Sometimes it just seems right

Guilt by association, I mean.

Odds are, if you speak at a conference of this sort, you aren't there as an undercover FBI guy gathering info on people potentially linked to domestic terrorism.

Or a sane journo looking for an exclusive exposé.

This guy, of course, was neither.

Who is Darren Beattie? Donald Trump speechwriter fired over white nationalist conference ties.

MSNBC reported he was a close associate of Stephen Miller, who was himself a KA of Steve Bannon.

No surprise to find someone of this sort working for Steve Miller in Donald Trump's White House.

A Donald Trump speechwriter has been fired following the discovery that he appeared at a conference frequently attended by white nationalists.

The White House confirmed that Darren Beattie’s contract had been terminated after he was found to have spoken at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club conference alongside anti-immigration activist Peter Brimelow.

“Mr. Beattie no longer works at the White House,” spokesman Hogan Gidley told The Washington Post. 

“We don’t comment on personnel matters.”

The H.L Mencken Club describes itself as an “organization for independent-minded intellectuals and academics of the Right.”

It started in 2008 and was named after the American journalist who once described Jews as “plausibly…the most unpleasant race ever heard of,” and an educated black person as being a “low-caste man” who will “remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.”

. . . .

Beattie confirmed his dismissal when approached by The Washington Post. 

“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 said in a statement.

“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.”

Beattie, who worked as a professor of political science at Duke University, openly supported Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. 

Speaking to the Chronicle, a Duke newspaper, Beattie said that Trump’s hard-line immigration policies were the main reason he backed him.

His Ph.D. thesis was based on the teachings of Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who was also a member of the Nazi party, reported Forward.

Heidegger's work is regularly taught in courses on Phenomenological Existentialism, and grad students in philosophy not uncommonly write about Sein und Zeit and others of his major works.

But a political scientist would be focused precisely on his association with the Nazi Party and his relationship with his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl.