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Legal experts are increasingly alarmed by Attorney General William Barr's efforts to help President Donald Trump win re-election.

The attorney general has joined the president in attacking voting integrity and civil rights demonstrators, and he has described his role in the election in explicitly religious terms that show Barr believes he represents "moral discipline and virtue" against "individual rapacity,"reportedThe Guardian.

"His abuses have only escalated as we have gotten closer and closer to the election, and as the president has felt more and more politically vulnerable," said Donald Sherman, deputy director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "I can't put it more plainly than this: The attorney general is a threat to American citizens having free and fair access to the vote, and is a threat to American having their votes counted."

Barr has recently asked federal prosecutors to consider charging protesters with sedition and designated New York City, Portland and Seattle as "anarchy" zones, which helps Trump whip up hysteria about public safety.

"I think this attorney general is demonstrably more committed to the political success of the president, and the president's political agenda than any attorney general in history I can think of," said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under Bill Clinton.

Kinkopf testified against Barr during his 2019 confirmation hearing, when he warned senators the deeply conservative Washington veteran believed in giving the chief executive "breathtaking" powers.

"When I testified against him, I recognized how dangerous the unitary executive theory is," Kinkopf said. "But what I didn't appreciate, and I don't think anybody appreciated, was just how fully he would deploy that theory in advance not of rule-of law values, but in order to advance both the president's political agenda, and I think more deeply for Barr, his own social and religious commitments."

The attorney general has accused Black Lives Matter protesters of fomenting chaos as part of a socialist revolution, and he has described himself as a bulwark in a battle between good and evil.

"The attorney general sees himself clearly as fighting culture wars that are to him moral and religious," Kinkopf said, "and those are deeper, I think, commitments for him than the commitment to federalism, and so to the extent that the balance of federal and state power gets in the way of achieving what he wants to achieve in the culture wars, he's willing to cast that aside.

"So if there weren't a culture war angle on it, I think he would take the position that states and local governments should be left to police their own communities, and the federal government should keep its nose out," Kinkopf added. "But because he sees something at stake in the current protests that jeopardizes what he feels as being the proper order of society, he's not troubled about using federal power to pursue what he views as being the right results."

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Legal experts are freaking out about Bill Barr's actions to help Trump win - Salon

David Frum: 4 reasons to doubt Mitch McConnells power

The Republican Party knows how to use polarizing rhetoric to split people along tribal lines. Donald Trump spent most of the 2018 midterm campaign talking up the caravan, the Central American refugees who were marching toward the U.S. border seeking asylum. Their numbers were small to begin with, and they dwindled further as they neared the border. Nonetheless, they made a useful talking point for Republicans, who wanted to remind their base on which side of the ideological divide they belonged. When Trump sent the U.S. military to the border, the subsequent outrage was justified, but it was also a trap: It drew attention away from real-life issues and encouraged voters to think they had to make a false choice between the caravan, crime, and illegal immigration on the one hand, and tradition, safety, and law and order on the other.

In a few key states, that gimmick worked. The caravan helped him, former Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri bluntly said after she lost to Josh Hawley, a Republican. She noted that her opponent was also helped by the Kavanaugh thing, meaning the story, presented by Republican media, of an upright conservativea man trying to protect familiessmeared by dangerous liberals.

Inciting a culture war didnt work everywhere. And in places where it didntin all those suburban House seats won by centrist Democrats, for examplethat was often not because candidates loudly denounced the presidents use of troops at the border, but because they changed the subject. When undecided voters were thinking about jobs and health care, they were prepared to break their habits and vote for Democrats.

