About
A political theorist and writer, Darren Beattie earned a PhD in Political Theory at Duke University in 2016, which is also when he became the only non-tenured professor in the U.S. to join a group of scholars in signing a letter endorsing Trump and predicting his 2016 presidential win. In 2017 the Trump White House hired him as a speechwriter, but then fired him a year later once news surfaced that he had spoken at the 2016 H.L. Mencken conference, a space frequented by white nationalists (including Richard Spencer).
Beattie had been a Claremont Institute Fellow some 10 years earlier, and appealed to a Claremont listserv for support. The response ultimately led the Institute’s president to permanently shut down the forum. After leaving the Trump administration in 2018, Beattie briefly worked as a speechwriting consultant to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) in 2019 and was “writing a book in defense of Trump Nationalism,” according to the credit in an article he wrote for the Claremont Institute publication The American Mind.
In May 2020 Beattie founded Revolver.News, a platform he has since used to spread disinformation about Hunter Biden in the final days before the 2020 election and about “election fraud” in the months after, including calling for “marching orders” for “American Patriots.”
January 6, 2021
- Beattie posted several racist tweets (that he has since removed) as the attack on the Capitol unfolded, telling prominent Black leaders to “take a knee to MAGA.”
- Without any factual knowledge or proof, Beattie pushed the rumor that the FBI and other government agencies were involved in the violent attack on the Capitol.
- Beattie was closely involved with helping to develop the conspiracy narrative in Tucker Carlson’s Patriot Purge video—namely that the insurrection was “a pretext to persecute, imprison and otherwise mistreat” patriotic Americans who disagree with Democrats.