Steve Sailer

Early life and education

Sailer was adopted by a Lockheed engineer and grew up in Studio City, Los Angeles. He majored in economics, history, and management at Rice University (BA, 1980). He earned an MBA from UCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: finance and marketing.

Writing career

He began writing for the conservative magazine National Review in the 1990s, but was let go in 1997. 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. He was a reporter for the American news agency United Press International.

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. Sailer's work has frequently appeared at Taki's Magazine, VDARE, and The Unz Review. He used the phrase "Invade the World, Invite the World" in the 2000s as a criticism of American foreign and immigration policies.

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 selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited by Steven Pinker*.*

In 2023, he published Noticing, an anthology of his writings. The title refers to the term "noticer", which is used by some sections of the online right to refer to people who believe in "race realism".

Sailer was the founder of an online electronic mailing list called Human Biodiversity Discussion Group.

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." After the 2016 election, Michael Barone credited Sailer with having charted in 2001 the electoral path that Donald Trump had successfully followed. Economist Tyler Cowen said on his blog Marginal Revolution that Sailer is likely the "most significant neo-reaction thinker today." His work is popular with the alt-right.

Views

Views on race

Sailer has been described as a white supremacist and white nationalist, including by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Columbia Journalism Review. He argued that the major cause for the lack of development of white identity politics was that "more Jews don’t want it to happen than do want it to happen." Sailer himself denies that he is racist. The authors of the 2020 book The International Alt-Right criticized Sailer's views as having a "pseudoscientific veneer [that] barely covers a base and explicit racism".

In his writing for VDARE, Sailer has described black people as tending "to possess poorer native judgment than members of better educated groups" and thus need stricter moral guidance from society. 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." 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. Neoconservative columnist John Podhoretz wrote in the National Review Online blog that Sailer's statement was "shockingly racist and paternalistic" as well as "disgusting".

Rodolfo Acuña, a Chicano studies professor, regards Sailer's statements on race as providing "a pretext and a negative justification for discriminating against US Latinos in the context of US history". Acuña wrote 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".

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.

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.

References

Works cited

References

1. Marantz, Andrew. (2019). "Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation". [[Penguin Books]].
2. Phillips, Kristine. (2017-01-26). "Resort cancels 'white nationalist' organization's first-ever conference over the group's views". [[The Washington Post]].
3. (2013-04-26). "Anti-immigrant Website Uses Boston Bombings to Target Immigrants".
4. (June 2021). "How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics". [[American Journal of Physical Anthropology]].
5. Sailer, Steve. (2007-02-16). "The paradox of majoring in economics".
6. Sailer, Steve. (2009-09-17). "College rankings".
7. Levitt, Steven. (1999-08-23). "Does Abortion Prevent Crime?".
8. (2003-12-31). "Northwestern University Psychology Professor J. Michael Bailey Looks into Queer Science". [[Southern Poverty Law Center]].
9. O'Sullivan, John. (1999-10-11). "Types of Right".
10. (June 4, 2018). "In letter to Amazon, Alliance Defending Freedom cited white nationalist writer who once promoted "gay germ" theory".
11. Pinker, Steven. (2004). "The Best American Science and Nature Writing". Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
12. Pinker, Steven. (2004-05-20). "The Best American Science and Nature Writing". [[Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]].
13. Wilson, Jason. (2024-09-28). "Florida university to host extremist after DeSantis-led lurch to right". [[The Guardian]].
14. Breland, Ali. (2024-08-20). "The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ".
15. "Steve Sailer".
16. (2016-07-14). "How Trumpism hid in plain sight for 15 years".
17. (2017-04-30). "The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right". [[Intelligencer (website).
18. (2016-12-02). "Would Another Republican Have Defeated Hillary Clinton?".
19. Phillips, Jon. (2014-05-18). "Troublesome Sources: Nicholas Wade's Embrace of Scientific Racism".
20. Thielman, Sam. (2019-05-09). "The fascist next door: how to cover hate".
21. (2016-11-17). "Steve Bannon's Heart Doesn't Matter. His Actions Do.".
22. M.. (2007-03-14). "American Conservative reportedly to publish far-right columnist's baseless, racially charged claims about "wigger" Obama".
23. Holthouse, David. (2008-07-25). "Extremist Steve Sailer is Source for CNN's 'Black in America' Series".
24. Solomon, Daniel J.. (2016-10-20). "John Podhoretz Says Hillary Clinton Can Already 'Measure The Drapes' — Thanks to Trump". [[The Forward.
25. Podhoretz, John. (2005-09-05). "The Most Disgusting Sentence Yet Written About Katrina…".
26. Acuña, Rodolfo. (2003). "U.S. Latino Issues". [[Greenwood Press]].
27. Millman, Noah. (2016-08-10). "A Tale Of Two States".