The mind of a racist, part 3: Steve Sailer and the Unz Review

Continuing from The mind of a racist, part 2

Steve Sailer has had a "journalism" career, for about twenty years more or less, thanks to right-wing sugar daddies, in addition to having his career promoted by Steven Pinker.

This is what Paul Krugman means when he talks about wingnut welfare:

Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.

Sailer thanked his sugar daddies in the intro to his 2008 book (free online) AMERICA’S HALF‐BLOOD PRINCE BARACK OBAMA’S “STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE"

I am especially indebted to my many patrons, most of whom wish to remain anonymous, who have donated sums of money, small and large, so I can continue to get by as a full‐time professional writer. Due to political correctness, we’re heading into an era when individualistic writers once again depend not upon the mass media for their pay, but upon enlightened patrons. Fortunately, the Internet allows heretical thinkers to help scratch out a living from the small donations of people around the world.

Sailer has had a column at the Unz Review since 2004 and is currently fundraising there:

First: You can use PayPal (non-tax deductible) by going to the page on my old blog here. PayPal accepts most credit cards. Contributions can be either one-time only, monthly, or annual.

Second: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to: Steve Sailer P.O Box 4142 Valley Village, CA 91617-0142

Third: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here. (Paypal and credit cards accepted, including recurring “subscription” donations.) Please make sure to click the box for: Make contribution to author
Note: the VDARE site goes up and down on its own schedule, so if this link stops working, please let me know.

Other methods you can use to pay Steve Sailer include Bitcoin, transfer via Wells Fargo or Chase and Google wallet.

Sailer claims 2019 has been a good year, according to these metrics:

2019 has been another strong year for iSteve. So far in 2019 there have been 1,685 blog posts comprising 666,9555 with is a lot, perhaps a half dozen typical books. You all have contributed 226,393 comments comprising 15,744,145 words, which is an insane amount. So far, iSteve has seen 4,211,669 unique visits total 10,355,015 page views with a little under 2 weeks to go in 2019. 

It’s been a very good year and I thank all my readers for their contributions, which dwarf mine in volume. On the other hand, as Reggie Jackson once said about the 1977 New York Yankees, I’m the straw that stirs the drink.

So what do you get for your money?

Well judging by Sailer's Unz blog for the past couple of days you get Sailer's thoughts about Harry Potter, Sailer's thoughts on the J.K. Rowling transgender controversy, twice, Sailer apparently suggesting - ironically or not, it's unclear - that Amy Klobuchar said something racist. And last, something about Trump.

What's interesting about Sailer's blog posts is how little work must have gone into them. They most often consist of large block quotes from others with a few comments from Sailer, interspersed. For example his post "Is Trump the best thing that ever happened to journalism?"

But Steve Sailer doesn't need a lot of words to express his hatred and contempt for black people. And he counts on his hereditarian readers to understand their underlying inferiority so he doesn't usually have to spell it out.

Sailer is obsessed with the idea that the housing bubble of 2008 was the fault of Those People. Sailer writes:

...Our society so focused on the problem of not enough mortgage money being lent to nonwhites that, surprise, surprise, we ended up lending too much mortgage money to nonwhites during the Housing Bubble.

Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman addressed that issue in one of his blog posts. I don't include the charts here:

...the fact that those libruls in Congress caused the bubble is just part of what everyone knows, even though it’s not true. 

Just to repeat the basic facts here: 

1. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was irrelevant to the subprime boom, which was overwhelmingly driven by loan originators not subject to the Act.
2. The housing bubble reached its point of maximum inflation in the middle years of the naughties:
3. During those same years, Fannie and Freddie were sidelined by Congressional pressure, and saw a sharp drop in their share of securitization - while securitization by private players surged. 

Of course, I imagine that this post, like everything else, will fail to penetrate the cone of silence. It’s convenient to believe that somehow, this is all Barney Frank’s fault; and so that belief will continue.

But the kind of people who read Steve Sailer are going to have much more confidence in the opinions of a sore-headed racist with a marketing background than in Krugman.

The bubble was caused by unregulated lending to low-income people of all ethnicities. Sailer harps on "nonwhites" because his focus is on blaming Those People for the problem.

Now it's true that a higher percentage of blacks have bad credit and lower income than whites. This is due to African American families starting out with nothing at all after emancipation, and then enduring 150 year of anti-black brutality and theft of black resources and wealth.

