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Steven Ernest Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American journalist, movie critic, and columnist. He is a former correspondent for UPI and a columnist for Taki's Magazine and VDARE.com. He writes about race relations, gender issues, politics, immigration, IQ, genetics, movies, and sports. As of 2014, Sailer stopped publishing his personal blog on his own website and shifted it to the Unz Review, an online publication by Ron Unz that described itself as an "alternative media selection".

His writing for both VDARE and Unz Review have endorsed eugenics and scientific racism. Sailer has been credited with coining the term "human biodiversity" in the 1990s, with the term later becoming popular among the alt-right as a euphemism for scientific racism.

Personal life

Sailer was an adopted child; he 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. In 1982 he moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, and from then until 1985 he managed BehaviorScan test markets for Information Resources, Inc. 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. He became a full-time journalist in 2000 and left Chicago for California.

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.

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

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 frequently appears at Taki's Magazine and VDARE, while Sailer's analyses have been cited by newspapers such as The Washington Times, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Times of London. He has been featured as a guest on The Political Cesspool.

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.

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.

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 . One could detect his influence even in the places where his controversial writing on race was decidedly unwelcome." Tyler Cowen has described Sailer as the "most significant neo-reaction thinker today". After the 2016 election, Michael Barone credited Sailer with having charted in 2001 the electoral path that Donald Trump had successfully followed.

Views and criticism

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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, and that Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians have higher IQs than non-Jewish whites. He says that prosperity helped blacks close the IQ gap. He suggests that a problem with mass immigration of non-white Mestizo Mexicans into America is that native-born whites in the US will become a master caste to a non-white servant caste. He also considers that "for at least some purposes—race actually is a highly useful and reasonable classification", 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, for "finessing" Affirmative Action when that's economically convenient, 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". Sailer considers Hispanic a non-racial characterization.

During the United States presidential election, 2004, Sailer estimated that based on the intelligence tests from military records of candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry, Bush probably had a higher IQ by about 4 IQ points. In a report on the findings for The New York Times, journalist John Tierney called Sailer "a veteran student of presidential IQ's", and cited the judgment of American psychologist Linda Gottfredson, an IQ expert at the University of Delaware, that Sailer's study was a "creditable analysis". Although citing Bush as having a higher IQ, Sailer has condemned Bush as "irresponsible" and "uninterested in proficiency and honesty".

In an article on Hurrican Katrina, Sailer said in reference to the New Orleans slogan "let the good times roll", Sailer commented: "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society. 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".

The "Sailer Strategy"

The term "Sailer Strategy" has been used for Sailer's proposal that Republican candidates can gain political support in the American elections by appealing to working-class white workers by 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 the share of the white electorate, and decrease the minority share of the electorate, with 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 election, and has been claimed to have been one of the reasons Donald Trump was able to win support from rural white voters.

