The Trump administration this week appointed Darren Beattie — who has repeatedly expressed hostilities toward the U.S. government and sympathy for several of America’s adversaries — as acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. In this role, Beattie would help lead the nation’s diplomatic outreach and messaging on issues including counterterrorism and violent extremism.
Beattie himself has shown many times that he holds views that are extreme — even by mainstream MAGA standards — and sees a utility in propagating false conspiracy theories. The new State Department hire — who reports to Secretary of State Marco Rubio — is a former instructor at Duke University who worked as a speechwriter for President Donald Trump during his first administration.
Beattie himself has shown many times that he holds views that are extreme and sees a utility in propagating false conspiracy theories.
Beattie lost his job with the Trump White House in 2018 after CNN reported he spoke at an H.L. Mencken Club conference two years earlier. The niche political gathering, which regularly drew notable white nationalist speakers and attendees, featured Beattie on a panel that included the founder of a racist anti-immigrant website. After Beattie resisted pressure to resign following the revelations about his appearance, the Trump White House unceremoniously fired him.
At the time, Beattie defended his speech to CNN and insisted that he said “nothing objectionable” at the event. He gave the outlet what he said was a full transcript of his own speech, which did not contain remarks that expressed support for racist views.
Beattie quickly rebounded his career and rehabilitated his image in the eyes of MAGA elites. Months after his ouster, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., hired Beattie as a speechwriting adviser. In 2020, Trump appointed Beattie to a commission tasked with preserving historical sites in Europe, including Holocaust memorials and Jewish cemeteries, which elicited outrage from Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and J Street. The Biden administration forced Beattie’s early resignation from the commission two years later.
Around the same time, Beattie launched a conspiratorial far-right media outlet called Revolver News, which became an influential clearinghouse for conspiracy theories about the 2021 Capitol riot. A devout reader of Beattie’s publication might believe the riot was orchestrated by the FBI, that official recountings of the day included fabrications and that a host of riot participants were working in service of a wide-reaching government conspiracy to undo Trump’s political career. (As the riot was in progress, it appears Beattie felt differently; he praised the attack in since-deleted tweets reported by CNN.)
The steady pace of credulous theories Beattie published would help reshape the stories many prominent Republicans told their supporters about the attack. Republican lawmakers have directly cited Beattie’s theories in Congress. Mainstream conservative media personalities have given him glowing interviews on prime-time television. Trump has repeatedly praised Revolver News for its Capitol riot articles and even granted Beattie an exclusive interview in 2023.
Under Beattie’s control, Revolver News has published inflammatory articles including racist screeds that wouldn’t be out of place on 2017-era white nationalist forum boards.
In a 2020 Revolver News article, written after two police officers were shot during a protest in Louisville, Kentucky, related to the police killing of Breonna Taylor, its unidentified author wrote that authorities had a “moral duty” to use violent force against racial justice protesters at “Burn Loot Murder riots” (a belittling reference to Black Lives Matter protests), even if that meant killing them. Calling back to Trump’s comments about racial justice protesters earlier that year, the author wrote: “Let the shooting start.”
‘Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,’ Beattie posted to X.
A strikingly less subtle 2023 article faulted a Department of Justice program that seeks to ease tensions in communities experiencing violence and conflict for having offered guidance about navigating racial tensions in cases in which white people were victimized by migrants and nonwhite perpetrators. Its unnamed author alleged the program, which also offers assistance in many other circumstances, collaborated with “anti-white” organizations to promote “anything that humiliates or contributes to the dispossession of traditional America.”
Revolver News has aggregated news items under headlines promoting white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theories, which Beattie has claimed are legitimate and a “key post WW-II agenda across the entire West.” The site has also published articles about race and identity that were bylined by at least one white nationalist writer: Scott Greer, who stepped down from his role at a traditional conservative media organization after he was found to have written articles expressing racist and antisemitic beliefs for a publication helmed by Richard Spencer. (Acknowledging his past writings for that publication, Greer said: “As the political situation has evolved in recent years, so have my views. That said, I do not apologize for honestly stating what I believed to be correct at the time, unless everyone must apologize every time they change their opinion.”)
On his X account, Beattie has expressed an alarming array of political beliefs that might strike one as absurdist if they weren’t so consistent. With a cartoon profile picture that depicts him sitting atop a chair made from his own brain, the new State Department leader has expressed disdain for his new employer, loathed the nation’s geopolitical agenda and praised U.S. adversaries — comments that have newfound gravity after his appointment.
“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” Beattie posted to X in October . “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
In one post, Beattie suggested using the term “butt plug diplomacy” to describe ways the State Department promoted its interests. Beattie also once claimed his new employer was “more closely aligned ideologically with ANTIFA than with middle America.” He has repeatedly bashed the “Globalist American Empire” he will soon work for, even predicting in 2021 that it would collapse. Beattie once praised the United Arab Emirates “for giving [the] middle finger” to the State Department in 2022. Beattie also posted that he loved it when U.S. “national security bureaucrats fail.”
“Imagine having respect for the State Department,” Beattie posted in October 2021.
The new undersecretary has also repeatedly sympathized with U.S. adversaries while criticizing the United States and other Western governments.
He has stated that the United Kingdom’s government was less legitimate than Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq and Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela. He has shrugged at the thought of China taking over Taiwan. And he theorized it was more plausible that U.S. intelligence officials were responsible for assassination attempts on Trump than Iran, which prosecutors alleged ordered an operative to kill Trump before Election Day.
‘Imagine having respect for the State Department,’ Beattie posted in October 2021.
Beattie has repeatedly argued that NATO was a greater threat to American liberty than the nation’s adversaries. He once asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “done more to advance conservative positions in the U.S. than any Republican.” He once claimed that Britain and the United States treated their white citizens worse than China treated Muslim Uyghurs, whom China has arbitrarily detained in re-education camps and brutalized, and he has repeatedly mocked Uyghurs who oppose their treatment by the Chinese Communist Party.
Working as an anti-extremism researcher for the last decade, I’ve encountered thousands of people who think and speak just like Beattie. But they’re usually found in cliques across the internet’s expanse, not in the halls of the State Department.
Beattie would most likely face a difficult confirmation hearing in the Senate if he were nominated to occupy his new role permanently, beyond his current acting role. It is unclear whether Trump intends to eventually nominate him.
But the appointment of Beattie lampoons any remaining notions that Rubio might act as a firewall against extreme U.S. foreign policy changes as Trump’s secretary of state — a woeful misgiving that most likely drove his unanimous confirmation to the role last month.
The Trump administration’s hiring of Beattie is, at best, a tragic miscalculation. At worst, it is a warning that the longtime establishment Republican has surrendered his moral compass to the pull of MAGA’s darkest excess.
