PS: "The "Unz" page for Steve Sailer is ranked No.68 in the results, when I tried the search just now, despite it being the best single archive of his writings."

I'm not sure how that got arranged, but I will say that Mr. Sailer really wants to distance himself from The Unz Review. I harder ever have heard or read him mention it anywhere else and hardly within his posts on TUR either. I guess it's the "crazy" stuff on the site. I noted in the Tucker Carlson interview, that Mr. Sailer had very good words for Jared Taylor - maybe just because Mr. Taylor is yet another calm, civil dude - but did not mention Ron Unz.

On immigration, Ron Unz is, if not clueless, just worthless. Leaving aside that the latest 10 million people are from all manner of foreign lands around the globe, Mr. Unz view seems to be that the Hispanics kicked the Blacks! out of Palo Alto (just his example, of course) and the murder rate went to 0, so they're greeeaaat. That's pretty much the whole thing for him. I'll give him lots of credit for hosting writings of many of the VDare writers over the years, including Steve Sailer, of course. He's no Sailer booster though, noting that Mr. Sailer's share of the page views or whatever aren't that big a proportion anymore. I kind of wonder if that - in the comments somewhere - ticked Mr. Sailer off enough to get him to switch over slowly to substack.

PS: Stephen Miller, Kris Kobach, and Ann Coulter.

I don't know all these details. I can see where possibly Stephen Miller was worried about losing power. I truly believe he wanted that power for use in the cause of the immigration issue rather than to get ahead in politics, make money, whatever.

I can't remember what Kris Kobach was to be appointed to, but I do remember a bit of this story from, of course, VDare.

Regarding Jeff Sessions:

"In 2009, Miller began working for Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, who was later appointed United States attorney general.[42] He rose to the position of Sessions' communications director.[27] In the 113th Congress, Miller played a role in defeating the bipartisan Gang of Eight's proposed immigration reform bill.[27][42] As communications director, Miller was responsible for writing many of the speeches Sessions gave about the bill.[43] Miller and Sessions developed what Miller describes as "nation-state populism", a response to globalization and immigration that influenced Donald Trump's 2016 campaign."

Miller doesn't look like the type to be the front man. He sure seems to have done a lot of good from behind the scenes.

I agree that Trump was stupid in his relationship with Jeff Sessions. I am not sure whether firing him was the right thing, but it was the way Trump went about things. Look, if Mr. Sessions was being the good fair, rule-of-law guy in recusing himself from the Russia! Russia! Russia! BS (rather than fighting the way we must now), Trump could have at least just let him go on good terms. ("Look, you're doing what you think is right, but I gotta get someone who will back me up. We'll say you've got to spend more time with your family, and I'll come to Alabama to help you in '20") What'd he do instead? He tweeted out nasty things about his own employee for a few years, fired him then, with all that time wasted, and then campaigned AGAINST Sessions, Immigration Patriot Grade A+, in the AL GOP primary.

We were just lucky that ex-football coach Tommy Tuberville turned out to be a darn good immigration patriot too.

PS: More seriously and on-topic re Stephen Miller here, Mr. Hail:

Though I can imagine the type of HS student you're talking about - dresses preppy, gets involved in clubs, runs for Class Pres., etc - if you can believe it, my school had nobody like this. It was a different time and place, and also a fairly small school. Sure, there was political talk among the students for a few weeks before the big election, but otherwise, nobody seemed to care very much. You didn't need to so much back then.

The Class President would just be one of the 2 popular guys (football players) running, but who won didn't matter, and said winner did not care about being the next Tucker Carlson, James Carville, what-have-you..

I don't agree that Stephen Miller was into politics at a young age for the reasons you suggest. I'm going to paste in a bunch of wiki stuff. It's not like what I like about Mr. Miller explains why it's on the wiki page, but the basic facts have me thinking that Miller really was on a mission from early on. (BTW, there was something about his GrandDad or someone being angry at Stephen for his anti-immigration stance for the usual Jewish "We came from Belarus with nothing, and they let us in, so ....")

Were he the Class President, future political wonk Beltway type, would Miller have done and said some of the things he did. Let me start pasting:

"Miller has said he became a committed conservative after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, a book opposing gun control by Wayne LaPierre, then-CEO of the National Rifle Association of America."

