The White House (semi) quietly let go of Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie on Sunday. This came a week after CNN reporters inquired about Beattie’s participation in a white nationalist conclave called The Ninth Annual H.L. Mencken Club Conference in November 2016. According to CNN, the White House was mum on Beattie’s exit except to say he had left at some point, some time. Beattie gave CNN this statement:
"In 2016 I attended the Mencken conference in question and delivered a stand-alone, academic talk titled 'The Intelligentsia and the Right.' I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely," he told CNN's KFile in an email on Saturday. "It was the honor of my life to serve in the Trump Administration. I love President Trump, who is a fearless American hero, and continue to support him one hundred percent. I have no further comment."
The Mencken Club’s “pedigree” is bottom-shelf bigots.
The Mencken Club, which is named for the early 20th century journalist and satirist whose posthumously published diaries revealed racist views, is a small annual conference started in 2008 and regularly attended by well-known white nationalists such as Richard Spencer. The schedule for the 2016 conference listed panels and speeches by white nationalist Peter Brimelow and two writers, John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg, who were both fired in 2012 from the conservative magazine National Review for espousing racist views.
Also speaking at the Mencken Club during that 2016 conference? VDARE Foundation’s Peter Brimelow, best known for saying things like this concerning Trump’s immigration policies:
"But there's no doubt that something in that book got to [President Donald Trump], because the way his speech was set up. His announcement speech went to the question of Hispanic crime, specifically rape. And [Ann Coulter]'s book is a very powerful statement of the fact that crime in this country is ethnically variegated. There's ethic specialization in crime. And Hispanics do specialize in rape, particularly of children. They're very prone to it, compared to other groups."
If you were to create a time machine and go back to the 1850s, in the South, on a slave plantation, you would find tons of quotes like the one above that Peter Brimelow made in 2017. His “foundation” is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Beattie got his job thanks to his very public support for Trump’s travel ban while he was a visiting professor at Duke University.