The race crackpottery of Steve Sailer and Bo Winegard part 2

PART 1

Steven Pinker has not, as far as I have been able to discover, acknowledged the existence of Steve Sailer since 2011, although prior to that Pinker promoted Sailer's career, using him to support his position in a dispute with Malcolm Gladwell and even included him in a collection of "the best" science and nature writing.

But since 2011, no acknowledgement, and I have looked. Although Steve Sailer will tell you that he has had a big influence on Pinker.

Sailer has certainly been a big influence on the thinking of "human biodiversity" proponents like Bo and Ben Winegard.

The Winegards together with the Koch-supported Johnny Anomaly, can be seen promoting "human biodiversity" in this 2020 paper, which cites many of the biggest names in scientific racism including Linda Gottfredson, J.P. Rushton and Richard Lynn. No mention of Sailer though, even to mention he coined the term human biodiversity.

The Winegards like to use a Sailer term "platonic essence" to justify how, although they are certain that a category of humans called "black" exists, and that this category has special evolved traits, at the same time they deny the existence of clear-cut races. How nice to have things both ways, without being conscious of the logical disconnect.

But Pinker, who has also promoted the work of the Winegards, has pioneered the use of equivocation as a career choice.

The Winegards, in their A Tale of Two Bell Curves, included the results of a survey of, they claim, "expert opinion" on intelligence testing and Sailer was deemed to be the most reliable source.

However there isn't much else online linking the Winegards with Sailer. Which is not to say there is no evidence of a relationship. Last June Bo Winegard can be seen having a friendly exchange with Sailer, on Twitter, about movies.

Winegard must have a pretty friendly relationship with Sailer, not only because he engages in casual conversation with him in public, but because Winegard is aware that Sailer is radioactive, since Sailer is infamous as a racist.

Sailer himself acknowledged this recently on his Unz blog (also double-dipping at VDARE) by quoting someone else saying Winegard claimed in his Quillette podcast interview:

one of the triggers to his being fired was him liking a tweet by Steve Sailer…

Pinkerite has discussed the professional racist career of Sailer, in depth in a series of posts but I kept meaning to come back to one particular thing that Sailer said, which demonstrates the utter failure of race "science" as a science.

In my post The racist logic of Steve Sailer, I quoted Sailer from a VDARE article:

Q. But I see all these black people on TV being highly entertaining. They look pretty lively upstairs. Could IQ tests be missing something? 

A. Yes. IQ test questions, by their nature, must have fixed, objective answers. If African Americans are better at subjective, improvisatory responses than they are at objective problem-solving, then IQ will fail to predict fully their patterns of success in the real world. And, indeed, we see much evidence for that every time we turn on the TV (e.g., Oprah).  

Unfortunately, there aren't nearly as many jobs being entertainment or sports superstars as black youths seem to assume, so, overall, IQ remains a quite accurate predictor outside of the tiny sliver of celebrities.

The link to support Sailer's claim that African Americans have a "subjective, improvisatory" kind of intelligence is an article by Sailer himself from 1999 in the National Post of Canada available via the Wayback Machine.

The article contains gems of science such as:

Interestingly, while blacks tend to be more masculine in physique and personality than whites or East Asians, they are often better at typically feminine, more subjective cerebral skills like verbalization, emotional intuition and expression, sense of rhythm, sense of style, improvisation, situational awareness, and mental multi-tasking. Jordan's brain, for instance, enables him to anticipate his opponent's every move while simultaneously demoralizing his foe with nonstop trash-talking. (Try it. It's not easy.)

So Steve Sailer has a problem, which he presents as a frequently asked question, about his racist theories. The problem is that many black people seem very smart indeed.

So Sailer invents a special kind of intelligence for African Americans - "subjective and improvisatory" as opposed to "objective problem-solving." And Sailer declares in his 1999 article that blacks are better at "feminine, more subjective cerebral skills."

There is no scientific evidence that the abilities Sailer claims are black and female are mutually exclusive with objective problem-solving, never mind evidence that women and black people are innately less able to solve problems.

But the absence of evidence will never stop a bigot. Steve Sailer needed a "scientific" justification so he pulled one out of his ass.

And that's where Bo Winegard gets his science - from Steve Sailer's ass.

Although we don't know for sure the reason why Marietta College declined to keep Bo Winegard on its payroll, it has every right to regard Winegard as a crank and a charlatan who dresses up 18th century beliefs and the crackpot theories of Steve Sailer as "science" to try to make a buck.

He might be able to make a buck, but like the career of Steve Sailer, he won't make a buck from people who value intellectual excellence and serious scientific work. Bo Winegard's hope for a career as a race monger rests on the right-wing racist eco-system funded by the same wealthy, cranky, old white men who have supported Steve Sailer for decades. 

