Trump Speechwriter With White Nationalist Ties Fired From The White House
It looks like the Trump administration is trying to distance itself from allegations that the president is racist. An article in The Washington Post reports that one of Trump’s former speechwriters was fired recently because he spoke at a conference frequented by white nationalists.
According to the Post, Darren Beattie, who had previously worked as an instructor at Duke University, was terminated after his superiors asked him to resign and he refused. Calls for his resignation were prompted by a media investigation into his appearance at 2016 H.L. Mencken Club conference.
CNN reports that the conference, which counts prominent alt-right figure Richard Spencer as one of its past attendees, is named after a journalist/satirist who became known for racist opinions after his death. Other speakers at the 2016 conference include two people who were also terminated from their jobs for expressing racist viewpoints, namely John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg. Known white nationalist, Peter Brimelow, who is the founder of the anti-immigrant website Vdare.com, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, also spoke at the conference that year.
Beattie did not deny that he spoke at the conference but said that he did not express racially offensive views in his speech.
“In 2016 I attended the Mencken conference in question and delivered a stand-alone, academic talk titled ‘The Intelligentsia and the Right,” Beattie said to CNN. “I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely. 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 has previously written an editorial for the Duke University student newspaper in which he advocated for the travel ban.
JUST IN: Omarosa believed to have as many as 200 tapes: report https://t.co/LTM8EKvXKI pic.twitter.com/fak4nvEXkS
— The Hill (@thehill) August 17, 2018
Trump has faced new allegations of racism after former White House aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman said that there’s a tape of him saying the “n-word” during a taping of an episode of The Apprentice. She also released a tape of Trump campaign advisers discussing the existence of the alleged tape and planning a strategy of how they can spin into the media.
As The Inquisitr previously reported, Trump has denied Omarosa’s claims, tweeting that he does not have the n-word “in his vocabulary.” But White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has said that she could not guarantee that the American public would never hear the president utter the racial slur on tape.
“I haven’t been in every room,” Sanders said when she was asked about it at a White House press briefing.
