It’s a relatively minor role, in the grand scheme of the federal government, to be heading up the fairly obscure United States Institute of Peace.
The organization, funded by Congress, was founded as an independent, nonprofit think tank with the aim of promoting peace and preventing military conflicts around the world.
Not a bad goal, one that has sadly — what is not sad when it comes to the federal government in 2025? — been targeted by the Trump administration, which wants to shut the institute down.
Its mission came under assault by DOGE, which literally stormed its headquarters in Washington, D.C. in those awful early months of this year, causing a standoff with staff at the building. The DOGEers came back with FBI agents and local police and gained entry. The administration then fired most of the institute’s nonpartisan board, and many of its 300 or so employees. A federal judge in May ruled that Trump was outside his authority in firing the board — which, again, reports to Congress — and its acting president and that all of his previous actions were therefore moot.
So the Institute of Peace still exists. It even has a new president, Darren Beattie, appointed by its new board, which includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
And, if you were looking for more reasons to despair about the radically misguided leadership of our country, here’s the way that Beattie sees the United States of America: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he writes. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
Darren Beattie did not write such an analysis of the supposed problems that bedevil us when he was some hot-headed college student many years ago. He wrote them in October 2024.
This is the person who would advance the cause of peace in the world for our diverse nation? This is the key issue he thinks we face — re-coddling all those poor, demoralized White men crying in their Pabst Blue Ribbons?
Well, that would appear to be the opinion of Rubio and Hegseth and their boss. If you thought things couldn’t get any worse, good people, meet the latest of the really, really bad people representing us in this world.
Beattie had actually already been dismissed from his role as a White House speechwriter during the first Trump administration after it was disclosed he had served on a panel at a gathering of White nationalists two years previously.
You’d like to think that he was being rewarded with this new post after having spoken some words of contrition, but we instead see that he is being rewarded for doubling down on his hatred of races and sexes other than his own. Because this Peace gig is really just a side hustle. In February, Trump appointed him undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, a job he will keep, “marshalling America’s exceptional cultural achievements in the arts, music, and academia in furtherance of the safety, strength, and prosperity of the American people.”
I suppose there ought to be a little asterisk there, noting that he really hopes to marshal the cultural achievements of the White guys among us, seeing as how the poor schmucks have been so demoralized of late by the ladies, and the “minorities,” that they can barely stay in charge and exercise all their competence.
Beattie also has an affection for, of all things, the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against the, um, minority Uyghurs, who his own State Department maintains have been subject to genocide in their country. He praises the dictatorship in Beijing for being “non-woke” in their repression of the group. As a senator, Marco Rubio co-chaired the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and co-authored the McGovern-Rubio Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which prohibits the United States from importing goods made from their enslavement.
Funny how times change.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.