliance of democracies | TheHill - The Hill

LOS GATOS, Calif., Dec. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Aridis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: ARDS), a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of novel anti-infective therapies to treat life-threatening infections, announced today that its fully human monoclonal antibody (mAb) cocktail AR-701 is broadly reactive against the Omicron and other COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) variants, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus), and seasonal ('common cold') human coronaviruses.

"Omicron has rendered current COVID-19 vaccines and monoclonal antibodies substantially less effective, and likely future COVID 19 variants will arise that continue this trend" said Vu Truong, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Aridis Pharmaceuticals. "AR-701 is the result of our successful search for a mAb therapy that is directed against a conserved region of the virus that would be less vulnerable to mutations and new variants such as Omicron. Our laboratory data suggest that AR-701 has the potential to be a future-proof COVID-19 therapy that can protect against SARS-CoV-2, SARS, or MERS pandemics," continued Dr. Truong. "To our knowledge AR-701 is the only COVID-19 therapy that targets two distinct viral mechanisms of action, making it much harder for the virus to generate resistance, and exhibits an unmatched combination of broad reactivity and high efficacy," continued Dr. Truong.

About AR-701AR-701 is a cocktail of two fully human immunoglobulin G1 (IgG1) mAbs discovered from screening the antibody secreting B-cells of convalescent SARS-CoV-2 infected (COVID-19) patients. AR-701 consists of AR-703 and AR-720 mAbs, each neutralizes coronaviruses using distinct mechanisms of action, namely inhibition of viral fusion and entry into human cells (AR-703) and blockage of viral binding to the human 'ACE2' receptor (AR-720). The two mAbs complement and enhance each other in a synergistic fashion, creating a potent first-in-class cocktail. AR-703 binds to the 'S2' stalk region of spike proteins from betacoronaviruses, including the SARS-CoV2 variants (beta, gamma, delta, epsilon), and binds to the Omicron variant with no loss in affinity compared to the original Wuhan strain. Multiple animal challenge models widely used to evaluate COVID-19 treatments support AR-701's broad efficacy, including:

The AR-701 mAbs are engineered to be active for 6-12 months in the blood. AR-701 is being developed as a long-acting intramuscular as well as a self-administered inhaled formulation for the treatment of COVID-19 patients who are not yet hospitalized. AR-701 mAbs were discovered through a collaboration with researchers at the University of Alabama in Birmingham and Texas Biomedical Research Institute (San Antonio, TX).

About Aridis Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Aridis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. discovers and develops novel anti-infective therapies to treat life-threatening infections, including anti-infectives to be used as add-on treatments to standard-of-care antibiotics. The Company is utilizing its proprietary PEXTM and MabIgX technology platforms to rapidly identify rare, potent antibody-producing B-cells from patients who have successfully overcome an infection, and to rapidly manufacture monoclonal antibody (mAbs) for therapeutic treatment of critical infections. These mAbs are already of human origin and functionally optimized for high potency by the donor's immune system; hence, they technically do not require genetic engineering or further optimization to achieve full functionality.

The Company is advancing multiple clinical stage mAbs targeting bacteria that cause life-threatening infections such as ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP) and hospital acquired pneumonia (HAP), in addition to preclinical stage antiviral mAbs. The use of mAbs as anti-infective treatments represents an innovative therapeutic approach that harnesses the human immune system to fight infections and is designed to overcome the deficiencies associated with the current standard of care which is broad spectrum antibiotics. Such deficiencies include, but are not limited to, increasing drug resistance, short duration of efficacy, disruption of the normal flora of the human microbiome and lack of differentiation among current treatments. The mAb portfolio is complemented by a non-antibiotic novel mechanism small molecule anti-infective candidate being developed to treat lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients. The Company's pipeline is highlighted below:

Aridis' Pipeline

AR-301 (VAP). AR-301 is a fully human IgG1 mAb targeting gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) alpha-toxin and is being evaluated in a global Phase 3 clinical study as an adjunctive treatment of S. aureus ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP).

AR-320 (VAP). AR-320 is a fully human IgG1 mAb targeting S. aureus alpha-toxin that is being developed as a preventative treatment of S. aureus colonized mechanically ventilated patients who do not yet have VAP. Phase 3 is expected to be initiated in 2Q22.

AR-501 (cystic fibrosis). AR-501 is an inhaled formulation of gallium citrate with broad-spectrum anti-infective activity being developed to treat chronic lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients. This program is currently in Phase 2a clinical development in CF patients.

AR-701 (COVID-19). AR-701 is a cocktail of fully human mAbs discovered from convalescent COVID-19 patients that are directed at multiple protein epitopes on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is formulated for delivery via intramuscular injection or inhalation using a nebulizer. AR-701 replaces AR-712 as the company's leading COVID mAb candidate.