And from Winegard's perspective, why not? Shilling the contents of Steve Sailer's ass as "science" sure beats working for a living.

The racist logic of Steve Sailer

Many have called Steve Sailer a racist. For example:

• The Center for Genetics and Society (reposting from FAIR): "Steve Sailer , a central figure in the promotion of racist and anti-immigrant theories."  

• Undark's profile on Razib Khan: "Steve Sailer has also helped rebrand scientific racism as 'human biodiversity.'"  

• Rightwing watch: "Steve Sailer, an unabashedly racist columnist for the white nationalist site VDARE"

And Malcolm Gladwell, while debating Steven Pinker, noted:

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. 

But in 2014, HBD Chick would have you know the bar is very high to declare someone a racist, and she feels that Steve Sailer does not meet that (my highlight):

some people seem to be under the impression that being interested in human biodiversity is somehow racist. they couldn’t be more wrong. 

first of all, what is racism? merriam-webster* tells us that racism is:

“A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” 

so there are TWO criteria there that have to be fulfilled to meet the definition of racism: you have to think that 1) race is the primary determinant of human traits, and 2) racial differences inevitably mean that one race is superior to the others. 

with regard to the first one, i can’t think of any serious hbd blogger or commenter in the hbd-o-sphere that thinks that biological differences between the races are the primary determinant of “human traits and capacities.” far from it, in fact. i certainly don’t (see: the entirety of this blog). i’m sure, too, that steve sailer doesn’t think that. nor does john derbyshire. not greg cochran. not henry harpending. not razib either. i know that neither jayman nor super misdreavus think that. and on down the list, etc., etc. ..

Sailer wrote an article for the white supremacist VDARE (he's a very frequent contributor) explaining just how important he thinks intelligence is and how unevenly it is distributed among "races":

Q. Are there differences in average SAT scores among racial groups?
A. Yes. Ashkenazi (European) Jews appear to average the highest—maybe around 110-112—followed by Northeast Asians (105), and then by gentile white Europeans and North Americans (100). The world mean is around 90, Hispanic-Americans are at 89. African-Americans traditionally average around 85 and Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa around 70.

So Steve Sailer thinks that intelligence is very important and he thinks different "racial groups" have different innate levels of intelligence although, as is common to race science promoters, he gives a small nod to environment.

But to get a true understanding of what Steve Sailer considers the innate characteristics of black people, there is this, also in the VDARE article:

Q. But I see all these black people on TV being highly entertaining. They look pretty lively upstairs. Could IQ tests be missing something? 

A. Yes. IQ test questions, by their nature, must have fixed, objective answers. If African Americans are better at subjective, improvisatory responses than they are at objective problem-solving, then IQ will fail to predict fully their patterns of success in the real world. And, indeed, we see much evidence for that every time we turn on the TV (e.g., Oprah).  

Unfortunately, there aren't nearly as many jobs being entertainment or sports superstars as black youths seem to assume, so, overall, IQ remains a quite accurate predictor outside of the tiny sliver of celebrities.

We can infer from this that Steve Sailer believes that black people are not innately good at "objective problem-solving" and this is a serious problem because their innate "subjective improvisatory responses" are not as valuable on the job market. Which of course implies something about black employment and black financial well-being.

If you look at Steve Sailer's Unz Review column it's clear that Sailer is obsessed with race (which is likely the reason his career is supported by wingnut welfare from people like Ron Unz) and that he employs racist logic when it comes to people of color. This is obvious in his December 13 post:

How long until Ava DuVernay, director of “When They See Us” about the Central Park Five, is hired by Netflix to concoct a five part miniseries on how the Morningside Park Three’s beautiful black baby bodies were framed by whites?

This is the very quintessence of a racist mind. Sailer believes that because some black teenagers in 2019 are suspects in the murder of a white woman, it therefore proves that black teenagers - who were exonerated - were guilty of an attack on a white woman in 1989.

Even a thirty-year separation in time cannot convince Steve Sailer to look at them as two separate groups of individuals.

That is how the mind of a racist works: those people are all the same.

Only a total crackpot like "HBD Chick" would claim that Steve Sailer is not a racist.

Steven Pinker, Steve Sailer and the Cousin Marriage Conundrum part 5

Illustration by Slug Signorino

<-- Continued from Part 4

Unlike Nicholas Wade, who refers to a metaphorical Adam and Eve, Steve Sailer's Biblical characters are actual:

The Muslim practice is similar to older Middle Eastern norms, such as those outlined in Leviticus in the Old Testament. The lineage of the Hebrew Patriarchs who founded the Jewish people was highly inbred. Isaac married Rebekah, a cousin once removed. And Isaac’s son Jacob wed his two first cousins, Leah and Rachel. Jacob’s dozen sons were the famous progenitors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Due to inbreeding, Jacob’s eight legitimate sons had only six unique great-grandparents instead of the usual eight. That is because the inbred are related to their relatives through multiple paths.

