“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.
Rather than link to the interview, the link above goes to Media Matters. If you want to watch my actual interview, you can see it here. I’m not a fast talker, but you can likely speed it up in playback.
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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.”
Do Atlantic readers not know that the black murder rate is about an order of magnitude higher than the white rate?
Among young men, blacks died by homicide 24 times as often as whites in 2022 according the the CDC’s WONDER database of the causes of all deaths in the country:
The black rate of committing murder appears to be even worse than their rate of suffering homicide, but it’s close enough that the CDC’s statistics on homicide victimization are a decent proxy.
Or, more reasonably, are Atlantic readers merely not familiar with superstar Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s conclusive demonstration in 2019 that black men tended to be imprisoned about four times as often as white men raised in households with the exact same income?
Sailer, one of the most prominent peddlers
Why not call me one of the most prominent price-gaugers?
I mean, I’m weird, aren’t I?
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.)
Seriously, why isn’t The Atlantic reviewing my book rather than publishing embarrassing hit-piece clickbait screeds like this? After all, it wasn’t very long ago when the back-of-the-book in The Atlantic was edited by the formidable intellectual Benjamin Schwarz.
He has claimed that Black people tend to have lower IQs than white people (while Asians and Ashkenazi Jews tend to have higher IQs).
Once again, do Atlantic readers (and Atlantic journalists) not know these basic social science facts?
If not, why not? Does The Atlantic feel some shame about the ignorance of its readers? Does it feel some guilt about not educating them about basic American realities?
Sailer says that nurture plays a role, but generally concludes that differences between racial groups exist in large part because of inherent traits.
This sentence is reasonably accurate, especially if you assume that by “in large part” I mean roughly 20% to 80%. Sure, it’s spun to make it sound like I’m the dogmatic extremist, when of course in reality I’m the moderate voice of reason on questions of nature vs. nurture and The Atlantic is frothingly nuts, but as a fellow opinion journalist, I’m not going to get up in arms over Breland doing that.
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.
Free speech? What kind of unAmerican horror is that?
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.
As all nice white liberals know, if it somehow turned out that the races somehow differed in average IQ, then that would prove that Hitler was right and we must genocide all nonwhites. And the East Asians must genocide whites.
Or something.
Seriously, as I’ve been trying to explain to American elites for several decades, it’s highly likely that rapidly improving genetic science will ultimately determine that there are indeed racial differences in things like sprinting speed and IQ, so we should be trying to get ready to not go insane over the scientific findings. But The Atlantic increasingly favors insanity.
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.
One of the more important articles in the history of American human sciences was Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein’s 1971 essay “I.Q.,” which was published in … The Atlantic. I can recall reading it in my local public library in about 1973.
… 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.
But not if The Atlantic continues to have any say over society!
Insanity now, insanity forever!
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 postedstatistics 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.
I suggested that health and nutrition are not the only explanation for average national height. In contrast, I also brought up the huge increase in average height in South Korea over recent generations (and the comparable increase in raw IQ test scores) as suggesting that nurture can play a large role.
Genetics may play some role in the average height in these two countries, but intelligence is not like height.
More realistically, intelligence is like height, but even more so. The big discovery of the GWAS revolution in genetics in the 2010s was that in healthy humans there aren’t that many genes of large effect. Instead, height seems to be influenced by a huge number of genes of small effect, and intelligence by a colossal number of genes of small effect, not all of which we’ve discovered due to sample size limitations.
As three prominent psychologists have written, “Modern DNA science has found hundreds of genetic variants that each have a very, very tiny association with intelligence, but even if you add them all together they predict only a small fraction of someone’s IQ score.”
Furthermore, that race is not a biological phenomenon is the consensus view among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists, building on generations of empirical research.
Oh dear …
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This article really has it all, from overuse of the adjective "far-right," scurrilous references to Jim Crow and of course Nazi Germany, uses of the passive voice ("in many cases to be met with swift condemnation" -- designed to mean "as everyone knows"), needlessly confrontational discrediting adjectives and verbs, strawmen ("No matter how hard people try, however, race cannot be reduced to the results of an IQ test"), and non sequiturs ("but intelligence is not like height"). It's as if they prompted AI (albeit probably a more sophisticated one than exists at the moment) to write an article containing all of the normal MSM tropes when writing about those they disagree with.
How about this: "but even if you add them all together they predict only a small fraction of someone’s IQ score." Small fraction being a mere 15%? I.e., the average difference between the mean white IQ and the mean black IQ?
This article really has it all, from overuse of the adjective "far-right," scurrilous references to Jim Crow and of course Nazi Germany, uses of the passive voice ("in many cases to be met with swift condemnation" -- designed to mean "as everyone knows"), needlessly confrontational discrediting adjectives and verbs, strawmen ("No matter how hard people try, however, race cannot be reduced to the results of an IQ test"), and non sequiturs ("but intelligence is not like height"). It's as if they prompted AI (albeit probably a more sophisticated one than exists at the moment) to write an article containing all of the normal MSM tropes when writing about those they disagree with.
How about this: "but even if you add them all together they predict only a small fraction of someone’s IQ score." Small fraction being a mere 15%? I.e., the average difference between the mean white IQ and the mean black IQ?
At least they asked you for comment.
I notice The Atlantic actually asked Steve for comments on their story. They quoted Steve. That's a major shift in style at Atlantic.
Protestations aside, they did let some facts slip through. That's not nothing