Read: What Ruth Bader Ginsburgs death means for America

Politicians in other parts of the world also use culture wars to their advantage. In 2018, I wrote about the Philippines, a country whose president, Rodrigo Duterte, managed to keep voters minds on his shocking policy of murdering drug dealers. Rather than thinking about poverty or illiteracy, his electorate argued about whether they were for him (and thus for law and order) or against him (and thusas he would put itin favor of crime and drugs). A recent study I helped design also showed, among other things, how the Italian populist Matteo Salvini gained traction by keeping Italians focused on the polarizing subject of migrants, even as the number of actual migrants dropped dramatically. Polarization is a well-known authoritarian tactic, too. Russian President Vladimir Putin has his state-controlled media cover the perfidy of the West rather than the countrys declining living standards. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan has used anti-Greek rhetoric in the run-up to elections to avoid discussing his own countrys economic mess.

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Don't Make the Election About the Court - The Atlantic

BBC Director of News and Current Affairs Fran Unsworth delivers the BBC Lecture at the Prix Italia on how public service media newsrooms need clarity of values to ensure they are serving all audiences in these challenging times.

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Thank you Marcello for that kind introduction and may I say first of all how pleased I am to be here to meet some in person and others virtually.

We live in stormy times and are all trying to navigate through them with intelligence and with good hearts and good intentions. We need each other so I thought I would share my thoughts and I welcome yours.

Like all news organisations and most companies all over the world the BBC Newsroom has had to significantly adapt to how it fulfils its role of providing badly needed accurate information and explanation to the public to help it survive a pandemic.

Initially, there was a lets all pull together spirit, but in the United Kingdom as the death toll rose, hospitals became overwhelmed, and the economy tanked, the political divisions soon resurfaced.

Those political divisions are more than even now not just focussed on policy differences but on symbols. We live in the so called culture wars and the BBC finds itself regularly accused not just of political bias, but also cultural bias.

What I want to explore today is how many actors wish to co-opt us into their side of the culture war; how increasingly hard this is to resist, but how if we dont, we will undermine our future as universal public service media organisations, taking money from everyone.

While nations tend to divide on left/right lines, public service news organisations can roughly divide their coverage on mathematical lines.

I use the term roughly advisedly. As our editorial guidelines state, due impartiality usually involves more than a simple matter of balance between opposing viewpoints, its about a range of voices.

But impartiality applied to culture is harder.

Especially when most newsrooms run very fast just to stand still.

In our job, the clock is always there. Deadlines don't just come once a day. They come every hour, sometimes many times within the hour. Our judgements are instant.

Every day of every week of every year we race to meet a deadline.

As the Red Queen put it in Alice Through the Looking-Glass: It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.

The Red Queen got it right. I know what she feels like. We measure our newsroom lives in seconds.

But at the same time our jobs are timeless too.

A newsroom has to capture the moment to have a sense of where the news is heading.

To decide, why is this story significant and not that other one?

We aren't historians but we have to have a sense of history a sense of what is froth and what is important; a sense of what is fleeting and what is significant

We need crystal balls.

Our ways of thinking our thought processes - need to range across the past, present and future. And to do it with instant judgement with that accursed clock ticking towards the top of every hour.Any newsroom that can live and thrive and serve our audiences in this difficult environment needs clear editorial direction, by which I do not mean dictatorial rule-from-top but clarity of values.

Too often though, I think we suffer from a confusion of identity.

And let me explain why.

Newspapers have always had a stronger sense of their identity than broadcasters. They take a stance.

They can campaign. Their readers know their political leaning and know that each paper appeals to a particular part of the spectrum. By and large, they do not write for the whole country. They write for their target audience. They inform, of course or at least the best of them do but some of them may find more clicks from confirming views rather than enraging readers.

As a public service media organisation, the BBC cant take positions on matters of current controversy. We take some positions, of course: racism is abhorrent, so is misogyny; we support the rule of law and so on. Fundamental democratic principles.

Increasingly, though, in a polarised, online world, people have absolute certainty of their own beliefs.And they want us to adopt theirs. And language is increasingly their battleground. On reflection, maybe this is not new.

The conflict in the Middle East is fought not just over territory but language. Occupied territories, or disputed? Legal or illegal. Fence or wall? Terrorist or freedom fighter?

But today, as the former BBC director-general Mark Thompson has argued, words hurtle through virtual space with infinitesimal delay. Argument, he says, has become cruder and more polarised.The result is a fight to the political death, a fight in which every linguistic weapon is fair game.

