Steve Sailer

Personal life

Sailer grew up in Studio City, Los Angeles. 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). He earned an MBA from UCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: finance and marketing. In 1982 he moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, and from then until 1985 he managed BehaviorScan test markets for Information Resources, Inc. 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. He became a full-time journalist in 2000 and left Chicago for California.

Writing career

From 1994 to 1998, Sailer worked as a columnist for the conservative magazine National Review, in which he has since been sporadically published.

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.

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. Sailer's work frequently appears at Taki's Magazine and VDARE, while Sailer's analyses have been cited by newspapers such as The Washington Times, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Times of London. He has been featured as a guest on The Political Cesspool.

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 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.)" Writing in the New York Times, pundit David Brooks referred to this article as showing the "surprising political correlations" of what he dubbed "natalism". 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." 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.

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.

Views and criticism

Sailer has often written on issues of race and intelligence, arguing that some races have inborn advantages over others, but that conservative socio-economic policies can improve things for all.

Sailer cites studies that say, on average, blacks and Mexicans in America have lower IQs than whites, and that Ashkenazi Jews and Northeast Asians have higher IQs than non-Jewish whites. He says that prosperity helped blacks close the IQ gap. 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. He also considers that "for at least some purposes—race actually is a highly useful and reasonable classification", 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, for "finessing" Affirmative Action when that's economically convenient, and for political gerrymandering. Sailer has also argued that Hispanic immigration is "recreating the racial hierarchy of Mexico" in California:

Rodolfo Acuña, a Chicano studies professor, regards Sailer's statements on this subject as providing "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". Sailer considers Hispanic a non-racial characterization, identifying non-Hispanic White Americans as second-class citizens because of affirmative action, which he claims has caused and will cause more and more "anti-white pogroms".

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. 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". Although citing Bush as having a higher IQ, Sailer has condemned Bush as "irresponsible" and "uninterested in proficiency and honesty".

Sailer's article on Hurricane Katrina was followed by accusations of racism from Media Matters for America and the Southern Poverty Law Center. 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.

Conservative columnist John Podhoretz responded in the National Review Online blog by calling Sailer's statement "shockingly racist and paternalistic" as well as "disgusting".

The "Sailer Strategy"

The term "Sailer Strategy" has been used for Sailer's proposal that Republican candidates can gain political support in the American elections by appealing to working-class white workers by 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 the share of the white electorate, and decrease the minority share of the electorate, with the belief that minority votes could not be won in significant numbers.

The strategy was similar to that used by Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and has been claimed to have been one of the reasons Donald Trump was able to win support from rural white voters.