While it's possible cousin-marriage was practiced during the time period portrayed by the Old Testament, Jacob's biography is not evidence of "older Middle Eastern norms." The Bible also claims Jacob lived to be 147 years old. Does this mean that cousin-marriage is positively correlated with record-breaking longevity? 

So, from incoherence, to ignoring data, to using the Bible as a source, Sailer's piece fails to meet any standards for good science writing. 

Even worse, it reflects badly on Pinker's explanation for including Sailer's piece: 

Many misconceptions about behavior are harmless, but in these dangerous times some could lead to catastrophe. Steve Sailer's "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" correctly predicts that it would be unwise to try to graft a political system onto a society without understanding how the psychology of kinship and ethnic identification plays out in the local environment.

Steve Sailer's prediction was proven wrong: currently available on the GitHub account of FiveThirtyEight is a table-based comparison of global consanguinity rates. The least consanguineous, Hungary, is no longer considered a democracy. While Fareed Zakaria, writing in The Washington Post last month calls Iraq's democracy a success.

The third-most consanguineous country, Nigeria, with a rate of 51.2 has been a democracy since 1999.

Neither of those democracies are perfect but then, neither is the democracy of the United States, in which one political party appears to be hell-bound to destroy voting rights and install Trump loyalists in a slow-moving coup. US consanguinity rate: 0.2%.

It may have been a bad idea to invade and "nation build" Iraq on the pretense that it had chemical weapons and was connected to al-Qaeda (I participated in the large NYC protest against the invasion) but Sailer comes nowhere near making a convincing case that the big problem with Iraq and democracy is consanguinity.

Steven Pinker apparently read the utter failure that is "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" and decided it would be a perfect addition to a volume of "the best science and nature writing" of 2004. 

People claim Steven Pinker is smart, but this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder. 

But perhaps quality wasn't Pinker's overriding concern. Pinker has not acknowledged Sailer in public, as far as I have been able to discover, since 2011, but Sailer's recent review of Pinker's book "Rationality" demonstrates that Sailer still deeply admires Pinker, even comparing him to Sailer's stout defender, the racist Charles Murray:

Pinker competes with venerable thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Jared Diamond, Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, Francis Fukuyama, and so forth for the mythical title of America’s Top Public Intellectual.

 

 

Sailer doesn't seem to hold any resentment towards Pinker for refusing to acknowledge his existence for the past ten years (while Pinker still gives interviews to racemonger Razib Khan) and it doesn't even seem to bother Sailer that Pinker is quoted in the Guardian article, saying that racism is "not just wrong - it's stupid." 

This is the very same article in which Sailer doubles-down on his own racism. He quotes Malcolm Gladwell referring to Sailer as "perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people" and Sailer follows that quote with this:

Other beliefs of mine include that Reno is west of Los Angeles, the Holocaust happened, and the sun comes up in the east.

So Pinker says racism is wrong and stupid and Sailer follows that up by claiming that it is self-evident that Black people are intellectually inferior to white people. 

It makes no sense: being a racist is the core of Sailer's career and personality, why would he continue to admire and align with anti-racist Steven Pinker?

In spite of Pinker's statement against racism, we know Pinker has consistently supported racists and racemongers for the past 20 years: Sailer, Khan, Quillette, Linda Gottfredson, Bo and Ben Winegard, Noah Carl, Brian Boutwell; as well as his continuing promotion of the speculative and extremely improbable claims about Ashkenazi intelligence by Steve Sailer's friends, Ron Unz grant recipient Gregory Cochran and white nationalist Henry Harpending.

Tweet from James Beacham, particle physicist at 

the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

Sailer never needs to account for his evidence-free assertions and his absurd racist statements: his career is based on getting paid by racists to mumble racism at other racists. He lives inside a racist echo chamber.

And until recently, Steven Pinker, celebrity intellectual and "venerable thinker" didn't have to answer questions either, about his support for racists. That Guardian article, asking Pinker about his connection to Sailer, is something new, and Steve Sailer knows it, which is why he claims it was an attempt to cancel Pinker:

Pinker goes on:

Sometimes the ad hominem and genetic fallacies are combined to forge chains of guilt by association: “Williams’ theory must be repudiated because he spoke at a conference organized by someone who published a volume containing a chapter written by someone who said something racist.”

