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Guest Post by Eòin Tierney
Almost everyone is familiar with the idea of the red pill and the blue pill from the movie The Matrix. The red pill, offered to the character Neo, who has already been nagged by doubt about things, is the pill that will wake him up to reality, to the actual character of the Matrix—“the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth”—and the blue pill will enable him to continue living in false delusions about the world, believing “whatever you want to believe.” In internet lingo, starting in the mid-2000s or so, taking the red pill came to mean rejecting mainstream narratives that are treated as sacred or unquestionable, especially regarding race and group differences, sex and gender, and immigration and demographics. Taking the blue pill therefore means accepting the various stories spun by the mainstream media and other officially sanctioned authorities about such things.
Fewer people are familiar with the terms “white pill” and “black pill.” Scott Greer’s recently published book, Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America (Passage Press), offers these definitions:
In internet parlance, a “white pill” (often condensed to whitepill) refers to an optimistic outlook or a development that restores a sense of possibility. It’s a variant of the more famous “red pill,” taken from the film The Matrix, which refers to waking up to the real problems of the world. In some cases, that awakening leads to the “black pill,” a pessimistic conclusion that the future is closed off from improvement and that serious change is impossible. (emphasis added)
Greer then goes on to describe the overall argument of his book:
The story of the Right’s radical transformation in the Age of Trump is unquestionably a whitepill. Trump and the online movement that came to be known as the Alt-Right are the key actors in this story. Absent their collision with mainstream politics in the mid-2010s, conservatism would still be dominated by the managerial, post-identity politics of figures like Paul Ryan.
Greer’s Whitepill, then, is cautiously optimistic without being fantastic, utopian, or delusional. It begins with having swallowed and thoroughly digested the red pill about the demographic transformation of the country, the institutional reality of anti-white hostility, and what he characterizes in his book as the utter failure of the pre-Trump conservative, open-borders, amnesty-first consensus. In the long stretch from the collapse of an older conservative orientation through the Bush, McCain, and Romney years, to be “conservative” meant “to be obsessed with platitudes about the free market and limited government (except, of course, in matters of defense). The ‘national question,’ encompassing all the thorny issues around race and immigration that became the centerpiece of the Obama presidency, was ignored outright or discussed only within the bounds of liberal sensibilities.” Establishment conservatism—“Conservatism Inc.”—wanted to move beyond identity issues entirely; it “would rather capitulate on race and immigration than risk” its “moral standing” with the liberal media. The collision of, among other things, the Alt-Right, the “Alt-Lite,” and Trump with mainstream politics in the mid-2010s is itself the white pill: what had been confined to anonymous forums and marginal publications forced its way, by turns, into the center of American politics, displacing the limp-wristed, mealymouthed, post-identity “conservative” managerialism and making it possible, for the first time in living memory, to “publicly name” those realities without flinching or shame.
Greer has himself lived through the transformation he describes; indeed, as he puts it, he is probably “the central figure in this story.” He doesn’t “try to hide from it or feel ashamed of how [his] career has unfolded.” After a rising path through the Leadership Institute’s news site, Campus Reform, The Daily Caller, a successful book, and regular Fox News appearances, he was doxed in 2018 when a former Breitbart acquaintance, a lady, supplied The Atlantic with details of his earlier anonymous work as a writer and editor at Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal—articles that, he emphasizes, contained “no racial slurs, calls for violence, or endorsements of fascism.” This cost him his job, a Robert Novak Fellowship, and access to mainstream outlets; The Daily Caller publicly called him “insane.” Yet the arguments he advanced were simply a few years ahead of what eventually became conventional conservative discourse since “Donald Trump descended from the elevator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president.” Those arguments, once enough to destroy his career, have since become conventional conservative positions. That is Greer’s white pill.