This is new. And it has consequences.The BBC is an accountable organisation. Its right that we should be so. We are funded by the licence fee which everyone has to pay. But, boy, when I say we are accountable, are we accountable!

Back in the day, newspapers would receive letters to the editor, which might or might not get printed, and broadcasters would receive occasional complaints, invariably in green ink. Today the BBC receives a million comments a year, some three thousand a day. At least a quarter of a million are complaints. The volume has increased by nearly half over the last four years. Complaints come in the tens of thousands for items of coverage which were probably seen at time of broadcast by a fraction of the people complaining. But they have been picked up on social media with an encouragement to protest. In short, email gives our audiences democratic access to the heart of our operation. This can be a force for good. It connects our audiences to us, and us to them, and holds our feet to the fire.

But increasingly complaints are accompanied by hostility to our work and frequently to our staff who come under vicious trolling, which they should not have to accept, but which we as employers struggle to protect them from.

It is not enough for some people that they think we have got something wrong.

No - errors and of course they happen are increasingly seen as the consequence of a grand conspiracy, a malign wish by the BBC to impose its biased view on the world.

As our regulator put it somewhat politely last year, in a time of political change social media has shaped increasingly passionate debate around news coverage."

Weve been on this path a while. The era of the internet was supposed to be the bulwark of a rational age the marketplace of ideas. But thats not whats happened.

We appear to have moved into a post fact age as one New York journalist put it.

An age where opinions and lies can sometimes carry as much weight as objective facts.

An age where it is not enough to have a civilized discussion but where battles must be won and enemies dispatched.

Recently, one of our specialist disinformation reporters posted a thread on Twitter to illustrate the level of abuse she receives. Wittily, she marked the posts out of ten.

She gave nine to the charming claim that she was a paedophile worshipper and a brainless fool - I certainly hope you get whats coming to you.

Another read:What a sad little life you must lead to perpetuate the lies of the globalists. I hope they pay you well. See you in Hell.

A third:Can you stop with your utter nonsense on the BBC? You are the essence of disinformation. You look pathetic and everybody with half a brain knows it. Have a good day.

One person sent fifteen emails over a twelve-hour period including youre really the equivalent of Josef Goebbels arent you?

Our correspondent attributes the high level of abuse she receives to a combination of radicalisation by conspiracy theories, the dis-inhibiting effect of social media, her gender, and her specialist field.

Of course, this is not unique to the BBC.

After her reports on the Istanbul protests a few years ago, the Turkish journalist Amberin Zaman was fiercely attacked on Twitter.

The messages were abusive, violent and sexual. She said "I received hundreds of tweets, using the most obscene language, threatening to kill me, threatening to rape me."

After reporting on the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris she experienced another mass attack on Twitter that she likened to a public lynching.

Some of this is from individuals but it is also from people forming wider groups on social media.

It would be wrong to pretend that specialist interest groups have never sought to persuade the BBC that it should reflect their own agenda.

By putting pressure on us, or by trying to persuade us to see the world their way.

That, in a sense, is part of the warp and weft of journalism. It goes with the territory.

It is our job to listen, to learn, and come to our own independent judgment about what to include in our coverage, and what to leave out.

To decide whats worth reporting, and how to do so which words and pictures we should choose.

But there are more interest groups now, and they are better organised through their use of social media. It is very easy to get up a petition with tens of thousands of apparent signatures.

But what weight should we put on that?

The online warriors appear to be able to capture the zeitgeist or societal undercurrents more quickly than institutions, however finely attuned our journalism might be.

They move swiftly to coalesce quickly around a position and can gain quick access to the BBC through its accountability procedures, or directly to editorial managers and staff.

They can encourage staff with a particular interest in an aspect of the news, for example from their lived experience, to seek to persuade editors that their view of the world needs to be reflected in our coverage.

Or that we should adopt the particular vocabulary they endorse.

