Why Is This Highly Respected Commentator Smiling?
A new book surveys the right’s dramatic transformation since 2015.
Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America
by Scott Greer, Passage Publishing, 2026
264 pgs. $34.95
Last month I received an email even more bothersome than the average inbox fodder of a magazine editor. It wasn’t a barely English, 3,000-word cold submission on “the political philosophy of Sydney Sweeney’s subversive sex appeal,” which, come to think of it, would probably do numbers for the website. It was instead about a piece already accepted and published, and it was short.
A POLITICO journalist, Daniel Lippman, was doing some investigative reporting. “Hi, The Post republished this American Conservative article,” Lippman wrote, linking to a Washington Post webpage. “The writer of the article was exposed by The Atlantic for writing for an alt-right website,” he added. Then, the coup de grâce: “Do you have a comment on why you published this? My deadline is 12:30 pm eastern.”
The “writer of the article” was Scott Greer, an author, podcaster, and regular contributor to The American Conservative. Apparently, Greer had written pseudonymously more than a decade ago for Radix Journal, a now-defunct website run by the white identitarian provocateur Richard Spencer. In 2018, as his prior association with Spencer was being exposed, Greer lost his contributor status at the Daily Caller, and Fox News stopped inviting him on for TV interviews.
Lippman’s aim was obvious: prevent a canceled commentator from reentering the mainstream. His strategy: implicitly threaten to tarnish the reputation of outlets that publish him. TAC didn’t find the situation especially threatening or tarnishing. The comment we provided, which Lippman didn’t wind up quoting, noted, “People make mistakes and moving forward from them is the American way.”
Sadly, it’s also the American way to punish people for having committed wrongthink in their early 20s. So, undeterred, Lippman moved forward with his story, and by the time it was posted, he’d engineered his own news hook: The Washington Post, bowing to the smallest whiff of pressure, had removed the article (and an earlier one by Greer) from its new-ish “Ripple” aggregator section of republished op-eds. The moral universe of liberalism had been set back right.
Reading the POLITICO article, I was struck by the quote Greer offered, which differed in tone and substance from TAC’s, and from Greer’s own previous explanation that his views have moderated over the past decade. It was less concessive, more provocative: “The opinions that got me ‘cancelled’ in 2018 are now mainstream conservatism,” he asserted. That line could be repurposed as a decent summary of Greer’s new book, Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America, published by Passage Press.
The one-word main title borrows from internet slang inspired by The Matrix. After you’ve eschewed the “blue pill” of continued complacency and boldly imbibed the “red pill,” awakening to the reality of mass demographic change (or whichever all-encompassing problem has epiphanically dawned on you), another choice of pills awaits. “White pill” refers to new reasons for hope or to the tendency to be hopeful, counteracting the doom and gloom of the “black pill.”
Many erstwhile supporters of President Donald Trump have become black-pilled thanks to the Iran War, the administration’s apparent incompetence, and its rampant corruption, among other depressing developments of the last year and a half. When I first heard about Greer’s book, I had assumed it would be a sustained defense of the second Trump administration against these disappointed right-wingers.
But it’s the subtitle that truly sets the stage. Whitepill is about the transformation of the American right since Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015 and announced his improbable campaign for president. It’s about the online radicals and trolls who prepared the ground for that campaign and sustained its manic energy. Greer maintains that the resulting right we have today is vastly superior to the wishy-washy, blue-pilled “right” that preceded it, but he doesn’t devote much time to arguing that point.
“The story of the Right’s radical transformation in the Age of Trump is unquestionably a whitepill,” writes Greer early on. In the subsequent chapters, he surveys the right’s evolution since the days of neoconservatism’s zenith, giving special attention to one pivotal moment: Mitt Romney’s electoral loss to President Barack Obama in 2012. Back then, GOP bigwigs saw the defeat as proof their party should become more liberal—specifically, by abandoning the immigration issue—to broaden its appeal.
But one political amateur, Donald Trump himself, drew a very different lesson. He intuited that the rank-and-file had tired of technocratic fixations like marginal tax rates and yearned for a fighter who would address what Greer calls “the ‘national question,’ encompassing all the thorny issues around race and immigration that became the centerpiece of the Obama presidency.” Republican leaders were horrified. They were also impotent. Trump proceeded to bulldoze the conservative establishment, seize the White House, and upend American politics.
If you don’t already agree with Greer’s right-wing views, the book won’t persuade you that the last 10 years should fill you with hope about America’s future. And if you’re among those right-wingers who have come to detest the second Trump administration, it probably won’t pull you back into the Trumpian fold. But such acts of persuasion don’t seem to be Greer’s authorial goals. Rather, he aims to make you step back and appreciate the significant leap rightward that American conservatism has taken in the Trump era—and he succeeds.
The book serves as a useful primer on the taxonomy and recent history of right-wing politics. Greer dissects various factions that jostled to win or keep power as Trump vanquished the old guard: the Alt-Right, Alt-Lite, neoreactionaries, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, Never Trumpers, and so on. Greer has coined humorous terms for some factions, such as “FanDuel Americans,” an apolitical bunch who resent liberal scolding and listen to Joe Rogan, and the “Insane Clown Party,” whose conspiratorial weirdness gained prominence after liberal elites lost narrative control.
The Alt-Right looms large throughout the book. “It was not the Trump movement. And, except for a brief period in 2017, it barely existed in the real world,” Greer writes. “It was an online phenomenon, an ideological and aesthetic counter-culture that broke hard from the philosophical premises underpinning the modern ‘idea’ of America.” Its contributions were thus primarily “metapolitical”—pertaining to culture and ideology rather than policy and elections—though its relentless online activism conferred some helpful meme magic on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Greer’s appraisals of the various factions are always nuanced and sometimes surprising. The Alt-Lite—a watered-down version of the Spencer-led Alt-Right—garners some high praise. Comprising influential figures like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, this faction’s pragmatic orientation, Greer writes, “made them vastly more relevant to Trump’s fortunes than the Alt-Right, whose fixation on racial theory and crude provocation left it detached from the tasks of real-world politics.”
