In 2018, Darren Beattie was a speechwriter for Donald Trump — until the White House learned that he had appeared alongside the prominent white nationalist Peter Brimelow at a conference two years earlier. The administration fired Beattie, who told the Washington Post in a statement that he said “nothing objectionable” at the conference and still backed Trump. He didn’t remain in the wilderness for long. In 2020, the White House appointed Beattie, who is Jewish, to a commission overseeing the preservation of Holocaust sites, as ABC News reported. The following year, he urged Black Republicans to “learn their place” and “take a knee to MAGA” on what was then Twitter. What place might they occupy? A subservient one, according to Beattie. “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he posted this past October. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
Like his master, Trump, Beattie has now returned to power. On Monday, he started a new position as an under secretary in the State Department, joining the ranks of Trump’s “competent white men.” Beattie arrives just as Trump battles DEI and Elon Musk terrorizes federal employees with the assistance of his young engineers. Much of the federal government is in chaos, as Musk and DOGE took control of the Treasury Department’s payment system, along with the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, and effectively killed USAID. The chaos is likely the point, as Musk consolidates power and a moribund Democratic Party struggles to respond.
We can still glean a few key truths from the wreckage. Musk is trying to assume control of the federal government in service of an underlying ideological agenda, which he shares with Beattie and Trump. The SpaceX founder believes he deserves power and profit because he is committed to the same race and gender hierarchy that animates Beattie. When Trump and his loyalists speak of “merit,” this is what they mean: a whiter, more masculine government that can transform society in its image. DEI programs must go because they theoretically block the ascendance of the men who are meant to rule. Efficiency is a convenient smokescreen for their real agenda, which is to make sure the government works for them and nobody else.
Beattie does not work alone, and neither does Musk. On Sunday, Wired identified six men “apparently between the ages of 19 and 24” who lack any government experience and are now working with DOGE. Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Y Combinator, posted that critics of the engineers fail to “understand the scale and speed of smart high IQ people who can program, and what they can do in a moment when intelligence now on infinite tap using LLMs.” Trump and his circle have portrayed the federal government as a decadent entity riddled with incompetent workers who owe their positions to DEI programming. By contrast, Musk’s engineers are entitled to shape the government as they — and Musk — see fit because they may be intelligent. They do not need experience as long as they fit other parameters. They are men, they are mostly white, and they are loyal to Musk and Trump. Anti-fascist activists reported on Monday that at least one of the engineers, Gavin Kriger, has reposted neo-Nazi accounts, including one belonging to Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist with a significant following.
Fuentes’s followers, the so-called “Groyper Army,” pose a real social threat. The writer John Ganz has warned of “groyperfication,” or “the cancerous replication of groyper cells across the entire society.” Ganz added that “every single person under say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groyper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in Discord chats, etc.,” and this influences not only the American right but also the Trump administration. One does not need to be in groyper spaces to believe, as Beattie does, that “competent white men” should be in charge, but the viewpoints are complementary. At minimum, the Trump administration is filling up with extremists who are convinced of their own innate superiority, and with the elevation of their race and gender above all.
Trump’s “competent white men” may soon include Joe Kent, a failed Republican congressional candidate who met with Fuentes and was interviewed by a neo-Nazi YouTuber in 2022. Trump has nominated Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center. If confirmed, he’ll join the likes of Beattie. Competence is not the barometer by which these men will be judged. What matters instead is their loyalty to Trump and Musk — and their proximity to a thuggish far-right politics. Musk’s engineers are closer to the Proud Boys than anything else, grinding fragile institutions under their boots as they march. At stake is not DEI, but the concept of multiracial democracy itself.
