Lawfare Is Too Kind a Word

We have already accepted an unacceptable process

I can’t recall the first time I heard the word ‘lawfare’, and I don’t know who came up with it. It seems like a neologism coined recently, but it may have older origins. After all, this is not the first time in history that a judicial system has been deeply corrupt. It’s just the first time in history that a judicial system has been deeply corrupt against an illegally ousted President of the United States of America who is still alive while almost everyone accepts the process of that corruption as completely normal.

I saw a widely circulated, well respected Substack the other day saying what a wise friend of mine has said for a long time. My friend, who is a lawyer by profession, has long argued that the cases being conducted against Trump are so unjust, so prejudicial, and so patently ridiculous that the proper response is to refuse to comply with them in any way. He’s said that Trump should refuse to attend these courts, should hole up somewhere in a potentially sympathetic State (such as Florida) and dare the corrupt system to forcibly remove him from that bolt hole.

I argued when we had these discussions that they would have zero embarrassment in doing so, and no matter how brutal and unjustified the treatment, they could indeed in those circumstances drag Trump away in chains and imprison him without an effective response from anyone else.

More respectable Substackers than myself, though, are now admitting that the nature of these cases is so outrageous that Trump should at least offer some passive or symbolic refusal of their authority. I saw one half joking suggestion that he should wear a gag in court, in response to the gagging orders which put a Presidential candidate in the position of being legally barred from commenting on his own persecution and on slanders against him raised by his political enemies.

Another source suggested a refusal to answer any questions, a mute bearing of witness to the process, would convey a dignified repudiation of what was happening. Perhaps it is time to apologize to my friend and admit that even that non-compliance response is better than giving any of this legal persecution a legitimacy it should not be given at all.

These responses are of course all merely symbolic, and while symbols are powerful things, they don’t change, at least immediately, the dynamics of power.

Trump, and the people Trump represents who are invested in his success, have almost zero power in the modern US. They don’t have business and corporations backing them. They don’t have the firm support of their own political party, but have rather seen the upper echelons of that party collude for years to remove the man they want and the policies they want too.

They quite obviously don’t have the legal system itself on their side, since bar associations of a neutral or objective persuasion would long since have removed Trump’s persecutors from the profession they hold if that was the case. And of course the governmental parts of the misnamed Justice system, like the Department of Justice, are green lighting and supporting Democrat DA’s and judges in their political witch hunt. It’s their witch-hunt, serving their purposes.

There are no Democrats who aren’t tainted by this, either in government posts or legal professions, and it is a taint which encompasses ordinary Democrat voters too. All of them have accepted and supported, have cheered on, the total corruption of the law to punish and harm a man they hate. Having failed to ever find real crimes he is guilty of, they have simply decided that ordinary actions are criminal ones, so long as Donald Trump did them.

The cases are the crimes, the twisting distortions of existing legal statutes to apply them to Donald Trump when Trump has committed no actual crimes at all are the real crime. Persecution of a political opponent simply for being your political opponent is the only real crime involved in any of these cases, and it’s an enormous one that every Democrat voter and the entire Democrat administration and Party has engaged in.

It’s the crime that threatens Democracy, and its theirs. They should be made to own it, at least verbally. They should be told that what they are doing is what dictatorships do, that their version of justice is no different to that offered by Soviet or Nazi judges and courts.

The bodies which if things were functioning normally would prevent lawfare, are the bodies creating lawfare. The Justice Department is a captured tool of one Party, as are the FBI, entirely happy to be used to enforce what is effectively One Party Rule and tyrannical actions against political dissidents to the level of a former President. The judges who should recuse themselves do not recuse themselves. The bar associations who should respond to political cases like these by revoking the license to practice law do not do so. The Supreme Court which should reprimand this entire process and point out that the law is not a tool of political oppression in a free society guided by the Constitution, do not do so.

Both of these things, the political persecution of an opposition leader through the courts for imaginary crimes or actions that aren’t in any way criminal, and the failure of the institutions and individuals who are supposed to block such Banana Republic actions as a basic requirement of their own responsibilities, constitute an existing tyranny.

A Constitutional Republic following the US Constitution dismisses these fraudulent cases before they ever get this far. Only a functional tyranny allows them to proceed.

Like everyone else, I frequently refer to what we are seeing, to all of this legalized tyranny, as lawfare. It is a convenient shorthand. But like Trump attending those court sessions and being silent when those crooked judges command it, we lend the whole thing an air of unearned legitimacy. Even as we criticize it, we go into the details of the cases in ways which suggest there is something there to answer, or that our role is to disprove what is being claimed.

But really lawfare is far too kind a word for what is happening. Lawfare used to describe what is happening is a verbal shortcut that skirts us past remembering what this really is, just as discussing the details of particular cases that are ALL massively illegitimate and corrupt implies that it’s just the details of the case presented against Trump that are slightly wrong.

