See also: SAILER SPEAKS: “Did Black Lives Matter Get All Those Black Lives Murdered? Yes. Yes, It Did.”
[Adapted from Peter Brimelow’s introduction to Steve Sailer’s address to the 2023 VDARE.com Conference, June 18, 2023]
Steve Sailer at the VDARE 2023 Conference: “The Secret History Of The 21st Century”
“Did Black Lives Matter Get All Those Black Lives Murdered? Yes. Yes, It Did.” - @Steve_Sailer https://t.co/IB7bj1NcCZ pic.twitter.com/rAKh9b9ZGT
I’ve often said that there are two actual geniuses—or genii ?—involved with VDARE.com. One of them is John Derbyshire. [Applause]. And the other is Steve Sailer. [Applause]
What I mean by genii is the incredible profusion of ideas and creativity that comes flooding out of them without any apparent effort at all, on a very, very wide range of topics. And of course, in an ideal world, they would be famous figures in the Main Stream Media and in public discourse. But, in fact, they have to settle for VDARE.com.
Now, this is partly my fault in the case of Steve. I learned this only quite recently. Steve was someone who came into the journalistic world in the late 1990s, just as the National Review purges occurred. He was discovered, I believe, by John O’Sullivan, then the Editor. John, of course, was subsequently purged because of being too strong on immigration (and for making Bill Buckley jealous—rather like Tucker Carlson!). But even after that Steve did write a couple of articles for National Review, until he told them that he wanted—I didn’t know this, I didn’t ask for it—that his blurb, his bio attached to the article, should say that he was a writer for VDARE.com. And Rich Lowry refused to do that because he didn’t want to publicize VDARE.com.
Now, if you know Steve as well as I do, you know that would not at all impress him. And so he simply refused to go forward with the article. And he stopped appearing in National Review.
But, on the other hand, having said that—Steve Sailer and Rich Lowry’s National Review—they’re not a marriage made in heaven!
Now, one of the things that Steve first wrote for VDARE.com, which immensely impressed me, and profoundly altered my thinking about American politics, was after the Presidential Election in 2000, very narrowly won by George W. Bush.
Of course, the conventional wisdom then, ardently promoted by Karl Rove, was what the Republicans have to do is to pass Amnesty for illegal aliens and thus, supposedly, increase their share of the Hispanic vote.
And Steve pointed out, because he has a grasp of elementary arithmetic, that any conceivable increase in the Hispanic vote would be easily swamped by highly achievable increases in the Republican share of the white vote.
Bush’s share of the white vote in 2000 was pitifully low—what Steve called a “measly 54%.” (In contrast, Bush I got 59% in 1988).
And Steve continued to write about this (at my urging; I christened it “The Sailer Strategy”), basically for the next 16 years, without making any impression at all, getting any acknowledgment at all in the Main Stream Media.
Just after the 2008 Presidential Election, thrown away by John McCain, Steve gave a talk for us—I think it was our first conference, it was in Boston—discussing what the Republicans could and should do. And he pointed out that the real target of opportunity was the Rust Belt, the Midwestern states. And if they could increase their share of the white working class vote by even a small amount, they would carry those states and win the election.
Well, in 2016, that’s exactly what Trump did.
God knows why. I mean, Trump apparently doesn’t read online. (I’m pretty sure Stephen Miller does!) But I just don’t know how he got the idea.
So of course, I thought at this point that, having languished in the obscurity of VDARE.com and TakiMag for 16 years, Steve would now become a World Historical figure and get reviews and attention from the Main Stream Media. Because he had been proved right! I mean, you’d think they would go and ask him: “What’s happening next?”
And he did get, I wouldn’t say 15 minutes of fame, but at least 1.5 seconds of fame.
He was mentioned in the New York Times. And there was a brief article about him in New York Magazine [The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right, by Park MacDougald and Jason Willick, April 30, 2017].
And that was it. After that, nothing—nothing.
Until early this year. Helen Andrews, who’s a senior editor of the American Conservative, wrote a very generous article about him in a webzine called Compact, which unfortunately is behind a paywall that even James Fulford couldn’t crack [Behind Steve Sailer’s Rise, March 9, 2023].
So I had to pay for a month’s subscription to get it!
It’s a very funny article. She says that she looked at some artificial-intelligence chatbot thing and asked it: Can you generate a Steve Sailer tweet?
And it responded:
I’m sorry, I cannot generate a Steve Sailer tweet, as his tweets often contain controversial and divisive content, which goes against OpenAI’s values of promoting kindness and respect.
And she went on to say:
Major publications are afraid to cite him. Journalists I know are afraid to be seen interacting with him on Twitter. A Florida professor was disciplined by his university for linking to a Steve Sailer article on his personal Twitter account. [Link in original]
Which strikes me as an extraordinary thing, given our supposed classical liberal tradition. In the classical liberal tradition, you’d expect that people would respect arguments on their merits, and not on who makes them.
But this is no longer true. We’ve reverted back to a more primitive, pre-Enlightenment era. It’s like being in an Amish community, or in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. They maintained discipline by shunning people.
But as Andrews went on to say:
Yet everyone reads him. Stories that Sailer broke can be traced like blue dye as they seep through the rest of the media.
I lack words to say what I think about Steve Sailer ’s very heroic and lonely struggle, his unyielding struggle, to tell the truth.
And so I’m going to turn to our very dear friend, our lawyer Frederick C. Kelly, who’s going to summarize for me.
[MUSIC PLAYING] [APPLAUSE]
[Fred regrets he had technical problems with his pipes. We didn’t have Irish whiskey on hand for them, only the Old Crow we buy for John Derbyshire. Steve added famous movie versions of The Minstrel Boy in his tweet here].
Ladies and gentlemen—Steve Sailer!
Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format.
