Tag: appeal
Heart Of Darkness II: A Trump Appointee's Deleted Racist Tweets

Heart Of Darkness II: A Trump Appointee's Deleted Racist Tweets

This story was originally published in COURIER's American Freakshow newsletter

Racist pseudoscience and flirtation with fascism were always in the water around Trump. But the influential online eugenicists and neo-Nazis of 2025 are not your grandad’s German Nazis, nor are they David Duke or even Richard Spencer (tiki torches, khakis, and gaiters are so 2017).

The Trump 2.0 white pride influencers often have academic cred. Their erudite snark appeals to the self-regard of Silicon Valley oligarchs and their fanboys who think being in a computer lab when the sum of all human knowledge initiated the digital era makes them superior DNA-bearing geniuses.

Last week’s featured Freakshow freak Geoff Martin and many of his fellow online racist anons, like Texas race pseudoscientist Jordan Lasker (who Elon Musk has engaged with dozens of times), prefer to lurk behind pseudonyms.

But some out-and-proud white nationalist/race scientists don’t mind putting their real names to tweets about sterilizing “low IQ trash” – the white supremacist online pseudo-scientists’ current favorite insult. Trump’s acting Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is Darren Beattie, and his white nationalist affiliations were too much for Trump 1.0. The White House sent him packing, and he went on to found a right-wing media outfit called Revolver News.

But in the new Trump regime, publicly declared racist views that might once have gotten pretty much anyone fired are now job qualifications. Beattie, like the rest of the creeps* who make up the MAGA Heart of Darkness, has academic bonafides. He wrote his PhD thesis on Nazi Martin Heidegger.

A typical Beattie tweet would be one in 2023, when he went on a tear about online street fight videos online, apparently unaware that Trump was getting cozy with UFC cage match tycoon Dana White, king of fight videos.

Many of Beattie’s Tweets about sterilizing “low IQ trash” – always understood to be people of color and not MAGA-white rabble – are still online. But his deleted tweets reveal another, sicker layer of sentiment, more familiar to movie-going Americans perhaps in the character Leo DiCaprio played in Django. Pure, deplorable, antebellum and Jim Crow racism.

The January 6 insurrection provoked Beattie to a frothing frenzy of anti-Black rage that he vented on Twitter for hours and then deleted. He was clearly more upset about what he might consider uppity Blacks on TV than the White horde that had just smashed, grabbed, and defecated on the walls of the capital.

He spent the afternoon and evening of that day calling for Black public commentators during the televised violence to get back to their “proper place” in the under-class. Some examples of now deleted Beattie tweets on January 6th:

“Ibram Kendi needs to learn his place and take a knee to MAGA. Learn his proper role in our society.”

“Kay Cole James of Heritage Foundation needs to learn her natural place and take a KNEE to MAGA.”

Beattie even took swings at Trump loyalist Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina:

“Tim Scott needs to learn his place and take a KNEE to MAGA.” (Scott is still a Trump-supporting Republican Senator. Whether he’s “learned his place” is not for us to judge.)

By midnight, Beattie had completely lost it, demanding that pretty much every Black person in America get to the back of the bus, with this tweet:

CNN unearthed some other deleted Beattie bon mots this week. In one tweet that was removed for violating Twitter’s terms of service, on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, Beattie’s Revolver News posted about the decision maybe permitting shooting at women who get abortions.

He has also accused his now-boss (in name only, apparently), Secretary of State Marco Rubio, of being “low IQ” and closeted, referencing a high school curfew violation at a park:

He followed that up with: “What happens in the Cabana stays in the Cabana #Rubio.”

When reporters asked Rubio about Beattie’s new position as his State Department’s “public diplomat” (before the latest round of personally insulting Tweets was revealed), Rubio kicked the can: “He went through the process that the transition office went through,” Rubio told a press briefing. “He’ll be acting in that capacity, and he’ll largely be focused – as that department will be – on not wanting this Department of State to be involved in censorship.”

In other words, Beattie is on board to make public racism great again.

Obviously, putting this man in this position is just a big troll. One can easily imagine Team Trump elves smirking as they added his name to their vetted list. Think Stephen “Goebbels” Miller or Donald Trump Jr., who hosted Beattie at least seven times on his Triggered podcast in the last two years, possibly a record for him for one single guest.

Junior used to close every rally speech in support of his father with the sign-off: “We will make liberals cry again!”So, haha, you, dear reader, are supposed to be crying as an out and proud racist serves as the face of American public diplomacy for the next year (although he will not be permanent – the regime doesn’t really need his services, just his presence as a billboard insult).

