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Steve Sailer

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This article is about the opinion writer. For the author of historical novels, see Steven Saylor.

Steven Ernest Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American far-right writer and blogger.[1][2][3] He is currently a columnist for Taki's Magazine and VDARE, a website associated with white supremacy.[4][5][6][7]

Steve Sailer
Born (1958-12-20) December 20, 1958 (age 66)
United States
EducationRice University (BA)
University of California, Los Angeles (MBA)
Occupation(s)Journalist, columnist, blogger
Websitewww.stevesailer.net Edit this at Wikidata

Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism.[2] Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism for scientific racism.[2][8]

Personal life

Sailer was an adopted child; he grew up in Studio City, Los Angeles, a son of a Lockheed engineer.[2] He majored in economics, history, and management at Rice University (BA, 1980).[9] He earned an MBA from UCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: finance and marketing.[10] In 1982 he moved from Los Angeles to Chicago,[11] and from then until 1985 he managed BehaviorScan test markets for Information Resources, Inc.[12] 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.[13]

He became a full-time journalist in 2000[14] and left Chicago for California.[15][third-party source needed] He was a reporter for the American news agency United Press International.[16]

Writing career

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.[17]

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.[18] Sailer's work has frequently appeared at Taki's Magazine, VDARE, and The Unz Review.[19][20] He used the phrase "Invade the World, Invite the World" in the 2000s as a criticism of American foreign and immigration policies.[2]

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.[21][22]

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

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".[23][24]

Sailer was the founder of an online electronic mailing list called Human Biodiversity Discussion Group.[25][3]

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."[2][26] After the 2016 election, Michael Barone credited Sailer with having charted in 2001 the electoral path that Donald Trump had successfully followed.[2][27] Economist Tyler Cowen said on his blog Marginal Revolution that Sailer is likely the "most significant neo-reaction thinker today."[2]

Views

Views on race

Sailer has been described as a white supremacist by the Southern Poverty Law Center[28] and the Columbia Journalism Review.[7]

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.[29] 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."[30] 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.[31][19] Neoconservative[32] columnist John Podhoretz wrote in the National Review Online blog that Sailer's statement was "shockingly racist and paternalistic" as well as "disgusting".[30]

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".[33]

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.[2][1][34]

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.[2][34]

