Nobody Cares That White Supremacists Are Calling the Shots Now

Chance Phillips

08 Aug 2025 — 9 min read

Darren Beattie, a speechwriter for Trump early during his first term, posted the following in October 2024, a month before Trump would win re-election: “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.”

“But undercutting the left’s diversity regime is not just a matter of policy,” he added in a subsequent tweet. “It requires rhetorically demolishing decades of anti-white propaganda designed to pathologize the very idea of competent white men being in charge.” Over the past several years, Beattie has repeatedly posted about the need of white people to “defend themselves as a group,” incessantly opined that white people are too scared of being called racist, and declared that “no group in the history of the world has ever been as mind-raped with propaganda as post world war 2 white people.” (If you’re curious about Beattie’s thoughts on WWII, he denounced the public uproar around Tucker Carlson interviewing a Holocaust denier and praised Churchill for endorsing the slogan “Keep England White” in the same post.)

Marko Elez, now a twenty-five year old, boasted on a pseudonymous X account in July 2024 that “just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” A few months later, that December, he called to repeal the Civil Rights Act and explicitly endorsed “a eugenic immigration policy.” Reporting by Katherine Long of the Wall Street Journal found he also used that account to vocalize sentiments like “normalize Indian hate,” “you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.” Again, all these posts are remarkably recent, dating from near the end of the Biden administration and written after Elez was already well into his twenties.

Former National Review contributor Nate Hochman was fired by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign in July 2023 for sharing a video portraying DeSantis in front of a Nazi symbol, the Sonnenrad. At the time, early reporting suggested he had also made that particular piece of Nazi propaganda, a claim he did eventually dispute. But in the immediate aftermath—in the days after people began to report he had made the video—Hochman evidently did not tell his fellow traveller Rod Dreher that he had not made the video. Or, if he did, Dreher didn’t feel fit to mention it in his public agonizing over whether to believe Hochman’s tall tale that he “had no idea that the Sonnenrad was a Nazi symbol.”

And in the months following Hochman’s departure from the DeSantis campaign, oh so evidently thoroughly chastened by the experience, he began writing for any paleoconservative outlet that would publish his name in a byline. A handful of his gems from that time include: spreading the libel Haitians were eating people’s cats and dogs in Ohio, in an article tastefully titled “Was It Worth the Empanadas?”; a critique of Vivek Ramaswamy on the grounds that “America was, historically, a distinctly and recognizably Anglo-Saxon nation” and “retains that character,” which necessitates screening immigrants by the “national character” of their home country; and articles pining over statues erected several decades after the Civil War in honor of the Confederacy and bemoaning Juneteenth as an unforgivable attempt to “replace July 4th.” In other words, statues often built as part of the explicit political project of retrenching racial rule of the South must be cherished, but a day off work every year to remember the Union’s final defeat of the Slavocracy ought to horrify any true conservative.

All three of these men currently possess significantly more political power and influence than I am ever going to hold. All three were given their current positions after their bigotry had entered the public record and after they had either been fired, in two cases, or chose to quit, in the third, over those selfsame beliefs.

Beattie has now been acting under secretary for public diplomacy at the State Department since the first few days of February. He was also recently announced as acting president of the U.S. Institute of Peace. In response to an inquiry about how Beattie’s past statements might affect his ability to be an effective under secretary, a State Department official told me “Darren Beattie proudly works for the first Hispanic-American Secretary of State.” They added that my “desperate questions targeting him are biased and lack journalistic integrity.” Elez, after initially leaving his post with DOGE before the Wall Street Journal article got published, was rehired thanks to a concerted PR campaign on his behalf carried out by Elon Musk and JD Vance. Hochman, as I detailed previously and as Jason Wilson documented in The Guardian, is now a quite well paid policy advisor for Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt. I noted in my earlier article that there is circumstantial evidence that he’s been helping to write or contribute ideas for Schmitt’s speeches.

In the 1959 spy novel Goldfinger, Ian Fleming wrote that “once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

Over the past ten years, the most interminable flavor of public discourse has been the debate over whether or not it is okay to call Trump, as well as his supporters and political allies, racist. As I griped back in February, Republicans’ retort has consistently been that Democrats are the real racists™, whether due to the “reverse racism” of affirmative action or the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Most recently, when the Department of Homeland Security posted a painting of white settlers sweeping Native Americans from their land with a caption many viewed as containing neo-Nazi dogwhistles, the debate kicked up again. But similar conversations were had when Trump bemoaned immigrants’ “bad genes,” when JD Vance waxed lyrical about the importance of having a graveyard of ancestors on American soil, and on the occasion of countless other incidents.

