Ron DeSantis Is Pushing Florida Out Of Balance— Virulent Racist Steven Sailer Gets A Platform At NCF

Dumbing Down The Sunshine State

I had a great time at college (Stony Brook). I was the freshman class president and booked The Fugs for the freshman dance. And the next year, I became chairman of the Student Activities Board. Over the next few years, I brought groundbreaking, mostly then-unknown artists to play at the campus, musicians on the cutting edge of pop culture: Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Joni Mitchell, The Dead, Otis Redding, The Airplane, Big Brother, Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, Muddy Waters, Country Joe, Ravi Shankar, Pink Floyd, The Byrds... But there was also a speakers series I felt I could use to help expose students to even more overtly cutting edge perspectives— like Timothy Leary. And then there was Julian Bond, who I want to talk about for a couple of minutes.

Julian Bond was one of 8 African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in the wake of passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Come January 1966, however, the Georgia House voted 184-12 to not seat him because he dared to publicly oppose the war against Vietnam. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House was depriving him of his freedom of speech and that they must seat him. They did, and I booked him to give a lecture at Stony Brook. Mrs. Couey, my lovely, batty old faculty adviser told me I couldn't present such an unbalanced program at a tax-funded university. I asked her if she wanted me to book the head of the KKK to balance it. “Now, Howie, you're so funny. You do the right thing.” So I booked Senator Strom Thurmond as a speaker for the same evening. Balance!

A week before the event— stoned out of my gourd, as I was for my entire four years at Stony Brook— I called Thurmond's office and explained that we're a struggling state university and the budget is tight and that I couldn't pay him the $5,000 I had offered and could he do it for $2,500? They said OK. I then called Julian and explained there was a change in plans and we would have to give him $7,500 instead of the agreed-upon $5,000. I felt I needed to do more.

The day of the event I picked Julian up at the airport in a fancy rented car and took him to the most exclusive restaurant in Suffolk County, the 3 Village Inn. We had an amazing dinner, and when we were leaving, we were approached in the parking lot by two waiters who said that although almost all the waiters were African Americans, this was the first time they had ever seen an African American eat there. They both had tears in their eyes.

Earlier I had asked my Hospitality Committee chairman to walk over, across the athletic field, to the Long Island Railroad Station and meet Thurmond. I gave him $10 and asked him to take the senator to a beer-and-pizza joint down the road from the campus for dinner. I knew Stephen would be very polite and charming to him— it's in his nature. He was the most flamboyantly gay person I knew at the time.

Julian spoke, and the audience gave him a standing ovation. Then Senator Thurmond took the stage, and the entire audience— as one and with no prompting— got up and walked out of the gym. Mrs. Couey and Stephen, forever the most courteous and proper guy I had ever run across, stayed to hear Thurmond. No one ever told me what he talked about.

Let’s fast forward to today to a related debate over who deserves a platform at a public university— except now, the stakes seem even higher. Recently, Florida’s neo-fascist governor, Ron DeSantis, turned one of the state’s most progressive institutions of higher learning, New College of Florida, into the most reactionary public college in Florida, so backward and ridiculous that over a third of the faculty has already quit. The school just decided to invited rabid racist Steven Sailer to address the university community. But unlike Strom Thurmond in 1966, whose outdated and bigoted ideas were being increasingly rejected, Sailer's dangerous rhetoric seems to be embraced in certain circles, as if we’ve forgotten the lessons of history. This isn’t about “balance” or “free speech” anymore— it's about using the power of government and of institutions to mainstream racist ideas under the guise of academic discourse.

It’s hard not to think of Mrs. Couey's old arguments for “balance,” but this time, it's not a harmless joke. Inviting someone like Sailer in today's political climate isn’t just controversial— it's a slap in the face to every African-American student, faculty member and staffer on that campus. And it begs the question: How far will DeSantis and his allies go to normalize hate under the banner of free expression?

Jason Wilson informed his readers that Sailer is a notorious white supremacist and a ‘proponent of scientific racism.’… In Sailer’s newly published anthology, Noticing, one essay claims that an ‘African population explosion’ is related to a ‘primal African cult of fertility.’ Another associates ‘young woman-of-color journalists’ with ‘Haitian voodoo and Southern hoodoo magic.’ Many offer variations on the claim that ‘Blacks have higher average levels of violent crime and lower average levels of intelligence.’”Sailer’s invitation to speak is the work of DeSantis allies like rightwing culture warrior Christopher Rufo who he put on the board of trustees and close ally Richard Corcoran who he gave the job of new college president, which comes with a fat $699,000 salary.

The event, at Sainer Auditorium, is a week from Tuesday (October. 8). Sailer has a bunch of fake credentials, falsely claiming a BA and an MBA. “[H]e has been instrumental in the revival of eugenic thinking under the euphemism ‘human biodiversity’ (HBD), has drawn on the ideas of self-described eugenicists and scientific racists, and has appeared on conference stages alongside prominent white nationalists and antisemites. His work in turn is cited by white supremacists”and Nazis. As for balance, the other speaker is assistant professor of political science at Kentucky State University, neo-fascist Wilfred Reilly, author of the books Hate Crime Hoax and Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me.

Throughout his career, Sailer has asserted that Black people are inherently more prone to criminal behavior than white people, and has used this as the basis for further claims about policing and politics.

