And I’m sure he’s whispering in the president’s ear as well:
“If you pull back the police from these communities there will be, there will be more harm done in these communities,” Barr said.
Hmmm. That’s Barr shifting his own rhetoric. Normally what he says is that if you don’t “show the proper respect” for police they won’t do their jobs and then you won’t have protection against criminals. And really, that’s what he means.
Barr also insisted that the Lafayette Square maneuver had nothing to do with Trump’s walk which is so ridiculous as to be laughable. It’s obvious they timed it specifically to be on our TVs in the minutes before Trump gave his “domination” speech and then walked over to the church and held the bible upside down. They wanted to demonstrate “domination” in the minutes before Trump’s appearance.
The whole thing was a propaganda ploy and the violence against the protesters was obviously part of it. How can anyone possibly believe otherwise?
He also contradicted Trump’s lie about the bunker:
And here we thought it was just an inspection…
I don’t know why the Attorney General, who is a lawyer, not an actual general, was involved in such tactical decisions at all or being asked to weigh in on them. This is ridiculous.
Anyway, he’s also an inveterate liar:
Apparently, he is unaware that he had cameras on him and the whole country was watching his little trip around the perimeter before Trump made his speech that day. We saw the crowd. It was not violent. And then the cops abruptly descended on them and violently pushed them back, using tear gas. We know what we saw. It’s all on video.
Barr’s comments mirror those of President Trump, who has repeatedly slammed proponents of defunding police departments and cast himself as a “law & order” president.
It’s interesting that he put it that way. The reason the crime rate is so low is because Trump handled the pandemic so badly that we had to shut down the whole country. I guess you can call that a silver lining but I think most Americans wouldn’t consider the 110,000 (and counting) dead bodies to be anything worth bragging about.
Barr and Trump are instinctive authoritarians. Barr’s smarter than Trump but not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. I’m not sure what motivates Trump beyond “winning” in the “ratings” sense but for Barr it’s obviously just power for power’s sake. He sees the country as being full of enemies of decent people (herrenvolk) who must be … dominated.