These people aren’t new among us, but Trump has empowered them. The mainstreaming of eugenics was already in full sway during the campaign last summer. The Atlantic ran an article headlined “The Far Right is Becoming Obsessed with Race and IQ: Race Science has returned.” Ali Breland pointed out that the eugenics clan (Klan?) uses a kind of code to know and amplify each other. They call their observations about racially-based inferiority “noticing.”

The pathology that infects these men is eloquently explained in Sven Lindquist’s “Exterminate All The Brutes.” The title comes from the supposed last words of Captain Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novel about Europeans in the Congo, Heart of Darkness. Lindquist traces how European racial superiority ideology has led to countless massacres and genocides throughout history, from the indigenous Americans to the people of the Congo to the Jews of Europe.

The offensiveness of this ideology is only exceeded in vileness by the passivity and toadying of the political and corporate leaders in America right now who are not objecting to the mainstreaming of the sickness.

STAY TUNED: In part three of our MAGA’s Heart of Darkness series, I’ll introduce the popular MAGA fanboy who has published a recipe for Hitler’s ice cream. Take your anti-nausea medicine.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.


RFK Jr.

Abortion Doubts May Drive Wavering Democrats Away From RFK Jr.

The extended family of third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an explicit effort Thursday to blunt his appeal among Democratic voters by endorsing President Joe Biden en masse.

Robert's sister Kerry Kennedy, daughter of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and niece of former President John F. Kennedy, called Biden “my hero” at an endorsement event in Philadelphia featuring at least 15 members of the Kennedy clan.

“We want to make crystal clear our feelings that the best way forward for America is to reelect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for four more years,” she said, a clear sign of the threat third-party candidates pose to Biden's 2024 reelection bid.

Almost simultaneously, news broke that RFK Jr. and his tech entrepreneur running mate Nicole Shanahan qualified for the ballot in the swing state of Michigan after being nominated by the Natural Law Party.

The ultimate effect of third-party candidates this cycle and exactly where they will make the ballot remains unclear. But we do know that Donald Trump, who has never won more than 47 percent of the vote, will need a spoiler or two siphoning away votes from Biden in order to prevail in November.

The supposed bipartisan group No Labels recently complicated Trump's calculus by ending its bid to find a candidate to run. That leaves anti-vaccine activist RFK Jr., Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Harvard professor Cornel West as potential spoilers to Biden's reelection, either individually or as a group. Kennedy, who polls highest and has the resources to potentially get on the ballot in all 50 states, poses the biggest threat.

It remains to be seen whether Kennedy's candidacy—which draws interest from conspiracy theorists and Kennedy-nostalgic Democrats alike—will hurt Biden or Trump more in November. But some polling suggests that Kennedy is currently skimming more voters away from Biden.

What is clear is that Trump benefits disproportionately from every third-party candidate in the race since he fell several points shy of reaching 50% in both 2016 and 2020. By contrast, Biden won in 2020 with 51% of vote—just barely enough to tilt the Electoral College in his favor. It’s telling that Kennedy's presidential bid has been bankrolled by one of Trump's biggest donors, Mellon banking heir Timothy Mellon, and championed by one of Trump's biggest allies, Steve Bannon. Not so coincidentally, a key Kennedy campaign official, Rita Palma, also said her No. 1 goal was blocking Biden's reelection bid. Palma has since been axed by the Kennedy campaign.

All that said, it is incumbent upon the Biden campaign to blunt Kennedy's allure among Democrats to make him a bigger drag on Trump in November.

“If Kennedy makes it on the ballot in these states—and that’s a big if—we’re going to make sure voters know how extreme his policies are and that MAGA megadonors are bankrolling his spoiler campaign to be a stalking horse for Donald Trump,” said Democratic strategist Lis Smith, who is advising the Democratic National Committee on the matter.

The Kennedy family itself, with its enduring star power among Democrats, has been searching for ways to kneecap RFK Jr., who's leveraging the family name while damaging the Kennedy legacy with his antithetical stances.

But at some point soon, the Biden campaign will have to deploy a strategy to neutralize Kennedy's Democratic appeal, and a recent Engagious focus group in Pennsylvania of 11 Trump-to-Biden swing voters may offer a window into one potential avenue.

According to Axios, roughly half of the swing voters who participated in the focus group said the candidates' stances on abortion would play a role in how they voted in the fall.

Six of those swing voters also said they would vote for Kennedy over Biden and Trump, but questions about Kennedy's abortion stance became an immediate hang-up for them.

"If he doesn't agree with what I agree with abortion, then I'm going to switch," said participant Michael W.

Rich Thau, the focus group moderator and president of Engagious, said that pro-choice swing voters who expressed support for Kennedy "seemed to second-guess their support when confronted with the argument that a vote for Kennedy is effectively a vote for Trump and his abortion policies."

After some initial jostling last year, Kennedy told NBC News’ Ali Vitali that he supported abortion during the first three months of pregnancy but would sign a federal abortion ban if elected.