Therefore, it was ironic but hardly surprising that The Guardian last week attempted to cancel Pinker.

And again, Pinker's connection to Sailer isn't "guilt by association" as defined by the tortured chain Pinker uses to illustrate the concept, above. The plain truth is that Pinker himself published an incompetent work by a racist.

Is Pinker himself an incompetent editor? Or did Pinker include "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" in spite of it being so bad, because he wanted to promote the career of the indisputably racist Steve Sailer?

Pinker has publicly expressed regret over contributing to Jeffrey Epstein's defense. 

He has never, to my knowledge, and in spite of his unexplained break with Sailer in 2011, publicly expressed regret over supporting the career of Steve Sailer. Why not?

~ END OF SERIES ~

UGH RACISTS! I feel that I am doing necessary work by documenting racists and the way mainstream media and media celebrities have promoted and continue to promote race pseudoscience, but it's nauseating to have to think about them for days at a time.

Let's have something from Curtis Mayfield to elevate the mood.

Bite your lip
And take a trip
Though there may be wet road ahead
And you cannot slip
Just move on up!
For peace you will find
Into the steeple of beautiful people
Where there's only one kind.

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.

Fighting with Steve Sailer and his racist pals on Twitter

Extremist Steve Sailer is not an official member of the IDW, as he was not named in the Bari Weiss article.

But given that Bari Weiss has identified Steven Pinker as the exemplar of IDW respectability, and given how much Sailer has influenced Pinker - as Sailer himself will tell you - not to mention his likely influence on the race science proponents at Quillette with their talk of Platonic essences, it's fair to talk about him on this blog.

Sailer, described by Malcolm Gladwell as "a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people" has, I believe, spent his entire career on wingnut welfare working for Ron Unz at the Unz Review as well as writing for VDare (fun fact - Virginia Dare was probably eaten by her fellow colonists) and American Renaissance and really, probably any racists who will have him. 

The pure essential evil of the brain of Steve Sailer was on special display this past week. Sailer was squawking about a woman of color talking about her appearance. It doesn't concern Sailer that perhaps women of color think about their appearance because racists like Steve Sailer say nasty things about their appearance. And make a living doing it thanks to scum like Ron Unz. 

Now the item I quoted was from two decades ago, but Sailer made it clear in my exchanges with him in the past few days that he still stands by his unsupported opinions, and which many of the gullible losers who follow him on Twitter take as fact.

Sailer is well aware of the one-drop rule as I discuss here.

I did a Google search on "women from Kenya" and "women from Iceland" and "women from China" and the results refute Sailer's claim that "black" women are more masculine-looking than "white" women or Asian women.

Now it's not a great methodology - it's clear that plenty of African-American women, who have a typically high degree of European ancestry thanks to all the slave-raping, are included in the mix for women from Kenya.

But even that is a better methodology than Steve Sailer's, since his methodology is to simply pull it out of his ass.

It's important to realize that Steven Pinker admired and supported the career of Steve Sailer after he felt the need to express his idiotic opinions about "blacks" and "whites" and Asians in public. David Duke is also a fan of Steve Sailer. PDF version here.

Steven Pinker & Steve Sailer & Human Biodiversity

Keira Havens has an excellent new post on her Medium site which discusses the alliance between Steven Pinker and Steve Sailer:

It has been fairly well reported that Pinker cites Steve Sailer, organizer of the Human Biodiversity (h-bd) group that connected Charles Murray, Henry Harpending, Rushton and others in the early ’00s. While most famously called out by Malcom Gladwell in 2009, Pinker published Sailer’s argument that Iraqis are too inbred to manage democracy in his 2004 anthology of best science writing, cited it again in a 2007 article for The New Republic, and cited a 2004 VDARE article of Sailer’s in Better Angels, one that highlighted the observations of fellow HBD member Frank Salter. In a 2009 comment, Sailer shares with confidence that, “Pinker, however, has long been moving away from 1992-style ‘era of evolutionary adaptation’ evolutionary psychology toward Gregory Cochran-style ‘continuing evolution.’” In 2016, a reader asks if Pinker reads Sailer’s blog, and Sailer uses those citations as proof that he does. 

 

The truth is, Sailer probably has a far simpler way of knowing that Pinker is reading his work. In early 1999, when Sailer’s resume was limited to Conservative movie reviewer and VDARE columnist, Steven Pinker, an endowed professor of Brain and Cognitive Scientists at MIT, was already in an email chain discussing the “special problem that Black people have with 3D-to-2D translation“ along with Geoffrey Miller, J Michael Bailey (of recent rapid onset gender dysphoria retraction fame), and J.P. Rushton of the explicitly eugenic Pioneer Fund. A few months later, many of these addressees would join the Human Biodiversity (h-bd) group, with Sailer proudly adding “the invitation-only Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals” to his resume. By the end of the next year, when the group was sending a few hundred messages per month, Sailer went on to share a private message that hadn’t made it into the group chat: a discussion of Al Gore’s lisp from “a best selling cognitive scientist / linguist / evolutionary psychologist.”

