From American Greatness:
Steve Sailer: The Hidden Figure of the New Right
Noticing will be welcome addition to the libraries of long-time fans and will serve as an introduction for younger readers who may have grown up in Sailer’s substantial intellectual shadow.
By Jeremy Carl
March 30, 2024“If the meritocracy was real, Steve Sailer would be one of the most famous writers in the world,” said Tucker Carlson in hailing Noticing, the recently-released first-ever published anthology of Steve Sailer’s writing. That Carlson, arguably still the leading figure on the right who spans both its intellectual and populist wings, would speak so highly of Sailer speaks of the pervasiveness of his influence on his readers, and, of course, the fact that Carlson has to say this for an audience that may barely know of Sailer’s existence reflects the limits of that influence within so-called “respectable” opinion.
How pervasive is Sailer’s influence? The day I sat down to write this review, I saw arguably the most influential voice in Christian nationalism on X/Twitter writing about “invade the world invite the world.” Another highly influential commentator on Israel-Gaza was tweeting about the high percentage of Gaza marriages between first cousins (extraordinarily high at 30%) and its relationship to lowered IQs and higher disease burden among Gazans.
I have no idea whether either was aware of their intellectual antecedents, but both were riffing off theses first fully explored for mass audiences by Sailer, a man who has arguably had a more esoteric effect on the intellectual dissident right than any figure in the last quarter century. Indeed, indicative of the breadth of Sailer’s influence and it’s extension beyond the right, is that Sailer’s original piece on cousin marriage, in the book’s opening section, was selected by Harvard Professor and liberal public intellectual Steven Pinker for The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology he edited in 2004.
The extent of that esoteric influence was the first thing that came to mind when I began to read Noticing, a collection of essays written over the last several decades and is the joint brainchild of Sailer and the very promising new right-wing publishing house Passage Press, which, through launching its eponymous Passage Prize and publishing the first books from prominent dissident authors like Sailer and Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), alongside forgotten right-wing classics, has carved out a major profile in a very short period of time. Noticing is a collection of columns spanning more than thirty years of Sailer’s journalism, and it represents the first comprehensive collection of his work, allowing us to better evaluate Sailer’s influence in retrospect.
Noticing is an ideal title for the book and a great description of what Sailer has resolutely done daily over the last several decades. And noticing is indeed the key challenge of our intellectually straitened age. As he wrote years ago, “Political correctness [an older version of what we might call “wokeness” today] is a war on noticing.” And Steve Sailer believes in noticing patterns that others don’t see—or refuse to see. A supposedly mild-mannered interlocutor (those who have met him inform me that he is kind, modest, and almost painfully earnest), Sailer’s observations are often pungent, but what distinguishes him from his further right brethren is that he is not a particularly political animal, nor are his observations made with partisan animus in mind.
To be sure, Sailer is a Republican after a fashion, but his politically incorrect observations are not done in obvious service of a political agenda, and he utterly lacks the anger or attendant political commitments that sometimes plague others of his ilk. He is more interested in being right than winning.
Read the whole thing there.
