UnHerd: "Is Steve Sailer re-entering the conservative mainstream?"
Please add your "selling out" jokes in Comments.
From UnHerd:
Is Steve Sailer re-entering the conservative mainstream?
By Laurel Duggan
The author's book tour events have been selling out.
… It’s here [Union Station in DC] that one of America’s most controversial writers, Steve Sailer, spoke Thursday evening, the latest stop on his long journey back toward the conservative mainstream.
He was joined by University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who was recently suspended for a year following a prolonged controversy over her remarks on race in America, along with conservative commentator Jack Posobiec. The sold-out event was a promotion for Sailer’s new book, Noticing: An Essential Reader, which anthologises his writings on race, class and intelligence from the past 50 years.
Keep in mind that the first 20 of those 50 years is covered by a one-paragraph letter to the editor I had published in National Review when I was 14.
Sailer covers a wide array of subjects, but he’s most famous for arguing that racial disparities in outcomes can for the most part be attributed to cultural and genetic differences rather than discrimination. At the DC event, attendees skewed overwhelmingly male, mostly though not entirely white, and surprisingly young — an audience not quite befitting of a wonkish social science enthusiast in his 60s.
For his speaking portion of the evening, Sailer read an essay which appeared in Noticing titled, “What If I’m Right?”. A common theme of his work is the chasm between elite narratives and the lived experiences of ordinary Americans, a point he reiterated in comments to UnHerd. …
There is no shortage of statements from Sailer which could explain his pariah status. He wrote a book about Barack Obama titled America’s Half-Blood Prince.
It’s an obvious reference to the non-controversial bestseller and blockbuster Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Of course, that was back before J. K. Rowling herself was semi-canceled for saying that men can’t become women.
I really didn’t see that one coming.
He coined “Sailer’s law of mass shootings”, a maxim for predicting the race of a shooter based on the dead to injured ratio, and he has a habit of restating it in the immediate aftermath of such events.
More wounded than dead: probably black.
More dead than wounded: probably nonblack.
Of course, it’s not a Law, it’s a tendency.
That one’s not controversial because if anybody pays attention to it, they are impressed by how much it clears up something unexplained. So nobody who hates me mentions it.
In general, what gets me in trouble is pointing out stuff that people already kind of know, but you aren’t supposed to mention.
Read the whole thing there.
Maybe call it a selling up, not a selling out.
I would question two things about the article. First, is 're-entering the conservative mainstream' the proper term? I don't remember Sailer being a mainstream conservative talking head at any point in his journalistic career. More importantly, I seriously doubt that being a part of the 'conservative mainstream' is a desirable situation for any serious intellectual, which I take Sailer to be.