AR-401 (blood stream infections). AR-401 is a fully human mAb preclinical program aimed at treating infections caused by gram-negative Acinetobacter baumannii.

AR-101 (HAP). AR-101 is a fully human immunoglobulin M, or IgM, mAb in Phase 2 clinical development targeting Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) liposaccharides serotype O11, which accounts for approximately 22% of all P. aeruginosa hospital acquired pneumonia cases worldwide.

AR-201 (RSV infection). AR-201 is a fully human IgG1 mAb out-licensed preclinical program aimed at neutralizing diverse clinical isolates of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

For additional information on Aridis Pharmaceuticals, please visit https://aridispharma.com/.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this press release are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. These statements may be identified by the use of words such as "anticipate," "believe," "forecast," "estimated" and "intend" or other similar terms or expressions that concern Aridis' expectations, strategy, plans or intentions. These forward-looking statements are based on Aridis' current expectations and actual results could differ materially. There are a number of factors that could cause actual events to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements. These factors include, but are not limited to, the need for additional financing, the timing of regulatory submissions, Aridis' ability to obtain and maintain regulatory approval of its existing product candidates and any other product candidates it may develop, approvals for clinical trials may be delayed or withheld by regulatory agencies, risks relating to the timing and costs of clinical trials, risks associated with obtaining funding from third parties, management and employee operations and execution risks, loss of key personnel, competition, risks related to market acceptance of products, intellectual property risks, risks related to business interruptions, including the outbreak of COVID-19 coronavirus, which could seriously harm our financial condition and increase our costs and expenses, risks associated with the uncertainty of future financial results, Aridis' ability to attract collaborators and partners and risks associated with Aridis' reliance on third party organizations. While the list of factors presented here is considered representative, no such list should be considered to be a complete statement of all potential risks and uncertainties. Unlisted factors may present significant additional obstacles to the realization of forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those described or implied by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including, without limitation, market conditions and the factors described under the caption "Risk Factors" in Aridis' 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020 and Aridis' other filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements included herein are made as of the date hereof, and Aridis does not undertake any obligation to update publicly such statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

Contact:Media Communications:Matt SheldonRedChip Companies Inc.Matt@redchip.com1.917.280.7329

Investor RelationsDave GentryRedChipDave@redchip.com1-800-733-2447

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Company Codes: NASDAQ-NMS:ARDS

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Aridis Pharmaceuticals Announces a Pan-Coronavirus Monoclonal Antibody Cocktail That Retains Effectiveness Against the Omicron variant, other COVID-19...

Bats sweltering in their boxes, polar bears and narwhals using up to four times as much energy to survive, birds starving as Turkeys lakes dry up, and unique island species at high risk of extinction as the planet warms. If there was ever any doubt about the inextricable link between the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis, those doubts were well and truly dispelled in 2021.

The science is clear: climate, biodiversity and human health are fully interdependent, Frans Timmermans, the European Commission vice-president who heads the European Green Deal; Achim Steiner, of the UN Development Programme; and Sandrine Dixson-Declve, of the Club of Rome, wrote before the Cop26 climate conference.

While the much-anticipated Cop15 Kunming biodiversity conference was delayed yet again, Cop26 brought together leaders from across the globe to discuss the climate emergency. Although the pledges on emissions cuts fell short of those required to limit the increase in temperatures to 1.5C, there were promises to halt and reverse global deforestation over the next decade.

Meanwhile, dozens of countries have committed to protecting 30% of the planets land and oceans by 2030, and in September, nine philanthropic foundations pledged $5bn (3.75bn) to finance the 30x30 pledge.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic and the many lockdowns, 2021 saw the worlds scientists, volunteers and conservationists continuing their efforts to protect nature. The International Union for Conservation of Nature launched its new green list of protected and conserved areas, researchers at the Natural History Museum worked on digitising its vast collection, Kenya held its first animal census, and a multimillion-pound project was launched that aims to describe and identify the web of life in large freshwater ecosystems with game-changing DNA technology.

In September, the IUCN world conservation congress in Marseille brought together innovators and policymakers from across the world for talks and debates on subjects as diverse as the universal declaration of the rights of the river, alien species, human-wildlife conflict, the use of smart technology in conservation, genetic engineering and much more.

Not all conservation efforts are down to scientists and policymakers though. There is growing recognition of the vital role communities and indigenous people play in conserving biodiversity and building livelihoods and this year we highlighted projects that included a shade-grown coffee initiative in Peru, islanders rallying to save the coco de mer nut in Seychelles and an army of nature recorders and seed conservers in the UK.

