Sailer In The National Post
08/01/2008
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Steve Sailer has mentioned David Brooks and Ross Douthat as pundits who use his work but don't often acknowledge it. (They get "a lot of grief from the commissars" when they do.) However, some people are willing to acknowledge their debt to Sailer. Peter Schweizer has written a book on the culture wars called Makers And Takers, which has been excerpted in Canada's National Post. The latest excerpt is called Mind Wars, [August 1, 2008] and speaks to the "conventional wisdom" that liberals and progressives are smarter than conservatives. This is not, in fact, the case. Schweizer writes
Though at the time, of course, no one could actually check because Kerry kept refusing to release his transcripts from Yale, or any information about intelligence tests that he would have taken as a Navy officer. Bush had taken the equivalent Air Force Qualifying Test, and they would have made a good point of comparison. But the results were not, Kerry said, "relevant" to the campaign, even though his campaign was based in part on Bush's lack of intelligence. (A similar excuse was made in regard to Kerry's military records, though his campaign was largely based on his claim to have been a hero in Vietnam—before he became an outspoken critic of the war. In other words, he was for the war before he was against it.)

Then a Navy veteran named Sam Sewell noticed something on the Kerry campaign Web site. In one of the documents posted on the Web page, an obscure military report offered a cryptic score that was actually the result of an IQ-like qualifying test Kerry had taken in 1966. As it happened, George W. Bush had taken the same test just a few years later. Columnist Steve Sailer determined that Bush's score put him in the 95th percentile, giving him an IQ in the 120s. Kerry's score was slightly lower, putting him in the 91st percentile.

When these results became public, NBC's Tom Brokaw asked Kerry about them. He was more than a bit peeved. Kerry dodged the question and wondered out loud how they became public in the first place. "I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public," he told Brokaw. "So I don't know where you're getting that from."

They were getting it from VDARE.com. It didn't appear anywhere else, and when John Tierney referred to it in the New York Times, he had to quote Sailer (to the tune of more grief from the commissars) because VDARE.com had an exclusive.

See  October 21, 2004 This Just In–Kerry's IQ Likely Lower than Bush's! and November 14, 2004 The 2004 IQ Wars: So Much For The Candidates–What About The Voters? for more details.

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