Why Is This Highly Respected Commentator Smiling?
The American Conservative · R · trust 41/100
A new book surveys the right’s dramatic transformation since 2015.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... 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…
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