There was good news elsewhere. The flatpack homes for animals that fall victim to wildfires that we highlighted in April have since been trialled in Sydney, where a housing estate of the biodegradable cardboard pods has been put up to give shelter to wildlife after the bushfires.

In response to our piece on conservationists criticising Marks & Spencer for releasing 30 million honeybees, the British retailer filled 500 stores with little signs telling shoppers about the importance of native bumblebees in producing a number of foods. M&S has been really open to learning, said Gill Perkins, chief executive of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, who believes it is the first UK supermarket to introduce bumblebee labels highlighting the work of these pollinators. She hopes others will follow suit.

Andrew Kerr, who spoke to the Guardian about wanting to create a UK eel rewilding programme, is having discussions with the relevant government ministry in January about the feasibility of getting rewilding permits sorted for this coming eel season.

Since we reported on the proposals to extend Barcelona airport, threatening neighbouring wetlands and a wealth of biodiversity, the plans have been put on hold. The future of the red wolf in North Carolina still hangs in the balance but the US Fish and Wildlife Service says it is planning to release nine wolves from captivity this winter. And an experimental feeding programme has been approved for Floridas manatees, after a record year of deaths.

Over the coming weeks, we will follow up on some of the stories that we covered during 2021 in more depth, but in the meantime, you might like to take a look at some of our favourite articles from the year that celebrate the planets beautiful and intricate biodiversity: why we need to stop treating soil like dirt; the wonderful world of fungi; the value of dead wood; how a wild night out could help you reconnect with nature; and, lastly, a lesson in why some things are worth waiting for, especially when they turn out like this

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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2021: when the link between the climate and biodiversity crises became clear - The Guardian

A LAB leak from Wuhan is now the "more likely" cause of the Covid pandemic, experts have told British MPs.

Dr Alina Chan, a genetic engineering expert,said she was "very confident" the truth will eventually come out about the origins of the deadly bug.

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The molecular biologist at MIT and Harvard believes a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is "more likely than not" after two unsuccessful years of searching for an animal host.

The WIV - a high security facility specalising in coronaviruses - has been in the eye of the storm as questions rage over whetherCovidcould have escaped from its lab.

BothChinaand the lab have furiously denied any allegations,but evidence of a lab leak has been piling up over the last year as scientists, researchers and governments hunt for answers.

Dr Chan told the Science and Technology Select Committee: "I think the lab origin is more likely than a natural origin at this point.

"We all agree there was a critical event at the wet market that was a superspreader event - caused by humans. But there is no evidence pointing to a natural animal origin of the virus at that market."

And Dr Chan said she was "very confident" the truth about Covid will eventually emerge in years to come - when it's safe for whistleblowers to step forward.

"We've seen from previous cover-ups that it just takes time, because right now its not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward," she said.

"It might be five years from now, it might be 50 years from now, but we live in an era where there is so much data being collected and stored that it will eventually come out."

Matt Ridley, who co-authored Viral on the origins of the pandemic with Dr Chan, also said a lab leak was now the most likely origin - and urged investigators to find out in order to prevent the next pandemic.

The science writer told MPs: "I also think its more likely than not because we have to face the fact after two months we knew the origins of SARS through markets.

"After a couple of months we knew MERS was though through camels. In this case, after two years, we still haven't found a single infected animal that could be the progenitor of this pandemic, and thats incredibly surprising."

Some scientists have also argued Covid was genetically modified by humans - with one claiming it was "ready made" to infect humans when the virus first emerged in Wuhan.

Dr Chan told MPs: We have heard from many top virologists that a genetically engineered origin of this virus is reasonable - so it's worth investigating - and that includes virologists who made genetic modifications to the first SARS virus.

We know now this virus has a very unique feature, called the furin cleavage site, that makes it the pandemic pathogen it is. So without this feature there is no way this virus would be causing this pandemic.

A proposal was leaked showing that EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were developing a pipeline for inserting novel furin cleavage sites - these genetic modifications.

"So, you fund these scientists who said in early 2018 Im going to put horns on horses and at the end of 2019 a unicorn turns up in Wuhan city.

"It's a striking coincidence that needs to be investigated."

Mr Ridley added: "We need to find out so we can prevent the next pandemic.

"We need to know whether we should be tightening up work in laboratories or whether we should be tightening up regulations related to wildlife markets.

"At the moment we are really not doing either.

We also need to know to deter bad actors who are watching this episode and thinking that unleashing a pandemic is something they could get away with.

We know now that experiments were being done at Biosecurity Level 2 in Wuhan that resulted in 10,000 times increases in infectivity of viruses and three or four times their lethality.

"The important thing is to stop doing these experiments that are risky.

Meanwhile, Richard Horton, The Lancet editor-in-chief, said the lab leak was "a hypothesis that should be taken seriously and needs to be further investigated".