By contrast, Greer seems contemptuous of paleoconservatives, who, after the Cold War, duked it out with the warmongering neoconservatives and lost. “Most damaging of all, the paleocons became obsessed with their status as losers on the Right,” Greer writes. “The slights, setbacks, purges, and their enemies’ triumphs became the movement’s focal point. It defined itself as a defeated ideology without a future.”
This magazine has been a leading paleocon outlet since 2002, when it was cofounded by Pat Buchanan, the faction’s most prominent figure. Buchanan had been deeply invested in issues of national identity, but Greer seems to consider him, in that regard, an outlier: “Paleos, with some exceptions, were more inclined to rail against quaint and mostly irrelevant enemies like nominalism, a medieval philosophical concept, than against the Civil Rights Act or mass immigration.”
Greer also suggests that TAC’s antiwar commitments have crowded out its opposition to mass migration. In the endnotes, the one article cited for this insinuation is “Immigrants Against Empire,” an empirical analysis from 2012 of the likely foreign policy preferences of America’s newcomers. Its author was Scott McConnell, another of our cofounders. McConnell boasts a long record of advocating immigration restriction, but also sufficient perspicacity to discern silver linings in gloomy skies.
Another paleocon outfit, Front Porch Republic, gets a thrashing. “The ‘front porch’ was a perfect metaphor,” Greer sneers, “the image of a doddering old man in a rocking chair fixated on his arcane interests while the rest of the political world passed him by.” That’s too good a line to provoke much objection by me, but it does capture a certain vehemence that seems misdirected.
Arguably, the biggest knock on the paleocons is that their genuine concern with the national question, coupled with their sustained enmeshment with the GOP, convinced disaffected right-wingers to continue supporting the party even after it proved repugnant to their interests. Some paleocons, however, notably Sam Francis, did take a radical turn rather than accept the role of beautiful losers, and the Alt-Right drew on their work.
Among the most compelling (and funniest) passages of Whitepill are Greer’s reflections on his time in the Alt-Right. Interested from a young age in exotic right-wing ideas, he gravitated to the faction’s main website—Alternative Right, which was edited at the time by Spencer, and from which the faction’s abbreviated name derives—because of its slick design and theoretical depth. In college he joined the Youth for Western Civilization, got involved in the mainstream conservative movement (or “Conservatism, Inc.,” as it’s derisively known), and landed an internship in DC. What came next was disheartening:
Before moving to DC, I found the overt white nationalism espoused by some elements of the Alt-Right both untenable and bad politics. I believed it was better for the movement to be more pragmatic and broadly conservative. My experience in Con Inc. quickly disabused me of that.
It cannot be overstated how lame the people were who worked in movement conservatism at the time.
In addition to being socially malformed, the professional conservatives Greer encountered in the nation’s capital were fixated on wonky fiscal issues and vocally indifferent to the problems of mass migration and multiculturalism. Radicalized by the experience, Greer began editing Spencer’s new publication, the aforementioned Radix Journal, on the side. “This double life,” Greer writes, “would eventually get me purged from mainstream conservativism.”
The Alt-Right ultimately imploded beginning in late 2017, after the inaptly named, wildly controversial “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The faction’s petty infighting accelerated, its already horrid reputation declined sharply, and several of its luminaries faced a legal reckoning. Greer looks back on the Alt-Right with a critical gaze, but also with the kind of dispassionate regret of someone who can’t disclaim his own formative experiences without thereby negating the person he’s become. Even so, Greer holds a few grudges and relishes the opportunity to throw bombs at personal adversaries:
…we continued working in the conservative movement, to the chagrin of Richard Spencer, who tried to recruit us to work for him for free.
…my colleague Matt Lewis, a mediocre columnist who’d secured a CNN slot through aggressive brown-nosing.
An acquaintance, Katie McHugh… provided information about me and several others to mainstream journalists… She had ambitions of being the next Ann Coulter, but lacked the looks, talent, and intelligence.
Greer, as these quotes illustrate, writes with a certain simplicity and exhibits an aversion to anything that smells like obscurantism. Personally, I admire the style, and appreciate that Greer always has something insightful to say.
Unsurprisingly, Whitepill is a worthwhile and enjoyable book. It fulfills the promise of its subtitle, chronicling and clarifying the role played by the online right over the last decade. Still, whether the age of Trump amounts to a white pill remains less clear, at least to me. As I write, the news seems cause for despair: the Iran War reigniting, more U.S. soldiers dying, a historic oil shock and teetering global economy, soaring debt levels, insufficient deportation numbers, unprecedented self-dealing by the White House, among other black pills.
Meanwhile, the blockbuster film The Odyssey—adapted from an ancient, foundational text of Western civilization—is breaking box office records with non-Western central cast members. At this year’s World Cup, a snooze-fest that concluded as I finished this review, the Western teams, and only the Western teams, didn’t look like themselves. The right now recognizes the existential crisis of multiculturalism, but liberals have already created facts on the ground that make it difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
Moreover, the chaos of the second Trump administration has discredited right-wing solutions in the minds of most Americans, even as the right hasn’t remotely solved the problems it awakened to some 10 years ago. Already, the Daniel Lippmans of the world are feeling more confident, working to shove Greer back out of the mainstream. And already, they are starting to succeed.
It’s great that Republicans no longer obsess over marginal tax rates. But wasn’t metapolitics supposed to lead, at some point, to political salvation?
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