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.

Mencken on evolution in the schools

Nobody ever told Mencken the First Amendment applied to the states (via the 14^th) or that state laws prohibiting teaching accounts of human origins contradicting the Bible in public schools conflicted with the establishment clause.

He thought that the people who paid for the schools had every right to decide what would be taught therein.

And he insisted pleas of “academic freedom” have place only at the college or university level, anyway.

He told Bryan on his first day in Dayton that he thought Scopes had no right to teach evolution in defiance of state law.

He never wavered in that view.

Of course, that did not prevent him denouncing the law and those who supported it in no uncertain terms, Bryan included and even Bryan especially.

Which he did.

But of course there are witches.

It is likely there have nearly always been witches in nearly all societies.

Think of Medea, Jason's wife.

Where appeal is made to dark powers and the black arts are practiced, there is witchcraft or something like enough.

Papa Doc held down his people in terror of the tonton macoot, yes.

But also in terror of himself, the evil master of voodoo sorcery.

It is only enlightened boobs, generally lefties and liberals like Arthur Miller, who insist with bland inconsequence that there are no witches because there is no Satan,  there are neither devils nor demons, and there are no dark gods.

Even Mencken, notorious iconoclast and independent mind, bought that line, since no one has ever advanced any other reason for the claim, egregiously false but that he endorsed, that there are not and never have been witches.

As if to say there are no priests because there are no gods.

Like priests, witches live on superstition.

Unlike them - well,  unlike most priests of most religions - witches live by terror of themselves and awful faith in their abilities to harm others.

They pander to and encourage malice and terrify people into obedience.

What makes their viciousness tolerable is that a man who has paid a witch to curse his neighbor has not paid a hit man to kill him.

And that is all.

Mencken, Notes on Democracy

Democratic Man  

Section 6  

He indulges - for a paragraph and disguised as hyperbole - the furious lie of right-wing propaganda that the lowest and poorest at no cost to themselves are shockingly coddled from cradle to grave in worthless and idle irresponsibility on the backs of others - in the America of 1927!  

Section 8   

"Justice, in fact, is always unpopular and in difficulties under democracy,  save perhaps that false form of so-called social justice which is designed solely to get the laborer more than his fair hire."  

A little further into the section he complains the masses resist compulsory inoculation against Smallpox and other public health measures.  

Still further in he writes,  "Learning survives among us largely because the mob has not got news of it."
 

That, at any rate, has always seemed to me indisputable.  

The Democratic State  

Section 1  

Mencken condemns American participation in The Great War, as he had done at the time.  

The charge has always been that he was pro-German,  though I have seen no evidence of it.  

Bertrand Russell,  on the other hand, was so franky pro-German he went to prison for it, radical leftist though he was then and all his life.  

Section 2  

His equating the non-voting of disenfranchised Southern blacks and disinclined Northern whites is absurd.  

His prediction of another Civil War the South would lose if blacks ever demanded their voting rights was not far wrong.  

Throughout the book he everywhere denies the impact of anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic features of government and the power of obstacles to change.

He even firmly maintains in this section that in the US democracy "works, and the people are actually sovereign."

Elsewhere he calls America "a democratic plutocracy," and that is far closer to the truth.

And that America is a mass society ruled by competing, usually self-interested minorities,  also closer to the truth.

His position on the German Revolution of 1848 is simply stupid.

Celebrating Mencken

The indispensable madman

Nietzsche

He was a crackpot and an absurd drama-queen, a critic of the racism and nationalism of his time who nevertheless inspired unknown numbers to dream that he and they were supermen, born to rule the vast majority of humans who were themselves born for slavery.

So much that he wrote deserved to be and has been regretted.

So much is just vacuous bombast.

But all the same he is must reading for anyone who would understand morality and especially for anyone who wants to, or thinks he has, seen through morality.

See for example, his preface to The Dawn.

It is no surprise, perhaps, that Mencken adored him.

But Red Emma?