I was disappointed to see the Washington Examiner, which normally publishes great work, join the recent flurry of guilt-by-association press reports reacting to my advisory role to Rep. Matt Gaetz.
My great offense was having delivered a talk in 2016 at an organization called the H.L Mencken Society. For this I am promiscuously smeared as someone with “white nationalist” ties who presumably ought to be banned from any future employment or interaction with polite society.
It should be noted that the smears in question have nothing to do with the substance of the talk that I delivered. Indeed, not only does my now-public talk “Intelligentsia and the Right” include nothing racial, it has been explicitly praised as “very smart” by figures such as Tucker Carlson and Roger Kimball.
Instead of any criticism of what I said, I am said to have “white nationalist” ties because years before I spoke there, Richard Spencer had been associated with the Mencken Club (though he had been unwelcome for several years). By that same absurd logic, anyone who had attended Duke University (where Spencer went to graduate school) or who publishes an opinion piece in the American Conservative (where Richard Spencer worked) would thereby possess “white nationalist ties.” Hogwash.
In 2016 I was a visiting professor at Duke University and the only nontenured full-time university faculty member in the entire nation to have publicly endorsed then-candidate Trump. Professor Paul Gottfried, a distinguished academic with whom I had had some scholarly correspondence, invited me to give a talk at the Mencken Club. Seeing as other academics whom I admire had spoken there in the past, including Charles Murray and Patrick Deneen, I said yes. I do not regret it.
To be sure, there were a few in attendance who had expressed politically incorrect views, though nothing even as remotely as bizarre as the many outright communists I have attended conferences with throughout my career as an academic. Curiously, I have not been thereby smeared as having “ties to communists.”
In my capacity as speechwriter and policy development aide for President Trump I was something of a rarity at the White House due not only to my academic background but also due to the fact that I had been an early and enthusiastic supporter of the president during the primary. It is disappointing that a hit piece from CNN regarding my speaking engagement at the Mencken Club led some (not the president) in the White House to urge my resignation. (Out of principle, I opted to be fired instead.) It’s especially disappointing considering that the president himself has brilliantly exposed the foolishness of caving into such media hit pieces.
Like the president, Gaetz is wise enough to ignore these pointless smears. I’d be inclined to ignore them too, as anyone I would want to work with is smart enough to see through them. Yet there are larger lessons beyond my specific case, both for the Right and for the country: Everyone on the Right should realize that a situation in which the media is able to get people such as me fired by absurd guilt-by-association rules that never apply to the Left is untenable. This asymmetry is simply inconsistent with any meaningful long-term political victories.
More importantly, a toxic political environment that focuses on cynical guilt-by-association smears instead of good-faith considerations of what people have actually said is inconsistent with the long-term health of our great country.
