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Steve Sailer (born December 4, 1958) is a reporter, movie critic for The American Conservative, VDARE.com columnist, and founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute (1999).
Sailer writes about IQ, genetics, race, gender, politics (including immigration), and sports. He was described as an "evolutionary conservative" along with Charles Murray and John McGinnis in a 1999 National Review cover story by John O'Sullivan, referring to his writing dealing with the science of human nature. Sailer frequently calls for a more open and fact-based debate regarding intelligence, genetics, race, and gender. Critics often criticize his dealing with race and intelligence.
The Human Biodiversity Institute argues understanding the social effects of varying allele distribution will be important if technology in genetics and reproductive therapy progresses to be able to act on allele distribution. To that end, the institute argues existing biodiversity is a valuable "storehouse of data available to base predictions upon," but that this area of science is presently discouraged. The institute runs the Human Biodiversity discussion group for scientists.
General standpoints
Sailer has described his starting point in analyzing political policies as being concerned with the greatest good for U.S. citizens, as opposed to being concerned with the greatest good for one's "identity group." He refers to this as a "citizenist" stance.
On race, Sailer supports the 'breeding population' definition used by biologists and evolutionary scientists, arguing: "A race is simply an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some degree a species inbreeds virtually exclusively."
Immigration
Steve sailer also opposes immigration, especially from the Mexican border. He does not argue against immigration in the traditional form of simple racism against a new incoming group. Rather he attacks the problem at the root source and turns the tables back at the Mexican oligarchy. He claims that the Mexican oligarchy knowingly exports illegal immgrants into the U.S in order to extend it's sphere of influence into the country. He often refers to those in power in Latin America as "Latin America's corrupt white elites"; mainly because caste in Latin America is roughly divided around racial lines or a "racial continuum" as he refers to it.
Hurricane Katrina and racial demographics data
Following Hurricane Katrina, Sailer argues in a series of VDARE articles that subsequent anarchy was preventable and should have been foreseen based on "the demographics and culture of New Orleans." "Officials should have expected that the population that failed to evacuate would be numerous, improvident, poor in judgment, laced with criminals, and highly dangerous to each other." Sailer argues that the racial demographics data would have been germane, as the lower average IQ of the African American population found in intelligence research correlates with "poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups stricter moral guidance from society." Realistic predictions of population effects, Sailer argues, were not made because of a cultural taboo against noting negative behavior on the part of poor African Americans.
Sailer responded to criticism by arguing that many of those making the accusations acknowledged a correlation between low IQ and poor judgment by supporting the U.S. Supreme Court's 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision "that, in effect, banned the death penalty for killers with IQs under 70." John Derbyshire defended Sailer in the National Review Online by citing large variance in crime rates by race and birth rates for unmarried women by race. According to Peter Brimelow, Sailer's original article has been emailed out by readers (through the link to "email to a friend") at among the highest volumes seen by VDARE's articles.
Controversy and criticism
Critics often criticize Sailer's work as racist. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights advocacy group, argues the science of human nature that Sailer and the HBI deal with have negative effects for minority population segments, and imply such study isn't scientifically legitimate. VDARE has been controversial for its immigration reduction stance. Sailer argues the racism criticism isn't a factual or logical refutation of his arguments, but is rather an emotive response to the transgression of taboo. Sailer notes that the SPLC has been accused by a Pulitzer Prize-finalist investigative report and by a Harper's Magazine exposé of exaggerating the threat of racism in order to increase its own financial assets.
Sailer's article on Hurricane Katrina was followed by some accusations of racism, most notably by John Podhoretz in the National Review Online.
Selected bibliography
Prominent articles
- "Cousin Marriage Conundrum: The ancient practice discourages democratic nation-building," The American Conservative, Jan. 2003. Selected for inclusion in Steven Pinker's book The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004.
- "The Genetic Revolution," "America's role in the twenty-first century may depend on acknowledging and understanding human genetic diversity." Speech delivered to Margaret Thatcher and other guests at the Hudson Institutes’ 1999 Thatcher Weekend conference on 'Will the 21st Century Be the American Century?'" Published in American Outlook Magazine, Spring, 2000. (Slideshow)
- "Is Love Colorblind?", National Review (feature article), July 1999. "While interracial marriage is increasingly accepted by whites, a surprising number of Asian men and black women are bitterly opposed. Why?"
- "Does Abortion Prevent Crime?", Slate, Aug. 1999. Dialogue between Sailer and University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt on Levitt's legalized abortion and crime effect.
- "How Jackie Robinson Desegregated America", National Review (cover story), April 1996 . "Perhaps the least-learned lesson of the saga of Jackie Robinson is that competition can transform self-interest into an engine for racial fairness."
Articles on the red state-blue state divide
After the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Sailer published a series of articles with his analysis of the red state-blue state divide in American politics.
- ""Affordable Family Formation"—The Neglected Key To GOP's Future," VDARE.com, May 8, 2005.
- "The Dirt Gap: The Fundamental Cause of Red vs. Blue States," The American Conservative, Feb. 14, 2005.
- "The GOP’s Third Electoral Secret: Marriage, Fertility…And Cheap Housing," VDARE.com, Dec. 19, 2004.
- "Democrats Recoil From GOP’s Electoral Secret: Marriage Plus Children," VDARE.com, Dec. 12, 2004.
- "Baby Gap: How Birthrates Color the Electoral Map," The American Conservative, Dec. 20, 2004.
Other articles
- "Hollywood's Skin Deep Leftism", The American Conservative (cover story), June 11th 2005.
- "We're Different. Get Over It.", National Post, Feb. 2005. On the controversy surrounding Larry Summers' statements on the gender gap in the sciences.
- "Whites, not Latinos, won it for GOP", Washington Times, April 2004.
- "Revolutionary Nepotism," The National Interest, Winter 2003. "Nepotism and dynasticism are on the rebound in politics, both abroad and at home. " Review of Adam Bellow's In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History.
- "Q&A: Steven Pinker of 'Blank Slate'", United Press International, 2002.
- Darwin's Enemies on the Left, National Post, Dec. 1999.
- The Left Doesn’t Like Darwin Either, Vdare, Aug. 2005.
Quotes
- "The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a] he constantly proclaims belief in human equality, but they don't; b] he has a high IQ, but they don't."
- "Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, whom the new issue of Discover Magazine rightly criticizes as "Darwin's Rottweiler," is self-defeating."
- "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. ... In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan — because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks."
Notes
- See, for example, "More on the New Orleans Nightmare:Why We Have to Talk About Racial Reality Even if John Podhoretz Says We Can’t," VDARE, Sept. 2005.
- See, for example, "The Most Disgusting Sentence Yet Written About Katrina...", John Podhoretz, National Review Online, Sept. 2005, and "The evilcon revisited", Tacitus (blog), Sept. 2005.
- "As when television news broadcasts hours of blacks behaving badly, enormous pressure builds up amongst the commentariat to denounce furiously the first person who is so crass as to mention what everybody can see with their lying eyes. Almost all these condemnations of me have been of the now-traditional point-and-sputter ilk. The critic can't think of any facts or logic to disprove my argument. So he merely gesticulates about what an awful person I must be to say such a horrible thing ...to gesticulate in fury at the sheer unmentionability of what I've said."