Steve Sailer

Steven Ernest Sailer is an American journalist and movie critic for The American Conservative, a VDARE.com columnist, and a former correspondent for UPI. He writes about race relations, gender issues, politics, immigration, IQ, genetics, movies, and sports. He is perhaps best known online as a blogger. 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.^[1]

Sailer grew up in Los Angeles and attended UCLA and Rice University.^{[citation needed]} He held an executive position at a market research firm in Chicago for many years.^{[citation needed]} From 1994 to 1998, he worked as a columnist for the conservative magazine National Review (and has published in it since then^[2]). In a 2006 National Observer column, Paul Gottfried (who also writes for VDARE.com) reported that Sailer operates a computer business in California, commenting that "given the politically incorrect topic that he addresses and the precariousness of his journalistic career, this advocate of immigration restriction is indeed wise to have other sources of income."^[3]

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.^[4] Sailer's analyses have been cited by newspapers such as The Washington Times,^[5] The New York Times,^[6] the San Francisco Chronicle and The Times of London.^[7][8]

Sailer has been featured as a guest on The Political Cesspool.

Views and criticism

Sailer cites studies that, on average, blacks and Mexicans in America have lower IQs than whites,^[9][10] and says that prosperity helped blacks close the IQ gap. He suggests that a problem with immigration of non-white Mestizo Mexicans into America is that Hispanic whites in the US will become a master caste, citing the Cuban community in Miami.^[11] He also considers that "for at least some purposes – race actually is a highly useful and reasonable classification."^[12] This was criticized as a result by Rodolfo Acuña, a Chicano studies professor, as "a pretext and a negative justification for discriminating against US Latinos in the context of US history." Acuña claimed 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."^[13] Sailer considers Hispanic a non-racial characterization,^[14] identifying white non-Hispanic Americans as second-class citizens because of affirmative action, and warns about "anti-white pogroms".^[14]

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 percentile points.^[6][15] 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".^[6]

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.^[16][17] 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.

—Sailer, Steve, "Let the Good Times Roll", VDare.com

Neoconservative columnist John Podhoretz, responded in the National Review Online blog by calling Sailer's statement "shockingly racist and paternalistic".^[18]

See also

• Race and intelligence

References

This article's citation style may be unclear. The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of citation, footnoting, or external linking. (September 2009)

External links

• Sailer's blog (updating)
• Steve Sailer's articles for VDare
• Archive of articles 1999–2006