But he told MPs he agreed with the previous conclusions from the World Health Organisation that it was "extremely unlikely".

Dr Chan and Mr Ridley said they both believed the lab leak was an accident - rather than deliberate.

The experts had already warned that terrorists who are considering using bioweapons will have noted how quickly China was able to dismiss the idea of a lab leak - and avoid scrutiny.

It means militants will now know how easily they can "get away" with the release of a cataclysmic bioweapon, knowing the source of the attack will likely never be found.

China has repeatedly stated it is not responsible for the global pandemic and dismissed accusations from those who say the virus was manipulated by humans.

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Wuhan lab leak now the most likely cause of Covid pandemic and the truth WILL come out, experts tell MPs... - The US Sun

In May 2020, Elon Musk tweeted Take the red pill. It was unclear precisely what he meant, but those with enough cultural context had a decent idea of what he was trying to say. That hunch was then affirmed by the enthusiastic response of Ivanka Trump, whose father became president at least in some minor part because of forces associated with the symbol that Musk was evoking. She quote-tweeted him cheerily: Taken! she said.

Less than an hour later, Lilly Wachowski chimed in. One of the two directors responsible for The Matrixthe film in which the modern concept of the red pill originatedWachowski didnt appear very pleased with these people, neither in general nor in regard to how they were continuing the strange legacy of her metaphor. Fuck both of you, she replied to Trump. The way they were tossing her symbol around was likely a lot different from what she and her sister, Lana, had in mind when, more than two decades earlier, they composed the indelible scene in which Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) has to choose between taking a blue pill, which would cause him to remain who he is in a fabricated reality, or a red one, which would officially transform him into Neothe chosen one, who alone could take down the grand enslavers and illusion makers.

The widely viewed Musk-Trump-Wachowski social media dustup, a collision between celebrities of the industrial, political, and entertainment variety, traveled into territory where those three camps tend to get pretty muddied. The pills symbolic journey has been long and gnarly, and has led to more confusion than clarity. What, really, did the red pill signify anymore? What was it supposed to be telling us about the world? Musks Twitter feed is typically defined by his anti-tax, anti-regulatory libertarianism, or by his often overbearingread: relatabledesire to be loved for posting clever memes. Ivanka Trump is a member of the family who was in the White House at the time and remains at the heart of the Republican Party. Wachowski is a prestigious transgender filmmaker whose largest work has become one of the defining cultural and political texts of the 21st century.

But this rhetorical clash between three very different, very famous people was only the latest occurrence in a long and still-active war of signifiers. For 22 years, there has been a semiotic battle over how to define the ideological import of the thing that Morpheus handed to Neo so that he could free his mind and fly. Wachowskis only semi-direct response to how the pill has been co-opted for two decades by misogynistic and reactionary internet communities (and eventually by professional conservative media) is still just that terse response on social media. But promotional material for The Matrix Resurrections, out this weekthe trailer, the posters, the musichas pills, both red and blue, everywhere. Beyond once again entertaining us in a singular way, Resurrections stands as a chance to reflect on the metaphorical chaos its predecessors inadvertently wrought.

The red pill was first presented to us 31 years ago. In Paul Verhoevens 1990 sci-fi epic Total Recall, protagonist Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is offered one in order to snap out of a professionally induced dream state. If he refuses, he is told, he will be stuck in a permanent psychosis, strapped down in a chair and lobotomized in the actual world as his consciousness remains trapped within his exciting-yet-horrifying fantasy. Quaid pretends to take the pill to assuage his enemy, but then whoops his ass, spits the pill out, and continues his fact-or-fiction odyssey in a way that is, by design, never resolved.

Verhoeven and his screenwriters intention in presenting us with this prickly ambiguity was, presumably, to craft a probing speculative narrative that inspires us to consider how blurry our sense of reality may become as technology advances to a point that can make absurd fabrications seem real. Such notions were first approached in the films source material, Philip K. Dicks story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale; Dicks story about the possibility of memory implant technology (which is ultimately less ambiguous than the movies take on the subject) does not contain the red pill.

The pill itself is one of the less-remembered elements of Total Recallits hard not to be overshadowed by things like, you know, this. The Wachowskis, though, noticed the red pill, described in Verhoevens film as a symbol of your desire to return to reality. Nine years later in The Matrix, Neo takes one during a now-iconic philosophical-crossroads moment. When Morpheus offers him a choice between it and the blue pillthe numbing complacency drug to the red pills freeing, journey-starting powersNeo does not spit it out like Quaid. There is no ambiguity about it: Our protagonist, by swallowing the red pill, will reveal for himself and the audience the true nature of this universe. And as it turns out, he has been trapped, along with basically every other person, inside of a giant energy-harvesting tower of goo chambers, pinned into a spell that convinces him that his boring cubicle-bound existence is real.

