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

Tim Dillon: "Donald Trump, when he is at his best, does not pretend to be anything other than what he is: a deeply selfish person who would not risk anything for another human being." pic.twitter.com/Bm52wyWJVV

— BulwarkClips (@BulwarkClips) August 23, 2026

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

Scott Greer has dismissed me as an “Alt-Right dinosaur.”

Well, I don’t take it personally. I was involved in that movement far longer than Greer. I first got involved in White Nationalism in 2001 when Stormfront was a small vBulletin forum. I’ve been around long enough to remember the collapse of WN 1.0, the rise and fall of the Alt-Right, Donald Trump coming down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 and the whole ride of the MAGA movement.

I’ve even come close to crossing paths with Scott Greer on his journey to becoming a “highly respected” conservative pundit. I also joined Youth for Western Civilization. I also lived in Virginia and took courses at the Leadership Institute. I also met the lame interns there. I went to Tea Party rallies. I still have my Fell for It Again award from the Tea Party Revolution of 2010 in the archives. I’ve known Richard Spencer for over 15 years, remember the launch of AlternativeRight.com and went to Charlottesville.

The biggest difference between us is that I never really aspired to be a conservative pundit. I hated those people in my youth. I didn’t want to live anywhere near DC. I didn’t want to be on FOX News. I didn’t want to live a double life and write culture war slop articles about how Democrats are the real racists for a paycheck. I decided very early that I would rather go back home to Alabama, get married, have a bunch of kids, get a normal job and live out my life here. It was the best decision that I ever made.

Scott Greer chose to continue traveling that road into professional conservatism. He got a job writing for The Daily Caller in the Obama years. He published his first book called No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education Into Hateful Indoctrination in 2017. He started appearing on FOX News. Eventually, the life that Greer had built in professional conservatism came crashing down in 2018 when he was ratted out to The Atlantic by Katie McHugh who used to work for Breitbart. In Whitepill, he recounts the story of how he was fired and denounced by The Daily Caller, memory holed by the Leadership Institute, blacklisted by FOX News and how his publisher tried to take away his royalty payments. These events and others like the defenestration of Rep. Steve King illustrate how little the world of professional conservatism had changed even well into Trump’s first term.

As a memoir, Whitepill reads like an emotional roller coaster. It begins in the dark days of the Obama presidency when the True Conservatives like Paul Ryan ruled in Washington. The mood brightens as our humble author discovers the rebellious internet culture of the Alt-Right and Trump steamrolls over the True Cons in his 2016 campaign. We fall into despair again after the Alt-Right crashes out in Charlottesville. We become whitepilled again in the core of the book which concerns the post-Charlottesville era. This is when figures like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk mainstreamed a lot of Alt-Right ideas and rhetoric. The climax is Trump’s miraculous comeback victory in the 2024 campaign. Finally, storm clouds appear on the horizon in the final chapter when Greer’s instincts detect a shift in the energy of the online right and senses that another purge might be coming. My only complaint is that Greer skips past his involvement with America First in the Stop the Steal rallies which culminated in the January 6 disaster. He was out there dressed in black doing street theater with Nick Fuentes long after a lot of us gave that up.

I don’t dispute the core thesis of Whitepill which is that the conservative movement has changed over the past decade under the influence of Trump and the Alt-Right. I read the book to see if there was any angle of this transformation that I hadn’t either covered and considered before. There wasn’t. I personally went though my own Whitepill era on this website as I reflected on the disastrous end of the Alt-Right. I was also optimistic that conservatism was evolving in the Biden years. I shared dozens of polls that illustrated that on this website. I did interviews about it. We tracked and covered every new milestone – Tucker’s injection of the term “anti-White” into conservative discourse in 2021, Tucker mainstreaming the Great Replacement in 2022, Trump’s embrace of concepts like “mass deportations” and “remigration,” Charlie Kirk’s surprising new skepticism of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, etc. In hindsight, this was all real and this period lasted from about March 2018 to Charlie Kirk’s assassination in 2026.

