Proud of What Exactly?

Fired White House speech writer Darren Beattie

The culturally-divisive views, racist comments and anti-(non-white)-immigrant  xenophobia expressed by Donald Trump with almost clockwork regularity are as well documented as they are repugnant to many.

So it's hardly a secret that a range of known white nationalists have, and do, work inside the White House as advisers helping to shape the domestic and foreign policy agendas and messaging that Trump espouses.

So it's interesting how quickly the White House quietly fired speech writer Darren Beattie last week after his own association with a fringe extremist group became public.

As CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski first reported on Sunday, Beattie was a visiting professor in the political science department of Duke University in 2016 when he appeared on a panel and spoke at the H.L. Mencken Club - an annual gathering that attracts leading white nationalists and an assortment of anti-immigrant zealots united around, and energized by, their hatred of people who don't look, think or worship they way they do.

According to an article by Washington Post national politics reporter Robert Costa (who recently began a stint as host of Washington Week on PBS), "Beattie spoke on a panel alongside Peter Brimelow...founder of the anti-immigrant website Vadare.com, [who] is a 'white nationalist' and 'regularly publishes works by white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others on the radical right,' according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group that tracks extremists."  

Costa quotes three unnamed White House sources as saying that within days of Kaczynski contacting the White House to comment on Beattie's appearance at the H.L. Mencken Club event in 2016 (at which he also spoke too), Beattie was fired and his WhiteHouse.gov email address was shut down by Saturday.

(Trump's lightweight economic adviser Larry Kudlow is also facing media heat today after the Washington Post reported that Peter Brimelow was at Kudlow's home for a birthday party last weekend just a day after Beattie was fired by the White House...)

Journalist and critic H.L. Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1880 amidst the landscape of post Civil War America and the dawning of the institutionalized racism and segregation of the Jim Crow Era.

Writer H.L. Mencken

He was a prolific writer whose personal diaries later revealed anti-Semitic and racist personal opinions of both Jews and African-Americans.

Views that were clearly shaped by some of the common beliefs and stereotypes that defined the era in which he came of age.

But is it fair for white nationalists / supremacists to name their little conference after Mencken?

He was an early admirer of Atlas Shrugged author (and Republican demigod) Ayn Rand, advocated the philosophy of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and criticized the principles of "one man, one vote".

But he was also a conservative with complex opinions and views that seem to contradict the ideology of the fringe white nationalists who've splashed his name across their annual gathering.

Mencken frequently employed satire to poke and criticize organized religion, and his colorful written accounts of the famous 1925 Scopes Trial for the Baltimore Sun (in which Tennessee substitute teacher John T. Scopes was charged with violating the Butler Act which made it illegal to teach Darwin's Theory of Evolution inside the classroom), made national headlines in what many consider the trial of the century.

Mencken's efforts to pander to the conservative southern readers who were engrossed in the trial seep through in some of his Baltimore Sun dispatches - for example, on the eve of the highly anticipated start of the trial on July 9, 1925, Mencken observed of Dayton, Tennessee where the trial took place:

"The town, I confess, greatly surprised me. I expected to find a squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing on horse blocks, pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town of charm and even beauty."  

Despite Mencken's use of common racial slurs like "darkies" to describe black Americans, and the even more racist private observations revealed years after his death in 1956, he publicly criticized the U.S. for not admitting more Jewish refugees into the country during World War II.

And he occasionally spoke out against the lynching of black Americans, calling out local white leaders of the small towns in which the horrific acts of racist terrorism took place for their silence and refusal to intervene to stop the heinous events from taking place.

Ex-White House adviser Sebastian Gorka wearing
the medal of Hungarian neo-Nazi group Vitezi Rend 

While I've never attended a meeting of "The H.L. Mencken Club", it's doubtful a condemnation of the lynching of African-Americans is on their agenda - and I'd wager that Darren Beattie never used his visiting professorship at Duke University to teach on such a topic.

Now in all fairness, Beattie isn't the first person to be fired from the Trump White House for known associations with white supremacists.

Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, who famously attended a Trump inauguration event in 2017 wearing the medal of a Hungarian neo-Nazi group called Vitezi Rend (or Order of Vitez) pinned to his chest (pictured left) was fired by the White House after months of calls for his resignation due to his ties and membership in Vitezi Rend.   

Unlike the British-born Gorka, whose parents were Hungarian (he lived there from 1992 until 2008), Darren Beattie didn't attend a white nationalist conference years before he was associated with Trump.

He attended and spoke at that conference in 2016, the same year he wrote publicly about his support for Trump's anti-immigrant policy proposals in the Duke University campus paper Chronicle. 

The presence of Beattie on a White House staff that also included Gorka (and still includes xenophobic hate-monger Stephen Miller) only confirmed what many critics have charged about Trump for months.

That he has surrounded himself with a creepy cabal of right-wing extremists with fringe views on race, ethnicity and immigration - individuals whose beliefs are radically out of step with mainstream American society.

Ex-Louisiana sheriffs deputy Brian Green

By now it's more than clear that Trump has effectively brought racism, bigotry and xenophobia into the conservative / Republican mainstream.

Making it "OK" for individuals to feel proud about holding such views in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse nations in the world.

And not just White House advisers in Washington either.

People like former Plaquemines Parish Sheriff Deputy Brian Green.

Last Thursday, just a day before the White House fired Darren Beattie, the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office announced that Green was being fired after being outed as a member of the Proud Boys - a men's only, far-right group with racist leanings.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center reports, members of the Proud Boys have aligned themselves with white nationalists and other extremists - even though they claim not to be racists.

Unite the Right rally organizer Jason Kessler (a former member) is one of many white nationalists associated with the Proud Boys, whose members were seen at the violent rally in Charlottesville alongside neo-Nazis and members of the KKK.

Obviously Americans have a right to their own beliefs and opinions.

But the idea of government employees who work for taxpayers, whether they're White House speech writers who influence national policy, or members of local law enforcement sworn to uphold and enforce laws fairly, being actively involved with organizations that promote intolerance, racial hatred and bigotry, crosses a line that the majority of Americans consider wrong.

Under the Trump administration, individuals feel strangely empowered to openly align themselves with extremists groups that advocate hatred of, and hostility towards others.

And they're even proud to do so.

But proud of what exactly?