Steve Sailer testified directly to me, in 2019 that he's been an important influence on Pinker's views:

On the rare occasions (maybe only the one occasion?) when a journalist asks Pinker about his connection to Sailer, Pinker cries "guilt by association":

Many critics allege that Pinker’s recent remarks are part of a longer history of comments and behaviour that have come dangerously close to promoting pseudoscientific or abhorrent points of view. To take a single example: the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people”. Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels, among many others, on his website.

Pinker is listed as a member of Sailer's Roster of Human Biodiversity Discussion Group Members although I have always been hesitant to cite this as more evidence of his connection to Pinker. 

It appears to me that Sailer just added anybody he wanted to his discussion group. The fact that Paul Krugman is listed on this discussion group is a sign that being a member does not mean you volunteered to be a member. However, there is an interesting data field worth noting - by the way, I created a Google Sheets version of the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group Members for sorting capabilities here.

So the column that is furthest to the right is labeled "Public Contributor" and Krugman is marked as "Not yet." Another member of the group who is labeled Not yet is Jonathan Marks who I assume is the same guy who says he coined the term "human biodiversity" and it was stolen by racists. 

On the other hand, Steven Pinker is marked "Yes." Also marked "Yes" are Charles Murray, J. P. Rushton, Peter Brimelow, Rosalind Arden, Gregory Cochran, Daniel C. Dennett, John Derbyshire, Henry Harpending, Kevin MacDonald, Helmuth Nyborg and Arthur Hu. What a collection.

I would pay big bucks to get my hands on Steven Pinker's contributions to the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group.

In the meantime, I discovered that Sailer let the domain name humanbiodiversity.org lapse, so I bought it. It displays very different content now.

Steven Pinker, Steve Sailer and the Cousin Marriage Conundrum part 4

<-- Continued from Part 3

So the articles that Steven Pinker chose to include in "The Best Science and Nature Writing" of 2004 are a mixed bunch. Several seem to have barely anything to do with science or nature, several are long-winded. But several were quite good, or at least clear and coherent and did not use the Bible as a source.

You cannot say the same about Steve Sailer's "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum," originally written for the American Conservative, which was founded by three likely anti-Semites and racists, Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell and Taki Theodoracopulos. 

"The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" is Sailer's first of 54 bylines, the last of which was published in 2013. He's also been the subject of more recent articles in American Conservative, as when Noah Millman celebrated Sailer's "moment" in May 2017 - his moment was said to have arrived thanks to a New York Magazine profile of Sailer.

Sailer's byline for "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" says he's a columnist for VDARE. Which is a white nationalist extremist rag.

In the first paragraph of the piece, Sailer states the issue to be addressed: neocons want to "nation build" Iraq but that will be impossible because Iraqis are inbred. 

...Americans know so little about the Middle East that few of us are even aware of one of the building blocks of Arab Muslim cultures: cousin marriage. Not surprisingly, we are almost utterly innocent of how much the high degree of inbreeding in Iraq could interfere with our nation-building ambitions.

In the second paragraph he says they are really very inbred indeed and introduces the term "consanguinity" which is a synonym for cousin marriage.

In the third paragraph he says there are factions and sub-factions in Iraqi society and the "engine" of those social divisions is cousin marriages. He reiterates this unsupported claim in the next paragraph:

"The clannishness, corruption, and coups frequently observed in countries such as Iraq appear to be in tied to the high rates of inbreeding."

He makes another unsupported assertion in the next paragraph: 

" But, in Islamic countries, family loyalty is often at war with national loyalty. Civic virtues, military effectiveness, and economic performance all suffer."

Then in the next paragraph he gives us what I expected would be expert testimony on the problem of Iraqi inbreeding:

Commentator Randall Parker wrote, “Consanguinity [cousin marriage] is the biggest underappreciated factor in Western analyses of Middle Eastern politics...

Commentator Randall Parker owns several blogs active since around the turn of the century. Some are defunct, and the two that survive are ParaPundit and FuturePundit but they don't appear to have been updated since 2017. Parker now has an up-to-date Twitter account, @futurepundit.

