Almost everyone knows the red pill and the blue pill from The Matrix. The red pill wakes Neo to the truth about “the world that has been pulled over your eyes,” while the blue pill allows him to go on believing “whatever you want to believe.” Beginning sometime in the mid-2000s, taking the red pill came to mean rejecting supposedly unquestionable mainstream narratives, especially about race, sex, immigration, and demographics. Taking the blue pill meant accepting them.
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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. (My emphasis)
Greer’s Whitepill, then, is cautiously optimistic. 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 period after the collapse of a much older form of conservatism and 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 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.” After a rising path through 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 for Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal—articles that, he emphasizes, contained “no racial slurs, calls for violence, or endorsements of fascism.” He lost his job, his Robert Novak Fellowship, and access to mainstream outlets; The Daily Caller publicly called him “insane.” The arguments that destroyed 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” ceased to be 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.”
In the book as well as in his recent writing, therefore, Greer defines the term 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 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. He is therefore 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 first 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.
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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 even 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’s claim about crime is too sweeping. It has not “consistently fallen.” Homicides rose by roughly 30 percent in 2020 and remained elevated for years; the later decline was a retreat from that enormous spike, not part of some uninterrupted improvement. 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 tell us little about what has happened in particular places. The Somali fraud scandals in Minnesota are a case in point. Feeding Our Future alone involved some $250–300 million. National crime averages tell us nothing about that.
Hanania’s own alternative is classical liberalism, associated perhaps most famously with John Locke. Neither Locke nor his more outspoken predecessor Hobbes 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. “There is no summum bonum (greatest good) or finis ultimus (utmost aim) 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 “commodious living,” or comfortable self-preservation. James Madison later put the point 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 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. Civil society would instead protect 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 and religious 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 that question “radioactive.”
Greer also warns against two ways in which the Right can go badly wrong. The first is white nationalism, with its ethnostate fantasies. It 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 at all. The other is what he calls the “Insane Clown Party.” “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.
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, for now, 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 which have been wrought and which Greer describes so eloquently will last. But withdrawing permanently from politics into cosplaying and fantasy or blackpilled despair absolutely guarantees they will not.
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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