“I believe a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life," Kennedy said. "Once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child." The exchange between Kennedy and Vitali was captured on video, making it fodder for attack ads.

Kennedy’s campaign has since backtracked on those remarks, issuing a statement saying he does not support a federal ban on abortion.

“Mr. Kennedy supports a woman's right to choose,” says the statement, adding that it’s “not up to the government to intervene in these difficult medical and moral choices.”

A national abortion ban is a nonstarter with Democratic voters, and perhaps most importantly, many Democrats who aren't thrilled about voting for Biden but would never consider voting for Trump.

In a follow-up exchange with Daily Kos, Thau said, "For pro-choice Trump and Biden voters, the risk posed by voting for RFK Jr. could be too much if abortion is a top-tier concern."

He added that he hasn't yet come across another issue that "would have the same effect on RFK-curious swing voters as abortion does. It’s not to say there aren’t such issues … but I haven’t pushed or probed on those yet."

Whatever the range of issues that could dissuade Democrats from voting for Kennedy, abortion appears to offer the Biden campaign a starting point.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Rice Will Appeal Indefinite Suspension: Reports

Rice Will Appeal Indefinite Suspension: Reports

Baltimore (AFP) — Ray Rice, the National Football League star banned indefinitely after video of him knocking out his then-fiancee surfaced, will appeal the suspension, according to multiple reports.

NBC, the Baltimore Sun and ESPN on Sunday reported that Rice, a star running back who helped the Baltimore Ravens win last year’s Super Bowl, would challenge the indefinite ban handed down by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell shortly after the Ravens fired Rice last Monday.

The same day, an Atlantic City casino elevator video revealed by TMZ showed Rice swinging a brutal left-hand punch that knocked Janay Palmer unconscious last February.

Rice avoided jail time on domestic violence charges from his brutal punch by agreeing in May to a pre-trial intervention program.

Goodell, who has guided the NFL since 2006, imposed only a two-game ban on Rice in July, one that drew widespread criticism as too lenient.

Last month, Goodell said he had made a mistake and toughened future NFL penalties for domestic violence.

But after imposing the indefinite ban, Goodell said any team wishing to sign Rice must come to Goodell first.

Rice is expected to argue “double jeopardy,” that he is being punished twice for the same rules infraction.

The NFL Players Association will push the appeal in part to establish a process and punishment terms under Goodell’s recent plan to toughen such penalties for domestic violence.

The union has until late Tuesday to file an appeal, a deadline set by Friday’s letter from Goodell to the union outlining the reasons for the tougher punishment on Rice, whose original ban would have ended Friday.

Goodell has said that the video showed details substantially different from the account Rice gave of what happened in the elevator when he spoke to Goodell about the incident.

Goodell says no one at the NFL saw the video although reports that the video was sent to the NFL prompted the league to have an independent investigator, former FBI director Robert Mueller, look into the matter.

Mueller will have access to all records and employees of the league, Goodell said, and the probe will produce a public report.

Critics have questioned the oversight role for the probe of two NFL team owners who are attorneys, Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers and John Mara of the New York Giants, both past supporters of Goodell.

Losing his job with the Ravens cost Rice the remaining $10 million on his contract.

AFP Photo/Ronald Martinez

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Utah Attorney General Asks Supreme Court To Rule On Same-Sex Marriage

Utah Attorney General Asks Supreme Court To Rule On Same-Sex Marriage

By James Queally, Los Angeles Times

Utah’s attorney general petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to hear an appeal of a decision overturning the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.

A federal appeals court found the state’s ban unconstitutional in a 2-1 decision on June 25, marking the first time a federal court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage since the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had to grant benefits to legally married same-sex couples in June of 2013.

Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes announced his intention to appeal a short time later and did so Tuesday.

“My responsibility is to defend the state constitution and its amendments as Utah citizens have enacted them,” Reyes said in a brief statement.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage, and this summer has seen a slew of lower-court decisions striking down bans around the country.

Shortly after the Utah decision, a federal appeals court overturned Oklahoma’s ban in a similar case. The attorneys general of Colorado and Indiana are challenging lower-court rulings against bans in those states, and three different judges in Florida have ruled that state’s marriage ban unconstitutional.

Marc Solomon, national campaign director for the advocacy group Freedom To Marry, said Reyes’ appeal could set the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court to make a definitive ruling on same-sex marriage.

“Today’s filing in the Utah case paves the way for the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a marriage case later this year and bring national resolution on marriage once and for all,” he said in a statement. “Every day, hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples and their children are suffering the tangible harms of not being free to marry. The sting of discrimination and the crazy quilt of marriage laws are not just wrong but unconstitutional.”

Photo: sigmaration via Flickr

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