OK, that part is kind of strange. Southern California of the likely late 1990s, maybe mid-, was not exactly gun country, and especially for a Jewish guy. Though those in gun country where hunting and fishing were de rigueur, I would not claim "the Fudds" even would have all cared about Wayne LaPierre and the real reason for Amendment II, much less a Jewish guy in LA. Mr. Miller seems to have "gotten it" early on.

"While attending Santa Monica High School, Miller began appearing on conservative talk radio.[27][24] In 2002, at the age of 16, Miller wrote a letter to the editor of the Santa Monica Outlook criticizing his school's response to the September 11 attacks; he wrote: "Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School."[27][30] While in high school, Miller cited Rush Limbaugh's book The Way Things Ought To Be as his favorite.[31] Miller invited conservative activist David Horowitz to speak, first at the high school and later at Duke University; afterward he denounced the fact that neither institution would authorize the event.[27] Miller was in the habit of "riling up his fellow [high school] classmates with controversial statements";[32] for instance, he told Latino students to speak only English."

The latter took some guts. Also, it's not the mark of a young man who wants to be a politician, shaking hands and kissing babies, or however they do it now.

Sure, Rush, Horowitz, etc, mean NeoCon, but that's still a good start at Miller's age. From this point (note his exasperation, as I had had) with the tolerance of an unAmerican separate culture at this young age. He went a lot farther with his views on immigration.

"At 16, Miller called in to The Larry Elder Show, a conservative radio show, to complain about his high school's alleged lack of patriotism because it did not recite the Pledge of Allegiance.[31] David Horowitz, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant extremist, published an essay by Miller, "How I Changed My Left-Wing High School", on his website.[31] Horowitz has been described as an influential figure in Miller's early life."

I know, I know, Jewish and anti-Moslem and David Horowitz... but anyone whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an extremist is a friend of mine. You've got to EARN that designation - it's not given out like Nobel Prizes are!

"Miller gained national attention for his defense of the students who were wrongly accused of rape in the Duke lacrosse case.[27][36] While attending Duke, Miller accused poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou of "racial paranoia" and described student organization Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán (MEChA) as a "radical national Hispanic group that believes in racial superiority"" There's a connection with a certain blogger we all know. Then too, they (wiki) say this like it's a bad thing.

There's more on that page about the Duke Lacrosse "scandal", BTW. I'd call it a railroading and horribly abuse of power rather than a scandal.

PS

-- the Steven vs Stephen question --

I remember iSteve.com, when I first encountered it, having a bottom-of-the-page list of keywords of the kind you used to see long ago when search engines were neutral entities actually looking for keywords. People would add those lists to make sure search engines would find the right place. He gave every possible alt-spelling of the names Steve and Sailer.

There is also a Stephen Seiler (with 'e') out there. He describes himself as a "physiologist studying endurance training in a global laboratory." That's actually not implausible for a "Steve" Sailer post, but the two are indeed different men (as far as we know).

BTW, one of the top results on Google for "Steve Sailer" now is the page on 'Goodreads' for the Noticing book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/206766480-noticing

The "Unz" page for Steve Sailer is ranked No.68 in the results, when I tried the search just now, despite it being the best single archive of his writings.

PS: Hello again, Mr. Hail. Stephen v Steven is one of the more innocuous, non-controversial, non-idiotic, name spelling differences. I have have no idea why one set of parents would pick one vs the other. This is in contrast to the Geoffrey's (first time I read that, I wondered why I'd been calling my friend "Jeff" - "Oh, is Jeff your nickname? What's Gee-off?") and the Meghans and Graeme (for Graham, if I got that right.)

Granted, those 3 are British/American, so at least it's not the Black stupidity, but it reminds me of a post I wrote 2 1/2 years ago:

"Local Multi-Culti"

https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=2364

PS: I've got a lot to reply with on your view of Stephen Miller, Mr. Hail. Of course, first let me correct the "Steven"s, of which I saw just 1 at first glance.

However, on my day off here, a friend just called - will meet him at the coffee shop and get back to you in the early afternoon, on:

a) A comparison with my small High School and class Presidents, politically minded students, etc.

b) The story of Stephen Miller as a highly politically-minded individual

c) His efforts vs what you mentioned Ann Coulter had to say. (She WAS there, in the WH at times, so I can't ignore what she has to say about Kris Kobach.)

d) Stephen Miller's Jewish family history. (You may want to write a post, as I KNOW you get into this stuff.