References

  1. ^ a b Marantz, Andrew (2019). "The Sailer Strategy". Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. London: Penguin Books. pp. 113–124. ISBN 978-0-525-52228-7.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Willick, Jason; MacDougald, Park (April 30, 2017). "The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right". Intelligencer. Archived from the original on May 2, 2017.
  3. ^ a b Dreger, Alice D. (June 2008). "The Controversy Surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen: A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex in the Internet Age". Archives of Sexual Behavior. 37 (3): 366–421. doi:10.1007/s10508-007-9301-1. ISSN 0004-0002. PMC 3170124. PMID 18431641. 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.
  4. ^ Phillips, Kristine (January 26, 2017). "Resort cancels 'white nationalist' organization's first-ever conference over the group's views". The Washington Post.
  5. ^ Gais, Hannah (December 11, 2016). "Cucking and Nazi Salutes: A Night Out With the Alt-Right". The Washington Spectator. Newsweek.
  6. ^ "Anti-immigrant Website Uses Boston Bombings to Target Immigrants". Anti-Defamation League. April 26, 2013. ... Steve Sailer, a longtime VDARE contributor known for making racist statements ...
  7. ^ a b Thielman, Sam (May 9, 2019). "The fascist next door: how to cover hate". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved August 27, 2023.
  8. ^ Panofsky, Aaron; Dasgupta, Kushan; Nicole, Iturriaga (June 2021). "How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 175 (2): 387–398. doi:10.1002/ajpa.24150. PMC 9909835. PMID 32986847.
  9. ^ Sailer, Steve (February 16, 2007). "The paradox of majoring in economics". iSteve. Archived from the original on September 27, 2011.
  10. ^ Sailer, Steve (September 17, 2009). "College rankings". iSteve. Archived from the original on September 27, 2011.
  11. ^ Sailer, Steve (August 28, 2008). "The Chicago Way". iSteve. Archived from the original on September 27, 2011.
  12. ^ Manzi, Jim (February 2, 2009). "Popper is my homeboy: a manifesto". The American Scene. Archived from the original on December 23, 2010.
  13. ^ Sailer, Steve (May 7, 2007). "Presidential candidates with cancer". iSteve. Archived from the original on March 9, 2013. Retrieved August 1, 2012.
  14. ^ Sailer, Steve (August 24, 2001). "Canada Doesn't Want Me". iSteve. Archived from the original on December 25, 2010.
  15. ^ Gelman, Andrew (January 3, 2010). "The Jewish Factor in Blue States". Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. Archived from the original on May 10, 2011.
  16. ^ Beirich, Heidi; Moser, Bob (December 31, 2003). "Northwestern University Psychology Professor J. Michael Bailey Looks into Queer Science". Intelligence Report. Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved March 15, 2024.
  17. ^ "Does Abortion Prevent Crime?". Slate.com. Archived from the original on October 14, 2008.
  18. ^ O'Sullivan, John (October 11, 1999). "Types of Right". National Review. Archived from the original on February 20, 2006.
  19. ^ a b Holthouse, David (July 25, 2008). "Extremist Steve Sailer is Source for CNN's 'Black in America' Series". Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on April 22, 2009. Retrieved June 12, 2009.
  20. ^ "In letter to Amazon, Alliance Defending Freedom cited white nationalist writer who once promoted "gay germ" theory". Southern Poverty Law Center. June 4, 2018. Retrieved September 30, 2024.
  21. ^ Pinker, Steven (2004). The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  22. ^ Pinker, Steven (May 20, 2004). The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Archived from the original on June 23, 2012.
  23. ^ Wilson, Jason (September 28, 2024). "Florida university to host extremist after DeSantis-led lurch to right". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved October 17, 2024.
  24. ^ Breland, Ali (August 20, 2024). "The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ". The Atlantic. Retrieved October 17, 2024.
  25. ^ "Steve Sailer". Archived from the original on March 12, 2005. "I'm a [...] founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, which runs the invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals."
  26. ^ Dougherty, Michael Brendan (July 14, 2016). "How Trumpism hid in plain sight for 15 years". The Week. Archived from the original on October 2, 2016. Retrieved October 3, 2016.
  27. ^ Barone, Michael (December 2, 2016). "Would Another Republican Have Defeated Hillary Clinton?". National Review. Archived from the original on December 3, 2016. Retrieved December 3, 2016.
  28. ^ Phillips, Jon (May 18, 2014). "Troublesome Sources: Nicholas Wade's Embrace of Scientific Racism". Southern Poverty Law Center.
  29. ^ Weiss, Bari (November 17, 2016). "Steve Bannon's Heart Doesn't Matter. His Actions Do". Tablet. Retrieved December 18, 2018.
  30. ^ a b Podhoretz, John (September 5, 2005). "The Most Disgusting Sentence Yet Written About Katrina…". National Review. Archived from the original on November 13, 2011.
  31. ^ M., S.S. (March 14, 2007). "American Conservative reportedly to publish far-right columnist's baseless, racially charged claims about "wigger" Obama". Media Matters for America. Archived from the original on December 7, 2008. Retrieved June 12, 2009.
  32. ^ Solomon, Daniel J. (October 20, 2016). "John Podhoretz Says Hillary Clinton Can Already 'Measure The Drapes' — Thanks to Trump". Forward. Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  33. ^ Acuña, Rodolfo (2003). U.S. Latino Issues. Westport: Greenwood Press. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-313-08861-2. Retrieved March 15, 2024 – via Internet Archive.
  34. ^ a b Millman, Noah (August 10, 2016). "A Tale Of Two States". The American Conservative. Retrieved May 4, 2017.
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