In a 2005 column, Sailer wrote that ‘African-Americans … tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society,’ a claim that even drew condemnation from conservative websites like National Review.

Sailer has repeatedly claimed, including in the newly published Noticing, that America’s growing racial liberalism allows the so-called criminal tendencies of Black people to go unchecked.

In an essay in Noticing called “America’s Black Male Problem,” he wrote: “Lately, we’ve declared that all empirical evidence of bad behavior by blacks must be proof of white malevolence. Not surprisingly, this cultural collapse is inducing blacks to behave even worse.”

In one part of his email response, Sailer condensed these claims into a comment on recent history: “It’s impossible to blame the African American homicide problem wholly on genetic differences because there was a huge explosions in the black-on-black murder rate in the days following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, when America’s progressive establishment declared it was time for the ‘racial reckoning’ and prudent police retreated to the donut shop.”

In the same Noticing essay, he wrote: “I’ve been arguing since the 1990s that blacks average more masculinity than other races. This has its upsides where maleness is a plus, such as blacks playing more on Super Bowl-winning teams. But it also has its downsides, such as blacks committing more felonies.”

In his email response, he repeated this claim: “Masculinity is very good for some things (eg, playing cornerback in the NFL) and not as good for other things (eg, avoiding engaging in violent crime).”

In a panel discussion at anti-immigrant VDare’s conference this year, which was also framed by Sailer as a promotional event for Noticing, he first claimed that “the Democrats and their allies in the media” unite their diverse coalition “by having them all resent and demonize the core Americans”, meaning white people.

In his email response, he made a similar claim, but added a claim resembling the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and a sideswipe at LGBTQ+ people.

“The Grand Strategy of the Democratic Party is to be the Party of Diversity and thus to profit from America’s increasing diversity, such as by promoting DEI affirmative action for blacks, amnesty and more open borders to increase the number of Democratic-leaning Hispanics and Asians, and sponsoring new forms of identity such as the transgender frenzy of the last decade,” he said.

Michael Lind, a professor at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, has written critically about Sailer, Richard Hanania and others he has branded “eugenicons.” In a story for Compact, he wrote that the work of Sailer and other like-minded writers “seldom rises above the level of stereotypes”.

In a telephone conversation, Lind called Sailer “an unintellectual person’s idea of an intellectual.”

Sailer regularly claims that Black people around the world are less intelligent or more primitive than white people, along with advancing other bizarre claims and racist stereotypes.

…In a Noticing chapter titled An IQ FAQ, which is structured as a Q&A, Sailer dismisses Black people’s intelligence in terms of a stereotype about Black people drinking malt liquor: “Q. Isn’t there an Ebonics IQ test on which blacks outscore whites? A. You can make up a test asking, say, ‘Do you eat, drink, or shoot a ‘40’?’ on which inner city blacks might outscore Korean-Americans.”

Sailer’s views on race and IQ are premised in part on discredited data from the late Richard Lynn, a self-described “scientific racist” and neo-eugenicist who, when alive, was said to have “[used] his authority as professor (emeritus) of psychology at the University of Ulster to argue for the genetic inferiority of non-white people.”

In an essay in Noticing, Sailer asserts a ranking of races by intelligence:

“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.”

Those claims are footnoted: “International data is drawn from ‘Lynn and Vanhanen’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002)’.”

Lynn rates dozens of mentions on Sailer’s Unz Review blog alone, and Sailer habitually deploys the 2002 figures as settled, reliable evidence.

In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, a Finnish political scientist, presented hierarchical tables of national IQ averages along with measures of national wealth including GDP to argue that “nations with more intelligent populations have been able to achieve a higher level of per capita incomes than less intelligent nations.”

They further claimed that “national differences in intelligence have a substantial genetic basis,” meaning they are rooted in purportedly racially determined characteristics like cranial capacity. “Oriental populations of East Asia have the greatest brain size, European peoples have slightly smaller average brain size, and the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa have substantially smaller average brain size,” they wrote.

Lynn and Vanhanen’s data is now radioactive in scientific circles. Journals including Proceedings of the Royal Society and Psychological Science have retracted articles that relied on it.

In 2020, the scholarly European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association published a blanket condemnation of Lynn’s data alongside its code of conduct on its website, writing: “Any conclusions drawn from these data are both untenable, and likely to give rise to racist conclusions.”

… Sailer also writes the Unz Review, a “platform for anti-semites and white supremacists,” according to the Anti-Defamation League, and which was founded by former software entrepreneur and Republican activist Ron Unz.

Unz’s website hosts Sailer’s blog along with those by the neo-Nazi and Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin; Holocaust deniers Kevin Barrett and Israel Shamir; and white nationalists Jared Taylor and Kevin DeAnna.

The evening at New College will be a milestone in the right’s apparent efforts to mainstream Sailer’s ideas after years of him being treated even by mainstream conservatives as a “fringe oddity”: Sailer told Tucker Carlson in June that “for 10 years from 2013 into 2023, you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere.”

Since the publication of Noticing in February, however, Sailer has been on a rolling book tour to cities around the country, which have mostly involved ticketed public talks, and high-dollar “salon events” billed as an “evening of dinner and conversation featuring Steve Sailer.” Along with the Carlson appearance, Sailer was a guest on the podcast of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk last October.