The praying before dinner was hardly offensive – if a bunch of Christians believe in Mencken’s ideas but don’t subscribe entirely to his views on religion, I hardly see how it’s disrespecting or disgracing Mencken. I think in any pro-Mencken organization, you’re going to have a variety of opinions on his hyper-individualized points of view. You’re basically playing tit for tat, saying that “it only focused on some of Mencken’s values but not others” and then “I would run it this way” essentially encouraging people to do the same thing. Less pesky principles, more Nietzschean nihilism! Unfortunately, this is a principle in and of itself. If everyone decided to autonomously pray, it probably would have looked the same as it did with whoever it was leading the prayer, so I don’t see much validity in blaming a club for catering to majority opinion. No one in the Darwinian Societies is complaining that scientists have long since rejected Darwin’s idea of Pangenesis.

Also, I’m not sure I would paint the whole institution as racially dogmatic and simplistic just because of a few various folks trying to promote their own agendas passing out flyers. That’s like me saying, “These people were a bunch of orthodox Menckenites!” because your book sold well there. The most I saw pertaining to race in the whole presentation was a brief (albeit admittedly superfluous) rundown of mean race IQs in one of the presentations, and a discussion on how more systematically lenient loans to underachieving minorities make little sense when these minorities are more likely to default on said loans in the first place.

That said, I do admire your dedication to the Mencken, and it seems inevitable that eventually someone would go to an event called The Mencken Club Conference expecting actual discussion of the dude, so I’m not sure where the lack of anticipation on their part comes from. And I also am critical of “paleo-conservatives” (who invented that word anyhow? Wikipedia?) who cater to a somewhat racially nationalistic sensibility but refuse to give credit to black leaders who promote basically the same agenda, so I see where you’re coming from there.