Trump Once Fired Him for Palling Around with White Nationalists. Now, Darren Beattie Is Back.
He seems to hate the American idea of freedom. He praises authoritarian regimes. And he’s in charge of our public diplomacy.
EVEN BY THE LOW, LOW STANDARDS of the second Trump administration, Darren Beattie, appointed last week as acting under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the State Department, is a controversial pick. It’s not just that Beattie founded and ran a website, Revolver News, that specializes in January 6th conspiracy theories including claims of an FBI frame-up, or that he recently repeated those conspiracy theories on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast. No, the truly notable part of Beattie’s record is that in 2018, he lost his job as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration following the revelation by CNN that he had been a speaker at a 2016 alt-right conference featuring prominent white nationalists. (Beattie was reportedly fired after he refused to resign, insisting that he was not a racist and had done nothing wrong.)
But that was six years ago. This is now. The bar has been lowered quite a bit. It’s easy to find examples of things Beattie said that would have been instantly disqualifying for a Republican administration not that long ago—such as this tweet, not from a hoary past but from a month before the 2024 election.
There’s also the series of totally-not-racist tweets Beattie posted on January 6th telling not only the Black Lives Matter movement but two prominent black conservatives—Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and then-Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James—that they should “learn [their] place and take a knee to MAGA.” Also, the fact that contributors to Revolver News include Scott Greer, the guy who got canned by the Daily Caller in 2018 after he got caught writing for a white supremacist website. (It’s almost like there’s a pattern.)
Given Beattie’s new State Department role, his peculiar foreign-policy views merit no less attention—such as repeated statements that the United States should accept the takeover of Taiwan by China as inevitable and should not bother with its defense.
Some of Beattie’s pro-China comments appear to be trolling. (His 2021 tweets asserting that China is not persecuting the Uyghur minority but merely combating “Uyghur supremacy” and “uyghurness” are clearly a sarcastic riff on American progressive rhetoric about “white supremacy” and “whiteness”—though there is no reason to think that Beattie was joking when he wrote last October that “America treats rural whites far worse than China treats Uiguhrs.”) But other bizarre foreign-policy tweets from Beattie appear to be entirely serious:
Will anyone be surprised to learn that on February 21, 2022, Beattie also dismissed reports of a “major war” in Ukraine as “Us/Ukraine clearly agitating” and “Kiev nonsense”—and added, for good measure, that only Russia had “real interests” in the region? (The invasion began three days later, and major it has been.)
Meanwhile, in screeds on Revolver News, Beattie expounds on the view that the “color revolutions” that brought pro-Western governments to power in a number of former Soviet republics in the 1990s and 2000s were the result of a “coordinated attack” by the U.S. government targeting undesirable regimes, in cahoots with private nonprofits and the media. That is, of course, straight-up Kremlin propaganda fare—and in fact, Beattie cites Kremlin accusations of American malfeasance as serious evidence. (He also sees a cabal of bureaucrats, activists, and journalists using the “Color Revolution playbook” domestically against Trump.) Moreover, Beattie seems to put not only pro-democracy protests in Venezuela, Iran, and Hong Kong in the category of malignant U.S. subversion, but even Czechoslovakia’s 1990 “Velvet Revolution.”
At this point, one could legitimately ask if Beattie has ever met an anti-American regime he didn’t like. Does he at least agree that the collapse of the USSR was a good thing? Hard to tell. He’s apparently no fan of Ronald Reagan: In 2021, Revolver News ran a “Requiem for Reaganism” by the aforementioned Scott Greer, blasting the Gipper not only for his pro-immigration views but for his “commitment to the Globalist American Empire.”
Beattie’s views also form a perfect horseshoe with those of the “anti-imperialist” far left. He’s chummy with Glenn Greenwald. On the left-wing Drop Site News, blogger and former Intercept reporter Ryan Grim has praised him as “an outspoken critic of the warhawk wing of the GOP” while expressing some discomfort at his racism and misogyny. Beattie, for his part, has repeatedly praised and promoted the fringe far-left Grayzone News, an outfit that sings odes to Cuban communism when it isn’t denying sexual violence by Hamas during the October 7th attack on Israel. When Beattie and Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal recently appeared on a podcast together, they disagreed on Israel but were in cordial agreement on other things—from hostility toward anti-disinformation efforts to hatred of “neocons.”