As a response, what we are doing, what Trump is doing and what even those of us who criticize the whole thing are doing, is tacitly accepting that the system trying to bury us is still a system we owe respect to. We should still treat these judges, who are using their position to attack political and personal enemies, as actual judges, who we must defer to. We are treating kangaroo courts and a Soviet show trial process as due process, when it isn’t.

Trump of course has already agreed to bonds paying the money that these corrupt courts have already stolen from him. By every definition of injustice known since Magna Carta the fines Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to pay represent a classic tool of tyrannical regimes, which is the theft of the property of political opponents. Magna Carta talks about excessive, novel, cruel and unusual fines and punishments levied as a form of both theft and oppression by King John. The English Civil War in part derived from the perception of the Commons that Charles I was doing this same thing. The Founders of the USA of course made arbitrary fines and punishments as well as taxation without representation the basis of their justification in rebelling against George III.

When the State or its agents steal from political opponents and give some legalistic excuse or cover of legitimacy to that theft because a corrupt court has endorsed it, but the theft is entirely political and entirely unjust by moral law, that is not only one of the easiest ways to recognize a tyranny, it’s the way that tyrannies most often provoke their own fall. Such forms of theft have often caused wider, deeper and more lasting resentment than murder does.

There is no difference in kind (or in intent) between the fines applied to Trump and Robert Mugabe seizing the property of white farmers, or a Communist regime seizing ALL property from private owners. Just as, if Trump is imprisoned on the basis of the over 30 counts of non-crime he is currently facing in the latest New York court he has been forced to attend, there would be no difference between that and some Myanmar junta of Generals imprisoning a democracy advocate they disagree with and wish to silence. That latest case is literally trying to imprison the man for a two word note in a private ledger never intended as an official record of anything and never supplied as an official record of anything.

There, the argument that accounting fraud laws apply to private notes is rendered even more absurd given that even in an actual submitted accounting ledger the description only becomes criminal according to the statute being used if it’s written that way to disguise another underlying crime (which ordinarily has to be proven first). So effectively we are talking about over 30 criminal charges for a non-disclosure agreement (which is legal) based on the evidence of a two word notation (which is legal) when NO CRIME (surface or underlying) has even been described by the prosecutors.

It’s easy being distracted by the details, isn’t it? Because the details are gigantically absurd, like wild brightly colored flowers fifty feet tall. You can’t help but look at those crazy bastards. Who the hell creates that thing? How is it fifty feet tall? That’s like no flower I’ve ever seen before on Planet Earth. Before you know it you are distracted, and talking about how much the fifty foot tall flower stinks.

But the important points aren’t really in those details.

The important point is that these type of flowers only sprout when the garden is in Hell. The important point is that this is not law. This isn’t remotely legal at all. It’s not ‘lawfare’. It’s tyranny. Every single bit of it.

It’s theft from a political opponent, and persecution of a political opponent. We are already past the theft. False imprisonment comes next.

And political murders are, we should remember as these trials progress, often the thing that occurs to justify or enforce the already intended political thefts. There’s no simple division in reality between those who have no respect for property rights and those who have no respect for human rights. Your burglar, or your doorstep government thug seizing your goods, can easily become your killer. If your judge is a political thief, he sure as hell isn’t going to pause about signing your death warrant either.

When a system is corrupt, it will pretend that these actions are legitimate. It will wrap them up in a process it claims is legitimate. But when the motivation is theft from your political opponent because you don’t like him, as is the reality of the Engoron verdict against Trump, your system has already embarked on the kind of politicized ‘justice’ that will also excuse State (or Deep State) murders of political opponents.

As, it seems likely, the US justice system did in relation to the murder of Robert F. Kennedy in the 1960’s.

And as the modern Democrat regime has in fact already done, with the murder of at least two January 6 protesters, and the judicial lack of response to those deaths, together with the arbitrary ‘justice’ witnessed in the disparity of treatment between January 6 protesters and Black Lives Matters rioters engaging in similar or worse actions (actions that resulted in 26 deaths).

Political interpretation of the law, the law turned to the oppression of political opponents, and deliberate selectivity of the law are not things which can be adequately and fully described as ‘lawfare’. They are things which sociopaths support and which tyrants enact. They are things which characterize an existing tyranny.

In that context, the progression of the cases against Trump cannot be viewed in any light other than that of a regime using any means available to destroy and remove all political opposition. The long imprisonment of J6 protestors, many of whom were guilty of nothing more than the misdemeanor of trespass in a public building, is part and parcel of the same thing. That, too, is not something the Constitution of the United States of America accepts as lawful.

These are all arbitrary injustices, delivered by corrupt judges. Precisely the sort of things that provoked the Founders to form a new nation in the first place. But also precisely the sort of things done by leaders far more evil than George III ever was, too. Mugabe Justice or Judicial Crime might be better descriptions of it than ‘lawfare’ is.