Few things shock me anymore. And I’m the worse for it. But leave it to an ex-Trump speechwriter to find a way. A think piece from Revolver was making the rounds on Fox News and into the living rooms of a million Americans. In it, one Darren Beattie critically examined court proceedings for some of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists. He noticed some defendants had yet to be charged. From this, he conjectured that these unnamed people are FBI agents, and that the entire day was an inside job. As an uninformed outsider, this floats to me somewhere on the edge of vague possibility. But it’s also a major cope. Right-wing populists have been yammering on for years about draining the swamp and fighting the elites. They put some bight behind their bark for once. They then spend entire news cycles trying to conspiracy-theorize it away. Republicans in name only, all of them.
But none of that was surprising. The kicker came from digging below the surface. Darren Beattie—hadn’t I heard of him before? He’s held up as an intellectual titan by those on the new online right. The types who imagine Steve Bannon is a 4-d chess-master of international Reaction and think: “Good.” I like reading folks four intellectual paygrades above my level. Even better when their stuff is filtered through the ADD-friendly medium of Twitter. And luckily for me, that’s about all there is to Beattie nowadays. On the timeline, Beattie was defending himself from a CNN anchor’s attacks. His retort was as follows: “In a serious country, hed [sic] be wearing a white apron asking me if I prefer still or sparkling water with my bread.” Bitch—what? Americans have a squeamishness about class—that’s usually to avoid dispelling a lot of comfortable illusions. Well, Beattie dispelled me of the idea that Trumpers at the highest level have anything but contempt for people below them. It’s un-American, not because America is a country of denial (it is). Rather, it’s un-American because the real America, the promise of the original revolution (and the second founding)—means dignity and hope. But Beattie wouldn’t know that. His Bizarro-world conservatism exists more squarely within a 1619 Project worldview. His recent pro-South African apartheid kick is instructive. It’s probably just a troll to knock BLM and the freakin’ Civil Rights Act back home. But behind it lies Beattie’s true thought: America has gotten too woke, and has to die.
Beattie’s other trick nowadays is to quash debate with the rejoinder: “Low-iq argumentation.” Some Vox journalist took the time to examine Beattie’s Jan. 6 speculations in the context of the legal language of past FBI ratfuckery. Federal agents are not named as co-conspirators in these cases. Co-conspirators by definition engage in criminal activity. Similarly, by definition, FBI agents or informants at-the-time are doing nothing criminal. Whether what they’re doing is right or not. In response, Beattie states: “Of course the FBI would not admit to wrongdoing.” He sees that as a tautology. However, he’s deliberately missing that these terms are the FBI’s—referencing their self-ordained immunity. None of that language is used here; it seems likely these unindicted co-conspirators ratted and were flipped after the fact. With charges advancing across the board, he’s had to take the L on this front. He’s now hedging on an (in his words) unfalsifiable front. Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oathkeepers (who was not present on Jan. 6), was the granddaddy FBI coordinator. If he isn’t charged (because not present) that proves the conspiracy. If he is charged—well, that proves Beattie’s point too somehow.
Beattie pursues such finer points in side-threads, reserving his defensive denials for insiders. To the Vox writer, he musters only his standard response: “Low iq thinking. I’m sure the author is a good person but he should stick to his cognitive strong-suits.” Beattie’s reply guys eat this up. Unabashed classism, weaponized (and unearned) notions of intelligence? He’s their man—they swing with all his petty jabs and get lifted by his increasing popularity. Forgive my, ahh, low-iq reference, but I’m hearing a line from Sideshow Bob: “Deep down inside you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king.” Beattie’s classist contempt is also adjacent to his all-in promotion of Noor Bin Laden. That’s Osama’s niece who is now rebranded as a MAGA firebrand. The only credential that matters is membership in the global aristocracy. Such is the state of current right-wing populism.