Contrary to what I expected, Randall Parker has no expertise on the subject of consanguinity and politics. I know because I asked him via Twitter direct message and received this response:

Then Sailer conflates cousin-marriage with any close-knit and/or extended family:

Similarly, as Francis Fukuyama described in his 1995 book, Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity, countries such as Italy with highly loyal extended families can generate dynamic family firms. Yet, their larger corporations tend to be rife with goldbricking, corruption, and nepotism, all because their employees do not trust each other to show their highest loyalty to the firm rather than their own extended families. Arab cultures are more family-focused even than Sicily, and therefore their larger economic enterprises suffer even more.

Italy has nothing to do with the point of Sailer's piece: cousin marriage. The "family-based" society of Italy has one of the lowest consanguinity rates, below Canada, France, Sweden and Ireland. 

There goes the clarity that Steven Pinker said is so important for good science writing.

It's not surprising that the American Conservative has no editorial standards, but it appears that neither does Steven Pinker.

When I reviewed this article for the first time, a few years ago, I assumed Steve Sailer had not had access to international consanguinity data. But thanks to Randall Parker's blog, I discovered that he did have access, by 2002. 

Knowing that Steve Sailer loves to think about the intersections between biology and society I sent him a link to Kurtz's writings. Steve immediately wanted to find more social science data about rates of consanguinity throughout the world. I went Google searching without any luck. Now several months later Steve just found a site with worldwide measurements of the incidence of consanguinity.

The site, consang.net, is in transition but it has archives available via the Wayback Machine. The data Sailer used is more difficult to use than the more current Five-Thirty-Seven data available on Github because larger countries are broken up into many sub-sections. But if you make an effort and average the rates out, some non-democracies have considerably lower rates of consanguinity than democracies. For example, according to Sailer's data source, China, with an authoritarian Communist government since 1949, has an average consanguinity rate of 9.4, while India, a democracy since 1947, has an average consanguinity rate of 24.2.

It's a mystery if Sailer looked at his own data when making his assertions about cousin marriage and democracy, and it doesn't seem to matter. He must have known without checking the data that India, at the time he wrote "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" was a decades-long democracy. Yet he lumps India in with other inbred countries, which are presumably incapable of achieving democracy, like Iraq.

American society is so biased against inbreeding that many Americans have a hard time even conceiving of marrying a cousin. Yet, arranged matches between first cousins (especially between the children of brothers) are considered the ideal throughout much of a broad expanse from North Africa through West Asia and into Pakistan and India.

The case of India, alone, should have given Sailer pause about his premise that consanguinity and democracy are incompatible, but he completely ignores it, not willing to let facts interfere with his beautiful theory. 

Sailer's data failure is especially interesting because a few years later, Steven Pinker, in a quarrel with Malcolm Gladwell, would defend his use of Sailer's work on the grounds that it doesn't matter that Steve Sailer is a racist, because he's so good with data.

Just this past month, in his review of Pinker's latest book "Rationality, " in Taki's Magazine, Sailer discusses the incident, and uses the opportunity to double-down on being a racist:

Therefore, it was ironic but hardly surprising that The Guardian last week attempted to cancel Pinker by repeating Malcolm Gladwell’s complaint that Pinker had humiliated him in a 2009 book review in The New York Times by citing data I’d compiled debunking Gladwell’s knuckleheaded assertion that the NFL performance of college quarterback prospects “can’t be predicted.” The Guardian whoops:

…the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people.”

Other beliefs of mine include that Reno is west of Los Angeles, the Holocaust happened, and the sun comes up in the east. The Guardian goes on to explain that because I am a bad person, according to the impartial geniuses Malcolm Gladwell and Angela Saini, logically, Pinker must be one too:

Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of ‘Superior: The Return of Race Science,’ told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale.” When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association”—just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism—he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid”—but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of ‘Better Angels,’ among many others, on his website.

The article of mine that Pinker reprinted in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 is my January 2003 effort “Cousin Marriage Conundrum” predicting that the Bush administration’s planned invasion of Iraq would fail at nation-building because the extraordinarily high rate of inbreeding in Iraq makes the population clannish—perhaps my most insightful essay ever.

Pinker is a really good editor.

But Steve Sailer, is, as usual, wrong. His article is not insightful - and Pinker is a bad editor by selecting "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" to include in "The Best Science and Nature Writing."

Unless Pinker had motives besides quality. 

But let's get to the part where Sailer uses the Bible as evidence. In Part 5 -->

The mind of a racist, part 5: Steve Sailer and Taki's Magazine

I pointed out in part 4 of The mind of a racist: Steve Sailer and VDARE that Sailer has decided that all race issues were resolved in the 1960s, in spite of systemic racist practices like redlining.