To be clear: Greer is “not a white nationalist.” From a young age, he writes, he thought “neo-Nazism was idiotic and a dead end.” Whatever might be said about a previous version of America—which, at least implicitly, if not in some cases explicitly, endorsed the idea of a predominantly white nation “in law and custom”—“after World War II, that worldview,” for reasons Greer discusses mainly in passing, stopped being considered politically relevant or salutary. From that point on, Greer tells us, “white nationalists tended to be economically downscale with a host of problems including criminality and drugs.” White nationalism, at the very least, became stigmatized “as politically irrelevant and morally repulsive.” Any “public-facing white nationalist movement ended in embarrassments and criminal prosecution.”
This does not mean that they were wrong about everything. They “were not wrong,” for example, “to sense that something had gone badly off course in postwar America. Urban crime and the collapse of public schools”—together with the vile practices of the block-busters—”drove millions of whites from the cities”:
Mass immigration was reshaping the country’s demographics at a pace few had anticipated. Outsourcing of middle-class jobs and the decimation of old working-class neighborhoods created a vacuum for many white Americans, who were simultaneously facing affirmative action and diversity programs to keep them out of opportunities in favor of less-qualified minorities.
Nonetheless, as Greer stresses, white nationalism offered no “serious answers to any of this. Instead, the movement became a refuge for the socially maladjusted.” While “a few figures tried to salvage something more intellectual,” something that treated “the issues of race and white identity” in a “more sober and sophisticated” manner in an attempt to move away from “racial slurs and bloodthirsty fantasies,” it always ran the risk of returning to those baser tendencies and what Greer calls “its performative extremism.”
In the book as well as in his recent writing, therefore, Greer defines the term more precisely: “In reality, white nationalism is a specific and much narrower ideology. It envisions a sovereign white nation, whether through territorial separation or political revolution.” That project is a practical and political “dead end” in the America that actually exists. Ordinary white Americans show little interest in it, and the country remains, at least for now, too stable for the upheaval such a program would require. Yet “white nationalism” is now used so broadly that, as Greer notes, it often means nothing. The label is routinely applied to any conservative—including, of course, Greer himself—who opposes mass immigration or speaks positively about white people as a group. But neither position necessarily entails support for a separate white ethnostate.
What Greer defends, then, is much more modest and therefore much more attainable: immigration restriction rather than open borders, authentic patriotic education rather than anti-white indoctrination, merit rather than racial spoils, and the continued primacy of America’s historic majority. After the transformation he chronicles—from the failures of older white nationalism through the identitarianism of the Alt-Right, the pragmatism of the Alt-Lite, and the eventual absorption of many of these themes by more mainstream conservatives and Trump himself, a full account of which lies beyond the scope of this review—Greer is content to call himself a “conservative.” White nationalism, he has argued, is now obsolete precisely because the mainstream Right has taken up questions of immigration and identity. To embrace the label today, in addition to engaging in silly, impractical, and utopian “fantasies and excesses,” would be a deliberate act of self-marginalization. Liberals essentially seek the same result when they use the term to place any discussion of immigration or anti-white double standards beyond the bounds of polite conversation.
Not everyone is convinced. Richard Hanania, who, like Greer, began with positions adjacent to the more radical “Online Right” but who, unlike Greer, is now a “Globalist Classical Liberal” with a Nietzschean twist, recently published a highly critical review of Whitepill in UnHerd. Greer seems favorably disposed toward Hanania. He has discussed Hanania’s own “cancellation” and reviewed his recent book, The Origins of Woke, on his Highly Respected podcast; Hanania, in turn, has interviewed Greer on his own podcast. And yet—unless I am deeply mistaken—there is something gratuitously nasty about his review of Greer’s book, something that comes across in the very title: “The Poverty of White Nationalism.”
Hanania concedes Greer’s central historical claim: once-fringe views on race, assimilation, and immigration have entered the mainstream of the American Right. Yet he insists that Whitepill reveals the intellectual and moral poverty of the worldview it describes.
