MAGA’s Heart of Darkness Part II

Public racist Darren Beattie wasn’t gone for long

Racist pseudoscience and flirtation with fascism were always in the water around Trump. But the influential online eugenicists and neo-Nazis of 2025 are not your grandad’s German Nazis, nor are they David Duke or even Richard Spencer (tiki torches, khakis, and gaiters are so 2017).

The Trump 2.0 white pride influencers often have academic cred. Their erudite snark appeals to the self-regard of Silicon Valley oligarchs and their fanboys who think being in a computer lab when the sum of all human knowledge initiated the digital era makes them superior DNA-bearing geniuses.

Last week’s featured Freakshow freak Geoff Martin and many of his fellow online racist anons, who, like Texas race pseudoscientist Jordan Lasker (who Elon Musk has engaged with dozens of times), prefer to lurk behind pseudonyms.

But some out-and-proud white nationalist/race scientists don’t mind putting their real names to tweets about sterilizing “low IQ trash” – the white supremacist online pseudo-scientists’ current favorite insult. Trump’s acting Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is Darren Beattie, and his white nationalist affiliations were too much for Trump 1.0. The White House sent him packing, and he went on to found a right-wing media outfit called Revolver News.

But in the new Trump regime, publicly declared racist views that might once have gotten pretty much anyone fired are now job qualifications. Beattie, like the rest of the creeps* who make up the MAGA Heart of Darkness, has academic bonafides. He wrote his PhD thesis on Nazi Martin Heidegger.

A typical Beattie tweet would be one in 2023, when he went on a tear about online street fight videos online, apparently unaware that Trump was getting cozy with UFC cage match tycoon Dana White, king of fight videos.

Many of Beattie’s Tweets about sterilizing “low IQ trash” – always understood to be people of color and not MAGA-white rabble – are still online. But his deleted tweets reveal another, sicker layer of sentiment, more familiar to movie-going Americans perhaps in the character Leo DiCaprio played in Django. Pure, deplorable, antebellum and Jim Crow racism.

The January 6 insurrection provoked Beattie to a frothing frenzy of anti-Black rage that he vented on Twitter for hours and then deleted. He was clearly more upset about what he might consider uppity Blacks on TV than the White horde that had just smashed, grabbed, and defecated on the walls of the capital.

He spent the afternoon and evening of that day calling for Black public commentators during the televised violence to get back to their “proper place” in the under-class. Some examples of now deleted Beattie tweets on January 6th:

“Ibram Kendi needs to learn his place and take a knee to MAGA. Learn his proper role in our society.”

“Kay Cole James of Heritage Foundation needs to learn her natural place and take a KNEE to MAGA.”

Beattie even took swings at Trump loyalist Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina:

“Tim Scott needs to learn his place and take a KNEE to MAGA.” (Scott is still a Trump-supporting Republican Senator. Whether he’s “learned his place” is not for us to judge.)

By midnight, Beattie had completely lost it, demanding that pretty much every Black person in America get to the back of the bus, with this tweet:

CNN unearthed some other deleted Beattie bon mots this week. In one tweet that was removed for violating Twitter’s terms of service, on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, Beattie’s Revolver News posted about the decision maybe permitting shooting at women who get abortions.

He has also accused his now-boss (in name only, apparently), Marco Rubio, of being “low IQ” and being closeted, referencing a high school curfew violation at a park:

He followed that up with: “What happens in the Cabana stays in the Cabana #Rubio.”

When reporters asked Rubio about Beattie’s new position as his State Department’s “public diplomat” (before the latest round of personally insulting Tweets was revealed), Rubio kicked the can: “He went through the process that the transition office went through,” Rubio told a press briefing. “He’ll be acting in that capacity, and he’ll largely be focused – as that department will be – on not wanting this Department of State to be involved in censorship.”

In other words, Beattie is on board to make public racism great again.

Obviously, putting this man in this position is just a big troll. One can easily imagine Team Trump elves smirking as they added his name to their vetted list. Think Stephen “Goebbels” Miller or Donald Trump Jr., who hosted Beattie at least seven times on his Triggered podcast in the last two years, possibly a record for him for one single guest.

Junior used to close every rally speech in support of his father with the sign-off: “We will make liberals cry again!”

So, haha, you, dear reader, are supposed to be crying as an out and proud racist serves as the face of American public diplomacy for the next year (although he will not be permanent – the regime doesn’t really need his services, just his presence as a billboard insult).

These people aren’t new among us, but Trump has empowered them. The mainstreaming of eugenics was already in full sway during the campaign last summer. The Atlantic ran an article headlined “The Far Right is Becoming Obsessed with Race and IQ: Race Science has returned.” Ali Breland pointed out that the eugenics clan (Klan?) uses a kind of code to know and amplify each other. They call their observations about racially based inferiority “noticing.”

The pathology that infects these men is eloquently explained in Sven Lindquist’s “Exterminate All The Brutes.” The title comes from the supposed last words of Captain Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novel about Europeans in the Congo, Heart of Darkness. Lindquist traces how European racial superiority ideology has led to countless massacres and genocides throughout history, from the indigenous Americans to the people of the Congo to the Jews of Europe.

The offensiveness of this ideology is only exceeded in vileness by the passivity and toadying of the political and corporate leaders in America right now who are not objecting to the mainstreaming of the sickness.

STAY TUNED: In part three of our MAGA’s Heart of Darkness series next week, I’ll introduce the popular MAGA fanboy who has published a recipe for Hitler’s ice cream. Take your anti-nausea medicine.

*As mentioned in the previous post, Beattie has featured Geoff Martin's tweets under his many different usernames in his Revolver News, and Beattie appears to have consciously followed Martin/Dreamer across various X/Twitter bans.