People don't generally reach adulthood redpilled. As a child unable to process language you are naturally in tune with reality, but as you grow up media is inescapable. You had to wake up one day near or at adulthood, and actively realize that things are not as the media presents and that your impressionability has been abused, and then you made a difficult transition in your thinking that alienated you from comfortable, sluggardly patterns of consumption, and probably from your friends and family to some degree. Normies could be defined as people who never made the transition from the sort of person who consumes political and current events narratives as though they were fiction, to one who actively questions these things. >the apparent disparity between anti-establishment '90s narratives versus today's pro-establishment 'radicals' A lot of media in the '90s was quasi-libertarian, in that it opposed the perceived authoritarianism of what were basically the tattered remnants of a functional, white society. "Working a day job is, like *square*, maaaan!" You saw this over and over: In The Matrix, Neo gets a harangue from his boss because he was up too late truth-seeking on the internet. In American Beauty and Fight Club, Lester Burnham and The Narrator both quit their jobs, securing large sums of money in the process, through fraud— but because it was fraud against "the man", it's portrayed as bold and courageous instead of as, you know, *theft.* We weren't meant to identify with our own society and our own people and our own well-being. We were instructed, rather, to pursue a sense of individual identity through consumption of narratives. The narratives back then were, again, not very good. The "Degeneration X" phenomenon from pro-wrestling, for example, is useful to study because it's a dumbed-down carnie version of the *literally degenerative* messaging you saw everywhere. The Matrix was "anti-establishment", but it was also meant to include a tranny, and the sequels were purely degenerate, and these movies were created by two degenerates who are now both trannies. You could also look up James Rolfe's take on the Mortal Kombat phenomenon. He gets dangerously close to pointing out the same things, though he just phrases everything as a question. So going from that sort of narcissistic, anti-civilizational pablum to the current state of affairs turns out not to be that far a trip. The few of us who had a sincere attachment to truth in itself (rather than repeating what we were told because it feels good to be a "rebel" or whatever) were banned from reddit and everything else because we wouldn't shut up when the truth became inconvenient to the establishment.