William Barr is an Authoritarian Religious Extremist

Yvonne Owens, PhD
4 min readFeb 18, 2020

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Knights of Columbus marching in new regalia

Barr has never been serving the idea of justice or the rule of law in the United States. He has always been working for several highly covert Roman Catholic anti-abortion and pro-Israel influence campaigns at once; ‘the Knights of Columbus and Opus Dei Catholic Information Center’s members and leaders “continue to have an outsize impact on policy and politics. It is the conservative spiritual and intellectual center … and its influence is felt in all of Washington’s corridors of power,” as was reported in the Washington Post.’

Have you ever wondered why Attorney General Barr — the chief law enforcement officer of the United States — so wantonly, so flagrantly breaks the law? With such an air of uncaring, irrationally entitled, self-righteous justification? This is why. He’s been waiting for a conscienceless, vain and malleable president like Trump all his life. That’s why he shamelessly auditioned for the job as AG.

That’s why he’ll fall all over himself keeping Trump happy, in power, issuing deranged ecocidal executive orders, and appointing misogynistic Christian Right judges. Like Reagan’s demented Right Wing Evangelical Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who first opened up federal lands for mining and oil exploration and development, he believes the Earth is toast anyway and the right thing to do is to exploit all Her resources in the war against Satan in Armageddon, which kicks off in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount, as per modern, criminally self-serving Religious Right misreadings of Revelations.

He thinks he’s doing God’s work by keeping an deranged autocrat in power who will appoint scores of Religious Right conservative judges, repeal Roe versus Wade, move the embassy to Jerusalem, support the Israelis in their dominance of the region of the ‘Holy Land,’ and otherwise fulfil the deluded ‘prophecies’ misread in Revelations. He thinks God’s got his back.

Barr and Pompeo are both religiously indoctrinated authoritarians who deeply believe in the ‘infallible’ rule and moral ‘rightness’ of executive power. Each believes that, if a man occupies the seat of near absolute power, it can only be because God has placed him there for His own inscrutable reasons — like Cyrus in the Old Testament.

Trump, like Cyrus, is God’s flawed vessel. In the case of Trump, God’s purpose for him has to do with Zionist victories over the Palestinians, so that the Second Temple can be rebuilt on the Temple Mount, where now stands the oldest mosque, Al Aqsa, so that God can destroy the Temple of Solomon yet again, for a third time, and most of the Jews with it, so that Armageddon, the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ can occur, with the Rapture airlifting the ‘good Christian believers’ out of the fray to sit at the Right Hand of God the Father, and witness the inauguration of the Thousand Year Reign of Christ on Earth — the so-called New Jerusalem. And they’ve both declared this belief, out loud, on many a podium, in many a venue, for the record.

THAT is why they do the shit they do. No one who doesn’t support a total ban on abortion and the short-term victory of Israel in obtaining control over the area of the divine showdown even registers on their self-serving, fear-addled consciousness. Their eyes are fixed on some mythical afterlife whereby, for their pains, they have racked up loads of ‘Brownie Points’ with Jesus, and can look forward to a cushy eternity with immortality and all the perks. This is what Barr meant when he (when asked about the hit-job he’s performing on his own career and reputation by defending and protecting Trump’s overt criminality) said, “I am at the end of my career…Everyone dies, and I am not, you know… I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that, you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?”

He meant that “immortality” comes when you die, and only when you die — when you gladly leave this ‘vale of tears’ in the best ascetic/Catholic ‘contemptus mundi’ tradition, and are given your ‘reward in Heaven’ by the so-called Grace of ‘God,’ due to having faithfully and obediently served your religious hierarchy’s male authoritarian masters and Church doctrine, most of which — if you look at it — concerns the rigorous suppression of women as ‘Daughters of Eve,’ maintaining an invasive degree of control over their bodies, and keeping them out of the priesthood until Kingdom Come. All else — America, American Constitutional Rights, the Constitution itself, Human Rights, democracy, human decency, the law (except for Church Law), his decades-long friendship with Robert Mueller — is immaterial.

In this they are no different than the ISIS, Al Qaida or Wahabi disciples who cash it all in for Paradise with loads of nubile houriis on call, and eternally flowing rivers of milk, honey and wine — except, in place of themselves and a few score poor victims in the wrong place, in the wrong time, it’s all the rest of us, the environment, and democracy itself they’re martyring.

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Yvonne Owens, PhD
Yvonne Owens, PhD

Written by Yvonne Owens, PhD

I'm a writer/researcher/arts educator on Vancouver Island and all round global citizen who loves humans even though we're such a phenomenal pain-in-the-ass.

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