Hillsdale College has never left much to the imagination concerning its worldview and the lens angle students who matriculate there will be looking through. A quick browse of its web page makes clear the brand it sells to recruits for both campus and on-line offerings. Long Fox/AM’s most reliable advertising dollar, Hillsdale’s site lays it on thick. Not just the Bible, but the book of Genesis as a seminar option. Founding fathers? Plenty on offer. Economics? Think Milton Friedman and Arthur Laffer. Indeed, it is the world according to Ayn Rand for young conservatives looking to leave home for the Michigan frontier. Even faculty curriculum vitae will note NRA instructor certifications, just to make sure no doubt exists that, at Hillsdale, the walk is walked.
So there is nothing surprising about the college hosting public speakers attuned to its perspective. Indeed, a conservative who’s who has visited, everybody who’s anybody. Attorney General Bill Barr, despite coming into office with the reputation as a no-nonsense get-er-done type, a fully committed institutionalist with no love for useless drama, has morphed into a Fox/AM darling, in addition to Trump poodle. These days he never met a mic he didn’t like, so long as he can spout sedition and strike fear in the hearts of public servants who haven’t held office for near four years now. He is vendetta man and apparently loving every minute of it. If he could comfortably fit into tights with a cape he probably would, but like his master, more salads and some stairclimber are the last things he wants any part of.
No, Barr speaking at Hillsdale yesterday was hardly surprising; it was what he said that shocked. The fact it isn’t front page news only reaffirms ruinous normalization of this misfit nihilist band. Seems the pooch wants off the leash to go as unhinged as daddy. At Hillsdale, he was free to roam and couldn’t have been more seditious.
Barr, who now devotes equal time to running interference for Trump’s near continuous disregard for the law, and rattling sabres at those who had the temerity to take umbrage at Russian interference in a US Presidential election, was not coy about defining his role in the federal food chain. “What exactly am I interfering with,” he wondered, referring to those who have a problem with Barr personally intervening in the Roger Stone and Michael Flynn matters. “Under the law, all prosecutorial power is invested in the attorney general.” Turns out Mr. Institutionalist has decided he’s the institution!
Whatever morale issues existed in the ranks of front-line prosecutors yesterday morning, they surely are considerably worse today after Barr likened his team to publicity hounds out primarily to “amass glory” at the expense of high-profile defendants. Alas, Barr rued, his people are “headhunters” defenseless babes like Stone and Flynn must be protected from. To hear Barr tell it, his is a lonely fight to reform a department long in the hands of subordinates his predecessors “blindly” deferred to. “No way to run an agency,” growled Trump’s now preeminent yes man.
Of course projection and hypocrisy are guiding tenets of this administration, but yesterday Barr astounded with a straight face when he mused about the “criminalization of politics.” “If you’re not in power, you’re in jail – or you’re a member of the press.” Hilarious! This not hours after Trump goaded his wretched core in Nevada to replace the “lock her up” chant, religiously directed toward Hillary Clinton at every MAGA rally since 2015, with “lock him up” in honor of Barack Obama, who Trump would arrest faster than taking another mulligan if he could. In fact, Barr appears ever more feverish in his efforts to criminalize Robert Mueller’s entire investigation. Forget hypocrisy, Orwellian best describes yesterday’s remarks on the subject of persecuting political enemies.
But Barr saved the best for last. In a White House devoid of any talent, with sycophancy the standard currency, Trump can be forgiven for giving the one member who once possessed genuine gravitas, albeit now a memory, permission to stray out of his lane. Barr was glad to do so during the question-and-answer period, the subject Covid. Along with falsifying Black Lives Matter as a Democrat political front using murders by police as “props to achieve a much broader political agenda,” the BillyBeast went looney tunes on pandemic lockdowns. Apparently, flattening the curve in March and April was “the greatest intrusion on American civil rights” other than slavery. Who knew? Expanding on his idiocy, Barr did his best Trump imitation: “All this nonsense about how something is dictated by science is nonsense.” It’s been clear since his election that loyalty to Trump is most effectively conveyed by becoming ever more stupid, a metamorphosis the President gains comfort from. Think above your station and you’ll be gone. Barr is certainly leaving nothing to chance on that score.
At the end of the day Barr established three things at Hillsdale. First, he is fully intent on living down to the common standard for Trump Cabinet lackeys: destroy the agency you are entrusted to lead. At his love fest confirmation the common assumption, shamefully accepted on faith by both sides of the aisle, was that Barr could at the very least be counted on to have the back of DOJ’s lawyers as they pursued cases, regardless the targets. He has obliterated that assumption, giving the worst like Mike Pompeo a run for his money at back stabbing his own people. It’s now clear a second Trump term means a complete purge at DOJ.
Second, at Hillsdale Barr’s tone took on a more gratuitous pitch, as in he’s getting off on this power trip. Let’s face it, with an addled psycho in charge, isolated and paranoid of everyone, cognizant of the legal apocalypse that awaits once he is again just a failed huckster, Barr is the muscle of this criminal enterprise, whose position at the top is rock solid. He was flexing in Michigan.
Finally, it’s now clear there is another voice coming from MAGA la la land capable of distracting us in equal measure from the things that really count right now, like Russian election tampering and voter suppression, overt sabotage of Covid acceptable practices, and atrocities committed at the border in all of our names, not to mention war on peaceful protest. Barr appears ready to bellow in tandem and with Trump’s blessing. That’s a lot of very ugly white noise that’s hard to ignore.
About 45 years ago Elliot Richardson, a stellar public servant, put honor and country ahead of ambition and servility. By resigning instead of firing Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox, Richardson stood for exactly what this country can’t exist without. Now we suffer his opposite, a piggish nihilist ever more comfortable with the idea of enforcing the termination of the American democratic experiment in the name of “law and order.” Whatever reservations he may have started with seemed to now be history as he spouted Trumpist gibberish last night at Rush Limbaugh’s favorite college. Just like his master there is now nothing left to the imagination; it’s the worst case scenario. Believe what he tells you. BC