Hanania, like Greer, has been candid about his own political evolution. In a 2023 Quillette essay “My Journey Out of Extremism,” he describes posts and comments from his early 20s that “encouraged racism, misogyny, misanthropy, trolling, and overall bad faith,” adding that “part of it is self-loathing towards my previous life.” He attributes those views partly to personal isolation and partly to his determination to embrace the opposite of what he regarded as liberal falsehoods: “If liberals lied a lot about race, I needed to speak ‘harsh truths,’ without much careful thinking about whether I was actually getting at truth or simply being similarly dogmatic.” In his February 2024 Substack essay “My Political Development,” he describes himself as having passed from conventional libertarianism into an “Identity Libertarian” phase before arriving at Globalist Classical Liberalism. He came to believe that classical liberalism simply works and that trying to engineer demographic outcomes is a “fool’s errand” when direct political reforms can accomplish more.
In his UnHerd review, Hanania argues that Greer rejects the white-nationalist label while retaining a “worldview that prioritizes maintaining white demographic dominance and cultural primacy.” In his reading, Whitepill is largely a victory lap written for readers who already share Greer’s priorities. Greer never explains why racial identity should take precedence over other political concerns, Hanania claims, and therefore never answers the most basic objections to his position. Hanania further contends that the successive arguments for immigration restriction have collapsed—crime, he asserts, has continued to fall—and that Greer’s worldview offers neither a “larger conception of the good” nor “a belief in a politics that places an emphasis on virtue.” “Even smarter versions of white identitarianism,” he concludes, “are degrading and ultimately morally poisonous.”
But this summary doesn’t quite capture the tone or method of Hanania’s attack. He begins by saying that Greer’s views can “charitably be described as white-nationalist-adjacent.” Later, he acknowledges that Greer rejects the label, accepts the American political order, and has no interest in an ethnostate—only to announce that Greer’s position is nevertheless essentially reducible to what Hanania himself would call white nationalism. Hanania simply brushes aside the distinction Greer takes considerable pains to establish. Hanania then begins assigning motives to Greer rather than answering him. Greer doesn’t merely fail to make his case; he “doesn’t even bother acknowledging” objections. His conclusions arise from emotion, his political principles are instrumental, and even his opposition to conspiracy theories is supposedly motivated not by a concern for truth but by political expediency. By the end of the review, Greer has become a kind of “avatar” of a morally poisonous politics. This is not merely a severe review; it seems determined from the outset to place Greer back into the very category his own book rejects.
Hanania is wrong about crime, too. It has not “consistently fallen.” Homicides rose by roughly 30 percent in 2020 and remained elevated for years. Crime has fallen since then, at least as far as official statistics are concerned, but a decline from an enormous spike is not the same thing as a continuous decline. Nor do figures showing that immigrants as a whole are imprisoned at lower rates than native-born Americans settle the question. Those figures lump together groups with very different outcomes and obscure what has happened, and continues to happen, in particular places. And moreover: anyone living in certain neighborhoods of Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and many other cities does not need a Cato Institute brief to know that particular immigrant streams have cost untold amounts of money and have brought disorder bordering on chaos, criminal and gang activity (Tren de Aragua), and violence, along with a visible degradation of public space: littering, loitering, and a general disregard for the cleanliness and order that are necessary to a functioning society. The Somali fraud scandals in Minnesota cannot simply be brushed aside as an unrepresentative curiosity. Feeding Our Future alone involved some $250–300 million, and prosecutors now believe that fraud in related programs may amount to hundreds of millions more. Such cases show how corruption can spread through ethnic networks and take advantage of weak or compliant local institutions. National crime averages tell us nothing about that.
But the argument isn’t finally about crime statistics per se, no matter how relevant they might be to the overall concern Greer expresses. Hanania could be right about every number he cites without answering the main question raised by Greer’s book. Classical liberalism may work very well in theory, or on its own terms, and it has clearly had its long day in the sun. But what happens when it no longer has anything to say about whether the historic American nation continues to exist? Hanania regards concern over demographic and cultural continuity as a kind of racial obsession. Greer regards it as a necessary part of politics. Hanania never really confronts this disagreement, at least in his review of Whitepill, whatever else he may have written elsewhere.