Dont misunderstand me.Democracy is good.Debate is good.Accountability is also good.

The BBC and any news organization - must listen and learn.

But we must all decide for ourselves what is right. In the middle of the maelstrom, we have to keep thinking clearly. We need to talk to each other and not get carried by social media bullies. I don't think that is too strong a word. Social media bullies. We must always remember that there are many more people who didn't pile on with a lynch-mob appetite.

Even when we get it wrong and we, like all people and institutions get it wrong. It's in the nature of any fast-moving, highly creative enterprise which, I hasten to add, the BBC is.

Ultimately, editors edit not interest groups. They do it with intelligence and honesty and also inevitable human fallibility.

I raise this today because I think this issue has a wider resonance. I think it's really important, not just for us and our organisations but for democracy.

The problem for all of us here is to see how thin the line can be between resisting pressure to protect our independence, and being remote from how the world is moving.If our journalism is not in touch with its roots, we will fail to recognize that members of the audience, or readers, or staff, have genuine grievances or thoughts about the world that they wish us to reflect.

But we also need to recognize the danger posed by the rise of interest groups that may have no truck with views that do not match their own.

The problem is not unique to broadcasting.

Newspapers such as the New York Times have faced difficulties in trying to encompass a broad range of opinion. When an op-ed writer, a political outlier on the paper, resigned, she alleged hostility inside and outside the building was crowding out dissenting opinion She said the New York Times was now being edited by Twitter.

How in such times can a newsroom continue to serve everyone the young and radical to the highly conservative.

How do we pick our way through the TERF wars', and navigate the debate over gender and sex? How do we respond to the debate about what the word woman actually means?

How do we best respond to different communities, different groups, different people, different individuals?

How do we respond to our traditional audiences who might not understand why we have a LGBT correspondent or a gender and identity correspondent? Who believe that we are simply giving in to pressure groups and shaping the world as they see it.

How do we avoid being seen to take sides in these polarising social issues?

I said a newsroom needed to range timelessly to have a strong sense of its identity.

But today the pace of change is so quick that the past can be a hindrance to our judgment.

Clearly we shouldnt have to wait for statues to be toppled to realise that time are changing.

But we shouldn't assume either that the revolutionaries speak for all the people.

One recent example: tradition dictates that the last night of the Proms our annual festival of classical music should end with the singing of Rule Britannia and Land of Hope & Glory. This year, the BBC found itself caught in the middle of a culture war about it. For some, the tradition is redolent of empire, of colonialism and slavery, and that people would struggle to enjoy the patriotic jingoism of these songs." But others said we should all stop our cringing embarrassment about our history. People love our traditions and our history with all its imperfections, they said. Tradition or jingoism? We were caught in the middle.

I believe in the idea that different opinions are valid. We may or may not disagree with them but we are not so certain of our own that we dismiss the opinions of others.

This does not though have to be a zero sum game, in which media organisations have all the power until it is stripped away from them by special interest groups that would fashion in their own interests.But for our part it will require adaptability and fixity of purpose.

Newsrooms that are not just watching the clock but are sensitive to the times. Newsrooms which can decide on the right editorial way forward and the right language to deploy, in a clear, calm, considered fashion.

And which when challenged can explain their decisions quickly and responsively to both the outside world and to our own staff.

That can shrug off social media pressure and the cancel culture, and parry the unfair attacks on our honesty and intentions

More than anything, we need newsroom leaders who are ready to reflect a broad range of thinking, who dont always go down the same narrow, well-trodden path because it is the one they have always followed.

But if we dont analyse the dangers these cultural issues pose to public service broadcasters and think them through, we may look up and see to our surprise that the hands of that clock we watch all day are pointing at one minute to midnight.

Thank you very much.

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After the Pandemic - News in the 2020s - European Broadcasting Union

Anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters face off against far-right militias and white pride organizations in Stone Mountain, Georgia on Aug. 15.Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

David Frenchs Divided We Fall, which warns that the U.S. is at risk of a literal breakup if current trends in political polarization continue, is one of those books thats almost too timely. Its long-range predictions already feel out of date.

