Steve Sailer

Steven Ernest Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American paleoconservative journalist, movie critic, blogger, and columnist. He is a former correspondent for UPI and a columnist for Taki's Magazine and VDARE, a website associated with white supremacy,[1][2] white nationalism,[3][4][5] and the alt-right.[6][7][8] He has a history of making racist statements[9] and has been described as a white supremacist by the Southern Poverty Law Center[10] and the Columbia Journalism Review[11] and writes about race relations, gender issues, politics, immigration, IQ, genetics, movies, and sports. As of 2014, Sailer ceased publishing his personal blog on his own website and shifted it to the Unz Review,[12] an online publication founded by former businessman Ron Unz that promotes anti-semitism, Holocaust denial, conspiracy theories, and white supremacist material.[13][14][15]

This article is about the journalist. For the author of historical novels, see Steven Saylor.
Steve Sailer
Born (1958-12-20) December 20, 1958
United States
NationalityAmerican
Alma materRice University
OccupationJournalist, columnist, blogger
Websiteunz.com/isteve
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Sailer is known for promoting racist bigotry and anti-immigrant theories[16] and has been credited with coining the pseudoscientific race theory known as "human biodiversity" in the 1990s, with the term later being used among the alt-right as a euphemism for scientific racism.[17][18][19][20] In his writing for VDARE, Sailer has described black people as tending to lack "native judgment".[21]

Personal life

Sailer was an adopted child; he grew up in Studio City, Los Angeles.[22] He majored in economics, history, and management at Rice University (BA, 1980).[23] He earned an MBA from UCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: finance and marketing.[24] In 1982 he moved from Los Angeles to Chicago,[25] and from then until 1985 he managed BehaviorScan test markets for Information Resources, Inc.[26] In 1996, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and in February 1997, he was treated with Rituxan. He has been in remission since those treatments.[27] He became a full-time journalist in 2000[28] and left Chicago for California.[29]

Writing career

From 1994 to 1998, Sailer worked as a columnist for the conservative magazine National Review, in which he has since been sporadically published.[30]

In August 1999, he debated Steve Levitt at the Slate website, calling into question Levitt's hypothesis, which would appear in the 2005 book Freakonomics, that legalized abortion in America reduced crime.[31]

Sailer, along with Charles Murray and John McGinnis, was described as an "evolutionary conservative" in a 1999 National Review cover story by John O'Sullivan.[32] Sailer's work frequently appears at Taki's Magazine and VDARE, while Sailer's analyses have been cited by newspapers such as The Washington Times,[33] The New York Times,[34] the San Francisco Chronicle and The Times of London.[35][36] He has been featured as a guest on The Political Cesspool,[37] a far-right radio program which has been widely criticized for promoting antisemitism and white supremacy.[38][39] From 2000 to 2002, Sailer was a national correspondent for United Press International, reporting on sports, law, and politics, among other topics.

Sailer's January 2003 article "Cousin Marriage Conundrum", published in The American Conservative, argued that nation building in Iraq would likely fail because of the high degree of consanguinity among Iraqis due to the common practice of cousin marriage. This article was republished in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004.[40]

In 2008, Sailer published his only book, America's Half-Blood Prince, an analysis of Barack Obama based on his memoir Dreams from My Father.

Sailer is the founder of an online discussion forum called Human Biodiversity Discussion Group.[41][42][43]

Influence

Sailer's writing has been described as a precursor to Trumpism, seeming "to exercise a kind of subliminal influence across much of the right in [the 2000s]. One could detect his influence even in the places where his controversial writing on race was decidedly unwelcome."[19][44] Tyler Cowen has described Sailer as the "most significant neo-reaction thinker today".[19] After the 2016 election, Michael Barone credited Sailer with having charted in 2001 the electoral path that Donald Trump had successfully followed.[19][45]

Views and criticism

Sailer has often written on issues of race and intelligence, arguing that some races are born with inherent advantages over others, but that conservative socio-economic policies can improve things for all.

Sailer cites studies that say, on average, blacks and Mexicans in America have lower IQs than whites,[46][47] and that Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians have higher IQs than non-Jewish whites.[48][49] He also considers that "for at least some purposes—race actually is a highly useful and reasonable classification",[50] such as providing a very rough rule-of-thumb for the fact that various population groups may inherit differences in body chemistry that affect how the body uses certain pharmaceutical products,[51] for "finessing" Affirmative Action when that's economically convenient,[52] and for political gerrymandering.

Rodolfo Acuña, a Chicano studies professor, regards Sailer's statements on this subject as providing "a pretext and a negative justification for discriminating against US Latinos in the context of US history". Acuña claimed that listing Latinos as non-white gives Sailer and others "the opportunity to divide Latinos into races, thus weakening the group by setting up a scenario where lighter-skinned Mexicans are accepted as Latinos or Hispanics and darker-skinned Latinos are relegated to an underclass".[53] Sailer considers Hispanic a non-racial characterization.

In an article on Hurricane Katrina, Sailer said in reference to the New Orleans slogan "let the good times roll" that it "is an especially risky message for African-Americans." He claimed that African-Americans tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups, and thus need stricter moral guidance from society.[54] The article on Hurricane Katrina was criticized for being racist by Media Matters for America and the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as some conservative commentators.[55][56] Neoconservative [57] columnist John Podhoretz wrote in the National Review Online blog that Sailer's statement was "shockingly racist and paternalistic" as well as "disgusting".[58]

The "Sailer Strategy"

The term "Sailer Strategy" has been used for Sailer's proposal that Republican candidates can gain political support in American elections by appealing to working-class white workers with heterodox right-wing nationalist and economic populist positions. In order to do this, Sailer suggested that Republicans support economic protectionism, identity politics, and express opposition to immigration, among other issues. The goal of this is to increase Republicans' share of the white electorate, and decrease its minority share of the electorate, in the belief that minority votes could not be won in significant numbers.[19][59][60]

The strategy was similar to that used by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and has been claimed as one of the reasons Trump was able to win support from rural white voters.[19][59][60]

See also


References
  1. Sam Frizell, GOP Shows White Supremacist's Tweet During Trump's Speech. Time, 21 July 2016
  2. Arnold, Kathleen (2011). Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 89. ISBN 9780313375224. Retrieved 2017-08-30.
  3. Holly Folk, The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), p. 64: "the white nationalist website VDARE.com."
  4. Robert W. Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 299.
  5. Kristine Phillips, Resort cancels 'white nationalist' organization's first-ever conference over the group’s views, Washington Post (January 26, 2017).
  6. Heidi Beirich; Mark Potok (Winter 2003). "'Paleoconservatives' Decry Immigration". Intelligence Report. Southern Poverty Law Center.
  7. Stephen Piggott (December 21, 2016). "Ann Coulter Attends VDARE Christmas Party – Her Second White Nationalist Event In Three Months". Southern Poverty Law Center.
  8. Hannah Gais (December 11, 2016). "Cucking and Nazi salutes: A night out with the alt-right". Washington Spectator (republished by Newsweek.
  9. Jason Richwine Has Ties To More Extreme Elements of Anti-Immigrant Movement. Anti-Defamation League, 2013
  10. TROUBLESOME SOURCES: NICHOLAS WADE’S EMBRACE OF SCIENTIFIC RACISM. Southern Poverty Law Center, May 18, 2014
  11. The fascist next door: how to cover hate. Columbia Journalism Review, May 19, 2019
  12. "Steve Sailer Blog Posts". Archived from the original on October 7, 2014. Retrieved September 27, 2014.
  13. Harmon, Amy (7 October 2018). "Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed)". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 March 2020.
  14. "California Entrepreneur Ron Unz Launches a Series of Rhetorical Attacks on Jews". Anti-Defamation League. October 4, 2018. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
  15. Sixsmith, Ben (September 15, 2018). "The curious case of Ron Unz". The Spectator. Retrieved April 19, 2019. In June, Unz published an essay saluting the ‘remarkable’ historiography of David Irving. In his legal fight against the historian Deborah Lipstadt, Unz wrote, Irving’s work was analysed ‘line-by-line, footnote-by-footnote’ by historians who ‘came up empty’. Readers of expert witness Richard J. Evans’s report on Irving’s scholarship will know this to be false. Unz followed this essay with an approving appraisal of the Nazis’ treatment of France that never once mentioned their millions of murders in Central and Eastern Europe, long articles implicating Mossad in the killings of John and Robert Kennedy and a series of analyses of Jewish history which concluded that Judaism entails ‘the enslavement or execution of all non-Jews’, that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is ‘a classic of political thought’, that the Holocaust almost certainly did not take place in a recognisable form and that anti-Semitism has in general been well-founded.
  16. Academic Racists Make Mainstream Inroads. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, April 1, 2015
  17. The International Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century?. Routledge, 2020
  18. Feldman, Ari (5 August 2016). ""Human Biodiversity": the Pseudoscientific Racism of the Alt-Right". The Forward. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  19. Willick, Park MacDougald, Jason. "The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right". Daily Intelligencer. Archived from the original on 2017-05-02.
  20. Human biodiversity as euphemism for scientific racism:
  21. Weiss, Bari (17 November 2016). "Steve Bannon's Heart Doesn't Matter. His Actions Do". Tablet Magazine. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  22. Sailer, Steve. "Out Of Africa?".
  23. "The paradox of majoring in economics". 16 February 2007. Archived from the original on 2011-09-27.
  24. "College rankings". 17 September 2009. Archived from the original on 2011-09-27.
  25. "The Chicago Way". 28 August 2008. Archived from the original on 2011-09-27.
  26. "Popper is my homeboy: a manifesto | Economics | The American Scene". theamericanscene.com. Archived from the original on December 23, 2010.
  27. Steve Sailer (May 7, 2007). "Presidential candidates with cancer". Archived from the original on March 9, 2013. Retrieved August 1, 2012.
  28. "Canada Doesn't Want Me". Archived from the original on 2010-12-25.
  29. "The Jewish Factor in Blue States « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science". statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on May 10, 2011.
  30. "Steve Sailer on Stephen Jay Gould on National Review Online". Nationalreview.com. 2002-05-22. Archived from the original on 2006-08-22. Retrieved 2009-06-12. "Archived here". Archived from the original on January 18, 2012.CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
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  32. Types of Right Archived 2006-02-20 at the Wayback Machine – National Review
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  34. Tierney, John (October 24, 2004). "Secret Weapon for Bush?". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Archived from the original on October 28, 2011.
  35. Stillwell, Cinnamon (August 3, 2005). "Racism Rears Its Ugly Head in Mexico". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on May 11, 2011.
  36. Hunt, Tristram (June 20, 2008). "Barack Obama should swap Chicago for Phoenix". The Times. Archived from the original on May 10, 2011.
  37. "The Political Cesspool: Guest List". The Political Cesspool. Archived from the original on February 22, 2012. Retrieved Feb 1, 2012.
  38. Conant, Eve (April 25, 2009). "Rebranding Hate in the Age of Obama". Newsweek. Retrieved September 2, 2010.
  39. "Pat Buchanan Appears on Political Cesspool, a White Supremacist Radio Show". Anti-Defamation League. Archived from the original on August 6, 2010. Retrieved September 2, 2010.
  40. Pinker, Steven (May 20, 2004). The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  41. "Steve Sailer". Archived from the original on 2005-03-12. "I'm a [...] founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, which runs the invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals."
  42. Dreger: The Controversy Surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen: A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex in the Internet Age (Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:366–421): "Bailey indeed does belong to the HBI "private cyber-discussion group"—the sort of online discussion group usually referred to by the less thrilling name "listserv"—and Bailey acknowledges that some of the most active members of the HBI list could legitimately be called right-wing (Bailey, 2006a); this would include the list’s founder, Steve Sailer."
  43. "Yahoo! Groups". groups.yahoo.com. Archived from the original on March 18, 2013.
  44. Dougherty, Michael Brendan (14 July 2016). "How Trumpism hid in plain sight for 15 years". Archived from the original on 2 October 2016. Retrieved 3 October 2016.
  45. Barone, Michael (2 December 2016). "Would Another Republican Have Defeated Hillary Clinton?". National Review. Archived from the original on 3 December 2016. Retrieved 3 December 2016.
  46. Sailer, Steve (2006-08-15). "Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: The black-white IQ gap—has it narrowed?". Isteve.blogspot.com. Archived from the original on 2009-01-26. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
  47. Sailer, Steve (2005-06-07). "Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: Aversion to "Acting White" Worse Problem for Hispanics than Blacks". Isteve.blogspot.com. Archived from the original on 2010-02-19. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
  48. Sailer, Steve (August 17, 2007). "Peter Frost's explanation for high average Ashkenazi Jewish IQs". Archived from the original on December 4, 2010.
  49. Sailer, Steve (October 1, 2007). "New York Times on IQ". Archived from the original on December 4, 2010.
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  55. —S.S.M. "American Conservative reportedly to publish far-right columnist's baseless, racially charged claims about "wigger" Obama | Media Matters for America". Mediamatters.org. Archived from the original on 2008-12-07. Retrieved 2009-06-12.
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  57. "John Podhoretz Says Hillary Clinton Can Already 'Measure The Drapes' — Thanks to Trump". Forward. October 20, 2016. Retrieved 2018-08-21.
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