But Beattie is an intellectual—right? A supreme one, if you believe the reputation preceding him. There’s a famously opaque Ben Garrison cartoon featuring him. A big-brained Beattie (who’s Jewish) with remarkably Aryan features is getting his feet scrubbed by a kippah-adorned Jonah Goldberg. Heidegger cheers from the background. Petty internecine rightist debates are even weirder than leftist ones. But beyond that—what? He runs Revolver, the successor to the Drudge Report after Drudge proved insufficiently enthralled with Trump. The best things on that site are the truly awful montages accompanying texts. Democrats (Pelosi, et al.) float as demonic disembodied heads above a nocturnal D.C. skyline. They cackle down at martyrs of the movement such as Ashli Babbitt. These collages are often non-sequiturs; in this era of surreal chaos they seem on the verge of expressionist art. It only takes five seconds to parse them, but they seem to bubble up from a deluded QAnon unconscious. I can grasp how a Facebook boomer might feel a touch of the sublime.
But most of Revolver’s articles suck—OANN-tier MAGA propaganda. Surely something else lies behind Beattie’s heavy reputation? Unfortunately, half of his weight in the world comes from being a dick in the trenches of Twitter wars. Most of those battles are lost to time. But each squabble and shitlord trolling has led to a slowly rising follower count: a tsunami-wave slowly gathering stray boats of blind fishermen leading us we know not where. That’s enough to ensure bookings for the occasional cable news spot—and for grifter purposes I suppose that suffices. Beattie, though, isn’t as savvy, charismatic, or handsome as even a critical race theorist like Christopher Rufo. Since Beattie edits a website, I can’t say he’s just phoning it in. But his present work isn’t intellectually engaging or honest. He’s coasted into his current realpolitik gig atop his past as a Trump speechwriter—and some other burnishing personal history dating back to pre-MAGA days.
Beattie once studied and taught at Duke University. But he didn’t get his populist chops from Lawrence Goodwyn. Rather he studied political science along with continental philosophy. His thesis was on “Mathematics and Heidegger.” It’s a tendency for dorks too smart for their own good to want to get all mathematical in supporting their crankpot views (hello, Eric Weinstein). Beattie describes his experience at Duke, amidst the liberal faculty, as that of a stranger in a strange land. He likes to say he was the only tenured prof to support Trump. That comes later in our story. I can imagine him, in the beginning—a privileged white boy—drinking deep from the cup of heterodox thought. It’s a potent elixir, especially in secret. I grew up in a fundamentalist intellectual wasteland. Dabbling in bad-boy philosophers from Nietzsche to the Situationists was certainly a heady mix. Beattie at this point was a good writer, and he knew it. He read writers who, in their propensity to pump up pomposity, are downright dangerous to young and restless right-wingers (Nietzsche, Chesterton, etc.). But he didn’t get lost or become (utterly) insufferable. He was up to his mentors. I see him brimming with contrarianism and ready to pounce on a world ready for the taking.
Beattie churned out weekly opinion pieces for the Chronicle, a school newspaper. These pieces rank as his best work, though he probably wouldn’t admit as much. Beattie then was a contemplative—he examined goings-on like the Arab Spring with a measured conservative even-handedness. Intellectuals on the right usually have two takes. Standing atop history yelling “stop” for bad things. And repeating “a blessing and a curse” ad nauseum for anything containing a glimmer of hope. Modernity at best is an inconvenience. Beattie sticks to these two approaches. He also had the self-awareness to mostly stick to the “blessing and a curse” schtick. It makes you seem less like a nay-saying stick in the mud. His Chronicle articles are generally enjoyable. He’s got one examining the meaning of Jewish identity in the wake of obtaining a homeland. He’s ambivalent—as I am about the article in light of current alt-right bad-faith anti-Zionism—but the piece is literate and entertaining. I’d even suggest you read it. You know where his sympathies probably lie. Yet he resists both ethnic partisanship and his own tendency towards pretension. Some of his other articles suck—there’s one in which he virtually fellates himself for understanding a math equation. But Beattie is at his best and brightest in the Chronicle. The bags under his eyes, which today are downright alarming, only showed themselves in his Duke days after long nights of study. If you wanted to cultivate a strong, principled Republican opposition in a two-party state you’d almost hope for someone like young Darren.
