Bill Barr Harpoons the 'Remarkably Monolithic Media' While Championing Religion, a Free Press, and Something We All Must Remember

In his first appearance on Capitol Hill since taking office, and amid intense speculation over his review of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report, Attorney General William Barr appears before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 9, 2019. Barr says he will release a redacted version of the Mueller report on the Russia investigation within a week. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

On Wednesday, Attorney General William Barr shish kabobbed the media.

Speaking at the 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, he decried the mainstream’s “remarkably monolithic” point of view.

Furthermore, according to Bill, the MSM is no match for the “tyranny of the majority.”

As reported by The Daily Caller, the AG focused on three “bulwarks against this slide toward [cruel absolute power]” in America: religion, the free press, and decentralized governmental power.

Here’s some of what he offered up:

“Today in the United States, the corporate – or ‘mainstream’ – press is massively consolidated. And it has become remarkably monolithic in viewpoint, at the same time that an increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change.”

There are certainly more attempting change. But what if they’re rallying and consider themselves objective?

Case in point: Jim Acosta.

Acosta does a fine job in his position — as a Democratic activist.

But call him a just-the-facts reporter for an objective news service, and we’ve entered a brilliant world of goofiness (here and here).

Back to Bill:

“These developments have given the press an unprecedented ability to mobilize a broad segment of the public on a national scale and direct that opinion in a particular direction.”

Then he went deep:

“When the entire press ‘advances along the same track,’ as Tocqueville put it, the relationship between the press and the energized majority becomes mutually reinforcing. Not only does it become easier for the press to mobilize a majority, but the mobilized majority becomes more powerful and overweening with the press as its ally. This is not a positive cycle, and I think it is fair to say that it puts the press’s role as a breakwater for the tyranny of the majority in jeopardy. The key to restoring the press in that vital role is to cultivate a greater diversity of voices in the media.”

He believes it’s an overt and knowing manipulation:

“Although totalitarian democracy is democratic in form, it requires an all-knowing elite to guide the masses toward their determined end, and that elite relies on whipping up mass enthusiasm to preserve its power and achieve its goals. Totalitarian democracy is almost always secular and materialistic, and its adherents tend to treat politics as a substitute for religion. Their sacred mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society according to an abstract ideal of perfection.”

And the move will be of the frog-in-the-water sort — “slow and imperceptible.”

Mr. Barr eventually landed on those aforementioned bulwarks.

Here’s one I particularly favor — an emphasis on state and local autonomy:

“The Framers would have seen a one-size-fits-all government for hundreds of millions of diverse citizens as being utterly unworkable and a straight road to tyranny. That is because they recognized that not every community is exactly the same. What works in Brooklyn might not be a good fit for Birmingham. The federal system allows for this diversity. It also enables people who do not like a certain system to move to a different one.”

Right on.

He thinks it’s safer for us all:

“It is easier to run away from a local tyranny than a national one. … [I]f it is one size fits all – if every congressional enactment or Supreme Court decision establishes a single rule for every American – then the stakes are very high as to what that rule is.”

It’s something that, in my opinion, is important to remember — we’re the United States…of America.

A confederation; not simply a giant kingdom.

As you know, in a conservative system of lesser federal control, states operate on a principle of competition in the marketplace.

Each region has an incentive to do what pleases its residents, but also that which will one-up the other states.

Bill called it: