Attorney General William Barr told WGN Radio on Monday that Democrats were demanding “[Joe] Biden or no peace,” adding that they were “creating an incendiary situation” that would lead to “rule by the mob” and a “socialist path.”

Speaking to conservative Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass for his podcast, The Chicago Way, Barr was unusually strident:

The so-called “Resistance,” which is not a proper term to use in our democracy — you know, instead of loyal opposition, it became actual resistance. There undoubtedly are many people in the government who surreptitiously work to thwart the administration, and the turn now to the mob violence, and the countenancing of mob violence, is another very disconcernting development, because I think, increasingly, the message of the Democrats appears to be, “Biden or no peace.” … That is rule by the mob, and we’re approaching that.

Barr was in Chicago for Operation LeGend, the federal effort to shore up local law enforcement in several cities that have crime waves in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and riots.

He said that after crime rates had fallen across the nation for two decades, recent liberal reforms in many parts of the country had created new threats to public safety.

The effect on inner city communities had been “devastating,” Barr said, because unlike “wealthier liberals,” they could not “buy their way out of it” and move to “gated communities.”

People in the urban communities most affected by crime wanted “more police, not fewer police,” he said. While they wanted police reforms, and felt the police had been insensitive, they did not want to weaken the criminal justice system.

Barr added that this was the most important election of our lifetimes.

“As an attorney general, I’m not supposed to get into politics,” he said.

However, he said: “I think we were getting into a position where we were going to find ourselves irrevocably committed to a socialist path, and I think if Trump loses this election, that will be the case. In other words, I think there’s now a clear fork in the road for our country.”

Barr warned that the mail-in ballot was a “terrible danger” to the integrity of democracy.

The traditional voting system, he said, had been designed to protect the secrecy of the ballot. “All of that is gone with mail-in [voting]. There’s no secret vote.” Mail-in ballots were associated, by design with the person who cast them, he noted.

He mocked Democrats for claiming that President Donald Trump would refuse to leave office if he lost.

“Liberals project. You know, the president is going to stay in office, and seize power, and all that [expletive]? I’ve never heard of that crap. I mean, I’m the attorney general, I would think I wouldd have heard about it. They’re projecting. They’re creating an incendiary situation, where there’s going to be loss of confidence in the vote.”

He lamented that much of the great thought that provided the foundation of American democracy had been forgotten, or perhaps never taught to young Americans.

“I personally think — and I’ve been saying this for decades — that the only way out of this is school choice, where we return education to the control of the parents.”

He said that it was harder to believe that public schools could be “neutral,” given that what was being defined as “neutral” was rejected by many Americans.

Kass was recently accused, falsely, of antisemitism for pointing out the role of George Soros in funding the election of left-wing prosecutors.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.