Who Is Steve Sailer?

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Metapedia:

Steven Ernest Sailer is an American conservative journalist and movie critic for The American Conservative, a blogger, a Takimag and VDARE.com columnist, and a former correspondent for UPI. He writes for VDARE about race relations, gender issues, politics, immigration, IQ, genetics, movies, and sports.

Contents

Personal life

Sailer grew up in Studio City, Los Angeles.[1] As a child, Sailer appeared alongside four other grade school students on the “Kids Say the Darndest Things” segment of Art Linkletter’s House Party. He majored in economics, history, and management at Rice University (BA, 1980).[2] He earned an MBA from UCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: Finance and Marketing.[3] In 1982 he moved from Los Angeles to Chicago,[4] and from then until 1985 he managed BehaviorScan test markets for Information Resources Inc.[5] In 1996, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and in February 1997, he was treated with Rituxan. (Sailer believes that he was the first person in the world with intermediate grade non-Hodgkin lymphoma to be treated with that medication.) He has been in remission since those treatments.[6] He became a full-time journalist in 2000[7] and left Chicago for California.[8]

Writing career

From 1994 to 1998, Sailer worked as a columnist for the conservative magazine National Review (and has since published in it[9]).

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.[10]

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.[11] Sailer’s work frequently appears at Taki’s Magazine[12] and Alternative Right,[13] while Sailer’s analyses have been cited by newspapers such as The Washington Times,[14] The New York Times,[15] the San Francisco Chronicle and The Times of London.[16][17] He has been featured as a guest on The Political Cesspool.[18]

Sailer’s January 2003 article “Cousin Marriage Conundrum”, published in The American Conservative, argued that nationbuilding in Iraq would likely fail because of the high degree of consanguinity among Iraqis due to the common practice of cousin marriage. This article has been republished in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, and in One World, Many Cultures.

After the 2004 US election, Sailer discovered a very strong correlation between voting patterns and fertility rates. He described the fertility link in an article in The American Conservative: “Among the 50 states plus Washington, D.C., white total fertility correlates at a remarkably strong 0.86 level with Bush’s percentage of the 2004 vote. (In 2000, the correlation was 0.85.)”[19] Writing in the New York Times, pundit David Brooks referred to this article as showing the “surprising political correlations” of what he dubbed “natalism”.[20] Sailer later discovered a slightly stronger correlation between marriage rates and voting, and dubbed his theory of modern American voting as “Affordable Family Formation”: “a state’s voting proclivities are now dominated by the relative presence or absence of affordable family formation.”[21] The correlation between home prices, marriage rates, and voting was verified by George Hawley at the University of Houston, using county-level data for the 2000 election.[22]

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, whose members he has described as “top scientists and public intellectuals”.[23][24]

Views and criticism

Sailer cites studies that say, on average, blacks and Mexicans in America have lower IQs than whites,[25][26] and that Ashkenazi Jews and Northeast Asians have higher IQs than whites.[27][28] He says that prosperity helped blacks close the IQ gap.[citation needed] 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.[29] He also considers that “for at least some purposes – race actually is a highly useful and reasonable classification,”[30] 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, [31] for “finessing” Affirmative Action when that’s economically convenient, [32] and for political gerrymandering. Sailer has also argued that Hispanic immigration is “recreating the racial hierarchy of Mexico” in California:[33]

While upwardly mobile Mexican-Americans marry blonde Anglos, downwardly mobile white men wed Mexicans. Now, there is no doubt plenty to be said for getting hitched to a Mexican lady. They probably tend to make better mothers, homemakers, and cooks than the leggy blonde careerists who, however, are so much more in demand in Southern California. But sadly, there is a big social cost to Anglo-Hispanic marriages – which raises severe doubts about America’s ability to assimilate Latino immigrants. As pro-immigration/pro-assimilation researcher Gregory Rodriguez admits, “Surprisingly, in most homes headed by an Anglo/Latino couple, Spanish becomes the household language.”

Thus, those L.A. blue-collar whites who don’t flee to Utah will tend to assimilate genetically and culturally into Latino culture.”