Its a simple yet powerful premise: live a dreary life, meet a weird guy, take a drug he gives you, discover the truth that your mundane existence is all just a setup. Neos dismal day-to-day state was not his own fault; his life had been rigged this way. But the pill would show him how to begin reconstructing his reality. Neos pilled awakening leads to his becoming the baddest of all asses: the no. 1 cool fighting guy, a nobody turned messiah who learns to destroy all forms of enemies via flying, martial arts, an otherworldly mastery of weapons, and even the re-creation of elemental matter on the fly. By the end of the Matrix trilogy, he has defeated the ultimate malignant virus (Agent Smith) and brokered peace between man and machine with both his fists and his imagination.

The Matrix was a surprise megahit, netting more than $460 million worldwide. Roger Ebert called it a visually dazzling cyberadventure, full of kinetic excitement. But The Matrix didnt immediately become a founding text for theories on our technocentric modern world. Information didnt move the way it does today, Joshua Topolsky, a tech and culture journalist, says. People were really concerned about the world ending because of the Y2K bug, which was probably a bigger part of the Matrix hype than anything about the red pill.

But the presence of the internet grew massively in the wake of The Matrixs 1999 release. In a kind of confirmation of what the movie presaged, the World Wide Web became what it still is: the closest thing that the world knows to those towering goo chambers. Here is where we place our brains daily to understand the world around usa process that, paradoxically, often involves our becoming more confused about it. In the early 2000s, forums rose specifically to discuss one of the major components of the movie: ever-evolving artificial intelligence. There were now open-ended internet conversations that previously had happened only among academics who studied this subject full time. They wondered whether AI would come to enslave usas it does in The Matrixor enhance us.

The title of the seminal AI chat board SL4 is short for Shock Level 4. A Shock Level, an explainer page on the sites archives says, measures the high-tech concepts you can contemplate without being impressed, frightened, [or] blindly enthusiasticwithout exhibiting future shock. The site inventories these concepts, clarifying that Shock Level Zero or SL0, for example, is modern technology and the modern-day world. SL1 includes virtual reality and e-commerce, a.k.a. cryptocurrency and NFTs, which still shock and befuddle many today, including Keanu. The rest remain beyond our current day-to-day technological imagination: SL2 is interstellar travel, medical immortality or genetic engineering, SL3 is nanotech or human-equivalent AI, and SL4 is the Singularity.

The Singularity referred to by SL4 is the concept of a profound technological shifta hypothetical inflection point at which artificial intelligence develops past the control of humans, and technological growth becomes irreversible, exponential, and infinite. This occurrence is embedded in the backstory of The Matrix and in a lot of popular sci-fi. In the world of Dune, for instance, the events take place thousands of years after a human rebellion against overgrown AI called the Butlerian Jihadan antidote to a singularity of sorts, which results in a new moral code that bans the creation of thinking machines by penalty of death. (The full arc of the original Matrix trilogy can be understood, to some extent, as a kind of Butlerian Jihad.)

The tenor of debate on SL4 was dry, intense, humorless, and deeply under the radar. This community evolved, though, producing offshoot sites like Overcoming Bias and LessWrong, which launched in 2006 and 2009, respectively. These were blogrolls featuring voices whounlike the authors of The Matrix, Dune, The Terminator, or Total Recalladvocated for the enthusiastic embrace of quickly improving technology. As the titles of the sites suggest, the ruling belief of the groups behind these sites was that AI presented a path closer to utopia and transcendence than to serfdom and suffering; should we accept and live by the terms of machine thinking, we might better marginalize ugly wars and the drudgery of our world. Though these sites didnt exactly explode in popularity, their standard blog format and sense of authorial voice offered a presentation that made them more accessible than SL4.

Much to the chagrin of many in these communities, the sites increasingly appealing templates would soon be retooled. Silicon Valley software developer Curtis Yarvin (known online as Mencius Moldbug) launched a blog called Unqualified Reservations in 2007 that, while similar to these sites both linguistically and in its diagnosis of the problems that humanity faced at large, came to much different conclusions. One of Moldbugs earlier, catchier posts was called The Case Against Democracy: Ten Red Pills. This screed merged AI theorists concerns about the human races collective irrationality with a gobsmacking cultural reference, as a way of introducing Moldbugs neo-monarchist polemic to the world. Moldbug posited that the issue people face is not exactly that they are flawed animals whose thinking can be aided toward better patterns by machines, but rather that too much liberalism has maximized human stupidity rather than any kind of righteous will. As Robert Silverman, a journalist covering the online right for the Daily Beast, puts it: Moldbugs apparent solution to the problem wasnt, Well, lets all put our heads together and try and figure out theoretical tests for a form of AI that doesnt exist yet, but rather, Actually, the answer is fascism.