See also

• History of the race and intelligence controversy

References

1. "Steve Sailer Blog Posts". Archived from the original on October 7, 2014. Retrieved September 27, 2014. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
2. Comfort, Nathaniel (23 October 2018). "Sociogenomics is opening a new door to eugenics". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
3. Feldman, Ari (5 August 2016). ""Human Biodiversity": the Pseudoscientific Racism of the Alt-Right". The Forward. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
4. ^ Willick, Park MacDougald, Jason. "The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right". Daily Intelligencer. Archived from the original on 2017-05-02. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
5. Human biodiversity as euphemism for scientific racism:
   • Hemmer, Nicole (28 March 2017). ""Scientific racism" is on the rise on the right. But it's been lurking there for years". Vox. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
   • Evans, Gavin (2 March 2018). "The unwelcome revival of 'race science'". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 December 2018. The far right has even rebranded race science with an alternative name that sounds like it was taken straight from the pages of a university course catalogue: 'human biodiversity'.
6. Sailer, Steve. "Out Of Africa?".
7. "Yeah, Yeah, Diversity Is Strength. It's Also Secession". Archived from the original on 2011-06-21. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
8. "The paradox of majoring in economics". Archived from the original on 2011-09-27. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
9. "College rankings". Archived from the original on 2011-09-27. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
10. "The Chicago Way". Archived from the original on 2011-09-27. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
11. Popper is my homeboy: a manifesto | Economics | The American Scene Archived 2010-12-23 at the Wayback Machine
12. Steve Sailer (May 7, 2007). "Presidential candidates with cancer". Archived from the original on March 9, 2013. Retrieved August 1, 2012. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
13. "Canada Doesn't Want Me". Archived from the original on 2010-12-25. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
14. The Jewish Factor in Blue States – Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Archived 2011-05-10 at the Wayback Machine
15. "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. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help) "Archived here". Archived from the original on January 18, 2012. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
16. "Does Abortion Prevent Crime?". Slate.com. Archived from the original on 2008-10-14. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
17. Types of Right Archived 2006-02-20 at the Wayback Machine – National Review "Archived here". Archived from the original on February 20, 2006. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
18. Taki's Magazine Archived 2011-05-20 at the Wayback Machine, "Steve Sailer," (retrieved on July 23rd, 2017).
19. VDARE Archived 2015-05-04 at the Wayback Machine, "Steve Sailer," (retrieved on May 27th, 2011).
20. Galupo, Scott (June 16, 2007). "You go, Guv". The Washington Times. Archived from the original on August 28, 2008. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
21. ^ 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. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
22. Stillwell, Cinnamon (August 3, 2005). "Racism Rears Its Ugly Head in Mexico". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on May 11, 2011. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
23. Hunt, Tristram (June 20, 2008). "Barack Obama should swap Chicago for Phoenix". The Times. Archived from the original on May 10, 2011. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
24. "The Political Cesspool: Guest List". The Political Cesspool. Archived from the original on February 22, 2012. Retrieved Feb 1, 2012. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
25. https://stevenpinker.com/publications/best-american-science-and-nature-writing
26. "Steve Sailer". Archived from the original on 2005-03-12. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help) "I'm a founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, which runs the invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals."
27. 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."
28. The Human Biodiversity email discussion group Archived 2013-03-18 at the Wayback Machine
29. 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. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
30. 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. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
31. 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. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
32. 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. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
33. Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: Peter Frost's explanation for high average Ashkenazi Jewish IQs Archived 2010-12-04 at the Wayback Machine
34. Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog: New York Times on IQ Archived 2010-12-04 at the Wayback Machine
35. "Implications of correlations between skin color and genetic ancestry for biomedical research". Nature Genetics. 36: S54 – S60. doi:10.1038/ng1440. Archived from the original on 2011-05-13. Retrieved 2011-04-13. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
36. "Who Wants To Be A Minority?". Archived from the original on 2011-05-10. Retrieved 2011-04-13. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
37. Acuña, Rodolfo. U.S. Latino issues. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003.
38. "06/28/01 – Pondering Patterson [VI]: Responding To The Reality Of Race". Vdare.com. 2001-06-28. Archived from the original on 2009-07-31. Retrieved 2009-06-12. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
39. Sailer, Steve (September 3, 2005). "Racial Reality And The New Orleans Nightmare". VDARE.com. Archived from the original on July 19, 2011. Retrieved October 30, 2012. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
41. —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. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
42. "Extremist Steve Sailer is Source for CNN's 'Black in America' Series | Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center". Splcenter.org. Archived from the original on 2009-04-22. Retrieved 2009-06-12. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
43. "John Podhoretz Says Hillary Clinton Can Already 'Measure The Drapes' — Thanks to Trump". Forward. October 20, 2016. Retrieved 2018-08-21. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
44. , John Podhoretz, National Review group blog, September 5, "Archived here". Archived from the original on November 13, 2011. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
45. ^ "A Tale Of Two States". The American Conservative. August 10, 2016. Archived from the original on August 11, 2017. Retrieved 2017-05-04. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
46. ^ Sabisky, Andrew (November 10, 2016). "I predicted Trump could win back in January 2015". International Business Times UK. Archived from the original on May 13, 2017. Retrieved 2017-05-04. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)

External links

• Sailer's blog (updating)
• Steve Sailer's articles for VDare
• Archive of articles 1999–2006

• 1958 births
• Living people
• American anti–illegal immigration activists
• American columnists
• Anti-immigration politics in the United States
• Journalists from California
• National Review people
• Politics and race in the United States
• Race and intelligence controversy
• Rice University alumni
• Scientific racism
• UCLA Anderson School of Management alumni
• Alt-right
• American white nationalists
• Alt-right writers