New College’s Descent from Stellar Florida College to ‘Eugenicon’

By Diane Roberts

Perhaps you’re wondering what’s been going on at New College of Florida. The venal idiots Ron DeSantis put in charge of that once-renowned institution have:

• Run off nearly 40% of the faculty;
• Thrown books on history, gender, and Judaism in the dumpster;
• Fired the librarian;
• Admitted a bunch of low-scoring jocks;
• Mowed down and dug up a beloved nature preserve — the jocks needed somewhere to play ball — and;
• Under the Visigoth-style “leadership” of Richard Corcoran, generally have done their damnedest to turn the clock back to 1950.

Probably you won’t be surprised to hear what’s going on is not good — as in welcoming white supremacists to campus not good.

Steve Sailer, a “eugenicon” who believes Black people are genetically inferior to whites, race is biological, interracial marriage is wrong, and “core Americans” are by definition white, has been invited to speak at one of the college’s “Socratic Stage Dialogues.”

Socrates himself would not know whether to laugh, cry, or take an even bigger swig of hemlock.

Sailer claims “young woman-of-color journalists” are obsessed with hair and thus tangled up (somehow) in “Haitian voodoo and Southern hoodoo magic.”

(No, I don’t understand it either.)

According to Sailer, Black men are in thrall to a “primal African cult of fertility,” and all Black folks, being not terribly bright, “possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus, they need stricter moral guidance from society.”

White people, being better at stuff like morality, book-learning, and hair, must help these poor benighted African Americans.




This kind of talk puts him on the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe: Even the dinosaurs at The National Review, not exactly friends of racial equality, declared such statements beyond the pale.

New College’s kind of racist

The New College event was scheduled for Oct. 8 but, given the Old Testament-level wrath of Hurricane Milton, it’s been postponed — possibly the only positive effect of this terrible storm.

While I’d love to think there are a couple of sane people left at New College who might decide to cancel the whole thing and save themselves embarrassment, that’s wishful thinking.

Sailer is the new New College’s kind of racist.

We should hardly be shocked: Sailer is Donald Trump’s kind of racist, too.

Trump’s always subscribed to Old School eugenics. Campaigning in Minnesota four years ago, he said, “A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it? The racehorse theory.”

He went on: “You have good genes in Minnesota.”

Those who don’t belong to the Nordic Master Race, however, have “bad genes,” and are gleefully “poisoning the blood” of the nation.

This language is not new. Horrified commentators compare Trump to Hitler (hell, his vice-presidential pick once compared him to Hitler), but American white supremacists didn’t get their “scientific racism” from Der Fürher: he got many of his nastiest ideas from them.

“The Passing of the Great Race,” published in 1916 by American lawyer and conservationist Madison Grant, claims America must be ruled by whites, specifically those of Northern European stock, or the country will degenerate.

We must not harbor too many Jews, Africans, Southern Europeans, or “Orientals” (as Grant called them) lest they dilute and pollute our “pure” white blood.

Hitler called Grant’s book his “bible.”

‘Nordic peoples’

A century on, Donald Trump preaches Grant-style racist paranoia, from the Great Replacement Theory to the superiority of “Nordic peoples.”

Last week he repeated the nonsense that certain immigrants, namely the darker-skinned ones, are natural murderers and rapists.

On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show he declared, “It’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Trump went on to fantasize about deporting millions of people, even ones here legally, parroting a dream he shares with far-right movements in Hungary, Germany, Austria, and other European states to force “remigration” of non-whites.

His running-mate J.D. Vance, whose racism tends to be smoother and more grammatical, insists he has nothing against Black people unless — like those Haitians in Springfield, Ohio — they’re illegal immigrants taking American jobs, driving up housing costs, infesting local schools, and eating cats.




The Haitians are not illegal, immigrants are not driving up rents or ruining schools, and nobody is eating cats.

Nevertheless, this nonsense reinforces white people’s fears and inspires bomb threats against schools and hospitals, terrorizing innocent people trying to make a life in the United States.

Just as our ancestors did before us.

Trump and Vance refuse to apologize for endangering a community of people who fled violence: Haitians aren’t real Americans, they’re Black, and don’t matter.

Vance shrugged off the outrage, citing what he called the “Christian idea that you owe the strongest duty to your family.”

I don’t know what kind of idea that is, but it ain’t “Christian.”

Speaking of wierd

Maybe Vance, the mega MAGA Catholic, doesn’t accept Jesus’ core admonition, repeated over and over in the New Testament, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Maybe it’s too wussy for the guyliner ex-Marine.

Vance made the look-after-your-own-and-to-hell-with-your-neighbor statement at a rally-cum-racist tent revival presided over by Lance Wallnau, a self-proclaimed “prophet” and white nationalist who says the “Jezebel” Kamala Harris practices witchcraft.




Wallnau did not specify whether she prefers the “Haitian voodoo” or the “Southern hoodoo,” but he’s confident she traffics in black magic and probably enjoys a good kitten burger.

Need I remind you these people are weird?

Speaking of weird, Christopher Rufo, the faux intellectual anti-woke warrior who jumped on the cat-eating bandwagon, continues to insist he was right and all those journalists, mayors, police chiefs, and non-deranged citizens attacking him for this fictional craziness are wrong, wrong, wrong.

Indeed, he has answered his critics with the unintentionally hilarious “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers” in which he pretends to be a journalist defending his story, writing that “our interview with the eyewitness matched the details of the original video and was unambiguous in its conclusion: ‘This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill. They was barbecuing the damn cat!’”

Rufo deployed what he calls “forensic analysis” including satellite images, property records, sociologists, and other “experts” who assured him that no, those things on the grill with the wings and bird claws were NOT chickens, but decent Christian felines destined for the tables of Black barbarians.

Christopher Rufo is a trustee of New College.

“Socratic dialog’

Florida’s honors college has been remade according to Rufo’s white supremacist, anti-diversity, hate-driven vision for higher education.

Thus, the invitation to the indefensible Steve Sailer, a garden-variety racist with no academic credentials.

No matter what happens in November, the Rufos and the Sailers of the world are not going away, so look for this “Socratic Dialogue” to happen in 2025.

Maybe it’ll be more fun than it looks: Dr. Marvin Dunn, professor emeritus at FIU and a historian of Florida’s long history of violence against people of color, has also been invited.

Dunn originally suggested he might wear Klan robes to the event, although he now says he was teasing and quite right, too.

The people who should be wearing white hoods are Christopher Rufo and Steve Sailer.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.