News broke today that the White House has fired Darren Beattie, a speechwriter known for his support of hard-line immigration restrictionism. Beattie’s departure comes after CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski revealed that he had delivered a speech in 2016 to the H.L. Mencken Club at an event that also included well-known white nationalist speakers.
Astute Tablet readers may recognize the name “H.L. Mencken Club.” The organization, named for the famous Baltimore scribe, was founded and helmed by one Paul Gottfried, whose influence on the alt-right as a mentor to white nationalist Richard Spencer has been documented in these pages. The very name “alternative right,” later shortened to alt-right, comes from the headline Spencer used when he published a speech Gottfried had delivered to the club.
Beattie has admitted giving a speech to the group on “The Intelligentsia and the Right” and defends his role in the event. “I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely,” he told CNN.
Here at The Scroll we believe that one day the full truth will come out. Mencken was a talented aphorist and an exceptional editor who has been wildly overpraised as a writer by status-anxious readers and a craven literary establishment that likes the abuse he dishes out because it provides them an auto-ritual where they can play both sadist and masochist.
Jacob Siegel is Senior Editor of News and The Scroll, Tablet’s daily afternoon news digest, which you can subscribe to here.
