It’s well worth recalling the speech of William Barr at Notre Dame a few years back, with commentary by Catherine Rampell:
On Friday, in a closed-door speech at the University of Notre Dame, Attorney General William P. Barr talked at length about a “campaign to destroy the traditional moral order.”
The alleged perpetrator of this campaign?
“Militant secularists,” who insist upon keeping government institutions free from the influence of any faith or creed.
To be clear: This was not merely an affirmation — delivered by a devout Catholic, while visiting a Catholic university — of how privately taught religious values can contribute to character development or stronger communities.
No. This appeared to be a tacit endorsement of theocracy.
Advocates of theocracies fall into two categories, the religious zealots and the callous grifters. I think, based on Professor Richardson’s summary of the news yesterday concerning the actions of Barr during his tenure, we have an answer to the question of which category Barr falls into:
Under then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Department of Justice subpoenaed from Apple the records of the communications of California Democrats Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the committee, and—we learned at about 11:00 tonight—Eric Swalwell, both of whom were key critics of Trump. The department also investigated members of their families, including one child. The government seized the records of at least a dozen people.
Here I insert my obligatory salute to my favorite lickspittle, Jefferson Beauregard Session III, and note that this paragraph is merely for context.
“[G]ood God,” journalist Jennifer Rubin tweeted. “They were running a police state.” For the Department of Justice to subpoena records from congressional lawmakers is extraordinary. For it to investigate their families, as well, is mind boggling.
Department officials did not find anything, and the investigations slowed down.
Remember back in May 2019, when the Senate was interviewing William Barr, who replaced Sessions as attorney general, after his delayed release of the Mueller Report, and then-Senator Kamala Harris asked him if then-president Trump or anyone else in the White House had ever asked him to open an investigation into anyone? Barr danced around the question and then refused to answer it.
It turns out that when Barr became attorney general in February 2019, he revived the languishing investigations, moving personnel around to ramp up the inquiry. Even after the Trump administration itself declassified some of the information that had been leaked, undercutting the argument for continuing an investigation, Barr insisted on keeping it going.
The Justice Department did not find that the Democrats they were investigating were connected with the leaks.
The DOJ also subpoenaed the records of journalists from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN to try to find leakers, a serious threat to freedom of the press.
Meanwhile, of course, as journalist Chris Hayes pointed out on Twitter, at the same time the White House and its operatives at the Department of Justice were secretly subpoenaing the records of members of Congress, they were refusing to answer congressional subpoenas of White House personnel.
I take this to be diagnostic of the religious zealot, who, having overcome the obvious doubts that accompany belief in a Divinity for which there is little to no evidence, finds it not beyond his abilities to believe his political adversaries are evil enemies as well. Politics is about power; religion quite often is as well. The social miasma of the one, masquerading as heavenly manna that often leads to social gains (Barr as AG), then envelops the rest of the victim’s life, infecting them with a paranoia-like
So if Barr was convinced that Schiff, et al, were the bad guys, it’s not surprising that he disregarded all norms and procedures in his pursuit of proving that he’s right.
And remember how Barr suddenly disappeared from the news, much to Trump’s anger? My suspicion is that Barr, finding that all of his investigations and his defenses (of Flynn and all the other prosecutions in which he interfered, which earned him not one, but two, letters from former DoJ employees demanding he resign in disgrace) had come to naught, was finally abashed enough that he tried to slink away. His religious-mania fueled certainty of his own rightness had smashed into reality.
Just as his wrecking ball of self-righteousness had rendered the norms and the law nothing but splinters before his wrecking ball.
Religion, as a carrier of heuristic morality, has some sort of place in the world. But a full awareness of the fallibility of religious understanding, its common negative use as a power ladder from which Crusades after worldly power can be launched, render it a real danger when an ambitious & feckless person – such as Barr, or Trump, or any of a large number of people of nearly all faiths and nationalities are examples of – starts the climb.
When does my blood run cold? When someone of a religious nature exhibits arrogance in the religious vector. They beat the atheists, every time the atheists attack the Bible, to use an example I didn’t record. It’s one of the first steps down to a worldly Hell of mistaken certainty, provincialism, and far worse things.
