Noticing and Nothingness

Steve Sailer's Lifetime Achievement Award

I come to bury Sailer, and to praise him

If you’re reading this you probably know who Steve Sailer is, but if you don’t he’s a former marketing executive whose interest in genuine racial diversity (as opposed to the “Diversity” of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”) led him into journalism in the nineties, where he contributed to The National Review until his insight and honesty in dealing with racial questions led William F Buckley to send him packing in his bowdlerizing purge of the magazine in 1997.

Since then Steve has spent the current century exploding the various blank slate errata making up today’s secular dispensation, analyzing and expounding on social and political trends with a unique combination of common sense and penetrating insight. For this temerity he’s been forced to publish from the obscurity of his iSteve blog, hosted since 2014 by Ron Unz’ rogue website The Unz Review, which specializes in publishing writers and ideas banished from the mainstream.

This year he released an anthology of his work, Noticing: An Essential Reader by Steve Sailer. Offered for direct purchase by small alternative outlet Passage Press, there’s a relatively reasonably priced paperback and a limited run of leather bound “Patrician” versions for $395 dollars.

This will not be a review of the book but of its promotion.

Over the years Steve’s casually thrown off more useful concepts, insights and memorable phrases than one can keep track of. Over time these have percolated up through layers of suppression to influence—almost always without credit—polite conservatives. His description of open borders combined with liberal intervention, “invade the world, invite the world” found its way into conservative parlance; his call for Republicans to adopt policies designed to create “affordable family formation”; his description of the identity politics regime as “the coalition of the fringes”; his mocking of “Ellis Island kitsch” and “the zeroth amendment” to the Constitution demanding anyone in the world having a right to emigrate to America and bullying resistance to mass immigration; his “Sailer Strategy” (more on that below); his phrasing of racial diversity as “human biodiversity (HBD); his definition of race as a “partially inbred extended family”; his unearthing of the barrier to ill-advised democracy promotion in other cultures, consanguineous marriage, or marriage between cousins, making familial bonds more important than citizenship; his exposure of the hypocrisy of liberalism now: “the typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a] he constantly proclaims belief in human equality, but they don't; b] he has a high IQ, but they don't” his “high and low against the middle”, as in elite demagogy setting lower classes and disaffected against the hated middle class to maintain power; these are but a few of Sailer’s original ideas.

But coinciding with Sailer’s remarkable career of pointing out the lies and obfuscations of the powerful has been the steady consolidation of their power. That consolidation accelerated in the response to Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president and subsequent administration, as a desperate elite launched the current regime of censorship based initially on the Russian collusion hoax and expanded now to include any dissenting views proving troublesome to power. In a very real sense it can be said that frantic but successful shutting down of dissent in response to Trump has been a response to the success of Sailer’s ideas.

In 2000 Steve suggested his Sailer Strategy for Republican presidential candidates, advising they maximize white voter turnout with policy focused on making it easier to start a family (“affordable family formation”) and sensible immigration restriction, rather than their Quixotic election cycle appeals to the “natural conservatives” of the growing Hispanic population and serial promotion of black mediocrities.

Donald Trump’s insurgent candidacy proved the Sailer Strategy effective—to the outrage of the elite and chagrin of even the Republican establishment. Furthermore Trump’s popular appeal (if not his governance in office) under the banner of “Maga” bears close resemblance to another Sailer notion, “citizenism”, which is simply the philosophy that the country should be run on behalf of its citizens without favor for race, sexuality, sex, immigration status—the components of Steve’s “coalition of the fringes” now dominating our politics. Citizenism was nothing new but a call to restore the principle of a colorblind constitutionalism taken for granted before the sixties ushered in the perverse present. But for Sailer reintroducing this obvious idea also was a means to circumvent what he saw as the otherwise inevitable rise of white identity politics, where white Americans openly, rather than implicitly, took their own side in the fray of identity politics dominating our elections—and which Trump, of all people, seems to be unsettling now.

