Florida university to host extremist after DeSantis-led lurch to right

New College of Florida (NCF) will host the extremist writer Steve Sailer, who has been described as a “white supremacist” and a “proponent of scientific racism”, at a college-branded public event next month.

New College has made headlines since January 2023, when the rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, vowed to transform it from a university known for liberal values into a conservative institution, and installed a new board of trustees including the rightwing culture warrior Christopher Rufo. That board in turn appointed DeSantis’s “close ally” Richard Corcoran as the new college president, in which role he makes a $699,000 salary.

DeSantis’s lieutenants’ actions at New College – like abolishing disciplines, removing bathroom signage and denying professors tenure – have seen the departure of more than a third of the faculty, and given rise to myriad legal actions.

But the moves have been lauded by the so-called “new right”, many of whom see US higher education as a bastion of liberalism that needs to be subject to a rightwing “reconquista”. JD Vance, for his part, has pledged to “aggressively attack the universities in this country”.

Even so, Sailer’s invitation to speak is likely to stir controversy for his extremist views, especially on race.

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”.

The NCF event has been promoted by Sailer’s rightwing publisher, Passage Press, as being “presented by” the press. But in an email, NCF spokesperson Nathan March said it was the college’s show: “Let me be clear: this is a New College event. We booked Mr Sailer and [Wilfred] Reilly.”

March added: “Passage Press represents Mr Sailer and we’re grateful they are promoting the event. We’re looking forward to having a great audience in Sainer Auditorium on October 8 for the event.”

The Guardian emailed March with a detailed request for comment on Sailer’s beliefs and history. There was no response.

Sailer’s interlocutor, Wilfred Reilly, is the author of the books Hate Crime Hoax and Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me, and assistant professor of political science at Kentucky State University. The Guardian emailed Reilly asking him about the upside of sharing a stage with Sailer, given his views. There was no response.

Sailer, meanwhile, has repeatedly denied in recent months that he is a white supremacist in response to reporting in the Atlantic. The Guardian asked Sailer to characterize his political position on race in a detailed request for comment that also sought clarity on matters of fact, his beliefs and criticisms leveled at him.

In a 3,000-word emailed response, Sailer described his views on race as “realistic” and “moderate”.

‘A prop for … white supremacy’

Sailer, 65, of Los Angeles, California, has no known academic qualifications in biology or any other scientific field. He has publicly claimed a BA, an MBA and a period of corporate employment that ended in 2000.

But he 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: the Guardian found dozens of favorable references to Sailer on the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront.

His central claims include the idea that social racial categories – Black, white or Hispanic – have a biological basis, and that this is revealed in differences in intelligence and other attributes.

Scientists say this is wrong.

Joseph L Graves Jr is an evolutionary biologist and geneticist, a professor of biology at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

In 2021, he and Alan Goodman, the Hampshire College biological anthropologist, published Racism, Not Race, a book-length refutation of the “myth” that there is a “link between socially defined races and genetic variation”.

As an indication of the scientific consensus, Graves pointed to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (Nasem) publication last year of a Consensus Study Report on the use of racial terminology in science, which called “socially constructed race” a “misleading and harmful surrogate for population genetic differences”.

In a telephone conversation, Graves said that NCF hosting Sailer was “like inviting somebody to campus to argue the flat-Earth theory”.

Graves added that Sailer’s positions were “certainly not grounded in what we know about human genomic diversity in the 21st century”. While genetic variation is real, he said, it is “continuous” across the entire human population, so that “socially defined race and human genetic variation do not map onto each other”.

‘Some races are more criminally inclined than others’

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”.

‘The primal African cult of fertility’

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 an essay in Noticing entitled Hair Hysteria, Sailer writes: “After having read hundreds of their op-eds and the like over the past few years, I’ve discovered that the No 1 topic young woman-of-color journalists want us to listen to them talk about is … their hair.”

He then proposes a cause that casts these Black professional women as primitive and irrational: “Due to the decline in prestige of white men, with their tiresome science and rationality, older ways of thinking are growing in influence. And hair plays an important role in Haitian voodoo and Southern hoodoo magic.”

In another essay collected in Noticing, Our New Planet Is Going to Be Great!, Sailer weaves a luridly apocalyptic narrative around the late Tanzanian president John Magufuli’s policy of promoting population growth, and claims Africans’ behavior arises from a “primal” and “primitive” nature.

Sailer writes: “Many African leaders continue in thrall to the primal African cult of fertility. Sub-Saharan Africa has traditionally had such high death rates that the culture compensates by trying at all costs to maximize birth.”

Sailer adds: “We need elites with the courage to make clear to African politicians like Magufuli that their cultural backwardness will not be allowed to swamp the rest of the world. I suspect that many Africans would respond favorably to a Western crusade for more sustainable African fertility levels.”

He then claims that “contemporary white culture’s worship of blacks as holy will keep us from criticizing Africans for their more primitive traits, such as their fertility obsession, and instead indulge them by letting them dispatch their surplus population to our lands”.

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.”

‘Likely to give rise to racist conclusions’

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.”

