Charlie Kirk, 31, RIP

The fine young broadcaster was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley U.

Charlie Kirk, the talented, likable broadcaster who was a worthy successor to Rush Limbaugh, was shot dead by an unknown assassin while answering questions from the crowd at Utah Valley U. today.

The first person arrested was let go upon further review. So, at the moment, no suspect is in custody.

Charlie had me on his podcast a couple of years ago.

Charlie kindly platformed me to talk about my book Noticing, even though that gracious action was then widely denounced by the respectable press. For example, from NPR:

Recent guests on Kirk's top-10 podcast include a slavery apologist, a pastor who believes women should not have the right to vote and Steve Sailer, a longtime promoter of racist pseudoscience.

Turning Point's spokesman told NPR that Kirk condemns white supremacy and doesn't always agree with his guests. He also disputed the characterization of Sailer as a white supremacist.

"Pardon us if we have a healthy skepticism of what the approved-of, regime, institutional mainstream label of racism is, because we've seen it be abused time and time again," said Kolvet.

In The Atlantic, Ali Breland was up in arms repeatedly that Kirk had ignored the mainstream media’s ban on allowing me to talk in public:

[Kirk] discussed crime stats with the white supremacist Steve Sailer in a way that veered toward race science.

The Atlantic then ran a fuller denunciation of me by Ali Breland, and of Kirk for not imposing the continuing omerta on me:

The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed with Race and IQ

“Race science” has returned.

By Ali Breland

AUGUST 20, 2024, 1:22 PM ET

“Joining us now is Steve Sailer, who I find to be incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers,” Charlie Kirk said on his internet show in October. Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organization, slowed down as he said “noticers,” looked up at the camera, and coyly flicked his eyebrows.

That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological. In his interview with Kirk, Sailer noticed that “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites, and it’s not just all explained by poverty.”

Sailer, one of the most prominent peddlers of race science in the United States, has made a career out of noticing things. (Last year, he published an anthology of his writing titled Noticing.)

He has claimed that Black people tend to have lower IQs than white people (while Asians and Ashkenazi Jews tend to have higher IQs).

Sailer says that nurture plays a role, but generally concludes that differences between racial groups exist in large part because of inherent traits.

Sailer has written for decades about race science, but his appearance on Kirk’s show—one of the most popular on the right—came amid a year in which he has earned newfound prominence. In June, he also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show. “Somehow you became a mysterious outlaw figure that no one is allowed to meet or talk to,” Carlson said from inside his barn studio…. Sailer chuckled in agreement. “For 10 years—from 2013 into 2023—you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere,” he said. Now he was free to speak.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. The far right has long espoused outright racism and anti-Semitism, especially in the Trump era. But more right-wing gatekeepers are shrouding that bigotry in a cloak of objectivity and pseudoscientific justification. They see race not as a social construction, but as something that can be reduced to genetic facts. Don’t take it from us, they say; just look at the numbers and charts.

Race science is hardly a new idea. During Jim Crow, the idea was used as justification for sterilizing Black people. In Nazi Germany, the veneer of science and biology was used as a pretense for genocide.

In recent decades, race science has chugged along in the U.S., mostly subterraneously. It has occasionally popped out into public view, in many cases to be met with swift condemnation. A version of that played out in 1994, when Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which argues, in part, that race and intelligence are linked.

… What’s different now is that race science is moving into the open. Sailer may have once been a fringe oddity as well, but these days his views are broadcast to the millions of people who listen to Kirk and Carlson. Neither Carlson nor Kirk pushed back on Sailer’s views: “Steve, what you’re doing is so important,” Kirk told him. Over email, I asked Sailer why he believes he’s now accepted into relatively more mainstream circles after having been pushed to the margins for years. Society is “drifting back toward sanity,” he claimed.

Other anonymous far-right accounts have accrued more than 100,000 followers by posting about the supposed links between race and intelligence. Elon Musk frequently responds to @cremieuxrecueil, which one far-right publication has praised as an account that “traces the genetic pathways of crime, explaining why poverty is not a good causal explanation.” Musk has also repeatedly engaged with @Eyeslasho, a self-proclaimed “data-driven” account that has posted statistics supposedly illustrating the inferiority of Black people. …

No matter how hard people try, however, race cannot be reduced to the results of an IQ test. There is more to the complicated genetic, cultural, economic, and historical realities of race than a few lines on a chart. When I asked Sailer to explain the links between race and intelligence, he said that he doesn’t “see strong reasons to assume that intelligence is all that different from a trait like height, which is clearly driven by both genes and environment.” He cited regions of Serbia and South Sudan as having tall populations despite being relatively poor, suggesting that health and nutrition are not the primary explanation for average national height.

In The Guardian, Jason Wilson was also angry about Charlie helping me get out of the virtual gulag:

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.

The odds are of course a thousand to one against my appearance on Charlie’s show having anything to do with the unknown shooters’s motivation.

Good-bye, Charlie.