As a Southerner, I was always repulsed by the weird side of White Nationalism which I have extensive experience with. I have spent years recounting these stories about activists. Harold Covington never wrote a fantasy novel about President Scott Greer’s mistress assassinating him with a pencil in the Oval Office. I don’t grieve the loss of marginal Alt-Right personalities like Commander Matthew Heimbach or Chris Cantwell who shared an audio file of himself having gay sex with a man last year. Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin have a new manifesto out about deciphering comic books. This is the sort of ridiculous atmosphere on the fringe right that causes people to give conservatism a second look.

The problem with Scott Greer’s book Whitepill is that the book is surprisingly myopic and focused on surface level rhetorical changes. Yes, we can grant that in Trump’s America it is a lot of easier now to operate as a conservative pundit churning out race war and culture war articles without having to look over one’s shoulder. It hardly follows, however, that this is a huge change in mainstream conservatism. Bill O’Reilly waged the culture war for over 20 years on FOX News. He wrote the book on it in 2006. Conservatives have also always engaged in race baiting and dog whistles in Republican campaigns. It was just more muted in the past because of the sensibilities of older generations. It never occurs to Greer in Whitepill that millions of Republican voters have died since 2016 and that the younger voters who have replaced them are more racist and thus stronger rhetoric is needed to activate them.

The Alt-Right’s obsession with metapolitics over political representation and actual results has been easily parried by the conservative establishment. Rich Lowry and Mark Levin are “America First” nationalists now. Lowry has written a book called The Case for Nationalism and condemned anti-White racism. Yoram Hazony is hosting the annual National Conservatism conference in Jerusalem in October. We have a trophy room full of Overton Window awards. It is true that conservatives have adopted the language of nationalism and meme warfare. They have hijacked nationalism and populist energy and funneled it into their golem – the MAGA movement – which they have used to vanquish antisemites at home and the Iranian regime abroad. Alt-Right concepts like “mass deportations” and “remigration” were neutered and reconstituted as traditional dog whistles to excite low propensity voters in the 2024 election.

Fundamentally, mainstream conservatism hasn’t really changed at all. It is still basically a grievance factory. It seizes control of marginalized constituencies like White identitarians or anti-vaxxers and exploits them to push its own agenda. Greer spends a lot of time bashing “Paul Ryanism” in Whitepill without ever noticing that the signature legislation that has come out of 11 years of the MAGA movement was using budget reconciliation to permanently lower the corporate tax rate. MAGA has spent years pushing deregulation and cutting entitlement spending to pay for a $1.5 trillion dollar defense budget and a war with Iran for Israel in the Middle East. It seems that Greer was mainly annoyed by the nerdy affect of Paul Ryan or George W. Bush’s pious evangelicalism and hasn’t been bothered when Trump has implemented their policy vision with the brash, more bullying style of a Bill O’Reilly or a Biff Tannen.

For an Alt-Right veteran, it appears that Scott Greer has forgotten everything he used to know about Jewish power and influence over American politics. It doesn’t come up in Whitepill. This is remarkable at a time when the MAGA movement is self destructing over Israel and the war with Iran. Charlie Kirk is dead and Tucker Carlson has been sent into exile. Perhaps Greer is silent on these issues because Laura Loomer is now in charge of keeping a list for the president of who is naughty and who is nice?

If you want to fit into Trump era mainstream conservatism, your race realism will have to be left at the door. Your dreams of a White ethnostate will have to be left at the door. Your concerns about Jewish power will have to be left at the door. Your White advocacy also has to be left at the door. Your “identitarianism” has to be diluted to the point where you see yourself as having more in common with the likes of Mark Levin, Vivek Ramaswamy and Byron Donalds than, say, Amren, Patriot Front or Return to the Land. I’m sorry but the Whitepill being offered as an exit ramp here still isn’t worth it.

Note: As I said on X, you could say Trump’s Golden Age is like the timeline where Biff Tannen bullied George McFly out of politics with a barrage of insults, became a cult figure and two term president, cashed out and turned over America to his Zionist donors, crypto investors and AI techbros.