Darren Beattie

Darren Jeffrey Beattie is an American conservative author and diplomat who served as a Senior Bureau Official at the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. He was previously acting Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs from February to October 2025.

Beattie was a visiting professor at Duke University and served as a speechwriter in the White House during the first Trump administration until 2018, when his participation in a 2016 conference featuring white nationalist speakers resurfaced. He was later appointed to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad. He is the founder of the news website Revolver News.

Biography Beattie holds a BS in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a PhD (2016) in political theory from Duke University, completing his dissertation on "Martin Heidegger's Mathematical Dialectic" under the supervision of Michael Allen Gillespie. Beattie wrote a biweekly column for the Duke Chronicle from 2011 to 2012, returning in 2017 to write an article condemning Duke's signature of a letter expressing opposition to Trump's Muslim ban. He was a visiting professor of political science at Duke University from 2016 to 2017. He also taught at Humboldt University of Berlin.

In 2016, Beattie was a part of a group of academics who signed a petition in support of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. In November 2016, he predicted that Trump would win the 2016 presidential election. he was fired.

In April 2019, U.S. representative Matt Gaetz hired Beattie as his special advisor for speechwriting. Numerous organizations, including those representing the Jewish community, objected to the appointment. In January 2022, the Biden administration forced Beattie to resign from the position.

Beattie founded Revolver News, which raised funds in part by selling pro-Trump apparel and merchandise. Beattie once wrote there that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents were behind the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Three months later, in September 2025, The Telegraph published a formal apology to Chernikov, retracting multiple assertions made in its June 2025 article and stating neither Chernikov nor Kirillova has any association with the Kremlin or Putin.

Beattie joined the United States Department of State under the second Trump administration in January 2025. On February 4, 2025, he was appointed acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Beattie told State Department officials that his goal was a release of internal State Department documents similar to the Twitter Files "to rebuild trust with the American public".

In July 2025, Beattie was appointed acting president of the United States Institute of Peace.

On February 2026, Beattie was named to a senior role concerning US-Brazil relations. Beattie is a critic of Brazil's government. In mid-March he requested and received a visa to travel to Brazil to attend a forum on critical minerals. His visa was revoked after he also requested a meeting with Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian ex-president imprisoned for an attempted coup. Brazilian President Lula da Silva said Beattie's visa could be reinstated if Brazil's health minister's US visa was also reinstated.

Views

Beattie has been described as a staunch ally of Donald Trump. He is active on Twitter, where his comments have attracted controversy.

Beattie initially praised the January 6 United States Capitol attack on Twitter, but he later deleted the tweets. which he still endorsed as of August 2024. In September 2024, Beattie suggested the U.S. Intelligence Community was more likely than Iran to be behind the assassination attempts on Trump.

In October 2024, Beattie tweeted, "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." The Atlantic has described Beattie's views as white nationalist.

Beattie has called for the sterilization of what he called "low-IQ trash".

Foreign affairs Beattie has strongly criticized U.S. foreign policy on Twitter and in longer-form writings. In a widely circulated 2020 essay on Revolver News, he compared U.S. involvement in post-Soviet color revolutions to "the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump".

Also in 2020, he tweeted: "NATO is a greater threat to American liberty than the Chinese Communist Party. Sounds crazy I know, but I'd be willing to debate anyone serious on this topic publicly." In 2021, he wrote that "a big part of American ruling class' hatred of Russia is that Russia is a major power that rejects the woke ideology at the core of American regime" and "Now that Xi's China is rejecting America's woke poison in key respects, interesting to see how this plays into cold war 2.0." In May 2024, he wrote, "Taiwan will inevitably belong to China, it's only a matter of time. It's not worth expending any capital to prevent", adding that a "visionary statesman will recognize this and make a deal- in exchange for acknowledgment of this basic reality, get some serious concessions on Africa and Antartica [sic]".

In August 2024, he wrote the "ruling regime" of the United Kingdom, referring to the Labour Party that took power in the 2024 general election, "is far less legitimate than Saddam was in Iraq prior to the US invasion—and, for that matter, far less legitimate than Maduro's regime in Venezuela".

In March 2026, Brazil revoked Beattie's visa following an attempt to visit former president Jair Bolsonaro in prison.

Personal life Beattie is Jewish.