Steve Sailer
Born (1958-12-20) December 20, 1958
United States
EducationRice University (BA)
University of California, Los Angeles (MBA)
Occupation(s)Journalist, columnist, blogger

Steven Ernest Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American far-right writer and blogger.[1][2][3] A former columnist for National Review and correspondent for UPI, he is currently a columnist for Taki's Magazine and VDARE, a website associated with white supremacy.[4][5][6][7] Since 2014, his personal blog, iSteve, has appeared in The Unz Review.[8][lower-alpha 1]

Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism.[2] Sailer reportedly coined the term "human biodiversity" in the 1990s, which has been commonly used in alt-right political circles as a euphemism for scientific racism.[12][2]

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).[13] He earned an MBA from UCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: finance and marketing.[14] In 1982 he moved from Los Angeles to Chicago,[15] and from then until 1985 he managed BehaviorScan test markets for Information Resources, Inc.[16] 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.[17] He became a full-time journalist in 2000[18] and left Chicago for California.[19]

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.[20]

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.[21]

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.[22] Sailer's work frequently appears at Taki's Magazine and VDARE. Sailer's analyses were cited by newspapers such as The Washington Times,[23] The New York Times,[24] the San Francisco Chronicle and The Times of London in the mid-2000s.[25][26] He has been featured as a guest on The Political Cesspool,[27] a far-right radio program which has been widely criticized for promoting antisemitism and white supremacy.[28][29] 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.[30]

He used the phrase "Invade the World, Invite the World" in the 2000s as a criticism of American foreign and immigration policies.[2]

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 was the founder of an online electronic mailing list called Human Biodiversity Discussion Group.[31][3][32]

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][33] Tyler Cowen has described Sailer as the "most significant neo-reaction thinker today."[2] After the 2016 election, Michael Barone credited Sailer with having charted in 2001 the electoral path that Donald Trump had successfully followed.[2][34]

Views

Views on race

Sailer has been described as a white supremacist by the Southern Poverty Law Center[35] 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.[36] 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."[37] 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.[38][39] Neoconservative[40] columnist John Podhoretz wrote in the National Review Online blog that Sailer's statement was "shockingly racist and paternalistic" as well as "disgusting".[41]

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".[42]

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][43][44]

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][43][44]

Notes

  1. ↑ The Unz Review is known to contain material promoting antisemitism, Holocaust denial, conspiracy theories, and white supremacy.[9][10][11]

References

  1. 1 2 Marantz, Andrew (2020). "The Sailer strategy". Antisocial: online extremists, techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation. London: Penguin Books. p. 113-124. ISBN 978-0-525-52228-7.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 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}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. 1 2 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."
  4. ↑ Kristine Phillips, Resort cancels 'white nationalist' organization's first-ever conference over the group’s views, Washington Post (January 26, 2017).
  5. ↑ Hannah Gais (December 11, 2016). "Cucking and Nazi salutes: A night out with the alt-right". Washington Spectator (republished by Newsweek).
  6. ↑ "Anti-immigrant Website Uses Boston Bombings to Target Immigrants". Anti-Defamation League. 26 April 2013. ... Steve Sailer, a longtime VDARE contributor known for making racist statements ...
  7. 1 2 Thielman, Sam. "The fascist next door: how to cover hate". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 2023-08-27.
  8. ↑ "Steve Sailer Blog Posts". Archived from the original on October 7, 2014. Retrieved September 27, 2014.
  9. ↑ Harmon, Amy (7 October 2018). "Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed)". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 March 2020.
  10. ↑ "California Entrepreneur Ron Unz Launches a Series of Rhetorical Attacks on Jews". Anti-Defamation League. October 4, 2018. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
  11. ↑ Sixsmith, Ben (September 15, 2018). "The curious case of Ron Unz". The Spectator. Archived from the original on April 19, 2019. 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.
  12. ↑ Feldman, Ari (5 August 2016). ""Human Biodiversity": the Pseudoscientific Racism of the Alt-Right". The Forward. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  13. ↑ "The paradox of majoring in economics". 16 February 2007. Archived from the original on 2011-09-27.
  14. ↑ "College rankings". 17 September 2009. Archived from the original on 2011-09-27.
  15. ↑ "The Chicago Way". 28 August 2008. Archived from the original on 2011-09-27.
  16. ↑ "Popper is my homeboy: a manifesto | Economics | The American Scene". theamericanscene.com. Archived from the original on December 23, 2010.
  17. ↑ Steve Sailer (May 7, 2007). "Presidential candidates with cancer". Archived from the original on March 9, 2013. Retrieved August 1, 2012.
  18. ↑ "Canada Doesn't Want Me". Archived from the original on 2010-12-25.
  19. ↑ "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.
  20. ↑ "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.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  21. ↑ "Does Abortion Prevent Crime?". Slate.com. Archived from the original on 2008-10-14.
  22. ↑ Types of Right Archived 2006-02-20 at the Wayback Machine – National Review
  23. ↑ Galupo, Scott (June 16, 2007). "You go, Guv". The Washington Times. Archived from the original on August 28, 2008.
  24. ↑ Tierney, John (October 24, 2004). "Secret Weapon for Bush?". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 28, 2011.
  25. ↑ Stillwell, Cinnamon (August 3, 2005). "Racism Rears Its Ugly Head in Mexico". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on May 11, 2011.
  26. ↑ Hunt, Tristram (June 20, 2008). "Barack Obama should swap Chicago for Phoenix". The Times. Archived from the original on May 10, 2011.
  27. ↑ "The Political Cesspool: Guest List". The Political Cesspool. Archived from the original on February 22, 2012. Retrieved Feb 1, 2012.
  28. ↑ Conant, Eve (April 25, 2009). "Rebranding Hate in the Age of Obama". Newsweek. Retrieved September 2, 2010.
  29. ↑ "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.
  30. ↑ Pinker, Steven (May 20, 2004). The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  31. ↑ "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."
  32. ↑ "Yahoo! Groups". groups.yahoo.com. Archived from the original on March 18, 2013.
  33. ↑ 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.
  34. ↑ 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.
  35. ↑ TROUBLESOME SOURCES: NICHOLAS WADE’S EMBRACE OF SCIENTIFIC RACISM. Southern Poverty Law Center, May 18, 2014
  36. ↑ Weiss, Bari (17 November 2016). "Steve Bannon's Heart Doesn't Matter. His Actions Do". Tablet Magazine. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  37. ↑ "The Most Disgusting Sentence Yet Written About Katrina…". National Review. September 5, 2005.
  38. ↑ —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.
  39. ↑ "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.
  40. ↑ "John Podhoretz Says Hillary Clinton Can Already 'Measure The Drapes' — Thanks to Trump". Forward. October 20, 2016. Retrieved 2018-08-21.
  41. ↑ Podhoretz, John (September 5, 2005). "The Most Disgusting Sentence Yet Written About Katrina…". National Review. Archived from the original on November 13, 2011.
  42. ↑ Acuña, Rodolfo. U.S. Latino issues. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003.
  43. 1 2 Millman, Noah (August 10, 2016). "A Tale Of Two States". The American Conservative. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  44. 1 2 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.
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