Classical liberalism is associated, perhaps most famously, with John Locke. Following the more outspoken Thomas Hobbes, he conceived of civil society as the solution to the natural condition of mankind—the state of nature—where human life, in Hobbes’s famous words, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes and Locke may have appeared to differ on important points, yet they both saw civil society as a way of dealing with the permanent problems of human nature, not as the embodiment of some higher moral order. This approach eventually found its greatest expression in the American Founding and the Constitution. Neither Hobbes nor Locke thought that political life should be devoted to a “larger conception of the good” or held a vision of politics that took its bearings from virtue—a vision that had, admittedly, wrought a great deal of havoc during the religious wars of their day. “There is no such finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers,” Hobbes declared. Locke grounded legitimate government in the protection of life, liberty, and property—natural rights that somehow exist prior to political society and that political society is meant to protect—not in the cultivation of virtue or the pursuit of a shared highest good other than what Hobbes called “commodious living,” or comfortable self-preservation. James Madison later put the point somewhat more practically: “neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control.” The system the Founders envisioned was meant to channel ambition and interest rather than depend upon the moral perfection of citizens or rulers. All this makes Hanania’s complaint that Greer offers no “larger conception of the good” or politics of virtue rather odd. Classical liberalism cannot provide such a vision of politics either. It deliberately leaves the question of the highest good unsettled. At best, it speaks of the nebulous “pursuit of happiness.”
There was a reason for this lowering of political aims. Hobbes and Locke were responding to religious war and Christian sectarianism. If the various Christian sects waged deadly wars precisely over the question of the highest good, politics, they thought, would have to stop trying to define it, at least explicitly. Civil society would instead apparently be devoted to the more humble goals of protecting life, liberty, and property while leaving larger questions of faith and salvation outside the political realm. But for that arrangement to work over the long term, perhaps especially in America, it still needed a people who shared enough of the same history and fundamental moral outlook—one deeper than an allegiance to any particular Christian sect or a fine point of theology—to govern themselves. Decades of anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-white subversion; of mass low-skill immigration; of racial and ethnic double standards; of the abandonment of the older expectation that immigrants should assimilate; of the open endorsement of black criminality; and of the promotion of all sorts of anti-normative sexual curiosities have considerably weakened, and perhaps even destroyed, that common ground. Ignoring these things—or treating them as less important than abstract neutrality—gave us, at best, the weak-kneed, fumbling, apologetic Conservatism Inc. of the Bush–McCain–Romney years.
Classical liberalism, in other words, is not a political form that can simply be detached from a particular people and place. It seems to presuppose an existing order, a people even—that is, something like nationalism—in order to work properly. A society that loses its demographic and cultural coherence will find it difficult, if not altogether impossible, to preserve the trust on which classical liberal institutions depend. This is the problem behind what Greer calls the national question. His book describes what happened when questions ordinary Americans were already asking finally broke through a conservative consensus that had declared the national question “radioactive.”
Greer also warns against two ways in which the Right can go badly wrong. The first is white nationalism, with what he deems to be its ethnostate fantasies. White nationalism of this sort is impossible in the United States as it now exists; indeed, most of the normal white people it claims to represent have “very little appetite” for it, which makes one wonder how it could be anything other than a utopian wish. The other is what he calls the “Insane Clown Party,” or “ICP.” “The pervasiveness of right-wing conspiracism and its downscale origins have had considerable negative effects on its political fortunes,” he writes. “First, it makes the Right look stupid and attracts stupid people. Second, it misdirects attention away from real explanations that would actually strengthen the right-wing case far more effectively than any delusional conspiracy.” Bureaucratic incompetence and affirmative-action failure may be less exciting than space lasers causing wildfires, outlandish theories about the Mossad assassinating Charlie Kirk, or bizarre claims that literal demons control all the bad actors in the world, but they are real. Worse, the clownishness has begun to infect people who hold or seek actual political power. “The ICP now produces officeholders and prominent spokespeople on the Right. The clownishness of Congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace would be unthinkable in another time.” White nationalism and the ICP both discredit the Right and eventually leave their followers blackpilled. Some end up as unwitting dupes for the Left, blaming vague abstractions such as “capitalism” or insisting that “race is, like, a social construct” invented by a mysterious “them” to divide and rule us all.