Anyway, I'll write back in a few hours, incl. to Mr. Ganderson on the previous post.

PS

I find myself distrusting Stephen Miller. Though naturally I like most of the content of what he says. I'll explain why I distrust him here. (BTW-- the 2010s-20s political figure and commentator has the "ph" spelling; unfortunately invalidating jokes about 1970s band. Scholars are unanimous in their agreement that the 1970s band had the "v" spelling: Steve(n) Miller.)

One reason I distrust Miller is because he is of that type to have been promoting himself into a kind of political life, or attention, since high school already. He made it into a kind of personality-lifestyle choice.

If one remembers one's own high school days, out of a segment of 100 students there'd always be one or two of these types of people. (If many more than one or two per hundred, it'd probably be an unpleasant school.) They are not necessarily the best of the best or the most ethical or the most public-spirited. The type I mean may or may not even be popular as such, though the type will tend to heavily overlap with those elected to "student government" including such things as class president. (For a similar reason, those graduating "at the top of their class" may not necessarily be the best students with the best ideas, but they did play the game properly in the same way that a video-game enthusiast will find every way to maximize a score.)

I remember one case in particular from my school, a male, one year ahead of me. He was pretty mediocre and kind of a clown, of White-Christian origin but outside (at least his surname) the NW-European core usual for White-Americans. He was friendly in a sense and would make jokes even with those only on an acquaintance level. He was not necessarily what one would call talented or driven by high ideals of any kind. But something in his mind caused him to just push and push and push and inserted himself whenever possible into political-like things (public politics, party politics, machine politics) and became a big name not through merit or thoughtful reasonableness or expertise but through simply obsessively forcing himself onto things.

The teenager I am here recalling and vaguely outlining, he eventually became a big name and was even sometimes quoted in the news, as one of the leading cheerleaders and propagandists for the Democratic Party. A few years into this career of his he somehow talked his way into meeting Hillary Clinton and she praised him as a diligent and stalwart pro-Democratic young man with a bright future; he ran nonstop political propaganda for her, despite only vague nods towards any 'ideas' or 'issues'. I am sure he liked Hillary solely because she was the main figure in the Democratic Party at the time, but he took to it like a religion.

The former classmate of mine whom I am now recalling developed a large social-media following, and put out bland tweets maximized for engagement and riling people up against the R-team. He had begun this 'career' of his a few cycles before Trump, but then found himself well positioned to become a hardline anti-Trump guy. But as I've already said was never more than a mediocrity interested in a kind of self-promotion or a video-gamification of reality in which political sloganeering and such were the ways to win the game. One memory I have of him, by the end of his senior year in high school he'd sometimes be seen in a suit and tie around school, because he was on the way to some political event. I also noticed him networking with other similar figures, but the whole thing felt very foreign to me at the time.

Rather than "political ideas," or vision, he was just sucked into the world of being a celebrity and a figure in the D-party machine. It greatly boosted his ego; one gets the sense for how party-machines work in mass-democratic societies; versions of this guy have popped up consistently all through the era of mass-democracy now about two centuries old. In the years since this guy emerged into his self-chosen career, I always shake my head when his name occasionally pops up, and take it as a warning against similar figures.

Back to Stephen Miller.

I grant that Stephen Miller is in many ways different from this friend of mine I've just described. Except for one big similarity: in that their Venn-diagram circles overlap on the "obsessive political activist-campaigner since mid-teenage years or so."

Stephen Miller loves to gab on news-talk shows. He presents a theatrical persona-character for himself, as an attack-dog, which I also find suspicious in and of itself.

Despite Miller being "on the right side," or so it seems, he is the very picture of the diasporic elite that furrows into positions of influence, may talk a big game but really tries to run the show. You have men like Kris Kobach (never hired by Trump, possibly blocked in 2017 by Stephen Miller, per rumor reprinted by Ann Coulter from her sources) and Jeff Sessions (stupidly fired by Trump in November 2018 because of a personality dispute and the Russia-Hoax; replaced by bozo-moderate Bob Barr). These other men, who were alas less successful in the Trump-world of politics, as a rule do NOT do these theatrical performances and rarely even appear on these news-talk shows and such at all, but they get stuff done.

