At the start of this week, Marco Rubio was proud to announce that his first foreign tour as secretary of state had already yielded positive results: The president of Panama said that his country would not renew its participation in China’s infrastructure loan program, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, and could even end its dependence on the Chinese program early.
It was strange and surprising then that the same week Rubio the China hawk was heralding a diplomatic win over our chief adversary, Darren Beattie was named acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.
Beattie is an all-around crank who was fired in 2018 from his job as a White House speechwriter in the first Trump administration after revelations he had spoken at a conference attended by white nationalists. Since then, Beattie has promoted wild January 6 conspiracy theories about government officials planting pipe bombs and has viciously insulted Rubio’s former Senate colleagues with race-baiting and gay-baiting tweets. But perhaps what made the appointment most shocking of all is that the man named to a senior diplomatic post—whose primary mission is advocacy—has spent the past several years arguing that life in America is worse than life under the yoke of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
On January 7, 2021, as Beattie was disgusted with Republicans who opposed Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he tweeted: “At a certain point the argument for supporting establishment GOP to defeat [Democrats] approaches [the] argument for supporting the American Regime in its fight against China/Russia/Iran.”
“Welcome to China: Except degenerate, fat, and lower math scores,” he tweeted four days later.
A few days after that, Beattie wrote:
21st Century belongs to China
And, to be honest, they deserve it
That’s what you get for being a Globalist American Empire (GAE)
The next month, he portrayed the United States as a worse “dystopia” than China:
In China you’re allowed to do blackface, criticize feminism, not have transgender propaganda forced on your children
In America you’re allowed to criticize Xi, watch Winnie the Poo, and talk about tiananmen square
Which dystopia would you rather live in?
On top of all of that, Beattie has denied the Chinese government’s genocide against the Uyghur people and claimed in October 2024 that “America treats rural whites far worse than China tweets Uiguhrs [sic].” He has also written that it is “not worth expending any capital to prevent” a CCP takeover of Taiwan, and that the defeat of that American ally would only mean “fewer drag queen parades in Taiwan.”
Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of the book Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance, observes that this is roughly the opposite message that one would expect from the Trump administration’s undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. “Donald Trump didn’t campaign on that message,” Sobolik said of Beattie’s CCP-friendly rhetoric. Sobolik argued that while the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy hasn’t been a terribly influential position in recent years, “that position needs to become one of the most important positions in the State Department” because that undersecretary ought to make the case for America and counter Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s efforts to control how people around the world and in the United States think about the CCP.
“If you have someone in that position that is actively denying the Uyghur genocide and running cover for our foremost adversary, that’s giving the CCP a bullhorn” at the State Department, Sobolik said.
With the Trump administration ending many foreign aid projects under the auspices of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and moving the programs that will continue to exist under the control of the State Department, Sobolik said the “important thing is to make sure that the good counter-CCP initiatives that were successful inside of USAID do not get mothballed.” He pointed to the Clear Choice program that made it easier for Latin American companies to work with U.S. telecom companies rather than China’s Huawei. But Beattie has advocated for the exact opposite principle: that foreign countries should not allow American nongovernmental organizations, media organizations, and internet companies to operate inside their borders because keeping America out is the only way for countries to maintain national sovereignty and the “only way to inoculate from the Globalist American Empire’s woke virus.”
So what possibly explains Rubio’s elevation of a man spewing CCP propaganda to a key public affairs role? Several officials at the State Department did not reply to interview requests from The Dispatch. On Wednesday afternoon, Rubio defended the appointment of Beattie as someone who would combat “censorship” at the State Department, but the appointment suggests that Rubio is not entirely in control of all major decisions there. Rubio demurred when asked if Beattie was a Rubio appointee: “Well, he applied. He went through the process that the transition office went through.”
“Let’s be honest, someone like Marco Rubio would not have picked someone like” Beattie without being pressured to do so, said Sobolik. “It goes against his record.” During his confirmation hearings, Rubio called China the “most potent and dangerous” adversary of the United States. In addition to being soft on the Chinese Communist Party, Beattie has tweeted that Vladimir Putin is greater than NATO and praised Putin’s propaganda efforts.
“Well, he applied. He went through the process that the transition office went through.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
It’s not clear which aspect of Beattie’s résumé must have appealed to the Trump team. After losing his job as a White House speechwriter, Beattie secured the same job working for Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz in 2019 and later founded Revolver News, a website where Beattie gained notoriety for promoting a variety of conspiracy theories about January 6. As a populist media personality, Beattie has sent out too many race-baiting tweets to count. In October 2024, Beattie, who now works under America’s first Hispanic secretary of state, tweeted: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” He tweeted that Taylor Swift had debased herself by supporting the removal of statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and founder of the Ku Klux Klan. He tweeted that “Democracy is a machine that can turn the ‘votes’ of sub-literates in Philadelphia into a foreign policy so corrupt and stupid only the CIA and State Department could love it.” While rioters were storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Beattie tweeted that several African Americans, including then-Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, needed to “learn [their] place” and “take a KNEE to MAGA.”
“Have you seen his X account?” a reporter asked Rubio at the end of Wednesday’s press briefing. “Okay,” Rubio replied. “Thank you guys.”
Tim Scott is not the only Republican senator subjected to Beattie’s undiplomatic barbs. “Lindsey Graham says take me to China!” Beattie tweeted while sharing an article titled: “China Gave US Diplomats Anal COVID Tests ‘In Error,’ American Officials Say.” Beattie has also trained his fire on Tom Cotton, calling the Arkansas senator a “closet case John McCain.”
“For people like Lindsay Graham and Tom Cotton, foreign policy is one big leather clad BDSM fantasy,” Beattie tweeted in 2023. In case Beattie’s subtlety was lost on anyone, he also tweeted in response to a letter signed by Sens. Cotton, Graham, Roger Wicker, and Susan Collins that “it is pretty obvious that at least two of the signatories here are closeted homosexuals.”
Even in a Senate rolling over to confirm controversial Trump nominees like Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Kash Patel, Beattie’s personal attacks on GOP senators probably go too far—and are likely one reason he was named “acting” undersecretary and not formally nominated to a position that requires Senate confirmation. According to the Vacancies Act, an acting official is only supposed to serve less than a year, but could potentially serve for roughly two years depending on the actions of the Senate and the president. Rubio affirmed on Wednesday that Beattie would not serve permanently in the role.
While Beattie might not have any fans in the GOP Senate conference, his announcement was praised by some Trump loyalists. “Darren personifies the America First Right — smart, tough, relentless — with a ‘take no prisoners’ attitude. He made Revolver a major player in the frontal attack on the Deep State,” Steve Bannon said in a text to Semafor, which broke the news of Beattie’s appointment. “As important as his agency will be in the building at ‘Foggy Bottom’ , the symbolism of his hire by POTUS screams: ‘We Don’t Give 2 F****x’ for convention.’”
What the hiring of Beattie screams to the Hudson Institute’s Sobolik, however, is that “having someone that is promoting CCP propaganda and CCP lies is bad for America.”
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