Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week appointed Pete Marocco to run the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), despite Marocco’s Jan. 6 past, and common sense might suggest this was the most controversial personnel decision of the week at Foggy Bottom.
If only it were that simple.
In 2018, officials in the Trump White House started receiving media calls about a speechwriter and policy aide named Darren Beattie. Journalists wanted to know whether Beattie’s colleagues were aware of his role at a conference regularly attended by well-known white nationalists, and soon after, he was fired.
Eight years later, Beattie is back, serving under Rubio as an acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. NBC News reported:
Beattie has a history of making inflammatory remarks, including a post on X in October that said: “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’s site promoted a baseless theory that the attack on the Capitol was the handiwork of the FBI, or has he put it, a “Fedsurrection.”
On a related note, Beattie also spent part of Jan. 6, 2021, telling various Black people — including Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina — to “learn their place” and “take a knee to MAGA”
Alas, the list keeps going. CNN had a related report on Beattie’s record, noting that he also praised Dr. James Watson, the founder of modern genetics who later suggested Black people were less intelligent than White people, as the “greatest living American scientist.” In 2020, Beattie also wrote online, “‘Shithole countries’ was the high-point of Trump’s presidency,” referring to a notoriously racist incident from Trump’s first term. In theory, these revelations seem like the sort of thing that would bring Beattie’s State Department tenure to an abrupt end. In practice, it’s not yet clear whether Rubio or the White House are concerned with Beattie’s record.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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