I will not address any of those specific incidents here. I don’t need to. I also don’t need to mention the special privileges being afforded to white South Africans, the attacks on diversity programs, wasting millions on honoring the slaveholders’ insurrection, or the heartbreaking cuts to foreign aid. The third time it’s enemy action.

Simply put, the Trump administration is obviously racist and is actively pursuing a white supremacist project. The White House and their allies have repeatedly and voluntarily chosen to staff up by hiring avowed racists, people who post about how “white men must be in charge” and who (allegedly) make neo-Nazi propaganda. Whether this or that apparatchik is personally racist is wholly irrelevant: the admin and its allies are actively and intentionally handing over political power to racists so they can enact racist policy. What is shocking is how transparent this all is, and how little anyone seems to care.

Darren Beattie’s initial rehiring as under secretary was fairly well covered by the Washington press corps, but his subsequent exploits have rarely if ever made the front page of the New York Times regularly, much less the defanged Washington Post. Politico reported in April that Beattie was personally vetting Fulbright scholarship applications for wrongthink. Then the MIT Technology Review documented in May that Beattie was seeking a massive list of records from the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub with at least a partial focus on the president’s critics. Weeks after he began that process, the program he’d set his gaze on began to be shut down.

Court filings and reporting by the New York Times and Washington Post reveals Elez has been very active around many parts of the federal government. The Times reports he has been involved at different times with the “Treasury Department, Social Security Administration, Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services, United States Digital Service, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Homeland Security, Citizenship and Immigration Services, [and] Transportation Security Administration.” Hardly an insignificant portfolio. The most that has typically been said about his beliefs, however, following Long’s initial reporting, is that he left the admin for a time over “a history of racist social media posts.”

And as best as I can tell, just two outlets besides Liberal Currents and The Guardian mentioned Hochman’s cushy gig in Senator Schmitt’s office at all: a pro-union Amazon worker wrote a stellar op-ed about it in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Ja’han Jones wrote a piece about it for MSNBC’s online outfit.

Meanwhile, the sum total effect on public opinion of this consistent pattern of hiring and promoting open racists is nothing. Outlets now obligatorily mention in articles revolving around Beattie or Elez’s actions that they have made “social media posts on white grievances”—gotta love the Gray Lady’s signature style—but it doesn’t really make it into the headlines anymore. Independent journalist Amanda Moore seems to be one of the only people actually dedicated to tracking how fans of virulent antisemite Nick Fuentes are getting nominated to positions in the Justice Department and organizers of the January 6th rally-turned-insurrection are being paid to organize America’s sesquicentennial celebrations.

It would be perfectly accurate for the Times to come out and say that men who now hold key positions in Trump’s Washington believe white people are superior to members of all other races and have fought for years so that public policy can reflect that belief. It is perfectly accurate to state that men who openly oppose the basic idea of “a nation where [children] will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” are deciding whether your children will receive a scholarship, and running roughshod through federal data. It is perfectly accurate to say that a man who believes America remains quintessentially “Anglo-Saxon” in character, a “fact” that should dictate our immigration policy, is actually helping shape policy for a member of the U.S. Congress right this minute.

Ryan Cooper of the American Prospect wrote last month that the Zohran Columbia admissions “story” revealed “the Times’ top brass knows perfectly well how to conduct a political attack.” What you do, he stated, is “publish every possible critical story you can think of, day after day after day, damaging the target’s reputation and creating an impression of scandal.” Cooper pointed out that the Times had somehow (purposefully) neglected to apply the same level of drumbeat coverage to Trump’s former chief of staff calling the then-candidate a fascist, or to their own reporting debunking Bush admin lies about Iraq.

Equally damning is that the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal, and just about every other major outlet haven’t chosen to make one singular story the dominant framing device of the past six months: The Trump administration is teeming with despicable gutter racists and President Trump and his cabinet are having them call the shots.

Beattie, Elez, Hochman, and all other D.C. staffers of their ilk should be met with a constant barrage of interview and FOIA requests intended to track every aspect of their malignant influence. Republican senators and members of the House should be being asked by CNN and MSNBC every single day why they haven’t yet called for Beattie to resign, or for Trump to fire Elez. Until every television news program has a little counter at the bottom displaying the number of days since Beattie was installed in the State department, America’s press corps has failed the country it aspires to inform.