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Steven Ernest Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American far-right writer and blogger.[1][2][3] He is currently a columnist for Taki's Magazine and VDARE, a website associated with white supremacy.[4][5][6][7]
Steve Sailer | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | December 20, 1958 |
| Education | Rice University (BA) University of California, Los Angeles (MBA) |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist, columnist, blogger |
| Website | www |
Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism.[2] Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism for scientific racism.[2][8]
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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).[9] He earned an MBA from UCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: finance and marketing.[10] In 1982 he moved from Los Angeles to Chicago,[11] and from then until 1985 he managed BehaviorScan test markets for Information Resources, Inc.[12] 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.[13]
He became a full-time journalist in 2000[14] and left Chicago for California.[15][third-party source needed] He was a reporter for the American news agency United Press International.[16]
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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.[17]
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.[18] Sailer's work has frequently appeared at Taki's Magazine, VDARE, and The Unz Review.[19][20] 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 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 selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited by Steven Pinker.[21][22]
In 2008, Sailer published his first book, America's Half-Blood Prince, an analysis of Barack Obama based on his memoir Dreams from My Father.
In 2023, he published Noticing, 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".[23][24]
Sailer was the founder of an online electronic mailing list called Human Biodiversity Discussion Group.[25][3]
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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][26] After the 2016 election, Michael Barone credited Sailer with having charted in 2001 the electoral path that Donald Trump had successfully followed.[2][27] Economist Tyler Cowen said on his blog Marginal Revolution that Sailer is likely the "most significant neo-reaction thinker today."[2]
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Views on race
Sailer has been described as a white supremacist by the Southern Poverty Law Center[28] 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.[29] 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."[30] 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.[31][19] Neoconservative[32] columnist John Podhoretz wrote in the National Review Online blog that Sailer's statement was "shockingly racist and paternalistic" as well as "disgusting".[30]
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".[33]
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][34]
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][34]
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