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.[15][34] 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 judgement of Professor Linda Gottfredson, an IQ expert at the University of Delaware, that Sailer’s study was a “creditable analysis”.[15]

Sailer’s article on Hurricane Katrina was followed by accusations of racism from left-wing organizations Media Matters for America and the Southern Poverty Law Center.[35][36] In reference to the New Orleans slogan “let the good times roll”, Sailer commented:

What you won’t hear, except from me, is that “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.[37]

Conservative columnist John Podhoretz, responded in the National Review Online blog by calling Sailer’s statement “shockingly racist and paternalistic” as well as “disgusting”.[38]

Sailer describes his personal ideology as “Citizenism”, which he explains as:

I believe Americans should be biased in favor of the welfare of our current fellow citizens over that of the six billion foreigners… A huge number of Americans grasp that we are lucky to be American citizens and they want to pass on their good fortune to their posterity undiluted.[39]

He views this as an antithesis of racism, and he argues that African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, European-Americans, and other groups can rally behind this. He has also stated that “White Nationalism is worse than a crime, it’s a mistake” and argued that the ideology, if widely adopted, would actually hurt American whites rather than help them.[39]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Yeah, Yeah, Diversity Is Strength. It’s Also Secession. Archived from the original on 2013-02-05.
  2. ↑ The paradox of majoring in economics.
  3. ↑ College rankings.
  4. ↑ The Chicago Way.
  5. ↑ Popper is my homeboy: a manifesto | Economics | The American Scene
  6. ↑ Steve Sailer (May 7, 2007). Presidential candidates with cancer. Retrieved on August 1, 2012.
  7. ↑ Canada Doesn’t Want Me.
  8. ↑ The Jewish Factor in Blue States – Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
  9. ↑ Steve Sailer on Stephen Jay Gould on National Review Online. Nationalreview.com (2002-05-22). Retrieved on 2009-06-12.
  10. ↑ Does Abortion Prevent Crime?. Slate.com.
  11. ↑ Types of Right – National Review
  12. ↑ Taki’s Magazine, “Steve Sailer,” (retrieved on May 27th, 2011).
  13. ↑ Alternative Right, “Steve Sailer,” (retrieved on May 27th, 2011).
  14. ↑ Galupo, Scott (June 16, 2007). “You go, Guv”. The Washington Times. http://video1.washingtontimes.com/riffologist/2007/06/you_go_guv.html. 
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 Tierney, John (October 24, 2004). “Secret Weapon for Bush?”. The New York Times (The New York Times Company). http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/politics/campaign/24points.html. 
  16. ↑ Stillwell, Cinnamon (August 3, 2005). “Racism Rears Its Ugly Head in Mexico”. San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/08/03/cstillwell.DTL. 
  17. ↑ Hunt, Tristram (June 20, 2008). “Barack Obama should swap Chicago for Phoenix”. The Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4175022.ece?print=yes&randnum=1213944736848. 
  18. ↑ The Political Cesspool: Guest List. The Political Cesspool. Retrieved on Feb 1, 2012.
  19. ↑ Baby Gap: How birthrates color the electoral map – The American Conservative
  20. ↑ The New Red-Diaper Babies – New York Times
  21. ↑ Value Voters: The best indicator of whether a state will swing Red or Blue? The cost of buying a home and raising a family. – The American Conservative
  22. ↑ Home affordability, female marriage rates and vote choice in the 2000 US presidential election: Evidence from US counties – Party Politics
  23. ↑ Steve Sailer. “I’m a […] founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, which runs the invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals.”
  24. ↑ 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.”
  25. ↑ Sailer, Steve (2006-08-15). Steve Sailer’s iSteve Blog: The black-white IQ gap – has it narrowed?. Isteve.blogspot.com. Retrieved on 2009-06-12.
  26. ↑ Sailer, Steve (2005-06-07). Steve Sailer’s iSteve Blog: Aversion to “Acting White” Worse Problem for Hispanics than Blacks. Isteve.blogspot.com. Retrieved on 2009-06-12.
  27. ↑ Steve Sailer’s iSteve Blog: Peter Frost’s explanation for high average Ashkenazi Jewish IQs
  28. ↑ Steve Sailer’s iSteve Blog: New York Times on IQ
  29. ↑ Pondering Patterson [II]: OK, How White Are Hispanics? By Steve Sailer. Vdare.com (2001-05-25). Archived from the original on 2001-06-20. Retrieved on 2009-06-12.
  30. ↑ 06/08/01 – Pondering Patterson [IV]: Why We Can’t Get Beyond Race. Vdare.com (2001-06-08). Archived from the original on 2001-09-27. Retrieved on 2009-06-12.
  31. ↑ Implications of correlations between skin color and genetic ancestry for biomedical research. Nature Genetics (Issue 36, S54 – S60 (2004)). Retrieved on 2011-04-13.
  32. ↑ Who Wants To Be A Minority?. Retrieved on 2011-04-13.
  33. ↑ America’s Imported Caste System. Archived from the original on 2003-04-02. Retrieved on 2011-04-13.
  34. ↑ 10/21/04 – This Just In—Kerry’s IQ Likely Lower than Bush’s!. VDARE.com. Archived from the original on 2013-02-05. Retrieved on 2009-06-12.
  35. ↑ — 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. Retrieved on 2009-06-12.
  36. ↑ Extremist Steve Sailer is Source for CNN’s ‘Black in America’ Series | Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center. Splcenter.org. Retrieved on 2009-06-12.
  37. ↑ Sailer, Steve (September 3, 2005). Racial Reality And The New Orleans Nightmare. VDARE.com. Archived from the original on December 11, 2012.
  38. ↑ The Most Disgusting Sentence Yet Written About Katrina, John Podhoretz, National Review group blog, September 5, 2005
  39. ↑ 39.0 39.1 Sailer, Steve (October 8, 2005). Sailer vs. Taylor, Round II —”Citizenism” vs. White Nationalism. VDARE.com. Archived from the original on February 8, 2013. Retrieved on July 20, 2010.
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JPOD: The Most Disgusting Sentence Yet Written About Katrina…