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE NEW State Department official’s prolific tweets reveals another, altogether unsurprising aspect to his foreign-policy views. Beattie’s comments on China and Taiwan, for instance, harp obsessively on the subject of drag queens, transgender people, and gay sex. Some of it is snarky trolling, such as a running joke about fighting for the freedom of “non-binary Taiwanese semiconductors” (which he evidently thinks is very funny). But when Beattie sneers at the idea of American soldiers “fighting and dying for the Drag Queen Empire in Taiwan,” or suggests that a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would mean nothing more dire than “fewer drag queen parades,” these posts apparently express a genuinely held view. And the view is not simply that the United States should mind its own business; it’s that the United States for some time has been the bad guy in the international arena, while China and Russia are strongholds of resistance to the “Globalist American Empire” and its “woke” degeneracy. Freedom, in this framework, is not just irrelevant but actively destructive while authoritarianism is an active good: A “closed society is [the] only protection” from the export of “cultural poison,” Beattie wrote in a 2021 tweet, advising China not to allow any Western NGOs or internet platforms.
While Beattie is particularly fixated on gay and transgender themes, he has also approvingly noted that “in China you’re allowed to do blackface [and] criticize feminism” and that “Chinese are not terrified of and controlled by the word ‘racist’ like whites are.”
About American power, Beattie has this to say:
Oh, and he has repeatedly referred to modern America as a “shithole country” (the term Donald Trump infamously used to describe Haiti and El Salvador in 2018). Totally normal for a guy whose new job involves public diplomacy and leading “efforts to expand and strengthen the relationships between the people of the United States and citizens of other countries.”
IF ONE HAD THE STOMACH FOR IT, one could spend a lot of time exploring the twists and turns in the mind of Darren Beattie. (One especially bizarre thing you’d notice: Beattie’s posts extolling white men and slamming women and minorities are sometimes inundated by antisemitic taunts—Beattie is Jewish—from people in his own culture-war camp.) But what really matters is that someone with Beattie’s views got a high-level post in the State Department.
One obvious way to read it is that the second Trump administration is willing to trample norms—including taboos on overt racism, misogyny and white identity politics—in a way the first one was not. As Trump adviser Steve Bannon told Semafor in a text message, “The symbolism of his hire by POTUS screams: ‘We Don’t Give 2 F****x’ for convention.’” In that sense, Beattie is an excellent fit for the new administration—especially since, like Trump himself, he brings personal grievances to the job. Besides his 2018 firing, which he blamed on liberal smears, he was booted by Joe Biden in 2022 from the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, to which Trump had appointed him in late 2020. (The commission’s purview includes the monitoring of sites related to the Holocaust.)
Semafor’s Ben Smith writes that the Beattie hire reflects Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s effort to “reassure the MAGA faithful that he’s with the program.” But it’s not clear that this was Rubio’s decision: Bannon’s text message suggest that the pick was Trump’s. One theory floating around Washington, D.C. is that at least part of the point was to humiliate Rubio—make him “learn his place and take a knee to MAGA,” to quote Beattie’s January 6th tweets.
One could look for a silver lining in the fact that Beattie’s appointment is temporary—“acting” officers can serve for 210 days—or that he will presumably be articulating the State Department’s position and not his own.
But it is also worth noting that, while Beattie’s rhetoric may be extreme, an undercurrent of disdain for the idea of America using its influence to promote freedom around the world—and of freedom as a universal ideal—is distinctly present in the new Trump administration. If one were conspiratorially minded, one could see a sinister symbolism in the fact that Beattie’s hiring coincided with Elon Musk’s assault—also widely hailed on the far left—on the United States Agency for the International Development, the vehicle for many of the programs accused of fomenting regime change abroad. (In his own horseshoe moment, Musk declared that a USAID program which may have used HIV prevention efforts in Cuba to covertly promote dissident activism was “very corrupt.”)
And one may hear an echo of this disdain for freedom in Vice President JD Vance’s recent case for “America First” in an interview with Sean Hannity. After Vance made the uncontroversial point that a leader’s first obligation is to his or her own country, Hannity asked about China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Vance’s reply was remarkable:
[Xi] is looking after the Chinese, Putin is looking after the Russians. They’re entitled to do that. Thank God we now have an American president who is looking after the citizens of his own country.
The notion that Putin, who is currently tanking his country’s economy and sending tens of thousands of Russian men to their deaths, is “looking after the Russians” is, of course, preposterous. But even more striking is Vance’s moral equivalency that fails to place any value on freedom, self-government, and the inalienable rights of men and women—instead valorizing only national sovereignty within whose bounds an autocrat is “entitled” to do as he likes. In this context, the hiring of as outspoken a freedom-hater as Beattie for a public diplomacy post is an especially ominous sign.