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I’d say Kirk himself moved to the right. And I’m not sure if you’ve watched the interview with Sailer, but from a skim watch it seems that he tempered or qualified some of his views, a lot was generic conservative policy. Sailer was always much less openly racist than Derbyshire, he considers himself essentially in the Cochran school, and his policy preference is basically colorblindness. I’d say today Sailer spends almost as much time criticizing dissident rightists as he does the left, I really think he considers himself almost a quasi-Buckley type figure, more mature and polite than vulgar and base DR types.
And again, The Bell Curve made the cover of The New Republic in the Late 90s, Sailer isn’t even much to the right of Andrew Sullivan.
Gavin was excommunicated because his multiracial boys’ group got involved in a bunch of federal cases that nobody wanted to get caught up in, and he was never much of a genuine conservative anyway. Yiannopoulos was excommunicated because he was perceived as having defended gay sex between 13 year old boys and adult men. In neither case was it because their (conservative) politics were too far right.
I see your point, but man, rightists sure loved getting involved with the less defensible J6ers.
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Sailer was never really far-right, more like a liaison between the neoliberal-left and the non-mainstream right. He pushed for the vaccine, sends so much traffic to the NYTs that they probably give him a Christmas card and free lifetime subscription .
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I coulda sworn a big thing with the bell curve was that it was basically respectable when it came out, and it took a few years before the 'pointing out statistics is racist' idea fully took hold on the left. I remember some big name black journalist who, in a retrospective, talked about how he found it personally disgusting that other people at the Atlantic(maybe?) wanted to have dispassionate scientific discussion about those ideas, and he had to nod and smile along, etc. I would model the change as, in the 90's, racism is bad, but statistics are not racist, into, those types of statistics are actually racist, into, maybe but those statistics seem correct and frankly I don't care anymore if you call me racist.
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