There are signs, though, that something ugly was brewing. He wrote a six-thousand word article for the New Atlantis. He’d probably value it higher than his more freewheeling school articles. In it, he tries to formulate a conservative response to bioethical dilemmas. More broadly it’s a paleoconservative inquiry into the value of science itself. He sees the struggle between scientific advance and human dignity as tragically bound up with the doomed eros of human curiosity. He recounts the myths of Prometheus, Adam & Eve, and Pandora’s box. In doing so, he commits the amateur classicist’s mistake of confusing recounting a myth for actual wisdom or sustained argument. Beattie’s lost his soul now—not that I have a clue about his moral trajectory then—but he was out to square living well in the modern world with an Abrahamic understanding of man’s fallibility. He wrote his essay before current, hysterical hyper-aversion to science. If he’d written it today, he would’ve almost certainly done worse. In the article, he seems to suggest tradition must be upheld for the sake of human dignity. Man’s divided nature, though—even if he hews to tradition—will inevitably lead him astray. It’s a pessimistic conservative worldview. The bitter draught may go down easier for some, though, if they’re stuck on the spectacle of Beattie enjoying himself. He leaves his question unanswered—maybe navel-gazing around it was the point. But Beattie has—what one might call—a dialectical worldview. You can feel some part of him recoiling in terror at the realization that conservatism’s goal is impossible. It’s like some high-level Soviet musing in private that communism is unrealizable, and all that’s left is the conflict between global superpowers. I’m reminded of the ending of Dear Comrades—when the mother hugs her daughter and declares: “We must improve ourselves.” Darren didn’t get the chance to improve. Instead, he got power.
Beattie was snatched up by the Trump administration as a speechwriter. It’ll take a better man than me to comb through Trump’s speeches and find the Beattie lines. I’d be interested—but it’s likely they all got adlibbed over with calls to “lock her up.” Beattie’s gig didn’t last long. He’d spoken at something called the H.L. Mencken Conference. Beattie’s speech was unremarkable. But he was surrounded with bona-fide Nazis. Such is the plight of (and company available to) conservative minds. Huff Post got wind of the Conference and got him canned real quick. What’s ironic though is that Beattie’s speech was basically about the impossibility by-definition of a conservative intellectual. Or rather, a conservative intellectual is conceivable—but we haven’t seen it yet. He identifies the pre-Trump conservative coalition of the past 50 years as mix-mash of unobvious, tenuous allies: anti-communists, evangelicals, free market libertarians. Anti-intellectualism was the only tool to smooth it all over. That collation shattered in 2016. We don’t yet know what monster lies brooding in the deep, ready to replace it. Beattie admits as much, but he’s there for the ride. It may turn out that globalism and neo-liberalism were at their friendliest when there was room to grow. Now that the wall has nearly been hit—and the world is closing in on itself—we may witness the emergence of a global right more in line with the weird, counter-revolutionary Reactions of the past. The ignorant white Southern racist was the worst the Right had to offer since WWII (not counting presidential war criminals, etc.) There are older energies afoot now—monarchist revolutionaries and genocidal Silicon Valley tech-bros all lusting after ultimate power. Traditional conservatism’s collapse presents an opportunity for these types.
Though cast out of the Trump admin, Beattie still got to play footsies. Inexplicably, in light of his media attention, he was placed on some board for Holocaust Remembrance. (Surveying the white nationalist pickings amidst lower-tier Trumpland, someone must have shouted “Get me a damn Jew!”) What he really threw himself into though was Revolver. Beattie had his taste of power with his short-lived appointments. That, combined with the media attacks, broke something in him I think. In this (current) stage of his career, there is no inkling of the sophisticated, literate Beattie of yore. (I suppose iq-based ad hominems could perhaps be seen as degenerated spawn of all that.) And of course a right-wing aggregation rag like Revolver couldn’t be successful otherwise. Beattie has surrendered to full Roger Stone-style media ratfuckery nowadays. It’s funny—with their philosophical background, and how they lie & dumb things down to the masses, intellectuals like Beattie more closely resemble manipulative cultural Marxism than the Frankfurt School. When he’s not pouring class-based contempt on his Twitter enemies, he’s working up his Revolver readers to ever-increasing paranoia and extremism. Beattie has to hedge his intelligence—smart enough to play dirty but willing to overlook inconvenient details. Almost certainly, he only half-believes the substance of his Jan. 6 claims. The truth, though, doesn’t matter—the narrative demands the blood be washed from Trump’s hands. Republicans aren’t ready to become a full-out fascist revolutionary party—at least not yet. Jan. 6 was one of the greatest reminders in recent memory that change is possible. In light of optics, though, it’s got to go!