We are now in such a media-saturated world -- even homeless people could spent their whole waking day sitting listening to constant fresh political propaganda, with a hand-me-down smartphone and a power outlet and a wifi connection (all of which can be found for free), and so theatrical attack-personalities are rewarded with attention. (Trump himself is not far off from this, of course. Trump is not shy about playing a clown if he feels it can get him points.)

The two-round race for president of Romania happened on Sunday, with the shock first-place finished (likely to lose in the run-off in two weeks) a man who no one was thinking about at all, a man who campaigned only on TikTok but had 1.2 million followers in Romania and squeaked past the 20% mark, enough to claim first-place in the crowded field with ten candidates. This seems another example of the same kind of phenomenon.

To summarize my only-semi-thought-out criticism of Stephen Miller:

(1.) There is something to the man and his doings, over the past decade, that feels more like "theatrical performance art" designed as much to whip up sports-like enthusiasm.

(2.) Meanwhile, the gaggle of people of the same ethnocultural origin obviously served as gatekeepers for Trump in 2017-2020. Stephen Miller had his public-facing 'role' and played it then and continues to play it. But the gatekeeper phenomenon was real and his role in that is said to have been considerable, in other words like many such people down through the ages he was a trusted advisor who became a gatekeeper, and blocked access to many good people, and influenced appointments and more. What was Stephen Miller's role in the process? It's something historians may have to sort out. Because one of the great questions -- unresolved at this writing -- is: Why was Campaign-Trump so different from President-Trump?

Trump excitement never "delivered," and the criticism of Stephen Miller is that he was talking like Campaign-Trump all the time but behind the scenes may have acted differently. Why was America's leading immigration restrictionist executive, Kris Kobach, denied a post?

The Trump movement and Trump-era politics do sometimes feel like they resemble a video-game, with little real influence on the order of previous historical juncture-points or dramas. You have to look hard to find changes, and at macro-scale things continued to slide (as I found in my "A study on America’s demographic-national crisis — Early-2020s birth-data by race; and developments in the White birth-share in the USA, 1920s to 2020s" last year). Compare this with the start of the European war in August 1914: disrupted cross-Atlantic migration and then other developments led the U.S. to put in a series of restrictionist measures which had been called for in a serious way since the 1890s. The most dramatic and nation-shaping was the sharp-but-temporary cutoff in 1921, famously made permanent by Congress in 1924.

The 1921/1924 cutoff is a huge deal in U.S. history, of course. As unbelievable as it now seems to the myth-weavers of the Stephen Miller sort but (nominally) on the other side, the USA was NOT an "immigration state" in the 1920s-1960s, really, at all. Except in a legacy sense, and certain ethnocultural strains played up their status of being descendants of groups outside the original White-Protestant core for reasons of their own, often connected to machine-boss politics. Mass-migration of Third Worlders really marks the 1970s and onward only.

Dating 1914-1968 (the latter year being the year the nationality-quota was lifted), that's ca. 55 years of something as low as zero-net immigration at scale. The Trump election of 2016 looks nothing like this. People trying to re-create the magic in 2024 (like James Kirkpatrick) got sucked into something that has no "track record" of being real, and which the caudillo-ization of the Trump phenomenon itself (combined with his gatekeepers, including Stephen Miller?) suggests is ephemeral.

To put it in shorter form, for President-Trump to become an executive version of Campaign-Trump might actually require an internal palace-coup of its own, by one element of the many that have attached themselves to the Trump ship. But Trump is already guarded by a set of gatekeepers.

Ann Coulter in 2017 slammed Stephen Miller for acting as a gatekeeper and using his considerable influence to block the Kris Kobach appointment, a demonstrated and effective immigration-restrictionist and tight-election-law enforcer. (The two presidential cycles Kobach oversaw in Kansas gave several-point +R margins over the several elections before (2000, 2004, 2008) and the two after (2020, 2024), another case-study of the actual vote-margin effect a state might have from hypothetical strict enforcement of all election laws and relatively looser enforcement. Those are real results, but Kobach, being a White Middle America type, is considerably less talkative about it all.