Take one of Moldbugs 10 red pills, and you will see that we ought to fully enable our executive branchso much so that the president is actually a king. At best, Moldbug writes, democracy is sand in the gears of freedom and law. Imagine that the flying, demonic, squid-like sentinel robots that keep humans trapped within the Matrix are not born from the AI singularity, but from New Dealstyle politics, and you will see what Moldbug is trying to say. Come 2009, Moldbug grew more specific about who the Agent Smith in his thought-voyage is: Weve all seen The Matrix. We know about red pills. Many claim to sell them. You can go, for example, to any bookstore, and ask the guy behind the counter for some Noam Chomsky. What youll get is blue pills soaked in Red #3.

That Moldbug was coming so hard for a political theorist whose ideas were only lightly familiar to the larger public speaks to how niche Unqualified Reservations was. But Moldbug, the reactionary offshoot of a Rationalist school of thinkers who were determined to use technology to augment humanitys shortcomings, was shockingly influential to a small and powerful group at the intersection between political eggheads and tech professionals. He has been linked to mega-billionaire tech investor and world-shaper Peter Thiel for roughly a decade. In 2013, tech entrepreneur and current cryptocurrency mogul Balaji Srinivasan gave an oddly political speech at a start-up event for young programmers that was believed to be directly pulled from Moldbugs work. By 2017, it was reported that Steve Bannon was a fan of Moldbugs. Most recently, Tucker Carlson had Moldbug on his new daytime talk show this past September, where he was called by his birth name and made some familiarly myopic appeals.

In contemplating the lasting impact of Moldbugs red pill co-optation, the spectacle-stirring Bannon is probably the best comparison point to consider. Both men live by Moldbugs truism that nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth; people like Donald Trump, whose campaign Bannon managed, do better in a world where basic textual literacy is lacking. The Matrix trilogy is about insurgents in an oppressive system, but many of those still celebrating its imagery want the president to be much more powerful. The comedy is that the people who want guys like Trump to be in power, [who want] Daddy Trump stepping all over them, are the guys who think theyre radical. ... Its such an incredible perversion of the concept, Topolsky says.

But as influential as he may be to bigger voices, Moldbug has never been anything like a household name. And although some of the tech-optimists who inspired Moldbug met him at his bespoke overlap of Silicon Valley, cool action movies, historical literature, and fascism, many also hated his co-optation: Slate Star Codex, the more contemporary bearer of the blog-torch for the rationalist movement, features him prominently in their Anti-Reactionary FAQ, which is designed to discourage further crossbreeding of their ideas and his.

The Wachowskis, meanwhile, have never formally responded to the use of their core symbolic imagery. (Hugo Weaving did, though.) In the late 00s, such a measure would likely have been overzealous: Moldbug wasnt big enough and neither were other remixes of their movies meaning. It is entirely possible, even probable, that the Wachowskis had no idea these ideas were even blossoming out there. But the Redditization of the red pill was on the way, and with it a reshaping of the emblem too large to ignore.

Its worth considering one of the larger questions of the red pills symbolic life beyond The Matrix: Was the source material ready-made for these types of readings? The most logical answer to that question is that the Matrix movies are, like the work of Socrates that inspired them, or a Coldplay song, written vaguely enough to be a parable for just about anything you want. They do not demand to be interpreted in one definitive way. At the same time, though, there is no denying how some of the fundamental demographics at play might attract lonely men who want to believe that there is something more conspiratorial and insidious at the root of their personal failures, and that there is also a hidden network of truth that might make them powerful enough to fight back. What if an epic action movie showed these men a white single male computer hacker whose voyage was just this? The Matrix could be described as a movie about a Wojak (the term for the animated meme-archetype of an unremarkable man, which you have likely seen online) who takes a pill of enlightenment and becomes the ultimate alpha, or Chadwhich just happens to be the name of Trinitys fake Matrix husband in Resurrections.

That being said, The Matrix is one of the most popular blockbuster action movies of all time. Millions of people have seen it without going there with it. It can simply be, and for most people is, a riveting sci-fi adventure that, while a bit more serious and philosophically loaded than most, is not worth reinterpreting reality over. The Wachowskis bear no real responsibility for what happened next, just like comic artist Matt Furie bears none for his cartoon frog Pepe becoming a Photoshopped symbol of the alt-right.

Nevertheless, in 2012, r/TheRedPill was born. Its not clear whether there is a bridge between the subreddits usage of the pill and Moldbugs. That link is either nonexistent or too old, tenuous, and fleeting to fully trace. An exact etymology of a decade-old meme is an almost impossible task. It could be that these different usages of the red pill were totally separate islands, terraformed by different men, all trying to use the movies power to advance their own truth brands. Or it could be that the ideas within Moldbugs dense, smarmy political science trickled down to more base messaging; most people dont give a shit about Chomsky, but everyone cares about sex.

