The White Pill: Why The Right Needs To Laugh, Fight, And Win

I’ve spent enough time in conservative media to watch several political eras rise, fall, mutate, and occasionally crawl back from the dead. I’ve been in the room for more of it than I probably deserve credit — or blame — for. That’s part of why I found Scott Greer’s “White Pill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America” so compelling.

Reading it felt less like reading a book about political history and more like watching somebody reconstruct a building I had been wandering around inside for twenty years. The book chronicles Internet subcultures and political change, and how various movements on the right collided to shape modern, populist politics and open the door for Donald Trump to reshape the American right.

Scott and I came to Washington at different times, but we witnessed many of the same battles. I arrived in the Bush years and eventually found myself producing Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley. I’ve witnessed the brawls over immigration, the Tea Party, the Republican establishment, the rise of Andrew Breitbart, the rise of Charlie Kirk, and eventually the arrival of Donald Trump. Scott came into that world later, cutting his teeth at the Leadership Institute, WorldNetDaily, and the Daily Caller before becoming one of the online right’s more recognizable voices.

His book explains how that online right emerged — and why it eventually became the political ecosystem that helped make Trump possible.

One of the most useful concepts in “White Pill” is the distinction between the red pill, the blue pill, the black pill, and the white pill.

The blue pill is essentially choosing not to see what is happening around you. The red pill is waking up. The black pill is waking up, seeing the problems, and deciding everything is hopeless. The white pill is waking up and deciding that something can actually be done. The white pill people move beyond doom and gloom and see opportunity. 

That distinction matters because I’ve watched an enormous amount of political commentary become addicted to the black pill because doom sells better than optimism. Black-pilling is an affirmation of a gloomy outlook backed by endless despair and continued promises of an upcoming revolution. 

But the revolution never comes. Instead, the black-pill people double down in paranoia and endless conspiracy theories. That’s not a winning strategy. We must not pine for a utopian vision the way the left does. 

There are people who spent 10 years telling their audiences to vote for Trump, only to discover after Trump won that he somehow wasn’t passing their purity test. They had spent years predicting doom, and when they finally got the political outcome they claimed to want, they couldn’t enjoy it — or even recognize it as a victory.

Politics doesn’t work that way.

Most politics takes place between the 40-yard lines. Every once in a while, somebody breaks through and scores. Reagan did it. Newt Gingrich did it in 1994. Trump did it in spectacular fashion. He is a cultural figure who has moved beyond politics. His Teflon coating is indestructible.

But most of the time, politics is incremental. You win some battles, lose others, and keep moving.

The Tea Party is a perfect example of a movement that was too centered on tax rates, spending, or the Export-Import Bank. It was not much of a cultural revolt. Meanwhile, people were watching their communities change. They were angry about immigration, political correctness, the financial crisis, government bailouts, and a political class that seemed increasingly disconnected from ordinary Americans.

Then the Tea Party came along and essentially said, “Don’t worry. This is really about fiscal policy.”

It wasn’t.

That disconnect created the opening for something different.

The online right eventually filled that vacuum. Memes, blogs, Twitter, podcasts, Breitbart, Drudge, and other alternative media platforms created an ecosystem where ideas that had been dismissed by the establishment could circulate freely. Humor became a weapon. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X, he ended the digital policing that had become the platform’s modus operandi.

Ridicule moves faster than rebellion. That’s something Scott and I particularly agree on. That’s part of the DNA of Dangerous Laughter. I’ve always believed that if someone tells me there’s a sacred cow I can’t mock, the natural response is to start looking for the barbecue. I support an equal distribution of mockery. Something along the lines of live, laugh, mock.

A political movement can write a 5,000-word white paper explaining why its opponents are wrong. Or it can make one penetrating cartoon and get the point across in 10 seconds.

The online right understood something that establishment politics often forgot: people don’t want to be lectured. They want to laugh. They want to recognize absurdity. And sometimes the most effective way to destroy an idea is simply to make it look ridiculous.

But Scott also gives us an important warning.

The online right cannot exist within an insulated bubble. If everybody is interviewing everybody else, appearing on everybody else’s podcasts, and talking exclusively to people who already agree with them, eventually they lose touch with the country outside their little digital strip of real estate. Audience capture becomes a real danger, and influence wanes. Commentators begin saying whatever their audience expects them to say rather than what ordinary Americans actually think.

That is where the black pill and the so-called “insane clown” approach can become destructive.

Entertainment matters. Politics should be entertaining. Hell, I host a show called Dangerous Laughter. But entertainment cannot substitute for politics. People ultimately care about immigration, trade, foreign wars, jobs, families, religious freedom, and whether their children have a future.

Trump understood that combination better than almost anybody: entertainment plus actual issues. The future of the right will depend on whether it can preserve that energy without becoming consumed by purity tests, conspiracies, factionalism, and endless online warfare.

That’s why I came away from my conversation with Scott Greer thinking the title of his book is more than a clever phrase.

The white pill is ultimately a choice.

You can look at the political landscape and decide that everything is doomed. Or you can recognize that political victories are rarely permanent, that movements take years to build, and that every election is another game in a very long season.

I’m a Philadelphia sports fan, so I understand the black pill instinct better than most. Fatalism is present even when we win big. 

You don’t win by refusing to play because you might lose.

You play. You fight.

And, if you’re lucky, you score.

That’s the white pill.

A.J. Rice is host of the Dangerous Laughter podcast, and author of the new #1 political satire bestseller, “The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity.” He serves as president & CEO of Publius PR, editor-in-chief of The Publius National Post.

Views expressed by guest contributors to Issues & Insights are their own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the I&I Editorial Board.

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