Jason Richwine on My "Noticing"

A new review of my anthology doesn't take me so seriously.

From Academic Questions, a publication of the National Academy of Scholars:

Yes, I Read Steve Sailer

Jason Richwine

Reviews

Summer 2025

Noticing: An Essential Reader (1973-2023), Steve Sailer, Passage Publishing, 2024, pp. 458, $29.95 softcover.

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“I read Steve Sailer.” For many years in Washington, this statement seemed impossible to make in public without first looking around warily, dropping to a whisper, and swearing one’s comrades to secrecy. The covert admission would usually be met with knowing nods. “We all read him,” the nods implied. “But you’re not supposed to say it!”

Now the taboo may finally be lifting. With the publication of Noticing, a collection of his best essays, Sailer has enjoyed a nationwide speaking tour. Suddenly it is not so scandalous to hear his name dropped in mixed company. References to his favorite themes, such as the “Zeroth Amendment” or “Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism,” have become more common. While Sailer’s appeal is still mostly on the political right, the reporter-turned-independent blogger is more influential than ever before.

What has made Sailer’s writing simultaneously popular and taboo? The answer is the title of his book. He does a lot of noticing. Or, to be more precise, he’s willing to notice. He gives voice to observations that others consider impolite, or even offensive, but are nonetheless valuable.

Some of that value comes from transgressive humor.

I know a few superstar professional comedy writers, and they are way funnier than me. For example, every few years I get a check for $50, the traditional fee in the comedy business, from a famous stand-up for using one of my jokes. When he borrows one of my jokes, note, that he is not using my punchline as his own joke’s punchline, but as the mildly amusing set-up for his own killer punchline that brings down the house.

Still, by pundit standards, I’m at least mildly amusing.

People who hate me tend to have zero sense of humor.

For example, Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism states that, “The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.” Noticing the myriad examples of this “law” can be entertaining, but it also carries a substantive lesson. Although formal barriers to female advancement have diminished, and women now hold a number of traditionally male jobs, their interests and behaviors still diverge from men’s. Indeed, sex differences are actually greater in places with legal equality and high levels of individualism, such as Scandinavia. The foundational claim of radical feminism, that the reproductive role is the only meaningful difference between the sexes, has been falsified many times over.

Sailer’s “laws” need not be humorous to be instructive. When mass shootings are breaking news, it can be frustrating when the authorities are not forthcoming with details. Helpfully, Sailer has noticed that the race of the shooter can usually be inferred from the casualty counts. Specifically, more wounded than killed implies a black shooter, and the reverse implies the shooter is white (or at least not black). This is not just some grim trivia. It actually illustrates the dual nature of gun violence in the U.S. The occasional extremist (typically white) can achieve a horrifyingly high kill rate with an AR-15. However, mass shootings more often involve a petty dispute that escalates into someone (usually black) firing a handgun haphazardly into a crowd, resulting in many injuries but lower lethality. Unfortunately, the infamous AR-15 incidents have obscured the overwhelming role that handguns play in firearms violence.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the importance of noticing more than the “transgender” movement. Even before Bruce Jenner began calling himself Caitlyn in 2015, Sailer had been explaining to his readers how transgender ideology does not comport with reality. Why, he asked rhetorically, do so many men who claim to be women “on the inside” seem to be so stereotypically masculine? If Bruce Jenner has always been “a woman trapped in a man’s body,” his life as a world-class athlete, thrice-married father of six, and aviation enthusiast seems rather unlikely.

Similarly, the Jeopardy champion Amy Schneider, a man who now claims to be a woman, once told an interviewer that his favorite film is Master and Commander, a story of Napoleonic-era naval warfare in which women play virtually no role. “Films don’t get much more girlish than Master and Commander,” Sailer snarked. “What little girl hasn’t wanted to grow up to be a master and commander?”

I should have written “What little girl hasn’t wanted to grow up to be master and commander of her own 28 gun man o’ war?”

After American Enterprise Institute war hawk Thomas Donnelly declared himself a woman named Giselle, Sailer was again sarcastic: “Giselle was always a true woman on the inside, a genuine woman who is obsessed, like all normal girls, with thinking about war, military hardware, neoconservatism, wonkery, and playing electric guitar rock.” …

Jason Richwine is a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies. He last appeared in AQ in spring 2023 with “The Victimhood Cult,” a review of Vivek Ramaswamy’s A Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, The Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence (2022).

Read the whole thing there.