Metapolitics Wins: Scott Greer’s Whitepill

3,700 words

Scott Greer
Whitepill: The Online Right & the Making of Trump’s America
Los Angeles: Passage Press, 2026

Scott Greer’s Whitepill is a well-written insider’s account of two triumphs, of populism and Right-wing metapolitics, that have reshaped American conservatism. Greer’s protagonist is the “online Right,” which basically means a constellation of webzines, blogs, and video and social media channels defending forms of populism and white identity politics, while attacking both the Left and the mainstream Right. The story of these triumphs is the “whitepill” of Greer’s title, which is internet slang for good news.

Greer also chronicles the defeat of one form of online Right-wing metapolitics, namely the Alt Right, which failed when it tried to come offline and become actual politics. The backdrop of the whole tale is the political career of Donald Trump.

Scott Greer is the ideal person to write this book. He’s a political journalist with an eye for concrete details that beautifully crystallize larger political issues. He had a front-row seat on the events he narrates, with one foot in the American conservative movement and another in the Alt Right.

Scott Greer arrived in Washington D.C. in early 2013. He began working at the Leadership Institute, where Kevin Deanna (a.k.a. Gregory Hood and James Kirkpatrick) previously worked. Greer fell in with the colorful D.C. Alt-Right circle, which, in addition to some very fine people, also included “a heroin addict with sociopathic tendencies, an unstable taxi driver who couldn’t control his racial outbursts, and one likely federal agent who tried to recruit us into a militia” (p. 87). But surely the worst character was Katie McHugh, a scene groupie who, when she finally washed out, doxed him and wrecked his mainstream career.

From 2014 to 2015, Greer wrote for and edited Richard Spencer’s Radix webzine. He also worked for The Daily Caller. In 2017, Greer published No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education into Hateful Indoctrination (World Net Daily Books). After leaving The Daily Caller, Greer worked for a conservative public relations firm and began writing another book with the support of a Robert Novak Fellowship. But in 2018, he was doxed for his association with Radix, fired from his job, stripped of his fellowship, denounced by his former colleagues, and cast into the wilderness, where he has been trying to relaunch his promising career as a conservative journalist.

Since then, Greer’s primary platforms have been Twitter/X, Substack (where he has a newsletter, Highly Respected), and Revolver News, edited by Right-wing Jew and fellow doxing victim Darren Beattie. Recently, Greer began writing for The American Conservative. This is a positive sign that mainstream conservative platforms are shifting towards a greater openness to white identity politics. But opposition on the Left is undiminished. Thus when two of Greer’s American Conservative columns were reprinted by The Washington Post, they were removed due to kvetching about his dox. Whitepill is clearly part of Greer’s comeback plan.

Greer sets the stage for the emergence of the online Right with a description of mainstream Republican thinking on immigration and national identity. It was overwhelmingly awful. Republicans were committed to amnesty, open borders, and civic nationalism, which basically means: white Americans are fungible with any featherless biped who will swear an oath to American “values.”

This Republican consensus has been completely overthrown, largely due to the confluence of two factors: the online Right and the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Greer also devotes a chapter to the increasing racial polarization and political correctness of the Obama years.

We’ve come a long way since then.

These chapters are necessary to Greer’s argument, because he can’t argue that things have gotten better without establishing just how bad things were. Compared to where White Nationalism was in the year 2000, we’ve made enormous progress. This is easy to forget, given the immense censorship, deplatforming, and harassment we have endured. It is also easy to forget when measured against what we need to do to save our race. Moreover, compared to earlier Republicans, Donald Trump is an enormous improvement. It is also easy to lose sight of this fact, because when compared to what is required to save America, Trump is a major disappointment.

According to Greer, “The Right today bears little resemblance to what I first encountered in 2013, in large part due to the triumph of the pseudonymous world (where I worked in secret) over the established institutions (where I was building my career)” (p. 8).

Greer emphasizes that the online Right was both populist (“a bottom-up revolt,” p. 5) and metapolitical, i.e., about spreading ideas and networking, both of which took place largely online.

What is the relationship between the Alt Right, which features prominently in Greer’s narrative, and the “online Right”? The Alt Right is a current of the online Right, which existed before the Alt Right and carried on after its demise. Between the middle of 2015 and the end of 2017, the Alt Right was the biggest current of the online Right.

The main issues of the Alt Right were white identity politics, America-first nationalism, popular sovereignty, traditional family values, and freedom of speech. The Alt Right opposed anti-whiteness, globalization, immigration, feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. These are the central issues of the online Right today.