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

John Podhoretz writes Sept. 5, 2005: …may not be Kanye West’s denunciation of Bush after all. I think West is given a run for his money by by Steve Sailer’s shockingly racist and paternalistic riff off of the New Orleans slogan “Let the good times roll,” on the website vdare.com. “What you won’t hear, except from me, is that ‘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.” Nobody with the unspeakable gall and tastelessness to write such sentences should be suggesting that any other person on earth requires “stricter moral guidance.”

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John Podhoretz & Regression To The Mean

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes for VDARE July 17, 2005:

I recently pointed out that even though actress Jodie Foster reportedly had carefully searched out a sperm donor with an IQ of 160 to father her two children, the expected boost in her kids` IQ over what she would have gotten from a typical 100 IQ donor would fall in a range centering around merely 12 points. This is due to a pervasive phenomenon that its discoverer, Sir Francis Galton, called “regression toward mediocrity” and we now call “regression toward the mean.”

Interacting with John Podhoretz, the son of long-time Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, inevitably calls to mind Galton`s great discovery.

Last week, I noted on my iSteve.com blog some of the younger Podhoretz`s bumptious comments on National Review Online`s “Corner” free-for-all. In reaction to John Derbyshire`s concerns about the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment granting automatic birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, Podhoretz blustered:

“Sorry, pal. You`re born here, you`re a citizen here. Period. That`s how it works, and thank God for it, otherwise a great deal of the advances made in the 20th century by immigrant children to the United States would not have come to pass…”

I suggested this “birthright pundit” might extend his logic like this:

“Sorry, pal. If you`re born a Podhoretz, you get to make a living offering your opinions, no matter how big of a jerk and fool you are. Period. That`s how it works, and thank God for it, otherwise a great deal of the money made in the 21st century by Podhoretz relatives would not have come to pass.”

Later, out of the blue, I received an email from Podhoretz reading:

“Please keep attacking me. It`s how I know I`m not a bigoted, racist scum.”

Peter Brimelow has observed how often a “racist” turns out to be someone who is winning an argument with a liberal. But with a neocon of Podhoretz the Lesser`s quality, well, you don`t even have to be arguing with him to be “a bigoted, racist scum.” I`m not exactly sure what “a … scum” is, but, clearly, Pod No Like. I replied:

“Such wit, such eloquence, such insight!”

He fired back:

“If you think I lack them, I imagine you think I have too much melanin in my skin.”

Hoo-boy! You got me there!

Thoroughly enjoying shooting fish in a barrel, I answered:

“How do you come up with such devastating comebacks? Do you keep a half-dozen Nobel Laureates on staff, or do you, somehow, just make these up all by yourself?”

While Podhoretz Minor might be an extreme example, he reflects the intellectual decline of neoconservatism from the first generation to the second. While the formidable father has often provoked fury, the son has mostly elicited laughter. Hanna Rosin reported in 1998:

… around the Washington Times offices, the [Podhoretz] column was often read out loud in Podhoretz`s absence, for comic value, in a ritual famously called Podenfreude ….

Norman Podhoretz was somewhat anomalous among the first generation of neoconservatives, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and James Q. Wilson, because he was trained as a literary critic rather than a social scientist. But like them, and like later neoconservatives such as Charles Murray, he had some audacious things to say about race.

In his 1963 essay in Commentary, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” the elder Podhoretz wrote:

“[F]or a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover, to me… [It] was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around.”

Thirty years later, the elder Podhoretz reflected on the controversy his article about “black thuggery” had caused:

“In 1963 those descriptions were very shocking to most white liberals. In their eyes Negroes were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil rights movement in the South, the “heroic period” of the movement, as one if its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. While none of my white critics went so far as to deny the truthfulness of the stories I told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of Negroes (how could they when the only Negroes most of them knew personally were maids and cleaning women?). In any case they very much disliked the emphasis I placed on black thuggery and aggression.

“Today, when black-on-white violence is much more common than it was then, many white readers could easily top those stories with worse. And yet even today few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime. Telling the truth about blacks remains dangerous to one`s reputation: to use that now famous phrase I once appropriated from D.H. Lawrence in talking about ambition, the fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture. And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are sick and twisted in their feelings about blacks, albeit in a very different sense that they were in 1963.”

Time for John Podhoretz to email to his father accusing him of being “a bigoted, racist scum.”!

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John Podhoretz on immigration

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Steve Sailer, Sept. 15, 2005:

A reader writes:

I attended a forum in Skokie outside of Chicago sponsored by the Jewish Policy Center (JPC) — the think tank offshoot of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC). The forum consisted of a moderator – Michael Medved, and four presenters, including John Podhoretz and David Horowitz.

I would say about 300 people showed up for the event, a lot considering it was a nice afternoon and both the Bears and Sox were playing.

The audience (naturally) had lots of questions about Israel. And here is where John Podhoretz began to squirm. One questioner asked him about his father, and John Podhoretz curtly cut him off, saying he was not his father. But that he would be happy to answer the question as John Podhoretz.

Another questioner from the audience asked the panel about our immigration problems. Medved, unfortunately, began to waffle and squish on the subject. He pointed out that America had (roughly) 3,000 miles of borders and it couldn’t possibly protect them all. He noted that Israel, by comparison, had something like 240 miles of borders and was having a hard time controlling even that. It was a bit disappointing as an answer from a guy I am normally inclined to agree with.

And Israel has 1/50th the population of America and 1/100th GNP.

But Podhoretz decided he wanted to answer this question, and here is where the fireworks began. He started by saying something along the lines of, “Well, first I feel when it comes to any issue of immigration, I have to rely on my Jewish experience. And I think back on the 1924 immigration restrictionist law which excluded so many Jews…”

Here he was interrupted and cut off by boos and jeers from the audience.

He was visibly taken aback by this reaction. He asked, “Why are you booing me?” Clearly shocked. Then he thought he had it figured out and responded by basically, “Oh, well I guess now this is an issue of Mexicans versus Jews…” And this produced even more jeers and boos from the audience, since he was clearly implying the audience was racist.

Damn Sailerites following him wherever he goes.

It seemed that at this point David Horowitz started speaking into his mike, and knocked the ball out of the park. He began by immediately denouncing our lax border controls and reckless illegal immigration — which prompted cheers from the audience. He then noted we needed massive deportations in addition to border controls. More cheers. I forget the rest of what he said on the subject, but he was clearly the hardliner on the subject (if only on illegal immigration I guess) and clearly much more on the audiences side then the bewildered JPod.

Michael Medved recovered his footing by picking up on the Horowitz line for deportations, noting that something like 400,000 illegal aliens with felonies were on the loose and they needed to be deported first.

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Steve Sailer: John Podhoretz averts his maidenly eyes

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer wrote Sept. 7, 2005:

After John Derbyshire bravely defends me once more in NRO’s Corner against John Podhoretz’s fatwa against my New Orleans article and its mention of the lower average IQ of African-Americans, JPod sputters:

I have read only two things by [Sailer] in the past few years, both of them e-mailed to me, and I regret having soiled my eyes, my brain and my sensibility with them.

This is another example of the typical attack on me — the “point-and-sputter” diatribe devoid of logic and facts.

Inevitably, responses to Pod the Lesser’s sallies traditionally fall into the “point-and-laugh” mode — for example, his former colleagues at the Washington Times coined the pun Podenfruede for their group ritual of reading Pod’s latest effusion and laughing at his shortcomings as a writer, thinker, and human being. Since JPod doesn’t give anyone anything to sink their teeth into — it’s hard to point out the fallacies in JPod’s logic when all he is expressing is mindless rage and thuggish threats. So, “point-and-laugh” is natural.

Still, my readers might be interested in some of the logical contradictions related to Pod Minor, even if rationality is not, personally, his thing. For example, will he next condemn Commentary and the American Enterprise Institute?

I ask this because the sentence in my New Orleans article that called “the most disgusting sentence yet written about Katrina” simply applied to the disaster the facts printed in the feature article in this month’s neoconservative Commentary magazine (and also posted on the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute’s website): “The Inequality Taboo” by Charles Murray, the Bradley Fellow at AEI.

Indeed, my previous VDARE.com article “Charles Murray Reenters America’s Inequality Debate” was a celebration of the article’s publication by Commentary, where Big Little Pod’s father, Norman Podhoretz, is “Editor-at-Large” after a distinguished quarter-century career as Commentary’s Editor-in-Chief. Further, many of the foreign policy pundits that Commentary routinely publishes are domiciled at the AEI, and the think tank gave Norman Podhoretz its Francis Boyer award in 2002.

Indeed, Norman Podhoretz has said:

“I’m a defender of The Bell Curve. I think The Bell Curve has been subjected to the most vicious lynching of any book since Making It.“

That was Podhoretz Major’s first autobiography, which came out 27 years before The Bell Curve.

Perhaps, JPod’s attacks on me are a surreptitious, indirect form of Oedipal warfare upon his father, since he knows by now that every time he attacks me on race, IQ, and crime, I will shine the spotlight of attention on the fact that his father holds equally politically incorrect views on the same subjects.

We should pause for a moment of sympathy for John Podhoretz. It can’t be emotionally easy having such a formidable figure as Norman Podhoretz as your father. Financially, of course, being connected has been very easy for John, but it must be tough on his dignity to go through life being known among the punditocracy as the world’s leading example of nepotistic incompetence and regression toward the mean.

More generally, JPod’s Oedipal anger reflects the understandable resentment of the second generation of neoconservatives (the “minicons”) looking back on the heroic first generation. The first generation — Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, James Q. Wilson, Andrew Greeley, and so forth, with Charles Murray as probably the youngest member of that pantheon — were primarily social scientists studying domestic issues of race, ethnicity, and crime. (As a literary critic, Norman Podhoretz was an odd man out among the quant jocks, but he was a trenchant writer on black crime even back when he was a self-proclaimed radical leftist. As he aged, he has, of course, become more obsessed with foreign policy, but that’s a natural progression for an elderly gentleman with four grandchildren abroad.)

The minicons, in embarrassing contrast, are primarily pundits obsessed with Middle Eastern affairs.

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