French imagined California splitting from the United States, presumably before Gov. Gavin Newsom declared California a nation-state in response to federal failures to combat the coronavirus. French puts forth a scenario where roadblocks are set up on state borders. During the early days of the pandemic, that happened. French foresees Democrats trying to pack the Supreme Court in order to protect abortion rights well, you get the picture. The problem with Frenchs nightmare scenarios isnt that they seem implausibleits that, as of now, they seem like wishful thinking.

French has more credibility than most when it comes to decrying blind partisanship. Hes a veteran of the culture wars: a Christian evangelical attorney who used to be best known for suing American universities on religious liberty grounds and writing for National Review. But since 2016, hes become better known as a leading conservative critic of Donald Trump, in the process enduring a torrent of abuse from right-wing trolls including disgusting racist attacks directed at his adopted Black daughter. Today, he describes himself as a man without a party and acts as an all-purpose defender of free speechsomeone willing to go to bat for both James Damore and Colin Kaepernick.

The first part of Divided We Fall is a very familiar overview of current trends in partisan polarization: Americans have become much less likely to associate with people with whom they disagree in politics, and increasingly live in overwhelmingly blue or red communities. Politics overwhelm every other form of social, cultural, and religious identification, and people become more extreme as they tailor their views to those of their peers. Partisans dont want to just defeat one another in argument; they want to destroy one another.

An even more familiar litany of alleged perpetratorsFox News, overly woke college activists, the NRA, antifaare trotted out as French decries the vitriol and winner-takes-all spirit that have taken over our democracy. Given the party identification of the White Houses current occupant, and which side is perpetrating the vast majority of political violence in the country today, it seems to me that French is reaching a bit to make both sides seem equally responsible for this state of affairs. Then again, according to his schema, I would think that, so its worth just conceding the point to get to the more provocative part of the book, which imagines the end result of these trends.

If the best argument for the continued existence of the United States is the security of Estonia and Taiwan, maybe it really is time to pack itin.

Putting on his speculative fiction hat, French imagines two scenarios for the breakup of the United States, one representing fears of the left, the other the right. In the first, California bans private gun ownership in the wake of a horrific school shooting, setting up a constitutional showdown that leads the states on the West Coast to conclude that the union is no longer worth preserving. In the second, Southern states ban abortion, setting a similar scenario in motion. In both cases, a subsequent act of accidental violence prompts the final crackup.

Whats odd about Frenchs scenarios is that its a little hard to tell why he thinks theyre a bad thing. After 244 yearsmuch older than most currently existing constitutional regimesif weve really become completely incapable of existing as one cohesive political community, then why, other than a sentimental attachment to the Stars and Stripes, should red and blue Americans continue to share a country? At the end of the Calexit scenario, he even writes that Americans mainly felt relief after it was all over.

Instead, he thinks the worst consequences will be international. After the split-up of the United States, he writes, the peace that had been maintained through the overwhelming military and economic might of the United States would not hold. This is an accelerated version of the argument Robert Kagan and others have made about Americas ongoing disengagement from the world. Without the U.S. security guarantee, French imagines a return to great power conflict, with China and Russia moving to invade their smaller neighbors. With all due respect to these countries, if the best argument for the continued existence of the United States is the security of Estonia and Taiwan, maybe it really is time to pack it in.

The completely unsentimental reason to be worried about the breakup of the United States is that its unlikely to be as tidy as Frenchs scenarios suggest. Peaceful national divorces are few and far between in world history. Examples like Czechoslovakias velvet divorce are far less common than nightmare scenarios like the Partition of India or the splintering of Yugoslavia. The Soviet Unions fragmentation did not lead to the Yugoslavia with nukes that many U.S. officials feared at the time, but it did spark decades of brutal war in the Caucasus. Russian resentment over the stranding of ethnic Russians across international bordersby what Vladimir Putin called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th centuryculminated in Russias annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine.