What is the relationship of the Alt Right with White Nationalism? The phrase “alternative Right” was coined by Paul Gottfried in a talk to the H. L. Mencken Club in November of 2008. It first appeared online at Taki’s Magazine (then edited by Richard Spencer) in December of 2008.

Richard Spencer launched AlternativeRight.com in early 2010 with start-up money from William H. Regnery II. Regnery was the founder of The Occidental Quarterly, which is a White Nationalist publication. TOQ is both race-realist and discusses the so-called “Jewish question.” In America, TOQ is the standard of White Nationalist metapolitical orthodoxy.

But Regnery wasn’t interested just in orthodoxy. He was also interested in outreach. Thus he founded the H. L. Mencken Club as an outreach organization for White Nationalism, basically a forum where people who were not White Nationalists could interact with those who were.

Regnery founded Alternativeright.com for the same reason, with the same formula. Like the Mencken Club, Spencer’s webzine welcomed many different strands of Rightist thought, but its goal was to promote White Nationalism.

Alternativeright.com got off to a strong start, but after a year, Spencer seems to have lost interest in the project. Eventually, Colin Liddel and Andy Nowicki took over editing the site. Then, Spencer shut it down at the end of 2013 and launched a new webzine called Radix.

The term “Alternative Right” stuck around, however, because it was useful. It created a discursive space where different factions of the Right and the public in general could encounter our ideas. It allowed people to flirt with elements of White Nationalism while maintaining plausible deniability. Thus I used the term at Counter-Currents, as did many of my writers.

From 2012 to 2014, the online Right got a lot bigger due to the confluence of four factors: the Left-Right polarization among libertarians after the Ron Paul 2012 campaign, the protests and moral panics coalescing around fake black martyrs like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the growth of the “manosphere,” and the “Gamergate” controversy. Many new people discovered Counter-Currents and other White Nationalist platforms around this time, and they stayed, because white identity politics made sense to them.

At the beginning of 2015, a new political movement had clearly emerged. White identity politics was at the core of it, including biological race realism. The manosphere also played an important role, because biological sex differences were just as salient and just as powerfully explanatory as biological race differences.

The Jewish question was certainly discussed. But it wasn’t central. There was an anti-liberal element to the new synthesis, but this too was not universal, especially given the massive recent influx of libertarians. Populism was also in the mix, but there were many elitist elements influenced by Nietzsche, Evola, and even the Neo-Reactionaries, another form of the online Right. Nationalism, of course, was part of the conversation. But there were anti-nationalist strands as well. Finally, National Socialism was inevitably in the mix, but it was by no means dominant.

I was a member of the private forum that had given rise to The Right Stuff website and its podcast The Daily Shoah. In early 2015, there was a debate about what to call this new movement. Many favored the “Alt Right.” I defended this choice. A few opposed it, largely because they associated it with Richard Spencer, who was generally seen in TRS circles as a pompous fool. But in the end, “Alt Right” won out, because it was short, made a good hashtag, and was suitably vague. Opposition to Spencer also melted over time, because in the land of the anonymous, even a pompous fool can be king, as long as he is willing to put his face out there.

I was perfectly content with Counter-Currents being an “Alt Right” platform, because that provided us with an audience and a set of questions for intellectual exploration and debate, debates I was confident that we could win.

At the beginning of June 2015, I remember looking down from our lofty metapolitical heights and feeling rather bored with American politics. I wondered what new horror tickets the Republicans had in store for us. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio? Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor? The extreme-Right specter of Ted Cruz?

Then Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president while rejecting the establishment consensus that immigration, globalization, and multiculturalism were sacrosanct. Until Trump came on the scene, no decent politician would compete on these issues, since doing so was seen as pandering to the lowest forms of populism, nationalism, and racism.

The whole Alt Right was jolted awake. Practically everyone I knew coalesced around supporting Trump’s candidacy. The Republican base also loved Trump, because American voters want patriotism, sensible social conservatism, non-interventionism, and a state that will side with the masses against the rich and connected. We want national populism, in other words, and Trump was offering it in a blunt and brutal style that trampled on the speech codes and fake civility of the political establishment, both Left and Right. In the first debate, when Trump uttered the words, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” I knew he was going to be America’s next president.

The establishment hated Trump, including the Republican establishment and Conservatism Inc. He was a traitor to his class. This is the point at which Trump and the Alt Right came together to change the American Right.

On every platform where we were allowed, the Alt Right defended Trump from all comers. We had better arguments, better rhetoric, and better memes. And although we certainly were not nice people, we got credit for brutal frankness about taboo topics. We were also damned funny, another mark of superiority. If you can laugh at the system, you’ve already risen above it. We laughed at our enemies as we ground them into the dirt.

Did the Alt Right “meme Trump into the White House”? We’ve got no proof of that. But we certainly helped. In every forum in which we could combat the Republican establishment, Trump won out. Even former Never Trumpers like Glenn Beck, Brent Bozell, Dana Loesch, and Megyn Kelley came around. Was it because of our arguments? Maybe. If they were paying attention, they certainly heard us, or people who were influenced by us.

However, in all places where conventional Republican ideas could not be challenged, Trump was stymied. I am thinking here primarily of staffing the administration. The great failure of Trump’s first term is that he allowed conventional Republicans to make his staffing decisions. If national populists who shared Trump’s vision were given jobs in the administration, Trump’s first term might have been much more satisfying.

In short, where the Alt Right could be heard, Trump won out. Where we could not be heard, Trump was blocked. Thus I conclude that, yes, the populist metapolitical insurgency of the Alt Right helped Trump win the White House.

To be more precise, the American people put Trump in the White House, because Trump offered the people what they want, for a change. The Alt Right’s main role was to beat back anti-Trump elite opinion.

This is why Trump and the Alt Right were branded threats to liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is the art of not giving the people what they want. Liberal democracy means minority rule, i.e., elite rule. Trump was the candidate of the people, not the elites. And the Alt Right were his intellectual bodyguard and shock troops.

You can order Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.

Greer is absolutely right to point out that just as the Alt Right helped Trump, Trump helped us. He dramatically increased our visibility and relevance. He dramatically accelerated the breakdown of the system.

But it is also important to recognize that we could have done it without him. Those who don’t recognize this fact will cling to Trump long after they should discard him. And my sense is that Trump is long past his discard date.

I operate on the assumption that white Americans basically want what we want. Yet the preferences of the masses do not triumph politically because of an illegitimate system—which includes the media, the education system, and the culture industry—ultimately founded on a fake moral dogma: Identity politics (viz. racism) is the worst thing in the world—but only for white people.

Our job was to chip away at this dogma while creating counter-elites and counter-institutions. The goal is to “wake up” people, overthrow the system that oppresses them, and create a system that represents their authentic interests.

It was a clash of ideas and elites. Our ideas would beat their ideas. Our elites would defeat their elites.

But history isn’t just a clash of ideas and elites. It is a realm of the contingent and unpredictable. The best ideas and organizations in the world can fail if contingent historical circumstances are not right.

But you can’t plan the contingent and unpredictable. By definition, you can’t predict the unpredictable. You can only plan for such things, i.e., be open to them and prepared to exploit them.

In 2015, two contingencies benefited White Nationalism enormously: the European migrant crisis and the Trump candidacy.

Trump, however, was the sort of wild card that we had long been praying for. All around the white world, a pattern has become familiar: an ordinary person, sometimes a minor elected official, would say the “wrong” thing about race and immigration, then he would be attacked, forced to apologize, and finally destroyed anyway by the establishment.

In 2014, I actually floated in our circles the Stand Your Ground Project. What if our movement had the ability to help such people before they apologized and backed down? What if a compelling young lawyer could contact such a person within a few hours of the story breaking, explain to him what will happen, convince him of the futility of backing down, and persuade him to stand his ground?

Since I believe that our system is fundamentally fragile—held together by lies and fear and ruled by idiots—even one person standing his ground publicly could be a turning point. Especially if that figure were already famous, too big to destroy, and not intimidated by the media. You can see where this is going.

Trump turned out to be that guy.

Trump’s most enduring achievement so far has been metapolitical. He broke the establishment consensus about what issues and opinions were politically permissible:

Trump changed the Right in many ways, but the explicitly identitarian politics he brought to the surface are what most separate him from the conservatism that came before. As the name implies, identitarianism prioritizes issues around race, national continuity, and cultural cohesion. Immigration, affirmative action, the fight over DEI, and disputes over historic memory and our national symbols all fall under this rubric. Trump inaugurated a new form of culture war, distinct from the moralistic campaigns of the Religious Right. (pp. 13–14)

But the Alt Right played a huge role in this metapolitical realignment. Trump put these issues in play. But Trump is not particularly articulate, consistent, or deep. And without people like us to fill in Trump’s thoughts, explain their rationale, and beat down his opposition, his political heresies would have been ephemeral.

After the 2016 election, the Alt Right self-destructed.

In the months running up to the election, tensions emerged between the Alt Right and the so-called Alt Lite, i.e., social media influencers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich who liked the energy and moniker of the Alt Right but were hostile to anything that smacked of White Nationalism. They also had large audiences.

This produced a panic in Alt Right circles. People were afraid that the movement would be “coopted” by half-baked civic nationalists. Basically, the debate was between people who wanted to drive out the Alt Lite and the people who saw them as a sign that our influence was growing. Greer describes this conflict as follows:

Some figures, such as Richard Spencer, welcomed their new allies and recognized that a broadening of its boundaries would bring more people into the fold without necessarily compromising its core identity. Others believed this inclusivity would prove disastrous. Counter-Currents, The Daily Stormer, and similar outlets insisted that the Alt-Right should remain explicitly white nationalist and rejected any attempt to water down its message. To them, only strict ideological disci­pline could prevent the cause from being subverted. (p. 122)

This strikes me as inaccurate in two ways. First, Greer mischaracterizes my position. I was one of the people who was arguing against “purging” the Alt Lite. Aside from the fact that one can’t “purge” someone from the internet, I viewed the Alt Right as a tool for White Nationalist outreach and entryism, which was its whole point from the start. Thus I argued that:

The only sense in which the Alt Right is “really” or “essentially” White Nationalist is that it was created as a tool of White Nationalist entryism and conversion. But it can perform that function only if it includes people who are not already White Nationalists. Indeed, they have to find it a safe and welcoming space, not a madhouse of trolling, bullying, and doxing.[1]

I did, however, oppose the people who believed that a “big tent” meant not criticizing people like Milo. You can’t run a metapolitical outreach movement if you are unwilling to state and defend your own ideas. That’s a far cry, however, from threatening your opponents with “gas chambers,” “bogs,” and “woodchippers.”

Throughout history, intellectual salons have been the incubators of radical ideas. And one of the hallmarks of these salons is that they were a space in which different ideological tendencies could meet and debate in a convivial and collegial atmosphere. I saw the Alt Right as an intellectual salon, not an ideologically rigid, hierarchical, would-be totalitarian political movement.

Second, Greer is surely right about Richard Spencer when he started Alternativeright.com. But something had changed by 2016, because the Spencer I remember forced a polarization between the Alt Right and the Alt Lite in an event that came to be known as “Hailgate,” which led me to write the obituary for the Alt Right “brand.”[2] Spencer then went on a campaign to centralize the Alt Right and purge it of people who did not look up to him. The result was a small bunker, not a big tent.

You can buy Greg Johnson's The White Nationalist Manifesto here.

Greer’s account of the downfall of the Alt Right is depressingly accurate. There were two related problems. First, the Alt Right was working beautifully as a metapolitical movement. But some people tried to turn it into a political movement. This led to disasters like Charlottesville. Second, the drive to turn the Alt Right into a political movement came largely from people who wanted to resurrect National Socialism.

This struck me as entirely perverse. We were already fighting an uphill battle to save America. Why burden ourselves with Hitler and the Holocaust? I was perfectly content for such people to circulate in our salon, but when we were actually beginning to make metapolitical headway, I thought dwelling on interwar fascism to be self-defeating.

If Greer ended his story with the Alt Right, this book should have been called Blackpill. It is embittering to contemplate where we would be today without predictable, preventable disasters like Hailgate and Charlottesville.

But Greer takes a broader historical perspective. At the beginning of the book, he showed us how bad things were in the pre-Trump era. Having interred the Alt Right, Greer then shows us how much better things have gotten: “From a distance, it can appear as though the Alt-Right won, even if the New Right that has emerged from it has set aside the movement’s early fantasies and excesses” (p. 13). “National identity and demographics would come to dominate the political conversa­tion. The issues the Alt-Right had fixated on did not die when the Alt-Right imploded” (p. 150).

Among the positive developments are the red-pilling of Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and Elon Musk; the mainstreaming of the Great Replacement, white identity politics, and “national divorce”; and the return of Trump to power with a much more serious administration (before he self-destructed).

True, all of it falls short when measured by what we need to save America. But it is also true that we are far better off than we were before the Trump era.

Moreover, our line seems to be going up from here:

Whatever direction it ultimately takes, the online right will continue to exert influence. At a metapolitical level, the forces that produced it are only becoming more intense. Younger Americans are less deferential to twentieth-century dogmas and less willing to accept abstract universalism as an answer to atomization and the deterioration of Western societies. Younger conservatives, in particular, are not searching for a return to neoconservatism or business-first Republicanism that shirks these larger questions. They are looking for a politics that confronts identity head-on—questions of race and nationality and civilizational conflict. (p. 222)

Yes, there have been some bitter defeats. But overall, we are winning more battles than we are losing, with no sign of stopping or even slowing down. And that, as the book says, is truly a whitepill.

---

[1] See Greg Johnson, “White Nationalism, the Alt Right, & the Alt Lite,” Counter-Currents, January 4, 2017.

[2] Greg Johnson, “The Alt Right: Obituary for a Brand?,” Counter-Currents, November 29, 2016.