But when evidence that blacks are still being discriminated against shows up, this is how Sailer spins it in an article entitled Black Retirement Planning.

Discrimination lawsuits alleging racism by deep-pocketed corporations (a.k.a., Black Retirement Planning) are a popular topic for credulous news articles.

The lawsuit in question is about discrimination against a wealthy ex-football player who wants to be a private client - a banking term that indicates high-asset clients -  and was told he couldn't because he was black.

Then the article notes:

This year, researchers for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that black mortgage borrowers were charged higher interest rates than white borrowers and were denied mortgages that would have been approved for white applicants.

The important point here is "denied mortgages that would have been approved for white applicants."

In other words, the black applicants in question were as well-qualified as the white applicants. The only variable was ethnicity. But of course Sailer has to say this in sarcastic response:

As we all know, the 2008 mortgage meltdown was due to not lending enough money to minorities.

So to recap, a lawsuit over a wealthy black man trying to take advantage of a bank "private client" designation like any other wealthy bank customer might is declared by Sailer to be an example of "black retirement planning."

And an example of well-qualified black applicants being denied mortgages on the basis of ethnicity is connected by Sailer to his claim that black people caused the 2008 mortgage meltdown.

To Steve Sailer, financially-qualified black people are the same as financially un-qualified black people thanks to the logic of racism : those people are all the same.

Sailer thinks no black people are qualified for the same type of mortgage as white people because it's not their income, but their blackness, that would cause them to default on a mortgage.

This is the same thought process behind Sailer personally retrying and reconvincting the Central Park Five on the basis that a black teenager stabbed a white woman in Manhattan, thirty years later.

And Steve Sailer makes a living spewing this toxic, hateful, sleazy racism.

Now I don't doubt Sailer gets small donations from his reader base, but where would Sailer be without plutocrats like Ron Unz?

Sailer, reposting his own American Conservative article from March 2009 in Unz Review:

...the man who did more to head off the dangers posed by bilingual education is a friend of mine. In fact, he’s my boss: The American Conservative’s publisher Ron Unz.

The Spectator suggests Ron Unz is a Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic Jew:

Contrarianism begins, by and large, with the valid conclusion that many of the ‘facts’ that we are told — by politicians, or the media, or academic and religious institutions — are less than wholly true. You begin to question other aspects of conventional wisdom. There is nothing wrong in this. Yet your questions, and methods of answering them, have to be rational. Otherwise your iconoclastic instincts are unmoored from reason; your passions and biases take over in the flattering guise of independent thought. You question established narratives but swallow alternative claims. You leap to alternative ideas but avoid questioning yourself. In the most extreme cases, you begin by questioning the grounds for preemptive wars and ends by claiming that religious Jews routinely worship Satan. 

That, sadly, appears to be what has happened to Ron Unz.

That would explain why Unz is publishing articles recently like Vulture Capitalism is Jewish Capitalism.

Unz isn't only a Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic Jew, he's a big fan of race science and Steven Pinker:

For example, in 2002 Harvard’s Steven Pinker, one of America’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, published The Blank Slate, an outstanding critique of this incorrect reigning dogma, which specifically included a lengthy debunking of Gould, Lewontin, and their circle. Not only was the book a huge seller and glowingly discussed throughout the MSM, but I was stunned to read an equally favorable review in The Nation, pole-star of America’s political Left. I naturally assumed that the full collapse of Gouldism was underway, an impression enhanced once the august New York Times later published an article describing an important instance of Gould’s scientific fraud.

According to SourceWatch:

Unz publishes The Unz Review. He formerly served as publisher of The American Conservative, a small opinion magazine. In the past, he served as founder and chairman of English for the Children, a nationwide movement to dismantle bilingual education. [1] Unz has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the far-right website VDARE, claiming that he supports them because they are "mostly broke and they write interesting things." In August 2018, Unz published a long essay in The Unz Review in which he supports Holocaust Denial.

Unz would have been the keynote speaker for VDARE's first conference had it not been cancelled by the venue owner. Jared Taylor and Steve Sailer had also been scheduled to speak.

As I have mentioned, Sailer also writes for VDARE, so Sailer is doubly-supported by Ron Unz. I'll talk about VDARE next.