The Anti-Defamation League called on Trump to rescind Beattie’s appointment to the commission, which CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called “downright shocking.” President Donald Trump has nominated Darren Beattie, a former White House speechwriter who attended a white supremacist conference, to a government commission that monitors Holocaust sites. Beattie, who identifies on Twitter as a “proud Jew,” attended a conference of the H.L. Mencken Club in 2016. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the conference “has hosted some of America’s most prominent white nationalist ideologues in the past, and serves as a safe space for professors to vent their racist views.”
Beattie appeared at the conference on a panel with Peter Brimelow, a white nationalist who runs the anti-immigrant website VDare. He worked as a White House speechwriter until shortly before CNN revealed his participation in the conference in 2018. Beattie has written multiple essays defending Trump’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. On Wednesday, Trump announced that he was appointing Beattie to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. The commission identifies and works to secure the preservation of historical sites in Europe, such as cemeteries, monuments and Holocaust killing sites, that are associated with the heritage of US citizens. It was established out of concern that European governments might neglect Jewish sites due to the legacies of the Holocaust and communist repression. The Anti-Defamation League called on Trump to rescind Beattie’s appointment to the commission, which CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called “downright shocking.”
via jpost: Trump taps ex-staffer with supremacist ties to monitor Holocaust sites