The Trump White House fired speechwriter Darren Beattie, a Neo-Nazi enthusiast, in August 2018 after it was reported that he had strong ties with white nationalists and that he had appeared on a panel at one conference with a Holocaust denier.
When asked if he had been fired, Beattie confirmed the news.
“It was the honor of my life to serve in the Trump Administration,” he said. “I love President Trump, who is a fearless American hero, and continue to support him one hundred percent.”
Beattie, a former Duke University instructor, first got Trump’s attention by supporting his campaign for president and then predicting that he would win the presidency.
In 2019, after Beattie had been fired from Trump administration, GOP congressman Matt Gaetz, one of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, hired him. Politico said that Gaetz had “drawn scrutiny of his own for inviting a Holocaust denier to one of Trump’s State of the Union addresses.”
Trump then hired Beattie in 2020 to a three-year term with the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Legacy Abroad, a committee charged with the purpose of preserving the memory of the Holocaust.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, responded: “It is absolutely outrageous that someone who has consorted with racists would even be considered.”
Under normal times perhaps.
But this was during the Trump Administration.
“Shortly after Mr. Trump took office, the White House issued a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day that neglected to mention Jews,” Maggie Haberman wrote in The New York Times. “And in 2017,” Haberman added, the president was denounced after saying there were ‘very fine people on both sides’ after a protester was killed at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.”
Michael Edison Hayden, an investigative reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center, criticized Beattie’s appointment during an interview with CNN. “When our government gives a post to a person like Beattie, it puts our security at risk,” Hayden said. “Take a look at his Twitter feed, where he calls Americans he disagrees with ‘the enemy.’ Beattie traffics in the kind of warlike rhetoric you’d typically encounter on neo-Nazi websites, which is what makes his continued connection to our government so disturbing.”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/23/opinions/beattie-trump-appointee-biden-should-fire-fox/index.html
Shortly after Joe Biden became president in January 2021, the Biden Administration forced Beattie’s resignation from the commission days after the right-wing blogger said that the FBI had incited the January 6 insurrection.