Anti-feminist evocations of the red pill had been organically trending for years before the subreddit was founded: In 2010, in a comment section on the mens rights activism (MRA) blog A Voice for Men, a user named redpill stated that Women are the natural enemies of men. No matter what anyone says and how good women claim to be, that is just the truth. This will never stop and men will continue under the tyranny of women. r/TheRedPill went on to crystallize sentiments like this, aggregating animosity found in the columns and comments sections of wounded male pride blogs like AVFM and The Spearhead. MRAs merged with the pickup artists community (PUAs) to create a space that was hostile to women in myriad ways. Among the (sometimes incompatible) beliefs of the community: A womans rejection is not really rejection, women secretly want to be dominated, and women are biologically predisposed to cheating. A popular acronym, AWALT (all women are like that) emerged to lazily justify every essentialist claim. In 2015, alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos did an Ask Me Anything session on the subreddit, before going on to infamously say that feminism is cancer in the spring of 2016.

That same year, a documentary called The Red Pill was released, seemingly inspired by the subreddit (though the Dispelling Myths page on the films website denies any substantive connection, asking us to be credulous enough to believe in such a large coincidence). In the movie, a self-described feminist named Cassie Jaye changes her tune as she uncovers the ways in which a supposedly gynocentric world has failed men. Largely funded via Kickstarter, the documentary is believed to be bankrolled for the most part by MRAs from the subreddit and related communitiesit is often, as a result, also discredited, and many of its initial screenings were canceled in reaction to protests of theaters planning to show it.

Before being permanently quarantined in 2018, the r/TheRedPill had close to 300,000 users at its peak. The community lives on to some formal extent, archived on its own webspace with the homepage sporting a Medgar Evers quote: You can kill a man but you cant kill an idea. Tucker Carlson and Republican Senator Josh Hawley seem to agree: Both have recently taken to their soapboxes to deliver speeches that could have been lifted directly from r/TheRedPill about how masculinity is under urgent attack in America.

The r/TheRedPill archive space also stipulates in its FAQ that anyone whose posts are visible in the archive is free to contact the host and have any potentially identifying details scrubbed. This is because known membership on the red pill subreddit has proved to have serious consequencesits founder, according to the Daily Beasts investigative reporting in 2017, was a Republican lawmaker from New Hampshire named Robert Fisher. Among the many misogynistic comments authored by Fisher was the claim that Every woman wants to be attractive enough to be raped. After initially resisting calls for resignation upon discovery of his internet activity, Fisher stepped down a little less than a month after the Daily Beasts reporting. Upon his resignation, he said his behavior was misrepresented and that he would still stand strong for mens rights and the rights of all.

Fishers downfall was part of a larger trend during the Trump presidency in which institutions attempted to grapple with the strange, angry forces spreading throughout the internet (that were often noted as a framework for explaining how Donald Trump won the 2016 election). The amount of causation that toxic new internet communities had in Trumps victory is debatable; some pundits center it, while others prefer to lean on hard data, focus on stray comments overheard in rural diners, or argue about the supposed power of various slogans until they are blue in the face.

But theres no question that the words red pill had taken on broad new cultural association by the mid-2010s. The emblem had traveled well outside of what the Wachowskis envisioned when they decided to wink at Total Recall. Now, it was the central metaphor for a huge hodgepodge of loosely affiliated online communities known as the manosphere: PUAs, MRAs, incels, the alt-right. Taking the red pill had come to mean opening your eyes to a world that was conspiring against men and empowering women, who were seen as fickle, savage, and evil by nature.

Over the past several years, the red pill metaphor has broadened even beyond the domain of men looking for allegorical explanation, taking on more widely reactionary qualities. Likely to Moldbugs delight, it has come to be understood as a more general right-wing conversion drug. It has kind of shifted to becoming this way to talk about making an intentional decision to reject liberal hegemony, says Ryan Milner, who is the chair of the College of Charlestons Department of Communication and the author of The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Its a really resonant metaphor, and lines up easily with a conservative worldview, he says, because of how it can be presented as a counter-truth to what might otherwise look like a losing battle in a culture war.

Media personality Candace Owens produced one of the more famous red pillings of the 21st century when she formed a friendship with Kanye West. Owens was then the host of the YouTube channel Red Pill Black, one of the places where she presented her anti-liberal plan for Black Americans; she also founded the organization Blexit to organize a mass exodus of Black members from the Democratic Party. West was spending time with Owens around then and tweeting positively about her, and in 2018 he infamously said slavery was a choice. In 2020, he tweeted gushingly about her latest book, Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape From the Democratic Plantation.