Another scholar who co-wrote a purely methodological paper that used Lynn and Vanhaven’s data as a case study told the Retraction Watch website that “there needs to be a ‘public health warning’ on the data set on which our methods paper is based”.

In 2020, the journal Personality and Individual Differences retracted a paper in part because it drew uncritically on Lynn’s argument that Black people have a higher level of psychopathy than white people.

Lynn, a self-described scientific racist, was densely connected with a network of like-minded individuals and institutions. His activities included sitting on the board of the infamous Pioneer Fund, which funded “leading Anglo-American race scientists” for decades; editing Mankind Quarterly, a “pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality”; sitting on the advisory board of the Occidental Quarterly, “a primary voice for anti-Semitism from far-right intellectuals”; and speaking to the white nationalist American Renaissance conference, which he told in 2002 that “there are more Black psychopaths and more psychopathic behavior among Blacks”.

Asked about the discrediting of Lynn’s work, Sailer said: “In his elderly years, the late Lynn was not the most meticulous compiler of data, but the general patterns of his quick and dirty findings of 2002 have been repeatedly replicated in more recent decades.”

Noticing Sailer’s history

For decades, Sailer has been described as the founder of the Human Biodiversity Foundation, but the Guardian could find no trace of any legal entity of that name in any jurisdiction.

Asked about this, Sailer said it “never existed except in an aspirational sense”, adding that “when I discovered c 2000 how much paperwork would be involved in starting a not-for-profit, I realized I’d never get around to it”. He blamed the misunderstanding on “leftist hate organizations”.

He did convene a human biodiversity (HBD) email discussion group around that time: its membership roster leaked while it was still in operation.

Kevin Bird is an evolutionary biologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Davis who has been an outspoken critic of scientific racism. He says that HBD is “a euphemism used to give a polite name to race science”.

He added that the term “sounds science-y. Their hope is you can say it in polite society and not sound like a deranged racist.”

Bird concluded: “Of course, they then just talk about human races as if they’re like the races in [Dungeons & Dragons] or Tolkien.”

By Sailer’s account in Noticing, he has been a full-time writer since the year 2000. He began at conservative publications with some mainstream purchase, but over time drifted towards self-published blogs and extremist outlets.

From the late 1990s, he placed articles in National Review (NR) beginning under the then editor-in-chief, John O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan was demoted at the end of 1997 by the NR founder, the late William F Buckley, in a house-cleaning that also encompassed the firing of the NR editor Peter Brimelow.

The shake-up came the same year that NR published what was later described as a “lengthy attack on interracial marriage” by Sailer.

After his ouster at NR, Brimelow founded VDare, a white nationalist website that Sailer wrote for from 2000 until the website effectively shuttered this year in the face of legal action from New York’s attorney general. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has designated VDare as an extremist organization.

Sailer maintained his association with VDare, publishing hundreds of articles there across three decades. In 2009, VDare published Sailer’s earlier book, a critical biography of Barack Obama called America’s Half Blood Prince.

He has also appeared at VDare’s conference events, including the most recent one, held at the organization’s castle at Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

Fellow speakers at that event included the white nationalist and American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor; white nationalist and self-described “raging antisemite” Keith O’Brien, AKA Keith Woods; and paleoconservative writer John Derbyshire, who has called himself a “mild and tolerant” racist and homophobe. Derbyshire has also written and recorded podcasts for VDare since 2013 after himself being fired from National Review after he wrote a racist column for far-right Taki’s Magazine.

Taki’s Magazine has been another home for Sailer’s columns since 2009. The magazine, once edited by the white nationalist Richard Spencer, has also played host to the likes of Taylor and Gavin McInnes, who used his column there to announce the formation of the Proud Boys.

The website was founded by Greek paleoconservative Panagiotis “Taki” Theodoracopulos, whose own claims about race and IQ and use of racist slurs in his Spectator column led to political controversy in the UK. Also, last year, a Swiss court handed Theodoracopulos a 12-month suspended sentence for attempted rape. The conviction is under appeal.

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.

‘A fringe oddity’ wants to go mainstream

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.

In May, the Guardian identified Jonathan Keeperman, 41, of Livingston, Montana, a former lecturer in the writing program at the University of California, Irvine as the proprietor of Passage Press – publisher of Noticing – and the person behind the far-right internet personality “L0m3z”.

Since his identity was revealed, Keeperman has appeared under his own name on various far-right podcasts and on stage at the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC in July.

In a 6 September post on X, Keeperman praised New College for bringing Sailer’s ideas to its campus: “New College deserves a ton of credit for their courage and willingness to follow through on their stated commitments to free speech and bringing new and vital ideas to the public.”

Sailer’s appearance at NCF is the latest example of far-right influence there since what Rufo has described as the “takeover” that established “political control” over the university. Rufo, a DeSantis appointee to the NCF board of trustees, has advertised Sailer’s event, posting on X on 6 September: “We’re launching a dialogue series at New College of Florida” with Sailer and Wilfred Reilly scheduled to talk about “race, crime, and statistics”.

Hannah Gais, a senior researcher at the SPLC, told the Guardian: “To me, this signals that parts of the more mainstream right is willing to indulge in extreme, reactionary ideas.”