Here are a few of the more prominent American authoritarians that are occupied with making life miserable for the rest of us. When the blather of a confident and persuasive authoritarian gains a national following, things begin to look like this: 
#1. “I AM THE CHAOS”
Years ago a journalist followed Donald Trump around New York and noticed the utter confusion that surrounded him. He asked Trump, “Why are you always surrounded by chaos?” To which Trump replied, “I am the chaos.”
This goes a long way towards explaining why Trump has fired so many appointed officials, why he pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and is withholding money from the World Health Organization. It explains much more, including his lies about the pandemic and his inaction during this crisis. It explains why he has attacked governors over several issues: to take responsibility off his back and to foment discord among Americans and have us take sides. He is fomenting discord and hatred to the extent that Washington’s Governor Inslee said Trump is “fomenting rebellion.”
Trump is the center of the chaos, but he himself is chaotic—confused, angry, vindictive, a narcissist and bully. He craves constant national and International attention. He does not want to build, he seeks to destroy. Hurling our nation into a pit of fear, confusion, and rage is proof that he exists. That he is indeed the world’s center.
#2. FROM SMALL TOWN BIGOT TO NATIONAL MENACE
This man has probably caused more damage to our Republic than any other in the last thirty to forty years. Through his weekday broadcasts he fomented a groundswell of anger and resentment against those with college educations (professors are socialists), against the women’s movement (controlled by “femi-nazis”), and against the main stream media (controlled and staffed by liberals, also known as socialists).
Rush Limbaugh worked his audience like a master puppeteer. He nurtured a hatred against those he called the elite. The elite, he told his followers repeatedly, control this country. They run our lives. And who are they? Liberals in positions of power, particularly East Coast liberals with Ivy League educations. He told his audience that these elitists think they know better than the rest of us how we should live, and what we should think.
Coming from Cape Girardeau, Missouri may have had a lot to do with his message. Limbaugh comes from a line of Missouri judges, but what status does a back-water Missouri judge have compared to a Harvard trained attorney appointed to (let us say) a New York appellate court? Not much. I now suspect that the resentment against the East Coast elite that Limbaugh fostered in his audience, and the anger he displays every broadcast, is actually an expression of his own resentment.
I began listening to Limbaugh in 1990. I discovered him by accident as I turned my car’s AM radio dial one day. I didn’t like what he said; clearly, there was something wrong with him, but the man’s sickness kept me listening for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.
In those early days he criticized Republicans and Democrats alike. His show, then as now, focused on politics, but in those days he had special segments mocking two areas of news. These segments reflected the influence of Limbaugh’s idol, Chicago rock jock Larry Lujak. Lujack’s segments, which included “Animal Stories,” “Klunk Letter of the Day, ” and the “Cheap Trashy Show Biz Report,” were inventive, sardonic and very funny.
But Limbaugh’s segments—“Animal Rights Update” and “Homeless Update”— were not funny, unless you thought environmentalism was a crock and the homeless were simply garbage “Born Free,” sung by Andy Williams, was the “Animal Rights Update” theme. Superimposed over the music were the sounds of gunfire and the cries of animals being machine gunned.
In one “Homeless Update,” Limbaugh read a news clipping about a homeless woman who had taken shelter in a dumpster one night and was compacted with the trash the next morning. In another episode, he referred to the homeless as “human debris.” Limbaugh’s audience ate this up, all of it.
Reflecting back on this now, I see that Limbaugh intended to tap into this large, angry segment of the population. These included, believe it or not, many well-to-do followers.
In the early 90s, Limbaugh talked endlessly about himself. As his fame grew, his circle of acquaintances began to embrace well-known conservatives. Whenever he had a conversation with one, or golfed with one, he announced it. When he had dinner with Pat Buchanan at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, his listeners heard all about it.
His ego was fragile; he needed applause and he needed to be known as someone who had famous friends. Out then President George H. Bush knew that Limbaugh had a large listenership, and knew he could be useful. He invited Limbaugh to the White House, and to stay overnight.
The flattery worked. We don’t know exactly what was said, but Limbaugh bragged about the visit as soon as he was back at his microphone. He was a new man: the White House had transformed hm: he was now a solid Republican, and an enemy of Democrats.
#3. THE SINS OF WILLIAM BARR
William Barr was a known authoritarian long before he was selected by Donald Trump to replace fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In fact, he was selected because he is an authoritarian.
Barr became nationally known when George H. Bush picked him to head the DOJ. As Bush’s attorney general, the incarceration rate for non-violent drug offenders, mostly black, increased, and private prisons proliferated.
The NAACP document opposing Barr’s appointment as U.S. Attorney General under Trump stated, “Mr. Barr acknowledges that he came into office as [Bush’s] Attorney General with a specific agenda of imposing harsh criminal penalties.”
When riots followed the acquittal of the police who had beaten Rodney King, Barr said the rioting “was not civil unrest or the product of some festering injustice,” but “was gang activity, basically opportunistic.”
The NACCP document states bluntly: “The prospect of Mr. Barr enabling this Administration’s worst undemocratic and authoritarian impulses is deeply troubling.”
The document proved prophetic. Barr is indeed using his authority to undermine the rule of law.
1. He dropped the charges against Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI. In response, two thousand FBI agents and DOJ employees signed an open letter demanding Barr’s resignation.
2. Barr announced the resignation of William Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Berman had not resigned. The Trump administration was simply getting even with Berman for having sentenced Michel Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, to three years in prison. Berman said he did not resign. Fortunately for us, Barr could not force him from his post since Berman’s appointment came from the Judges of the Southern District of New York
3. To quote the Atlantic (02/17/20): “Perhaps most disturbingly, Barr contends that it is virtually impossible for a corrupt president to be held to account by the Department of Justice, or by any independent counsel that it or Congress might appoint. THIS IS AN EXTREME VERSION OF THE UNITARY EXECUTIVE THEORY. (More later)
4. Also from the Atlantic article: Last May, Barr’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion advising that former White House Counsel Don McGahn was not subject to Congress’s subpoena power, asserting that senior officials have “absolute immunity from congressional compulsion to testify about matters that occur during the course of discharging official duties.”
5. Barr’s Office of Legal Counsel also advised the Department of the Treasury not to release Trump’s tax statements.
Despite all these and other actions and statements, Barr contends that he is not Trump’s lapdog.
4. THE BANALITY OF EVIL
Remember John Yoo? Professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley?
He was Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice from 2001-2003. He wrote the “Torture Memo” for President George H. Bush, which declared that the president has the authority to “torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child . . .” When in 2004 the Justice Department’s Office of Professional
Responsibility investigated Yoo’s work for Bush, Yoo told DOJ investigators that “president’s war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be ‘massacred’.”
Yoo has been advising Trump, directly and indirectly. In June he wrote an article for The National Review in which he claimed that the Supreme Court’s recent decision on DACA “makes it easy for the President to violate the law.” The article was seen on Trump’s desk. Soon afterwards Trump told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace: “The decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on healthcare, on other things that we’ve never done before.”
Yoo is one of many powerful men in and out of Washington who embrace the unitary presidential theory. Authoritarians are attracted to the theory like flies to manure. The Federalist Society is a club filled with authoritarians.
The unitary presidential theory goes back at least to the late sixties, early seventies. In essence, it relies upon two foundations: 1) loopholes in the law (which are used to destroy the law), and 2) outright lies. (Remember the non-existent weapons of mass destruction?)
Yoo and his fellow federalists are here to stay, and the threat they pose to our republic is serious.
I look at a photo of Yoo and I am reminded of “Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil.”
5. GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE DO!
Who is this guy?
It’s Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association.
Does his picture remind you of strong men across the ages who come and go, use and damage a population and then are blown off the pages of history? Sometimes in disgrace?
One strong blast from New York State’s Attorney General Letitia James is now likely to end LaPierre’s shameful career. The attorney general’s office has posted the following: “The suit specifically charges the NRA as a whole, as well as Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre” and three other officers, including its former treasurer “with failing to manage the NRA’s funds and failing to follow numerous state and federal laws contributi\ng to the loss of more than $64 million in just three years for the NRA.”
James’ website elaborates: “The NRA’s influence has been so powerful that the organization went unchecked for decades while top executives funneled millions into their own pockets. The NRA is fraught with fraud and abuse, which is why, today, we seek to dissolve the NRA, because no organization is above the law.”
For twenty-nine years LaPierre has headed the NRA and during that time raised its profile from an extremist organization to a dangerous extremist organization. He has made it so powerful that with its millions in campaign contributions it can make and break politicians. He keeps a score card on every state and federal legislator, rating their records on gun legislation. NRA members and sympathizers pay attention to those scores. Thanks to its donations and score cards, NRA lobbyists have successfully blocked any meaningful gun legislation, even as school shootings and public massacres and public outrage continue.
After the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which twenty students and six adults were killed, LaPierre held a press conference and told the nation that “The only way to stop a bad guy with a guy is with a good guy with a gun.” He blamed the killings on the “lack of mental health reform and the prevalence of violent video games and movies.” And then called for armed guards in schools.
(Some NRA members went even further, calling for teachers to be armed. Imagine yourself a five, ten, thirteen year old sitting in class while Mr. Jones, with a forty-five tucked into his trouser belt, teaches cursive writing or lectures you on history. Not only that, but you have to practice emergency evacuation drills. How well would you concentrate?)
LaPierre had a lot more to say after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School killings in Parkland, Florida, in which seventeen people were killed and seventeen injured. According to LaPierre, guns were not among the causes of the massacre. The “elites” bore the responsibility.
(Notice he’s picked up Limbaugh’s derisive use of the word “elites.”)
Days after the massacre, LaPierre told the Conservative Political Action Conference that the “elites” have a nasty agenda with their proposed gun laws. “Their solution is to make you ― all of you ― less free.” “They want to sweep right under the carpet the failure of school security, the failure of the family, the failure of America’s school systems and even the unbelievable failure of the FBI.”
(According to LaPIerre, the FBI is in charge of monitoring mentally ill school-age children, not to mention suspected foreign terrorists.)
“The elites,” he said, “don’t care not one whit about America’s school system and school children. If they truly cared, what they would do is they would protect them. For them it’s not a safety issue, it’s a political issue. They care more about control and more of it, their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so that they can eradicate all individual freedoms” [emphasis mine.]
Eradicate all individual freedoms. Like Limbaugh and Goebbels, LaPierre learned that if the lie big enough, the masses will swallow it. And like Trump and Roger Stone, LaPierre has learned to deny . . . and deny . . . and deny. Roy Cohn’s teaching endures.
And for all this, LaPierre is well compensated. A 1995 Los Angeles Times story reported that LaPierre earned $190,000 a year, but in 2015, according to the Washington Post, his compensation package was $5 million.
It takes a pair of steel-you-know-whats to go before the nation and spout this stuff. But maybe all it takes is a sociopathic brain that unconsciously hopes to introduce the first act of Armageddon.
But did LaPiere write those words? I’m guessing he did not. For thirty years the NRA has had Ackerman McQueen, an advertising and public relations firm, craft its public image. Most corporations have in-house p.r. flaks to write speeches for the CEO and other officers, but the NRA used Ackerman.
In 2019, the NRA sued Ackerman for what it claimed was inflated billing and for leading it into the swamp of digital media production, which proved disastrous. It sounds like the NRA did not check out digital media production. And as for inflated billing . . . Who was signing those checks? The mail boy?
As a consequence of the lawsuit, Ackerman is firing broadsides at the NRA’s leaking vessel. It has released documents that include a memo from Ackerman claiming that over thirteen years it spent $542,000 of the NRA’s money on LaPierre’s expenses.
The Wall Street Journal reported that between 2004 and 2017, LaPierre spent $274,895.03 on Italian suits at a Hollywood men’s boutique. On one shopping spree alone, he spent $39,000.
At the same time it was suing Ackerman (and because it was going south at warp speed), the NRA paid outside attorney Bill Brewer $24 million to scrutinize its financial dealings and begin a cosmetic make over. Brewer’s work split the NRA into opposing factions, one result of which was the firing of its president, Oliver North, who is now producing documented evidence of NRTA corruption.
Plato got it right: a band of corrupt people end up eating one another.
“I AM THE CHAOS”
Years ago a journalist followed Donald Trump around New York and noticed the utter confusion that surrounded him. He asked Trump, “Why are you always surrounded by chaos?” To which Trump replied, “I am the chaos.”
This goes a long way towards explaining why Trump has fired so many appointed officials, why he pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and is withholding money from the World Health Organization. It explains much more, including his lies about the pandemic and his inaction during this crisis. It explains why he has attacked governors over several issues: to take responsibility off his back and to foment discord among Americans and have us take sides. He is fomenting discord and hatred to the extent that Washington’s Governor Inslee said Trump is “fomenting rebellion.”
Trump is the center of the chaos, but he himself is chaotic—confused, angry, vindictive, a narcissist and bully. He craves constant national and International attention. He does not want to build, he seeks to destroy. Hurling our nation into a pit of fear, confusion, and rage is proof that he exists. That he is indeed the world’s center