There’s a fundamental contradiction in Revolver’s reporting. Beattie is aware of it. He repeats to excess that he’s protesting some defendants remaining uncharged—not because he thinks any criminal conduct occurred, but because the uncharged are FBI agents. He can’t just come out and say he supports his movement its actions. I’ll say it now—if Beattie still has any principles, and if he’s willing own up honestly to the path he’s been walking, he’ll stop with this FBI conspiracy theory angle. He should commit all his funds to the legal defenses of the average Americans his movement prodded to violence. In doing so, he can remain ideologically consistent and show he actually gives a shit about lives that he and Trump have ruined. I won’t hold my breath though. Per Revolver, Jan. 6th was an inside job—the narrative is all that matters. Beattie couldn’t be bothered less with the pawns he’s put into motion.
Beattie’s not an elemental beast, a genius of Reaction wandering the earth to and fro a la Steve Bannon. He was once just a fresh-faced hyper-smart philosophy nerd. With pictures, you can map his descent over time. During his late college and early speechwriter years, his eyes reveal a fresh Luciferian spark not dissimilar to Milo Yiannopoulos. Fast forward though, and those bags under his eyes have deepened—grown permanent. His face seems heavy and bloated—he’s no longer a spry young talent. He’s settled down on a concrete path—fate encircles and prods him on. Another Zoom Newsmax appearance; the bags grow deeper yet. He rails against wokeness for five minutes, then turns the video feed off. Somewhere close behind, Satan belches up a fresh obscenity into the world.
The waiter quip was in awful taste. A conservative, hierarchical society shaped by contempt for the lower classes is indefensible—deserves to die. What makes me truly angry though are his appearances at Trump events. His puts his classism and moral degeneration on full view elsewhere. And then he dares address the great American unwashed. Folks like my family, neighbors, and coworkers. Trump’s rise was a source of hope for them—a sign of possibility and progress. Charlatans like Beattie have seen behind the curtain—”all struggle and progress is doomed to a tragic self-betrayal.” And yet he still ascends the stairs and mounts the podium. “Greetings, fellow Americans! It does my heart well to see so many patriots amidst the crowd here today!” He speaks pretentiously in moreovers, furthermores, and final conclusions. People pass distractedly in front and behind him, but he conveys the hits well enough to warrant applause. I hope anyone from the “white working class” in attendance recognizes the profound gap between Beattie’s interests and theirs. More likely, and perhaps just as well, they simply tune out.
Beattie is taking these folks down a dark road. Without an outlet, the kind of anger and anti-Fed conspiracy theorizing he foments gets nasty, quick. Beattie doesn’t mind. It’s cope that he offers—but not little white lies that help you fall asleep. His movement distorts the interests of the average heartlander. His lie allows us to escape into unreality. But it also consistently demands misplaced physical and metaphysical violence. They started killing my people with heroin. And with this MAGA shit now they’re trying to finish the job.
These people’s moral and intellectual lives—it’s all 4-d dimensional chess—playing for keeps. Beattie’s intimated that this rush of the new may lead straight down to hell. But that’s a chance he’s willing to take. Beattie has tied himself to a false populism. He and his ilk unleash the frustration of the masses. But that ire is intentionally warped—given false scapegoats and enemies—for the benefit, ultimately, of the global ruling class. But those directionless pitchforks, encouraged to reject all notions of solidarity, have a doubled edge. There’s a rising tide of something—only time will tell its true shape. And that tide is enveloping Beattie, too. When the high water’s everywhere– what then? Beattie is smart enough to sense what’s out there. When the deluge comes though, I’m not sure he’ll be able to, amidst the waves, gurgle out anything other than “I’m smart, I’m smart… I’m smart.”