This racially inflammatory, ahistorical brand of red pilling is just one of the many radicalization variants that have grown from the original subreddit. In September of this year, Joe Rogan displayed another version: I took Ivermectin and its part of my red pill regimen, he said at a comedy club, invoking the symbol for no reason other than to own the libs.

Unlike the sobering effect it has on Neo as he discovers the sockets in his flesh, this pill tends to have the same effect as going too deep into any research hole on the internet without proper barriers. It is much more likely to create further distress, alienation, or just outright absurdity than it does clarity. Have you just awoken? asks Annie Kelly, a PhD student researching anti-feminism and conspiracy theories, with a focus on far-right communities online. Have the scales fallen from your eyes? Or have you been dragged into this really deranged world that is just making things much less clear for you?

Kellys question gets to the heart of the modern legacy of the red pill, and more broadly that of getting pilled, or ingesting something from some exciting new source (Morpheus, or just some guy on the internet) and going on a corresponding vision quest. Frequently, these sessions are more psychedelically paranoid than they are educational. And the internet offers countless opportunities for them. Hari Kunzrus riveting 2020 novel Red Pill depicts exactly such an online neuro-excursion and illustrates a modern truth: To the extent that the World Wide Web is our Matrix, our various pillings tend to take us further into the goo as opposed to out of it. Spending more time online, as red pill warriors tend to do, is a lot different from what Neo did; when he takes his pill, he leaves the sludge to breathe real, fresher air. Much to the contrary, most contemporary notions of getting pilled result in getting lost in the sauce.

Misguided interpretations of the red pill continue to develop and lift the symbol away from its source and further into a right-wing context. A few months after her tweet at Musk and Trump, Lilly Wachowski showed just how far this retconning had strayed from her own creative intentions when she confirmed certain fan theories that the movie was actually composed as a metaphor for her and her sisters struggle with gender identity. She said that at the time the world wasnt quite ready. The character Switch, she explained, was initially meant to bring these themes to the surfaceSwitch was originally written as a man in the real world, but a woman in the Matrix.

Wachowski did not frame her explanation as a direct rebuke to the co-optation of her symbol, but, given the timingand her aggrieved tweet replyit is certainly easy to read it that way. Meanwhile, conservative media, to the extent that it cared about Wachowskis reframing of her movie, held tight to their version. Breitbart called the red pill a symbol of those who have seen past the mainstream media filter and referred to the trans subtext as bullshit pure pandering to those who crave being pandered to: the shallow, stupid, and spoiled brats we call Wokesters.

Based on Lanas previous work with her sister Lilly (who is sitting out for The Matrix Resurrections), we arent in for a straightforward, didactic response to the unfortunate cultural mangling of the pills anytime soon. The Wachowskis prefer to work in more allusive and allegorical ways, and the consignment of two literary novelists (David Mitchell and Aleksander Hemon) as cowriters of the new screenplay wont change that.

The closest we get to anything so direct in Resurrections is when Thomas Andersonwho must again discover his inner Neosits in a meeting with a group of people who offer up their hard takes on what The Matrix (a video game in Resurrections rather than a film) was about. Its a transparently meta moment meant to emphasize the grand folly of audience interpretation.

But even if the new Matrix movie were to plainly reject the red pills current place in the culture, its hard to believe such a gesture would be very effective. There will always be room to impress a wide range of ideas onto mythologically powerful work. And that is what The Matrix is: In a richly realized fantasy, the Wachowskis portrayed anxieties about current and oncoming realities at the end of the 20th century. What if we lose ourselves to technology? What, in our rapidly changing world, can really be trusted? What is being hidden from us, or stolen? Is all of this progress good? But parts of the audience took these concerns in their own directions and stretched the touchstones of the movies to graft them onto more irrational and pernicious fears about humanity. This is simply what some people do with epic, messianic workshave you heard of the Bible?

Whatever exactly Wachowski means to say about the red and blue pills in 2021or about any other interpretations of her workwith the latest text of The Matrix, there will be no way to deter people from taking a movie that makes them feel something and glomming their emotions and ideas from elsewhere onto it; perhaps wrongly, perhaps collectively, perhaps in an obfuscating and destructive way. Simply put, there is no medicine for that.

John Wilmes is a writer and professor in Chicago. Follow him on Twitter at @johnwilmeswords.

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The Twisted, Stolen Legacy of the Matrix Red Pill - The Ringer

Though the broad U.S. market saw a tumultuous ride last week with most of the sectors in red, biotechnology was the biggest gainer. This is especially true as the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index jumped 4.9% last week, pushing many ETFs higher.

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Biotech ETFs That Outperformed Last Week - Yahoo Finance