The problem with drawing new borders, whether its Europe after World War I, the former Soviet Union today, or the U.S. in Frenchs imagined future, is always minorities. People dont usually live together in fully homogenous divisible units. Wherever you draw a new line, someone is going to be on the wrong side of it.

One of the main reasons that French thinks the U.S. is ripe for secession is that, as in the years prior to the American Civil War, red and blue states tend to be geographically clustered with Democrats in control of the Pacific Coast and the Upper East Coast and Republicans dominating the states of the Southeastern Conference.

But while these red and blue clusters are apparent on a state-by-state election map, things look very different when you break it down further. A district-by-district map shows America as a sea of red interspersed with tiny but densely populated splotches of blue. There is a geographical divide in the U.S. today, but North vs. South and coasts vs. heartland are often less relevant than urban vs. rural. Breaking the country up into chunks would leave a lot of stranded citizens. For this reason, I dont think secession is very likely, and if it did happen, it would involve more violence, border conflicts, and massive population exchanges than French is anticipating.

Frenchs solution to the problem is essentially more federalism: devolving more political power from Washington to the state level. If we just let California be California and Tennessee be Tennessee, the argument goes, every presidential election and every Supreme Court vacancy wont feel like a life-or-death blood struggle.

French says that his awakening about the dangers of American factionalism came after he witnessed sectarian violence in Iraq, where he was deployed as a reserve JAG officer. So, theres some irony in the fact that his solution to Americas cultural conflicts has some similarities to Joe Bidens much-derided 2006 plan for a soft partition of Iraq into semi-autonomous Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish zones.

The argument is appealing in many ways. But minorities are also why the soft partition strategy seems unlikely to address many of the problems French is concerned about. Would a gun-owning, anti-abortion resident of Allegany County, New York, which went 68 percent for Trump in 2016, really be more accepting of laws they view as illegitimate and immoral if they were being written in Albany rather than Washington? What about a Latino Democrat in Starr County, Texas79 percent for Clinton? More state-level federalism seems likely to accelerate the big sort (the geographical clustering of like-minded voters) and to move life-or-death political struggles down to 50 separate capitals. Perhaps we could go farther and devolve everything down to the local or community level, but then youre getting pretty close to anarchist theory, and it doesnt seem like French is heading in that direction.

Its on the question of civil rights where Frenchs otherwise scrupulous neutrality starts to break down. He acknowledges that for many Americans, the notion of states rights brings to mind Southern senators filibustering civil rights laws, but he seems to find these concerns outdated and feels that the Bill of Rights will prevent outright discrimination. He quotes a thoughtful progressive friend saying, Its hard to give up on the notion that embracing federalism doesnt also mean abandoning African Americans in Mississippi, to which he responds, What kind of place do you think modern Mississippi is? His friend could have pointed to the racial makeup of Mississippis prison population or its absurdly restrictive election laws, but French doesnt give him the chance.

French sees the Obama administrations suit to block Arizonas draconian 2010 immigration law as executive overreach (to be fair, he also opposes the Trump administrations efforts to stamp out Californias sanctuary cities) without acknowledging that many Americans viewed that law as a violation of undocumented immigrants human rights, not just a matter of local preference.

Many contentious issues also cross state lines. Gun laws meant to keep firearms off the streets of Chicago wont be very effective if you can buy them 30 miles away in Gary, Indiana. French notes that conservative Americans feel disrespected by a popular culture dominated by secular liberals. But even if power is returned to the states, theyre still going to be seeing NFL players kneeling on Sunday, and their kids will still be streaming WAP.

Likewise, French doesnt acknowledge environmental issues at all except to sneer at plastic straw bans. Climate change is the textbook example of a borderless problem. Blue states can pass all the emissions caps they want, but if North Dakota continues fracking, emissions will keep increasing. Conversely, the reason the Trump administration is suing California over its auto emissions standards isnt because Republicans are intolerant of Berkeley lefties environmentalist lifestyles. Its because, given Californias size, the state can effectively mandate standards for the entire country.

