When Accountability Becomes Betrayal
What the GRA's Latest Threat Reveals About Its True Priorities
When Accountability Becomes Betrayal
By Jeremy McKeown
May 2025
Follow-up to: The Rotten Core of Georgia Republican Politics
They say character is revealed not when you’re in power, but when you’re challenged by it.
Yesterday, I received a Signal message from GRA President Nathaniel Darnell in which he told me that by writing publicly about my experience—an experience that included being falsely implicated in a criminal threat, smeared in GRA channels, and then ignored for 20+ days after filing a formal inquiry—I had “made many feel betrayed.”
He then threatened me with possible expulsion from the GRA for sharing the truth.
Let that sink in:
I was called selfish and petty for defending myself.
I was told my reputation didn’t warrant urgency.
And now I’m being threatened with discipline for doing the only thing that ever gets a response—making it public.
This Is the Rotten Core
Nathaniel’s message to me wasn’t just personal. It was emblematic of everything wrong with the GRA’s current leadership culture:
Selective Accountability: A public PR war with Debbie Dooley gets a full-length article defending leadership within 24 hours. Meanwhile, my AAG filing—done quietly, respectfully, and by the book—was ignored for nearly a month.
Weaponized Loyalty: Rather than deal with the problem, Nathaniel invoked someone named “Chris” and claimed that I’d lost their confidence. I don’t who Chris is let alone what he would have to do with any of this.
Moral Posturing Over Action: The GRA’s principles speak of Judeo-Christian values, but what Christian ethic punishes someone for seeking fairness after being slandered?
Inversion of Guilt: In a truly Orwellian twist, the leadership has made me the problem for highlighting that they never followed their own rules.
Who Does the GRA Really Serve?
I joined the GRA because it claimed to stand for truth, accountability, and principled conservatism. I believed those words meant something.
But now I’m told the organization has “a long line of people ahead of you” and that they’re not, quote, “an HR department.” I’m sorry—if clearing the name of a falsely accused conservative leader isn’t worth the GRA’s time, what is?
The fact is, they had no issue responding when Debbie made her accusations public. And they had no issue taking immediate action against me when I was accused—even in error—of violating a chat rule. But to this day, the person who smeared me still hasn’t been held accountable. Still hasn’t even been contacted.
What does that tell you?
The GRA's Identity Crisis
The Georgia Republican Assembly finds itself in a crisis—not just of public image, but of identity. If the GRA believes that defending one’s name is “petty,” but defending power is urgent, then it no longer represents the grassroots. It has become what it once opposed.
And that’s the real betrayal.
A Final Thought
If I must be the sacrificial lamb that forces the GRA to confront its hypocrisy and either correct course or collapse into irrelevance, then so be it. I’m not afraid of being cast out. I’m afraid of being silent while others are cast aside for asking the system to work.
Nathaniel, if you're reading this:
You didn’t lose faith in me.
You lost faith in your own mission.