Whitepill: A Fair and Balanced Review

At parties in Washington, D.C., even at the Whitepill release party — which was well attended — while socializing, you test and prod and learn what you can say to whom. Though we supposedly live in a post-woke, post-censorship environment, where doxxing doesn’t work anymore, our culture is still one of fear, suspicion, and worry. This constant vigilance could be a hangover from woke or wisdom gleaned from those awful years. Sometimes it feels much more like the former, and this makes me hopeful that things really have changed.

Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America

Whitepill is a surprisingly short book at 223 pages that aims to offer an account of “...how Trump and the internet shattered the old GOP.” Part history, part memoir, but neither formal enough for the former nor personal enough for the latter, Whitepill is a good introduction to the online right’s history, though it fails as an argument for optimism. Fortunately, the reader can appreciate the first while rejecting the second. Whitepill, sometimes relying on statistics and studies and at other times on Greer’s personal experiences, explores the long arc from the civil rights movement through the variegated factions of the American right to the present, with particular focus on paleo-conservatism, Donald Trump’s impact on the Republican Party, and the alt-right. Named for the meme from The Matrix, to take the red pill and wake up, and the blue pill and sleep, Whitepill presents the history of Trump’s America and the online right from a hopeful and optimistic point of view, tracing alt-right ideas from the humble origins of message boards to the Oval Office.

Greer is at his best when writing about the alt-right and when he relies on his personal experiences and studies to buttress his argument. These sections, which make up about half the book, read best. They are well-argued, cover key figures such as Richard Spencer, and address important moments like the Bronze Age Pervert reading at Claremont. The discussion of the alt-right begins around page 60. Greer lauds, with real sincerity, the freedom and creativity generated by this mostly online movement, but laments its political naïveté and its inability to “read the moment” of the 2016 election and its aftermath. He makes a compelling case, especially in his discussion of “Hailgate,” an episode in which Richard Spencer led a crowd in an absurd chant followed by the Roman salute, which was broadcast on national television and went viral. The sections that don’t cover the alt-right are a bit weaker and less smoothly integrated. Though united by a sense of optimism, they occasionally become muddled and are delivered less adroitly. After his discussion of the alt-right, his next best treatment is of the causes of Trump’s success in 2016. He has covered the subject in short form before, and explains clearly the relationship between white anxiety about disappearing identity, cultural alienation, mass migration, and Trump’s election.

Whitepill is not a history book, does not adopt standard conventions of the historical style, and I would not imagine that, in thirty years, anyone will read Whitepill as a history book. The voice is all Greer, treating the reader to sentences such as “In short, the culture under Obama got a lot gayer,” which, of course, has no place in a history book but does belong in a personal memoir, where informal writing like this excels. His voice, which is blunt and sarcastic, would have more room to shine.

As an example of the book’s weakness as history, Greer mentions the name Christine O’Donnell but doesn’t explain who she is, and I don’t think we ever learn. A few pages later, Greer offers an interesting discussion of the election of Dave Brat, who ran on an anti-immigration platform and defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. The reader learns the full story; the threads are tied up, and they are not left wondering. The problem is inconsistency. Sometimes we get names and stories, such as in Greer’s treatment of Paul Nehlen; other times, only names, like Jason Kessler and Mike Peinovich. If the book were more informal, this might help him manage all these threads. His insulting treatment of certain figures like O’Donnell or Chris Cantwell (“a majorly unbalanced figure”), which is dotted throughout the book (and well-deserved in some places), really belongs in a memoir, and he could raise and dispense with enemies and unnecessary people as he sees fit. In a memoir, just a few more details would fix these inconsistencies, without requiring the more detailed treatment of a work of history.

Additionally, in a memoir, we could have explored a few interesting subcultures: Greer mentioned he found the alt-right through metal music boards and forums, paralleling how others stumbled onto the right through anime and 4chan. But we get no more details. Personally, I would have found Greer’s discussion of metal music rather interesting, as it is wholly foreign to me, but instead, I am wondering who Christine O’Donnell is, and I refuse to ask Grok.

Whitepill is not an objective treatment aimed at historical balance; it is written from Greer’s point of view, which is generally fair but clearly influenced by his own experiences. For example, he writes of the paleocons as a curmudgeonly grandpa rocking on a porch, an image I quite enjoy, but whose historical validity is debatable. Often, he mentions a subject or person and then discusses them several pages later. This is done informally and serves only to move the discussion forward with boilerplate signposting; we even get “in the next chapter...”. Other oddities include a portrait of Obama’s America before a discussion of pre-Trump conservatism, which begins in 1955, resulting in a disjointed narrative that moves forward and then backward in time. A greater emphasis on chronological order would have strengthened arguments. An example is Greer’s discussion of the “Gang of Eight” negotiations in the subsection “The Conservative Case of Cucking,” which would be better situated in the context of Obama’s America rather than appearing much later, after a detour that covers the history of The National Review.

Another order problem, on page 88, he hints at his purge from mainstream conservatism, and on page 147, we finally get the story, very late into the book. Is Whitepill for a person who already knows Greer’s story, and who knows who Christine O’Donnell and Jason Kessler are, and thus it’s fine to raise these references without discussion or very late in the text; or is Whitepill for an uninformed reader, who may find these late mentions, omissions, and time-skips jarring? I prefer Greer’s confidence in the reader to Gad Saad’s insulting assumption of total ignorance, but neither strikes a happy balance. Of course, Greer is a much better writer and more deserving of your attention.

Did I “whitepill?”

And yet, Whitepill did not whitepill me. As Greer recalls,

“The clandestine nature of the Alt-Right heightened these dynamics. We met in secret, spoke in code, and obsessed over operational security (opsec) to avoid being outed. Conferences operated under fake names to evade Antifa. Attendees constantly watched their backs. If a hotel employee entered unexpectedly, speakers stopped mid-sentence and pretended it was a business meeting. Many people used fake names offline as well as on. We saw ourselves as a kind of ideological sleeper cell. This was a self-image far more dramatic than our reality as junior staffers in Con Inc. that wanted an end to mass migration...” - Whitepill, pg. 88

Even now, there are signs on Washington street lamps and power boxes offering money for “MAGA group chats.” Passage’s own events in D.C., such as the one with Steve Sailer, are held in secret. While it’s true that there aren’t antifa on the street outside Heritage, antifa sympathizers now staff most Democrat offices. Much of the right has moved to the positions of the online right, not merely because the online right is convincing, but also because the left has grown more vicious, hateful, and intent on destroying normal American life. I find Greer charming in his humility about the absurd drama of the secret meetings, but I wonder if he’s underselling his own bravery and the bravery of others.

Even on the Passage Publishing site, we can find an “About” page, but no staff directory or employee biographies. Though publicly led by Jonathan Keeperman and speculated to have financial support from Marc Andreessen, we actually don’t know much about Passage. They run, like most hard-right organizations, an opaque operation to protect their staff.

I think Whitepill would be stronger if it dropped the title for another, as Whitepill stakes the entire book on a claim of progress, which is so hard to defend and so easy to attack. Additionally, the strongest elements of the book — Greer’s discussion of the alt-right and the Trump election — could stand alone as a long-form essay.

None of this is an excuse to “blackpill,” but I’m not confident I want to be fully whitepilled just yet. Regardless, I can’t help but like the book, and agree with Greer that, “It’s our fight to lose now. We are in the arena. There are adversaries on all sides, but the power to determine our political fate is in our own hands. And that’s a whitepill.”