Some of these are just fights were going to have to have out, and given the stakes, it will have to get heated.

An alternative view of a politically riven future America is provided in the 2019 novel Fall by cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson. In Stephensons future, Americans consume social media at all times via goggles. Liberal urbanites pay editors to curate the information they receive and put out, and zip from liberal enclave to liberal enclave via self-driving electeic cars. They rarely if ever turn off the interstate into Ameristan, where residents have been Facebooked out of reality by misinformation and QAnon-like conspiracy theories, and where armed militias and religious extremists dominate. Algorithms keep the two sides from talking to each other, and they have little interest in doing so anyway.

Stephensons vision often feels like a snobbish, blue-state fever dream, and hes far less respectful than French of those with whom he disagrees politically. But what Stephenson does pick up on is that while Americans are too entangled at this point for either formal secession or Frenchs federalist soft partition, its very possible for us to share the same physical space while increasingly living in very different countries.

By David French. St. Martins Press.

Readers like you make our work possible. Help us continue to provide the reporting, commentary, and criticism you wont find anywhere else.

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David Frenchs New Book Arguing That the U.S. Will Break Apart Is Too Optimistic - Slate

Donald Trumps astonishing suggestion at a campaign rally last weekend that the US president will deploy government lawyers to try to hit the brakes on the counting of ballots on election night relies on the complicity of one federal official more than any other.

That official is the attorney general, William Barr, who, as the leader of the justice department, directs the army of government lawyers who would sue to halt the counting of votes.

Conveniently for Trumps stated plan, Barr appears not only ready to acquiesce, he seems eager to bring the lawsuits, having laid groundwork for challenging the election with weeks of misleading statements about the integrity of mail-in voting.

To some observers, the attorney general appears to have also laid the groundwork for a further alarming step, one that would answer the question of what action the Trump administration is prepared to take if a contested election in November gives rise to large new protests.

In order for Trump to steal the election and then quell mass demonstrations for that is the nature of the nightmare scenario now up for open discussion among current and former officials, academics, thinktankers and a lot of other people Trump must be able to manipulate both the levers of the law and its physical enforcement.

In Barr, Trump not only gets all of that, critics say, but he also enjoys the partnership of a man whose sense of biblical stakes around the election imbues him with a deep sense of mission about re-electing Trump.

In a break with the relative reticence of his first 18 month in office, Barr has laid out his own thinking with a series of recent speeches, interviews and internal discussions. Even routine critics of Barr have been struck by the Barr that has now revealed himself.

The erstwhile mild-mannered Washington lawyer has been spouting attacks on election integrity and hostility toward street protests while describing, in explicitly religious terms, an epochal showdown between the forces of moral discipline and virtue which he believes he represents and individual rapacity manifesting as social chaos, embodied by leftwing protesters among others.

His abuses have only escalated as we have gotten closer and closer to the election, and as the president has felt more and more politically vulnerable, said Donald K Sherman, the deputy director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington watchdog group, which has called for Barrs impeachment.

I cant put it more plainly than this: the attorney general is a threat to American citizens having free and fair access to the vote, and is a threat to American having their votes counted.

In recent weeks, Barr has reportedly asked prosecutors to weigh charging protesters under sedition laws, meant to punish conspiracies to overthrow the government, and to weigh criminal charges against the Seattle mayor for allowing residents to establish a small police-free protest zone. He has designated New York City, Portland and Seattle as anarchy zones that he says have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract criminal activities, threatening federal funding.

Such designations cleanly feed Trumps re-election narrative of public safety under threat. They also reflect a constitutionally questionable, and normally non-conservative, eagerness on Barrs part to reach the arm of federal government into local law enforcement.

Barr has demonstrated this tendency before. In June, he took the highly unusual step, as attorney general, of personally directing federal officers to use crowd suppression tactics to eject peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square near the White House.

Barr later denied giving any direct orders, but the White House stated flatly: It was AG Barr who made the decision.

