Barr. Jesus Christ. A natural born fascist, an Opus Dei Catholic with a profound hatred for democracy and a stupefying willingness to shatter democracy on behalf of a cabal of dark money billionaires, because these Federalist Society types tend to believe the whole Enlightenment was our big mistake.
Can we stop calling Bill Barr “normal” and giving him the benefit of the doubt now? The idea that membership in Opus Dei is in any way compatible with a nominally Enlightenment-inspired constitutional republic is ludicrous on its face. No one with any Opus Dei ties should serve in the US government. Bill Barr is Louie Gohmert with hair. What the hell else does Bill Barr believe? Does he believe the Pizzagate conspiracy theory? Does he believe windmills cause cancer? Does he believe Alex Jones’s boner speed meth pills are real nutritional supplements? Does he believe Glenn Greenwald makes some good points sometimes?
WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE DEALING WITH?
I don’t see how this tide of fascism is stopped in this country. I honest to God believe we’ve passed the point of no return. In any case, Barr is serving the same function at Justice that McConnell is in the Senate and Roberts and his majority on the Court. And there’s no-one in a position to stop them. The icing on this horrid cake is our billionaire press, which might have saved us with some good reporting—there was a point until fairly recently when that would have been enough—but which is obviously, god help us, determined to double down on the horrendous malpractice of 2016 that got us into this hell on earth in the first place. They will blow smoke to keep the Republicans in power in 2020, or die trying.
As it turns out, when a handful of multi billion dollar corporations control the news, and when their executives are profoundly contemptuous of democracy and its institutions, then the consequence is a press that is more outraged by Joe Biden’s wandering hands than by a president who instructs border guards to break the law and lie about it in court, or an Attorney General engaged in reckless obstruction and smears.
The New York Times—which helped to set the tone for the relentless media attack on Secretary Clinton in 2016— is already treating Barr’s demented and dangerous remarks with the same Vaseline-lensed deference the Times showed to Mr. Hitler and his chums some 85 years ago.
Apparently, the very rich old men who are bankrolling this horror show believe they’ve come up with the magic formula to get the fascism without the 50 million dead and the shattered cities: to get the prison camps without the death camps: to get the censorship and the paramilitary toughs maintaining public order, without the murders, rape squads, and other fascist games. Maybe they’re right.
But, yeah, Joe Biden sniffed someone’s hair and put his hands on their shoulders.