In spite of the evidence in media reports as in the NYTimes, Sailer denies that redlining exists:

But, you don’t understand, the 2017 homeless subsidization program is going on now, while redlining hasn’t happened since 1968, so, obviously, redlining is more determinative of today’s behavior.

Steve Sailer believes whatever he wants to believe. And he has so little self-awareness he wrote a response in Taki's Magazine to Race, genetics and pseudoscience - an explainer in which he actually claims:

In contrast, I tend toward the exact opposite writing style. I may not convince you of my ideas, but I’m going to provide you with a lot of data and examples.

But as we've seen, he couldn't even be bothered to Google "redlining" and learn that redlining is still happening now.

Steve Sailer is lazy and delusional and racist, but luckily for him, those are advantages in a world with a vigorous racist network, funded by wealthy men such as Ron Unz and Panagiotis "Taki" Theodoracopulos.

Theodoracopulos is ten years older than Donald Trump but they sound like they have much in common, and their families traveled in the same circles:

The Donald told Harry Theodoracopulos (brother of Taki), 77, from New York, that he was no longer welcome at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach because he claimed he verbally abused caddies and talked too loudly on the driving range.

The Theodoracopulos brothers, like Trump, became rich by being born into it, although the Theodoracopuli haven't had multiple bankruptcies, unlike Trump, by avoiding high-stakes endeavors like casino-building. Taki Theodoracopulos works for mainstream publications like The Spectator, a weekly British magazine:

The millionaire playboy has breezily called himself a "soi-disant anti-Semite" and peppers his conversation with words like "wop", "yid" or "dago"; yet he has survived seven editors and five proprietors. 

Taki has his own online magazine, where he doesn't have to worry about editors. "Taki's Mag" has a rogues gallery of far right columnists.

And let's not forget it was once edited by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

It was in a column in Taki that Gavin McInnes expressed his admiration for Steven Pinker:

... I'm talking about brave souls such as Ezra Levant, Anthony Cumia, Ann Coulter, Greg Gutfeld, Kathy Shaidle, Bill Whittle, Jared Taylor, Dana Loesch, A.J. Delgado, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Charles C. Johnson, Mary Katharine Ham, James O'Keefe, John Bolton, Sean Hannity, Phelim McAleer, K.T. McFarland, Mark Steyn, Steve Sailer, Jon Derbyshire, Steven Pinker, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Peter Brimelow, Jonah Goldberg, John Stossel, Doug Stanhope, Jim Goad, Naomi Schaefer Riley, Katie Pavlich, Charles Krauthammer, Kevin D. Williamson, and Garfunkel and Oates. 

Another member of the IDW, Charles Murray, gets a mention, as does white supremacists Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, Claire Lehmann's buddy Ezra Levant and Steve Sailer.

I've been asked why I pay attention to a nobody like Steve Sailer. It's because in the world of right-wing racists, Steve Sailer is somebody, living on the largess of plutocrats.

So far as I know, though, Sailer has not been able to get funding from the top level of the eco-system, Charles Koch. But that could change. I'll talk about that next.

Steve Sailer exposes another race science promoting college professor - meet Charles Negy

As much as Pinkerite would like to take credit for reducing the amount of hereditarian bullshit being promoted on college campuses, it seems that the most effective way to expose academic race science promoters is to associate them with Steve Sailer.

By way of Steve Sailer's blog was the claim apparently from Quillette's Bo Winegard himself, that Winegard was fired from Marietta college because of his association with Steve Sailer:

one of the triggers to his being fired was him liking a tweet by Steve Sailer…

And now, right after Charles Negy retweeted Steve Sailer promoting one of his typically racist articles in right-wing Taki's mag (I talked at length about its founder Panagiotis "Taki" Theodoracopulos here) Negy is the subject of a NYTimes article which links to that retweet. 

The article is University to Investigate Professor Who Tweeted About ‘Black Privilege’ and says:

Dr. Negy’s remarks prompted outrage among students and faculty and led to calls for him to be fired. On Twitter, the university denounced Dr. Negy’s remarks but said they could be considered constitutionally protected speech.

“Being actively anti-racist means calling out and confronting racist comments,” the university wrote. “We are aware of Charles Negy’s recent personal Twitter posts, which are completely counter to UCF’s values. We are reviewing this matter further while being mindful of the First Amendment.” 

The University of Central Florida, near Orlando, enrolls more than 69,000 students. Dr. Negy, 60, was granted tenure by the university in 2001, according to his résumé.
His book, according to a synopsis, argues that “white Americans and white culture frequently are under siege for a host of transgressions, ranging from colonialism to slavery, Jim Crow laws to racism, and from microaggressions to white privilege.”
In an interview Thursday, he defended his remarks, saying, “Why would I resign?”

