Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American journalist and blogger who became the leading popularizer of human biodiversity, the euphemism for hereditarian claims about race and intelligence, and a connective figure between academic race science and the alt-right. He founded the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group in the late 1990s, wrote for paleoconservative and anti-immigration outlets, and originated an electoral theory that anticipated the racial politics of the Trump era.¹²

Human Biodiversity and the Sailer Strategy

Sailer organized an invitation-only Human Biodiversity Discussion Group around 1998 and built an audience for hereditarian arguments through his columns and blog. He drew on the race-and-IQ framework of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve and presented average group differences in intelligence as genetically grounded, a position mainstream science rejects as scientific racism. In 2000 he advanced what became known as the "Sailer Strategy," the argument that the Republican Party should win national elections by maximizing turnout among white voters rather than courting minorities, a thesis later echoed in the Bannon-era nationalist politics.¹³

Sailer created a "Roster of Human Biodiversity Discussion Group Members" dated March 3, 1999, and later styled the listserv the Human Biodiversity Institute. The invitation-only group drew academics in race-and-IQ and sex-difference research along with sympathetic journalists, among them the science writer Razib Khan and the anthropologist Gregory Cochran. After the 2016 election the columnist Michael Barone credited Sailer with having mapped in 2001 the white-turnout electoral route that Trump later followed, and the writer's racial-realignment thesis circulated in nationalist circles around Bannon.⁵⁶

Outlets and Influence

Sailer wrote film criticism and political commentary for United Press International and National Review before parting with the latter, and he became a regular contributor to the anti-immigration website VDARE and to Taki's Magazine. His framing of "noticing" group differences and his immigration-restrictionist "citizenism" circulated widely in the online right and were cited by alt-right and neoreactionary writers, placing his work in the same hereditarian substrate that runs through Curtis Yarvin's neoreaction and the race-science discourse that surfaced inside the Rationalist Community. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies Sailer as a promoter of racist pseudoscience.²⁴

Born in 1958 and adopted by a Lockheed engineer, Sailer grew up in Studio City and took a degree from Rice University in 1980 and an MBA from the UCLA in 1982. He wrote a National Review column from 1994 until he was pushed out in 1997 around the time Rich Lowry succeeded John O'Sullivan as editor. His "citizenism," coined in the mid-2000s, held that Americans should weigh the welfare of fellow citizens above that of foreigners, a frame later adopted by the columnist John Derbyshire; in February 2024 the new-right house Passage Publishing issued a collected volume of his work titled Noticing: An Essential Reader, 1973-2023.²⁷