Hanania calls Whitepill a victory lap. But Greer is hardly declaring victory, and the white pill does not require him to defend everything Trump does. In an essay republished in American Greatness in April, he called the Iran war a “grievous mistake” and “Trump’s biggest failure so far.” He argued that it had damaged the economy, strained America’s alliances, hurt the Right throughout the West, weakened Republican prospects in the midterms, and deepened the split between MAGA and the Online Right. This is difficult to reconcile with Hanania’s claim that economics and foreign policy matter to Greer only when they advance immigration restrictionism or oppose multiculturalism. Some readers may disagree with Greer about the war, but the article makes it difficult to claim that he views every political question through the lens Hanania assigns to him.
Nor does Greer believe the political changes described in Whitepill are secure. Demographic change still threatens the future of Trumpism. The recent successes of Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America surely demonstrate “that even as the Right was gaining political and cultural power, demographic realities continued to call into question the viability of Trumpism over the long term.” The cost of living, unaffordable homes, H-1B abuse, uninhabitable cities, and ethnic-spoils politics in places like Minneapolis, California, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere remain unresolved. “The deleterious effects of mass immigration are still everywhere. In many places in the country, hearing the English language is a novelty.” Congress does little to nothing; the lower courts resist almost every attempt Trump makes to address the national question properly. And even his would-be aggressive use of executive power can go only so far against problems that run much deeper than legislation.
The Online Right, which comes closest to giving Trumpism an ideology, is “hardly a united front.” Its members disagree over fundamental questions and spend much of their time fighting among themselves. Some no longer support Trump. Others have returned to the Alt-Right preference for fantasy over politics, imagining parallel societies, a hostile takeover of the Republican Party with no serious explanation of how either could win mass support. Still others somehow believe that the Right should help the Left keep winning—even vote for it—and that someday, somewhere, everything will work out once enough people become “based.” And then what? The Left will obligingly allow them to revolt? The Right will somehow magically end up winning by losing? “Tweeting about revolutionary fantasies is more emotionally satisfying than the tedious work of voter mobilization, or, even worse, voting for your local Republican candidate like every other normie.”
Greer doesn’t despair over any of this. He distinguishes between the conservative movement, which he shows unequivocally has changed substantially for the better, and the Republican Party, which remains the only available vehicle for winning elections. It is indeed true that the Democrats, as Greer has made clear on a recent podcast, if they win the midterms and then the presidency in 2028, could wipe many of the genuine accomplishments of the Trump administration away. But, as he says, “that’s the nature of politics.” Political gains are almost never permanent: ground is won, lost, and fought over again and again and again. One fights the battle at hand even when the next one may go badly. Again, nothing guarantees that the changes Greer describes will last. But withdrawing permanently from politics into cosplaying and fantasy or blackpilled despair absolutely guarantees that they will not.
What would this mean for the problems facing Trump’s base? It would mean measures with real effects rather than more sermonizing or platitudes: using tariff revenues for direct relief, taxing remittances and returning the money to citizens, seizing university endowments to pay tuition, confiscating property and wealth connected to illegal hiring or housing, and perhaps even offering bounties for identifying illegal workers or fraud. Mass deportation remains the closest thing to a comprehensive remedy. These are not necessarily Greer’s own proposals, but they are examples of what a serious nationalist politics might consider once it no longer regarded the national question as verboten.
Greer’s Whitepill rejects utopianism. It shows the utter necessity of keeping the national question in ordinary politics while refusing to indulge in what he sees as the ethnostate fantasies of white nationalism and the conspiratorial foolishness of the Insane Clown Party. The old apologetic Right is finished, and the questions it refused to face are not going away. For Greer, only a nationalism shorn of these fantasies can defend the interests of the historic American nation. Without such a nation, moreover, there can be no politics of the common good or virtue of the kind Hanania finds missing from Greer’s account.
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Eòin Tierney is a pseudonym. Tierney writes on the collapse of American and European institutions, the betrayal of elites, the deliberate erosion of heritage and order, and the fight to defend Western civilization against decline. This review is a longer version of one published at American Greatness. You can read Tierney’s other work here.
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