Meanwhile Barr has competed with Trump to erode faith in the upcoming election, peddling baseless conspiracy theories about foreign nations printing counterfeit ballots, spreading tales about mass mail-in ballot fraud in a lie that was later retracted by the justice department and expressing frustration that the United States uses mail-in voting and multi-day voting, which are common measures to accommodate voters going back decades.

Were losing the whole idea of what an election is, Barr complained in an appearance earlier this month at Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under Bill Clinton, said that Barrs solicitousness for Trumps political wellbeing was historic.

I think this attorney general is demonstrably more committed to the political success of the president, and the presidents political agenda than any attorney general in history I can think of, Kinkopf said.

What drives Barr? For political observers familiar with Barrs long Washington career, which included an earlier stint as the attorney general under George HW Bush, the notion that he could help lead American democracy off a cliff might provoke some cognitive dissonance. Like other powerful Republicans and everyday voters who have enabled Trump, Barr does not appear to be motivated by personal loyalty to Trump per se, but by a sense of Trumps role in a greater plan.

Before his appointment by Trump, many insiders saw Barr as a committed institutionalist who would protect the independence of the justice department from Trumps most damaging tendencies, though Barr clearly was a strong believer in a muscular presidency.

But others saw Barr coming. They include Kinkopf, who testified against Barr before the Senate at Barrs January 2019 confirmation hearing. In his testimony, Kinkopf warned about Barrs subscription to so-called unitary executive theory, which lays out an alarming and dangerously mistaken view of an executive power of breathtaking scope, subject to negligible limits, Kinkopf said.

The attorney general sees himself clearly as fighting culture wars that are to him moral and religious

It appears that, if confirmed, William Barr will establish precedents that adopt an enduring vision of presidential power; one that in future administrations can be deployed to justify the exercise of power for very different ends, Kinkopf warned at the time.

But today even Kinkopf says he is deeply surprised by the extent to which Barr has surpassed that warning.

When I testified against him, I recognized how dangerous the unitary executive theory is, Kinkopf said. But what I didnt appreciate, and I dont think anybody appreciated, was just how fully he would deploy that theory in advance not of rule-of law values, but in order to advance both the presidents political agenda, and I think more deeply for Barr, his own social and religious commitments.

Those commitments, in turn, are a matter of public record, including in a speech Barr delivered at Notre Dame University about one year ago. In the speech, Barr described a political philosophy driven by the need to counter an individual rapacity in humans that quickly produces licentiousness and the destruction of healthy community life if not restrained. The only possible restraint, in Barrs view, are moral values [that] must rest on authority independent of mens will they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.

In short, Barr argued, as he has elsewhere, that the inevitable result of secularism is moral decay and social chaos.

It appears that it is just such chaos that Barr sees in the current street protests driven by the ant-racism Black Lives Matter movement. He has denounced the protesters in his Michigan speech as these so-called Black Lives Matter people and claiming they were not interested in black lives. Theyre interested in [using] props a small number of blacks who are killed by police to achieve a much broader political agenda.

If Barr gives shockingly short shrift to the motivations of protesters haunted by the recurring specter of police killings of people of color, he holds his own motivations in high esteem.

Barr appears to see himself locked in a historic struggle against literal evil, and he appears to regard the upcoming election as the climactic battle. A Trump loss, Barr recently told a Chicago Tribune columnist, would mean the United States was irrevocably committed to the socialist path. He called the election a clear fork in the road.

The attorney general sees himself clearly as fighting culture wars that are to him moral and religious, Kinkopf said. And those are deeper I think commitments for him than the commitment to federalism. And so to the extent that the balance of federal and state power gets in the way of achieving what he wants to achieve in the culture wars, hes willing to cast that aside.

So if there werent a culture war angle on it, I think he would take the position that states and local governments should be left to police their own communities, and the federal government should keep its nose out. But because he sees something at stake in the current protests that jeopardizes what he feels as being the proper order of society, hes not troubled about using federal power to pursue what he views as being the right results.

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'His abuses have escalated': Barr's kinship with Trump fuels election fears - The Guardian