Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Briar Wood
(1892)

"Dictators only ever come in hapless colors."

Our imbecilic incumbent remodeled our Justice Department first thing. He fired those he feared were not loyalists, replacing them with lapdog equivalents, many of whom held high positions without any benefit of anything even remotely resembling a legal education. They brought conviction with them into office, the conviction that the world had largely wronged their benefactor as only a paper billionaire can ever hope to be wronged, and that it would be their duty under their interpretation of the law they didn’t understand to, in their words, “unweaponize” our governance. Of course, our governance had never actually been weaponized against anyone, other than in the noticeably addled imaginations of those opposing partisans. True to usual fashion for fascists, they set about actually weaponizing a government that had never actually been weaponized before. That was the beginning of what we might understand to be ImaginaryCivility, where the laws of this land would get rudely interpreted so as to deliberately place the administration’s heavily weighted thumb on Justice’s traditionally impartial scales.

The pattern had existed since the earliest mentions of our idiot incumbent’s so-called MAGA Movement, his self-proclaimed attempt to, and I begrudgingly quote him here, “Make America Great Again,” with special emphasis on the “again” part of that proclamation. No specific mention was ever made as to precisely when America had been great before, other than vague references to the McKinley administration, only the strong suggestion that it had somehow been in some vaguely distant past. This amounted to a declaration opposing modernity, as if flush toilets might prove to be the downfall of society. In actuality, he who wouldn’t recognize civility if we glued bells on it, had expended considerable Presidential press conference time in his first term, complaining precisely about modern toilets. I never understood what he was railing about then. Anyone as dedicated as he has been to becoming a victim of imaginary injustice tends to rail on about utterly meaningless issues, like toilets, in lieu of railing on about anything of meaningful substance. I figured this was just part of the MAGA trance and ignored whatever meaning it might have contained.

Scores of experienced Federal prosecutors left when their competent leaders were fired for knowing better than their newly-instilled dedicated amateur superiors. Goofy indictments followed a blanket pardon for all the criminal insurrectionists who had formerly been convicted of infractions akin to treason. This, they laughingly characterized as a prima facie example of weaponization in practice. This single Presidential act put upwards of fifteen hundred experienced criminals back out on the street, where many simply returned to their previous lifestyle dedicated to undermining civil society. They apparently saw this as their sacred responsibility. Many dressed their dedication up in religious raiment: sackcloth or tactical gear, both seen as representing what they referred to as freedom fighters. They lobbied for selectively oppressing anyone who wasn’t white or a self-proclaimed Onward-Christian-Soldier Christian White Supremacist, imagining themselves marching into actual war, with the cross of their utterly imaginary Jesus, going on before. They commenced to assassinate each other.

Our Justice Department essentially changed its name, dispensing injustice instead. Judges rejected more Injustice Department arguments than at any prior time in our nation’s history, especially considering that many judges struggled to maintain a properly straight face when reviewing these bush-league assertions. Repeatedly, courts declared that the Federal prosecutor had apparently invented the rights they asserted, correcting injunctions as if they were teaching Introduction to Law classes in a fourth-rate university to particularly poorly suited students. Injustice, as our department formerly known as Justice was widely informally called, sued a former head of our FBI for posting a photo of some seashells on their Instagram. Those who had previously prosecuted or convicted our first felonious President in history found themselves indicted for predictably Trumped-up charges, typically imaginary infractions against which no actual law had ever existed with damages typically declared in billions of dollars. The courts became clogged with such unserious business. The administration, for whom justice became a term used exclusively in derision, routinely denied its targets due process, anyway, hopping over inconvenient details like formal charges, courts, and enforceable legal judgments. They took to dispensing their brand of justice, which few successfully passed off as anything other than chaos. They willfully deported inconvenient evidence.

Perhaps chaos was always the point of the MAGA Movement. Replacing civility with tyranny might require considerable ImaginaryCivility, with certain people asserting rights nobody was ever guaranteed under anybody’s Constitution, and nurturing grudges when the actual legal system stands in the way of full implementation. Wrongs discouraged by actual rights seem to have been the source of the signature MAGA grudge, for its budding Injustice seemed to stem from a deep misinterpretation of what justice actually always was. The right to speak against never bestowed a right to necessarily prevail. Crackpot concerns festered into terrifying intrusions. The courts were swamped, rejecting increasingly silly assertions. Our incumbent sues on whims and always has. He spends the majority of his considerable campaign funds paying for lawyers whose opinions he typically ignores. He figured he could delay any reckoning by merely filing another motion, even it the motion was written in crayon by a pseudo lawyer with the equivalent of a third-grade education in the actual law. The purpose of the MAGA de-weaponization effort was, as with most everything MAGA, the opposite of its advertised intentions. What was touted as unweaponization amounted to pointing and firing a large-caliber gun at the heart of our sacred judicial system. The cynicism involved has been breathtaking.

Fortunately, ImaginaryCivility ultimately becomes self-defeating, as any effort rooted in lies always inevitably undermines itself. His attempts to rebrand our government in his disgraced name seem the rough equivalent now of renaming our Justice Department The Dollar Store Department of Justice, given the quality cache the Dollar Store label imparts. He’s tried and almost accomplished turning our most sacred city into a second-rate trailer park, complete, now, with a cage-fighting ring and beer advertising billboards on the White House lawn. The courts will doubtless find this construction, too, violated actual law, and deliver another in an ever-lengthening line of judgments finding against our ignorant, if insistent, incumbent. Anyone dispensing Injustice under the guise of the genuine article deserves to go the way of every hapless dictator before, and eventually has. Dictators only ever come in hapless colors. I warmly anticipate the displacement of this ImaginaryCivility, which the grudgy MAGA devotees attempted to inflict upon us. Let us re-weaponize in favor of actual justice next time, and toss this imaginary stuff into that proverbial ashcan of actual history.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz