White nationalists are on the march as never before. Credit: Getty
Over the last decade, once-fringe views on race and American identity have taken over important sectors of the US Right. These include the belief that people from some cultures aren’t capable of assimilating; that the fate of the country turns on keeping it as white as possible; and that Democrats are importing foreign voters to cement a permanent majority. It isn’t unusual to hear pundits and lawmakers from the mainstream of the conservative movement giving voice to some or all of these sentiments.
White nationalism’s shift — from the peripheries to the center — forms the premise of Scott Greer’s new book, Whitepill. Greer himself has views that can charitably be described as white-nationalist-adjacent. He has written skeptically about color-blindness on the grounds that it “could just mean whites denying their own interests in the vain hope that minorities give up their racial consciousness.” He is also one of the movement’s sharper thinkers. Yet ultimately, the only thing his book proves is the intellectual and moral poverty of this worldview.
In the mid-2010s, Greer was a rising star within mainstream conservative journalism. In 2018, it was revealed that he had written for Richard Spencer’s white-nationalist website Radix a few years earlier, where he made arguments about topics such as the “Jewish role” in promoting multiculturalism. He had already left The Daily Caller for several months before his dox. But henceforth, he would be in essence canceled from movement conservatism.
As Greer points out in Whitepill, his career would have easily survived the revelations about his past today. The things he was saying in 2014 on white-nationalist websites are often scarcely distinguishable from the talking points of major Right-wing influencers and GOP elected officials today. “We know our country’s better than yours,” Megyn Kelly told Haitian immigrants recently, adding: “We don’t want you.… Go back to fucking Haiti.” Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee refers to Zohran Mamdani as “little Muhammad” and demands that New York’s mayor be stripped of his citizenship and deported. Rep. Brandon Gill, meanwhile, has complained about Indians working at 7-11 stores — this, despite his wife being of Indian heritage.
Greer’s new book is a victory lap celebrating what has been accomplished. The title is a reference to taking the white pill, which in online circles refers to being happy about a given state of affairs, in contrast to the black pill, which signifies the loss of hope — both being a spinoff of the red and blue pills made famous by The Matrix. The lesson of his book is that white nationalists have won. But it leaves the thoughtful reader wondering what the point of this race-based politics is supposed to be.
Full disclosure here: I have known Greer since his alt-Right days. I wrote for some of the same websites, though my politics have obviously gone in a different direction. I now reject white identitarianism of all kinds. My doxxing came in summer 2023. For this reason, I briefly appear as a character in Whitepill, with Greer using me as one example to demonstrate that by the time my former views were unearthed, people could survive revelations that they once expressed racist and other reactionary views.
Whitepill is essentially a history of the American Right from the Obama era to the present, with a particular focus on race and identity issues, such as DEI, affirmative action, and, above all, immigration. There is not a lot here that is going to surprise anyone who has followed the news over the last decade: from the rise and fall of the Tea Party to the killing of Trayvon Martin; and from the Henry Louis Gates controversy and the resulting beer summit to then-candidate Donald Trump’s comments on immigrants in his 2015 launch speech and the summer of George Floyd.
The bulk of the book might be a valuable read for young people not old enough to remember the Obama era, or those who only recently started following politics. But for those of us who have kept up with current events over the last 10-plus years, particularly developments on the American Right, there is limited value in most chapters.
The point of the book is to demonstrate just how much has changed on the Right. The most interesting parts are the author relaying his first-hand account of the transformation. In 2015, Greer was one of the first people at The Daily Caller to support Trump. It marked him as an outcast, and colleagues thought that it was a joke; he built a “wall” of books around his desk in order to show his support for Trump and his signature border proposal.
Greer’s takeaway from this is that the mainstream movement’s stalwarts in those days were “lame.” He was, and remains, outraged that conservative activists and journalists were uninterested in race and immigration issues, instead stressing deregulation and free markets. Greer’s alt-Right circle, in contrast, featured “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.” For those who weren’t there, it is useful to stress just how marginalized white identitarian attitudes and adjacent opinions were across the political spectrum in the pre-Trump era.
Now, Greer asserts, most prominent figures in conservatism share at least some of these views. This might be an overstatement. Much of the Christian Right remains theologically immune to the racist appeal, and likewise, there are many who haven’t adopted based signalling and racial slurs in the populist bargain. Nevertheless, as Trump’s hard-line immigration positions and the quotes above from the likes of Kelly and Ogles demonstrate, the author is correct about the general direction of travel.
He celebrates Tucker Carlson for bringing identity issues to the forefront of American conservatism, and the transformation of the late Charlie Kirk, spending five pages documenting his move toward immigration restrictionism and a pinched account of national identity. He correctly points out that Republican voters are motivated primarily by identity-related concerns, rather than economics, which is what created an opening for Trump and more intellectually minded nativists to take over the party. He’s backed up here by a large amount of political science data, which I’ve written about before.
That doesn’t mean that Greer is completely satisfied with the direction of modern conservatism. He thinks it’s too conspiratorial, for one thing. Indeed, it was Greer who coined the term “Insane Clown Party” to highlight Republicans’ growing fascination with topics like UFOs and Satanic pedophile rings. He also has little patience for religious debates on the Right, perhaps limiting his intellectual horizon, since American Christianity has at various points — and sometimes simultaneously — challenged and upheld white supremacy.
