Steve Sailer | |
|---|---|
 Sailer in 2021 | |
| Born | United States |
| Education | Rice University (BA) University of California, Los Angeles (MBA) |
| Occupations | Columnist, blogger |
| Website | www |
Steven Sailer is an Americanfar-right writer and blogger.[1][2] He is a columnist forTaki's Magazine andVDARE, a website associated withwhite supremacy.[3][4][5] Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguringTrumpism.[2] Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism forscientific racism.[2][6]
Sailer was adopted by aLockheed engineer and grew up inStudio City, Los Angeles.[2] He majored in economics, history, and management atRice University (BA, 1980).[7][8] He earned anMBA fromUCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: finance and marketing.[9]
He began writing for the conservative magazineNational Review in the 1990s, but was let go in 1997.[8] In August 1999, he debatedSteve Levitt at theSlate website, calling into question Levitt's hypothesis, which would appear in the 2005 bookFreakonomics, thatlegalized abortion in America reduced crime.[10] He was a reporter for the American news agencyUnited Press International.[11]
Sailer, along withCharles Murray andJohn McGinnis, was described as an "evolutionary conservative" in a 1999National Review cover story byJohn O'Sullivan.[12] Sailer's work has frequently appeared atTaki's Magazine,VDARE, andThe Unz Review.[13][14][15] 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 inThe American Conservative, argued that nation building in Iraq would likely fail because of the high degree ofconsanguinity among Iraqis due to the common practice ofcousin marriage. This article was selected forThe Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited bySteven Pinker.[16][17]
In 2023, he publishedNoticing, 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".[18][19]
Sailer was the founder of an online electronic mailing list calledHuman Biodiversity Discussion Group.[20]
Sailer's writing has been described as a precursor toTrumpism, 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][21] After the 2016 election,Michael Barone credited Sailer with having charted in 2001 the electoral path that Donald Trump had successfully followed.[2][22] EconomistTyler Cowen said on his blogMarginal Revolution that Sailer is likely the "most significant neo-reaction thinker today."[2] His work is popular with thealt-right.[8]
Sailer has been described as awhite supremacist andwhite nationalist,[6] including by theSouthern Poverty Law Center[23][14] and theColumbia Journalism Review.[5] He argued that the major cause for the lack of development ofwhite identity politics was that "more Jews don’t want it to happen than do want it to happen."[24] Sailer himself denies that he is racist.[8] The authors of the 2020 bookThe International Alt-Right criticized Sailer's views as having a "pseudoscientific veneer [that] barely covers a base and explicit racism".[8]
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.[25] In an article onHurricane Katrina, Sailer said in reference to theNew Orleans slogan "let the good times roll" that it "is an especially risky message for African-Americans."[26] The article onHurricane Katrina was criticized for being racist byMedia Matters for America and theSouthern Poverty Law Center, as well as some conservative commentators.[27][13]Neoconservative[28] columnistJohn Podhoretz wrote in theNational Review Online blog that Sailer's statement was "shockingly racist andpaternalistic" as well as "disgusting".[26]
Rodolfo Acuña, aChicano 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".[29]
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 heterodoxright-wing nationalist andeconomic populist positions. In order to do this, Sailer suggested that Republicans supporteconomic protectionism,identity politics, and expressopposition 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][30]
The strategy was similar to that used byDonald Trump in the2016 presidential election, and has been claimed as one of the reasons Trump was able to win support from rural white voters.[2][30]
... Steve Sailer, a longtime VDARE contributor known for making racist statements ...
