It’s hard to drink from a firehose. Every news cycle brings fresh horrors on how our democracy is being ravaged by people whose main qualifications are their dedication to Donald Trump. As the White House bombards the country with wave after wave of fresh decrees, important and disturbing factors go unnoticed.
Media attention has been focused on the Big Three nominees—RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel—while others, who many have never heard of, are being installed to shape the government in Trump’s twisted image of white grievance. Darren Beattie is one of many whose known views and recent history make him a terrible choice for the job he now holds as acting under secretary for public diplomacy at the State Department.
He was fired from the first Trump White House, where he was a speechwriter, after attending and speaking at a white supremacist conference. That was back when the Trumpers were still worried about optics. His consolation prize, awarded by Trump in 2020, was a seat on the Commission to Preserve America’s Cultural Heritage Abroad, which mainly oversees Holocaust sites. Jewish groups weren’t happy about that, and in 2022, President Biden had Beattie removed from the Commission.
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Now Beattie is awaiting Senate confirmation to lead a $2.5 billion, 5,000-person global enterprise—or at least that’s what the Bureau of Public Diplomacy was under his predecessor. Seems unlikely that he will be a proponent of the public advocacy of cultural and educational programs around the world that the State Department funds.
There is a public diplomacy office in every embassy and consulate around the world. This is called soft power. It’s how America competes with China to gain influence. “How does the U.S. show up as a partner when we’re not going to build a port or a road? We show up with public diplomacy. We’re good at identifying the next generation of leaders,” a former senior State Department official told the Daily Beast. “Six hundred world leaders today have been through various U.S. government programs.”
Trump and Musk portray government workers as though they’re a waste of resources instead of doing real work that they care about. The official who I spoke with teared up repeatedly discussing how heartbroken she is to see the retrenchment of the State Department’s work, and to see Trump cede humanitarian efforts around the world to China, which is busy making global friends while Trump makes enemies.
“Are things done perfectly? Surely not. They need reform, but there’s a way to have that conversation without moving fast and breaking things,” the former State Department official says, questioning Musk’s authority and the cadre of young bullies rampaging government offices and records.
“These are dark times,” she says, showing me the instructions on her phone from whistleblower lawyer Mark Zaid and ethics watchdog Norm Eisen advising government workers to “grab personal files sooner than later.”
Beattie has a Ph.D. from Duke University and in 2016, spoke at an H.L. Mencken Club conference, delivering, in his words, a “stand alone academic talk titled ‘The Intelligentsia and the Right.’ I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely,” he said in a statement at the time.
The Southern Poverty Law Center categorizes the H.L. Mencken Club as an extremist organization. Beattie’s doctoral thesis is about the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, the Nazi Party’s chief racial theorist.
Two years ago, Beattie co-founded the far right site, Revolver, which markets Trump paraphernalia.
As recently as last October, he posted on social media this view: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities and demoralizing competent white men.”
Beattie is one of five under secretaries of state, all requiring Senate confirmation. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, put a blanket hold on all State Department confirmations until AID is restored as an agency. That won’t work for long. Democrats don’t have the votes to block Trump’s nominees, but they can draw out the process and shine a light on the actions initiated by a billionaire who Trump has designated a “special government employee.”
Terrorizing government employees to find savings to fund tax cuts for the rich shouldn’t be happening in a democracy.
