#1104: Steve Sailer

As you are probably well aware, there is a war going on; a war waged by evil liberals, with nefarious and nebulous agendas wrapped in the language of diversity, tolerance and political correctness, against innocent children and the families of good, down-to-earth, hard-working Americans. It is the infamous War on Christmas. And every year, conservative pundits and writers, from Bill O’Reilly to Brian Fischer, will not let us forget. Though the war seems to have been originally discovered by the John Birch society in the fifties, if anyone can be credited with its modern rediscovery it must be the writers at VDARE, categorized as a “Hate Journal” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and their editor Peter Brimelow.

Now, Steve Sailer is a journalist and movie critic for The American Conservative, blogger, VDARE.com columnist, and a former correspondent for UPI, where he provides his two cents with a wingnut slant on a variety of issues. He has been noted in particular for speculative articles on the IQ of various politicians and presidential candidates, as well as IQ-related speculations used to draw conclusions about immigration and affirmative action (you can kind of imagine where those are going, can’t you?). Indeed, though he accepts evolution (though there is a question of how well he understands it), he has attempted to maimtain a conciliatory tone toward creationists as long as they accept his racial realism and evolution-based arguments for racial differences, since that’s apparently what matters.

So what’s the war on Christmas connection? Well, Sailer must be held more than partially responsible for reigniting the war when he, in 2005, emerged as the winner of VDARE’s “Annual War on Christmas Competition” with his article “Christmas, Jews, De-Assimilation and Decline”, where he draws not only on the by now traditional War on Christmas conspiracy, but his work on racial differences … with relatively ugly results. In the article Sailer complains that, although Jews wrote many of today’s most popular Christmas songs, those songs were secular, and these days, they aren’t even doing that, because rather than being grateful for the piles of money they’ve been able to make off of Christianity all they want to do is destroy the Christian tradition of Christmas. So the War on Christmas, then, is to a large extent another Jewish conspiracy. I suppose it is good to know the extent to which you should listen to anything else Sailer might happen to say.

Diagnosis: Sailer is by no means the most obviously incoherent, stupid or nonsensical wingnut out there, but that, of course, is in part what makes him dangerous.