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Helen Andrews In COMPACT: "Behind Steve Sailer’s Rise"

By Steve Sailer

03/12/2023

I’m up to 75,000 Twitter followers.

Here’s a nice profile of me in Compact magazine:

Behind Steve Sailer’s Rise

Helen Andrews

Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative.
March 10, 2023

… “I have this odd status as a sort of underground cult figure notorious for bizarrely sensible views based on careful analyses of standard social science data,” he tells me. “Probably a more accurate term for my status than ‘canceled’ would be ‘shadowbanned.’” For example, Sailer’s Twitter follower count has grown massively since Elon Musk’s takeover bid was first floated and especially since the purchase went through, gaining almost as many followers in that period as in his previous 12 years on the platform combined.

… The underlying premise of this growing national race obsession is that only one side gets to speak. There are progressives who love talking about race, and conservatives (plus a classical-liberal remnant) who think race shouldn’t matter, that politics should be colorblind. It is absolutely forbidden to express the third position, that race is interesting and sometimes does matter, but not always as a story of white oppressors and innocent victims of color. That is the rule that Sailer violates. And for so long as the dominant liberal culture insists upon a simplistic, Manichaean narrative about race in America, Steve Sailer will gather a subterranean strength — by boring empirical holes in that narrative.

… To see his point about lack of sophistication and logic in mainstream coverage of race, consider the case of Rachel Dolezal. She would have been a perfect occasion for ridicule. Here was an absurd woman with a tan and a weave whose fraud seemed to vindicate Sailer’s assertion that privilege in modern society is not to be found in embracing whiteness, but in fleeing from it. … It would have been easy to join in the mockery. On the contrary, Sailer wrote of Dolezal sympathetically as a human story. His blog was the first place where I learned that Dolezal had grown up with adopted black siblings and had married a black man with whom she had a biracial child. “It’s not unnatural to identify to some extent with your adoptive siblings’ race,” Sailer wrote.

You can read the whole thing there if you want to deal with Compact’s paywall.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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