Furthermore Trump’s “America First” slogan evoking citizenism under another name combined with his opposition to wars of liberal intervention brings to mind yet another aforementioned Sailerism: invade the world/invite the world. Trump therefore brought two of Sailer’s central theses into play in sudden, dramatic fashion in 2016. Steve didn’t seem to notice and by the time Trump was ousted and challenging the 2020 election results at the Supreme Court he dismissed Trump’s fight with a shrug, seemingly content to be relieved of the embarrassing association with the boorish Trump and adding to his growing catalogue of conventional views the refusal to find anything suspect in the last presidential election.

Since then Steve’s fall from grace—for some—has only accelerated. He’s accepted uncritically the covid narrative, including lockdowns and mandatory vaccines, embraced the demonization of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine and steered clear of Israel’s destruction of Gaza after October 7 and the subsequent unleashing of American law enforcement on protesters, choosing instead to take up, half-heartedly, the fight against “antisemitism”.

As new divisions on the right coalesce around the post October 7 moment, with the “far right” dividing between antisemitic and antizionist forces on one hand and pro-Israel rightwingers on the other, Sailer’s ideas have proven more useful to the latter. From this quarter comes now an argument ostensibly based on Steve’s “racist” writings about “HBD”, invoking the supposed intellectual inferiority of brown Palestinians and even in one case cousin-marriage—which Sailer once demonstrated was antithetical to American attempts to install a liberal democracy in Iraq—to justify Israeli atrocities.

It is with a profound sense of pathos that I consider this supposed revival and belated recognition of Sailer who seems to have acquired a whole new generation of admirers to replace the many more who have fallen away in recent years, some embittered with a sense of betrayal, some depressed with a sense of futility and some perhaps exhausted by the repetition of points long ago proved—and now proven to make no difference.

Steve’s victory lap in promotion of the book is not the beginning of Sailer’s long-overdue influence on the national dialogue, but the end of it; more whimper than bang. Sailer is being given the equivalent of a belated lifetime achievement award with relief that whatever threat he posed is long gone and with the apparent confidence that his ideas on race and IQ can now be the grounds for defending Jewish domination of American politics.

It seems less that Sailer is being rewarded for his bold transgressions, as his arriviste promoters now, one part clueless and one part disingenuous, proclaim, but more as if he’s being rewarded for his compliance. Compliance to the suspect covid narrative; compliance to the US’ proxy war on Russia through the destruction of Ukraine; compliance to the solidifying of Jewish dominance, based on the “merit” of superior intelligence, over America. Above all Sailer has signaled that he is opposed to any explicit expression of white advocacy. After years of exposing the lies upon which the system is now founded Sailer has shown he will not abandon his ultimate faith in the system, whatever form it takes and wherever it leads from its terrifying present.

Meanwhile Sailer carries on lapping the competition in a race long ago won and no longer relevant. Another memorable phrase of Steve’s, the “point and sputter”, describing the unfortunately effective but intellectually dishonest practice of pointing out and defaming as “racist” or otherwise verboten statements or ideas without any attendant substantive refutation of their veracity remains in effect and effective, while Sailer continues to indulge in what I call the point and titter, the practice of pointing out conventional absurdities for a laugh but to no meaningful effect—and beyond this point it isn’t clear their effect isn’t in fact deleterious, acting as an energy sink and diversion.

For a long time but, notably, not for a while now, Sailer expressed confidence in the triumph of truth, of the steady march of facts and new revelations in the study of genetics to finally overcome the lies of egalitarianism. I recall him citing an anonymous anecdote: a race realist asked by a leftist university professor how long it would take before race realism would become publicly undeniable, with the professor lapsing into thoughtful silence at the answer—in a few decades or so—as if contemplating the consequences. Well the professor need not have worried, we can see now. Steve and his readers thought something would have to give over time. Something gave all right, but it wasn’t the elite’s hold on power or the power of their lies. Sailerism is resolving not in what Steve predicted—a world not much different than the one we see now, but unencumbered by absurd misconceptions. No, it seems more likely now that Sailer’s contribution will be the justification of elite power, dominated by Jews, on the basis of—there it is—racial superiority. His critics got it half right, and would be relieved for that, if they only understood.

My heart is in the coffin there with Sailer, and I must retrieve it before it’s buried there with him.