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Item one: Has everyone forgotten about Barr’s 2018 Notre Dame speech? Well, I’m here to remind you.

Surprised by Bill Barr? Don’t be. Oh, yes, it’s shocking that he said on Fox News on Wednesday night that if push comes to shove, he’ll be voting for what he euphemistically referred to as "the Republican ticket." I’m not denying that it is. The frequency and ferocity with which Barr has attacked Donald Trump—a "consummate narcissist" whose second term would be "chaos" and a "horror show"—has led many people to believe that there was no way on God’s earth he’d endorse Trump. 

Barr hates disorder and all the rest of it. But he hates something else more: liberalism. And when I heard the endorsement news Thursday morning, my mind raced back to October 2019, and a speech Barr gave at Notre Dame University on government, religion, and the perceived assault thereupon. It was shocking to me at the time—as extreme (though evidently quite honest) a profession of fears and lamentations about modern secular society as you’re likely to hear at an Opus Dei convention, let alone from a sitting U.S. attorney general.

The speech’s, and the man’s, core philosophy were laid out in these sentences: 

No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.

But, if you rely on the coercive power of government to impose restraints, this will inevitably lead to a government that is too controlling, and you will end up with no liberty, just tyranny.

On the other hand, unless you have some effective restraint, you end up with something equally dangerous—licentiousness—the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good. This is just another form of tyranny—where the individual is enslaved by his appetites, and the possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.

Barr reaches into his hat to grab a few statistics that allegedly make his point about the sewer into which we have descended. First up, out-of-wedlock births, which have indeed gone up since the 1960s from under 10 percent to around 40 percent. Is the main culprit here that society has lost its religious moorings? Some would put that spin on it, sure. 

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But specifically, social science seems to have settled on these explanations: wider availability of birth control and abortion (things that Barr laments but are available in just about every developed nation in the world) and the ending, starting in the 1970s, of shotgun marriages. Barr surely thinks this an evil. I would imagine a lot of Americans consider it not a bad thing at all that two immature and incompatible 19-year-olds aren’t forced to marry out of a social convention that traps them in a probably unhappy marriage where the wife may end up the victim of some kind of abuse. 

He also cites "record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic." Again, all true. But the society for which he pines didn’t even measure many of these things and locked mentally ill people away in facilities where we wouldn’t put dogs today. And is the answer to these ills greater piety, or maybe more opportunity in the places that forge all these alienated young men?

It was a very revealing and, as I say, honest speech. He regrets pretty much everything that has happened in America since Elvis. He uses the phrase "moral chaos" twice. And he clearly believes we are in an age of secular tyranny.

So you see, Barr is against Trump, but not in the same way that you and I are. He eventually took a stand against Trump, but let’s recall that it did take him a long time. It wasn’t until Trump’s election denialism after the 2020 election that it all became too much for Barr to swallow. Until then, he was with Trump all the way: through the Muslim ban, through the family separation policies, through the Putin love, through the climate denialism, through the various expressions of racism, through the relentless dividing of the country into an Us and a Them, through the reactionary response to George Floyd’s killing, through the famous walk across Lafayette Park to use a Bible as a prop for the cameras, in which Barr, I remind you, was a happy participant—through every bit of it. 

But he objected when Trump tried to overthrow democracy. And good on him for doing so. His was a necessary voice at a crucial, brittle time.

But now we see the real nature of Barr’s Trump opposition. Many conservatives have beheld Trump, contemplated how the GOP could have come to this, and become pretty different people than they used to be—Stuart Stevens, Nicolle Wallace, Jennifer Rubin, many others. That the party and the movement of which they were once proud members was so easily captured by Trump made them see the hollow core of its belief system, and they took on a new belief system instead.

Barr has had no such revelation. Trump the election denier was a danger to the republic. Everything else, though, was jake. 

So let’s not kid ourselves. There are a lot of Barr Republicans out there, and it’s clear how they’re going to vote. "A continuation of the Biden administration," Barr said on Fox, "would be national suicide." The tyranny of licentiousness. He laid it all out for us back in South Bend.

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Item two: I can’t believe I’m writing something nice about Mike Johnson

What’s happening in the House of Representatives right now is pretty remarkable. It does appear that the speaker of the House actually cares about the fate of Ukraine. 

On a personal level, Mike Johnson apparently just believes that the United States should be helping Ukraine repel the Russian invasion. He called Vladimir Putin part of an "axis of evil," along with Iran and Xi Jinping—amazing that a right-wing, MAGA Republican put Putin in there. He has said that he believes the intelligence about Ukraine’s dire situation. What an un-Trumpy thing to say! And all this after visiting Mar-a-Lago. 

In the House itself, Johnson’s stance has produced a situation that for people who’ve been watching the GOP since basically the days of Newt Gingrich is kind of stunning. Johnson won a vote late Thursday night in the House Rules Committee by 9–3 with the support of five Republicans and four Democrats; the three "nays" were Republican hard-liners. You can read Playbook on why this is so mind-boggling, but trust me, it is. The votes, on aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, will come this weekend and seem likely to pass (yes, the Israel aid apparently once again would be unconditional, which of course is a big problem; but the more interesting thing in here, in domestic political terms, is Johnson’s stand against Trump and his right wing, of which Johnson has always been a part).

Will he survive as speaker? I don’t know or care. I generally cheer for chaos on the Republican side, so I hope not in that sense; however, if Johnson gets his hide saved by Democrats, it might encourage him to do a little more of this.

Let’s give the last word to Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw, another hard-right caucus member, who actually summed up the craziness on the far right well: "I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the speaker over it. I mean, it’s a strange position to take. I think they want to be in the minority too. I think that’s an obvious reality."

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Quiz time!

Last week’s quiz: "If it doesn’t fit…" Thinking of the O.J. Simpson trial, a quiz about famous crimes in the United States.

1. If I tell you the names Evelyn Nesbit and Harry K. Thaw, what would you say is the third name in that infamous early twentieth-century love triangle?

A. Stanford White

B. Jack Johnson

C. Smedley Butler

D. Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Answer: A, Stanford White. The famed architect was shot by Thaw, Nesbit’s husband, after White had plied her with liquor and raped her, and Thaw even committed his crime in one of White’s great creations: the original Madison Square Garden. After one hung jury, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

2. Why did Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb kidnap and kill 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924?

A. They meant only to kidnap him and get a ransom from his wealthy father; the killing part was an accident.

B. Franks had stolen Loeb’s bicycle.

C. They wanted to prove they could commit the perfect crime.

D. Franks’s father had sold Leopold a lemon of a car.

Answer: C, the perfect crime. It wasn’t very perfect. They were immediate suspects, and eventually they confessed.

3. This man’s last words were: "I am glad that my life in a world which has not understood me has ended. Soon I will be at home with my Lord, so I am dying an innocent man. Should, however, my death serve for the purpose of abolishing capital punishment—such a punishment being arrived at only by circumstantial evidence—I feel that my death has not been in vain. I am at peace with God. I repeat, I protest my innocence of the crime for which I was convicted. However, I die with no malice or hatred in my heart."

A. Dick Hickock 

B. Charles Weems

C. Bruno Richard Hauptmann

D. Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Answer: C, Hauptmann, the (alleged?) kidnapper and killer of the Lindbergh baby. I remember a TV movie from the 1970s that made him look guilty as all get-out, but evidently some doubt remains.

4. True or false: The JonBenét Ramsey case has never been solved.

Answer: True. That little girl would be 34 today. The years do pass.

5. Complete the famous quote from Perry Smith: "I thought [Mr. Clutter] was a very nice gentleman. Softspoken. I thought so right up to the moment I …"

A. stole his money.

B. left his house.

C. killed his dog.

D. slit his throat.

Answer: D, slit his throat. And if you don’t even know who Perry Smith is, you’ve walked into the wrong bar, pal.

6. Match the Simpson trial figure to the post-trial fact about his or her life.

Answer: Clark = Scientologist, Fuhrman = Fox News, Shapiro = ShoeDazzle, Kaelin = Pauly Shore flick. Kato’s had a nice little acting career, it seems, often playing himself.

Play TNR’s Daily Crossword Puzzle

This week’s quiz: "Looks like another perfect day.…" I’m in Los Angeles for the weekend, so let’s talk Tinsel Town.

1. Los Angeles was growing in the early twentieth century, but it didn’t have the water to serve its population. The Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed in 1913 under the supervision of whom?

A. Winston Chandler

B. William Mulholland

C. James Pico

D. Carlton Beverly

2. Two of the world’s most famous bowls, the Hollywood Bowl and the Rose Bowl, opened the same year. What year was it?

A. 1922

B. 1928

C. 1932

D. 1939

3. Who has the most stars—five, one for every category of achievement recognized—on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?

A. Bing Crosby

B. Tom Hanks

C. Judy Garland

D. Gene Autry

4. Match the celebrity to the place they died:

5. Which is the largest art museum in Los Angeles?

A. The Getty

B. LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

C. MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art)

D. The Broad

6. What was the median household income in Beverly Hills in 2022?

A. $116,771

B. $189,903

C. $277,118

D. $401,008

You’ll be surprised. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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