Newly installed Secretary of State Marco Rubio will get assistance in his messaging from Darren Beattie, a controversial media entrepreneur and speechwriter in President Donald Trump’s first administration, who will join Rubio’s State Department team as acting Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, according to Semafor.
Beattie, a self-described “Grothendieckian Centrist” who founded Revolver News and holds a PhD in political science from Duke University, was ousted from the first Trump administration in 2018 after questions arose about his earlier attendance at a conference also attended by White Nationalists.
Trump put him back in a government role in 2020, adding Beattie to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. (He was moved out by the Biden administration in 2022.)
Lawyer and DOJ veteran Eric Columbus responded to the news of Beattie’s resurgence at the State Department — in an important global communications role — with examples of racially charged posts Beattie made in the past.
These feature examples, as Columbus writes, of Beattie “telling various black people — including Tim Scott — to ‘learn their place’ and ‘take a knee to MAGA’.”
Columbus featured four social media posts in his response, one of which addresses the Black Lives Matter movement, and reads: “BLM must take a knee to MAGA They must learn their place.”
(The Cambridge Dictionary defines the term “know your place” as meaning “to accept your position within society, an organization.”
Learning one’s place isn’t limited to Democrats or BLM activists in the Beattie posts Columbus features. Besides the aforementioned Republican South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, Beattie takes aim at Kay Coles James, the HBCU graduate, former Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia and trustee and former President of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank responsible for Project 2025.
Beattie wrote that James, too, “needs to learn her natural place and take a KNEE to MAGA.”
Darren Beattie, the new head of public diplomacy at State, spent January 6 telling various black people — including Tim Scott — to “learn their place” and “take a knee to MAGA”
www.thebulwark.com/p/even-as-hi…— Eric Columbus (@ericcolumbus.bsky.social) February 2, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Other left-leaning commentators — see Ron Filipkowski below — resurfaced arch Beattie social media posts on other issues, such as “whining globalists” who would be unhappy if Russia’s Vladimir Putin “invades Ukraine.”
Trump’s new State Department appointee. pic.twitter.com/X8GdizcGkS
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 3, 2025