The bigger question is: what exactly is all this for? This is the question that Whitepill never answers, and Greer’s other work likewise avoids. This book is meant to convince those who, like the author, reduce identity and belonging to race and then prioritize racial identity concerns over all else. For Greer, other issues (such as economics or foreign policy) are of secondary importance at best. They matter only insofar as they might promote immigration restrictionism and defeat multiculturalism. Greer doesn’t like conspiracies or abstract intellectualizing as part of a political movement mainly because they make it more difficult to achieve his larger goals.
What Greer never does is explain what exactly he believes and why. His project is an insular one, proceeding from the unstated assumption that the reader will agree with him on the importance of winning on the issues white identitarians care about; all that’s left are discussions of tactics and strategy. For example, when Greer addresses abortion, it’s from the perspective that those focused on the issue are causing dissension within the Republican coalition. He calls on pro-lifers to be grateful for what Trump has done, and calls on the Right to tune them out as political liabilities. But what if you actually believe that abortion is murder? He makes no attempt at explaining how abortion issues should fit into the white-nationalist project, except from the perspective of its political impact.
To be sure, he’s honest enough to sometimes acknowledge that his own preferred policies are unpopular, as he does on mass deportation. But in that case, he explicitly says that Trump should do it anyway (which is what pro-lifers want on abortion, too). There’s something unprincipled about this approach to political analysis, though one can easily discern the underlying logic. Greer wants to submit to public opinion — that is, until the need comes to get tough on immigration. Because on that issue the Republicans need to forge ahead and do what’s best for the country.
In order to piece together why Greer believes that identity issues need to be paramount, one has to gather stray comments. He tells us that H-1B visas threaten to harm American workers, and that mass immigration has made cities like Minneapolis “hotbeds of Third-World corruption and politics dominated by ethnic spoils.” But he doesn’t elaborate on these points. One might ask for some data on the H-1B issue, or whether Somalis in Minneapolis, an extremely small portion of new arrivals to the country, are representative of immigrants as a general matter. Mainstream MAGA pretends that immigration leads to much higher levels of crime, but Greer seems aware that this is not true in the aggregate. By not taking up such false narratives, he is left with few tools to make the positive case for his hardline positions.
It is important to note that Greer rejects the label of white nationalist. To him, though, this rejection simply implies that he accepts the American system and doesn’t aspire to form an ethnostate. However, this is precisely what I would call a worldview that prioritizes maintaining white demographic dominance and cultural primacy. Why else consider every single form of immigration a threat, and why else should anti-white racism, especially after the vibe shift, remain such a high priority? Greer doesn’t explain, but it all makes sense in the context of a racialist worldview.
To Greer, the victory chronicled in Whitepill means that today we can just call this conservatism. It follows that white identitarianism has so successfully swept the Right that Greer doesn’t even feel the need to make the first-order case for his beliefs.
But that leaves him vulnerable to all sorts of counterarguments (which, again, he doesn’t even bother acknowledging). Even as white identitarianism has ascended, one justification after another for limiting immigration has fallen by the wayside. It was once said new arrivals would boost crime. But crime has consistently fallen — despite some localized disorder and anecdotes that the Trump 2024 campaign pointed to as representative of the effects of immigration (they weren’t, statistically speaking).
Then there is the argument about migrants pushing the electorate to the Left. In her 2015 book ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole, Ann Coulter argued that nonwhites can be expected to vote Democratic indefinitely into the future; hence, conservatives had to close the border if they hoped to win on any other issue. In 2024, however, naturalized immigrants may well have voted majority-Republican. Now, conservatives are reduced to complaining about competition for tech jobs, despite tech workers not making up any significant part of their coalition, and the American tech industry being such an overwhelming success that it is powering the rest of the economy and putting us at the forefront of the most important industry in the world.
Some of the MAGA faithful may not see such points clearly, but Greer does. Still, he refuses to intellectually tackle them. Instead, the emotional response to immigration comes first, and justifications are simply put forward on an ad hoc basis. As the intellectual case for restrictionism gets weaker, conservative attachment to nativism only becomes more firmly entrenched.
The main premise of Whitepill is undeniably true. On the whole, Republicans have moved toward white identitarianism. This being America, even many of our white identitarians are diverse, with names like Nick Fuentes. But there is practically no reflection here on why that is something to celebrate. The worldview presented lacks any larger conception of the good, or a belief in a politics that places an emphasis on virtue.
To take one example, while Greer laments immigration as a threat to American culture, he is indifferent to the fact that it was his political hero, Trump, who attempted an insurrection. Greer plays down the events of Jan. 6 and ignores the larger context of what we know about Trump trying to overturn the results of the presidential election he lost. What matters is Trump, and the larger Republican Party, as vessels for demographic politics. Even when Greer admirably breaks with his own tribe, as in the case of his denunciation of conspiracy theories, it is a matter of political pragmatism in the service of his larger goals, rather than due to a commitment that honesty and truth are valuable for their own sake.
Greer has some virtues that are rare among his political tribe. He doesn’t, for example, drink the entire glass of MAGA Kool-Aid. He doesn’t believe that Haitians eat dogs and cats. Nor does he conveniently adopt socialist economic views to oppose immigration. Nonetheless, he is an avatar of a strand of conservatism that centers white identitarianism — without being able or willing to articulate why.
As a pragmatist, Greer understands that identity politics for white people has worked, and can continue to be a powerful force into the future. But the sad intellectual and ethical state of his type of Right wing politics, and the hollow nature of his attempts to defend what it has become, show why even smarter versions of white identitarianism are degrading and ultimately morally poisonous.
Richard Hanania, an UnHerd columnist, is the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and blogs at Substack.
RichardHanania