“Despite what so many ‘haters’ are saying about me on Twitter, I’ve never said ANYTHING critical of George Floyd,” Dr. Negy said in an email. “The man was murdered in cold blood by a man who was a total sadist. So cruel.”
Dr. Negy added that while he was not a white supremacist or racist, he was critical of all ethnic and cultural groups. 

“In my classes, we critically look at various groups, including whites,” he said. “There is no way I can be brutally honest about each racial/cultural group without offending someone.”

But if you look at his Twitter timeline, it's obvious Negy is lying. First because Steve Sailer is a professional racist who especially hates and lies about black people.

And this wasn't the first time Negy agreed with Sailer on Twitter.

But Negy doesn't need Sailer's help to promote race science ideology:

Claiming that the African American experience is similar to the Asian American experience is a standard "human biodiversity" tactic as demonstrated by Bo Winegard's twin brother Ben. 

Now I am not one to believe that race science promoters are especially bright, but they cannot possibly be so stupid and ignorant as to believe that the African American experience is comparable to any other ethnic group's experience.

Unlike Bo Winegard, who was let go by Marietta, Charles Negy has tenure at UCF. I don't know how the rules of tenure work, but there is an online petition calling for Negy to be fired.

If he is fired I wouldn't be too worried about him. Steve Sailer has made a living supported by wealthy old racist men like Theodoracopulos, Ron Unz, and Peter Brimelow. And Charles Murray has been supported by Koch via the AEI for many years. Bo Winegard is on staff at Quillette, which is supported by right-wing plutocrat Mark Carnegie, and also, I'd be willing to bet, by Koch.

The Right's wingnut welfare machine takes care of its favorite promoters of race science.

Steven Pinker must be so proud ~ Steve Sailer & Tucker Carlson & the Sailer lawsuit

Weird that at first glance Sailer looks 
like Joe Biden who is over a decade
older than Sailer.
-----------------------------------------------------

I'm not saying that Steve Sailer owes his entire career to Steven Pinker, after all there's no record of Pinker giving Sailer a nice wad of cash like Ron Unz did, but it sure didn't hurt when Pinker chose to include a garbage piece of work by Sailer in the 2004 edition of "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" and it didn't hurt that Pinker used Sailer's data in his own writing, or as Malcolm Gladwell said:

"(Pinker) had three (scientific data) sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people."

That was in 2009. Pinker did not stop allying himself with Sailer until after 2012, when he included a blurb from Sailer for Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature."

Pinker throws a hissy fit when a journalist asks him about his Sailer connection - which rarely happens, mainly because Pinker is a sacred cow of the media, constantly promoted as a "liberal" no matter how often he publicly aligns with libertarians, Republicans and the extreme racist right.

The media, the stupid, lazy media, is merely taking its cue from Pinker, who likes to have things both ways.

But apparently Sailer harbors no ill-will towards Pinker, no doubt since they are likely both still in agreement on issues of race and since Pinker has never expressed regret about promoting Sailer's hideously racist career. 

Now Sailer is promoting racism and Trump on the show of Tucker "too extreme for Fox News" Carlson.

Meanwhile, miserable low-life Steve Sailer is being sued for "Assault Libel & Slander" as a result of his unconscionable refusal to quit defaming the target of the redacted hit piece published in the sleazy City Journal.

Like Alex Jones, these other right-wing ghouls lack a conscience and will try to beat up on people who are not public figures because they think they're vulnerable. But as Alex Jones found out and as Sailer is finding out, their targets are not as vulnerable as the ghouls hoped. The rule of law still means something in the United States - at least until the Trump fascist gang - of which Sailer and Carlson are very much a part - destroys it.

The rule of law still means something in the UK too and Emil Kirkegaard owes Oliver Smith £982 and the judge ruled that contempt proceedings against Kirkegaard may proceed.

And speaking of horrible rightwing ghouls, it looks like milord and milady of the White Supremacist Castle are in financial and legal trouble, per the Southern Poverty Law Center:

VDARE is embroiled in multiple legal proceedings in state and federal courts in New York. These cases include a federal lawsuit that VDARE filed against the AG’s office in December 2022; a special proceeding that the AG’s office initiated against VDARE in New York state court in December 2022 for failing to abide by the subpoena; and multiple appeals.
In a March 29 post on the VDARE website, Peter Brimelow estimated that the proceedings have cost his group “up to $1 million” over the course of three years.

Apparently the ghouls were living in the castle:

The Brimelows have not denied residing on castle grounds, with Lydia Brimelow referring to the complex as her “home” in a March 15 interview.
Additionally, neither Brimelow has denied purchasing the property with funds given to the VDARE Foundation.