APR 27, 2024
So I received a literary gift the other day, the Steve Sailer anthology Noticing, published by Passage, run by my friend Lomez, to go by his nom de guerre. Buy it & revisit the major American changes in society of the last 30 years or so, seen through the eyes of the only man who noticed & talked candidly, intelligently, mixing the curiosity of the student of political science & the concern of the citizen.
This publication is important for three reasons that all point to the transformation of conservatism as a political & intellectual movement. First, it announces Lomez’s success as a self-made publisher. He gets talented people to have him publish their works — adds something prestigious to their celebrity — announces to the rightwing audience that they are now in charge of intelligent writing. Lomez will be the most important tastemaker on the right if he keeps this up & his present success already shows how to do it. As liberalism fails & wokies trash the culture, it’s going to be people like him who save the day. Comparatively, conservatives have reduced their respectability to cowardice & lost a generation, everywhere from elite schools to pop culture. Don’t wait for a few years to remember I told you so — join Lomez.
Next, Steve shows the path for contesting political issues through social science observations. He is a guide to activists & journalists; he will be an inspiration to bureaucrats, social scientists, & anyone else in gov’t who wants to fix the corruption Progress has installed in almost every public institution. He didn’t just research & write, he also was an early digital adopter, bringing people together in online communities to discuss the burning issues neglected by liberals. Whoever the next GOP president of America will be, his advisers will be inspired by Steve.
Finally, Lomez is himself a student of Steve. You’d be shocked to know how many of us read Steve 20 years ago or so. We were young men, we had an interest in the world around us & noticed how much cannot be said in 21st c. America, however important or urgent, but we also realized that we ourselves didn’t quite understand what was going on. Steve was writing columns steadily through the years, ignoring the people who ignored him, educating us instead & gradually acquiring a kind of secret fame stretching from Hollywood comedians to the new generation of talent involved in quant on the right. Now, thousands upon thousands of people want to buy this volume & soon tens of thousands more. Steve was generous. Steve won.
This reminds me, I had the pleasure to talk to Steve not once, but twice — I recommend the podcasts. Listen to his calm California guy voice & his all-American story:
This one is especially good — Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism is the theme!
