The Proof is in the Putsch of January 6, 2021

Bolsonaro tried to steal Brazil’s elections, and he has been given a 27-year jail term. In the infinitely asinine United States, Trump was rewarded for his Putsch by winning in 2024.

By

David Gottfried

As the Death of American Democracy approaches, we frolic with the Bread and Circuses of Imperial Rome

The New York Times of September 11, 2025 told us that in some places, such as Latin America, where many states had been famous for a succession of tin pot military dictators, Democracy still is somewhat alive.

Mr. Bolsonaro tried to steal Brazil’s election. He was a coarse and crude man, with the Machiavellian smarts of an Oxford Don, and he wowed Brazil by fusing the he-man hate of Archie Bunker with the Neanderthal, Hunnish streak of Donald Trump. Bolsonaro and his fascist followers love Donald Trump, and they have a new symbol for their hard-right, revanchist and reactionary politics: The Stars and Stripes. Apparently, in Brazil, the American Flag has taken the place of the Swastika.

However, Brazilians are more than bozos showing off their bums on the beach. They had the grit and the gravity to mete out punishment to a would-be dictator. And America by contrast is under the spell of its dictator. (I know Trump is doing hideously in many polls, but he usually polls very poorly)

American Justice is a Monumental Mouse

Its Monuments are Courts that strut on the Street like Members of the British House of Lords. Those Courts are almost always dressed up in Greek and Roman architecture, betraying the undemocratic desire to glower at the peasants and glorify the rich. Although its courts are palatial, American Justice is a woosey little mouse as it fell flat on its face when it sued Donald Trump.

Do you want to know why conspiracy theories are so big ???? Do you want to know why no one trusts the press ????

It’s because “The News” is leaving something out. Remember Mueller’s prosecution of Trump in 2017 ?? I thought Mueller had a fantastic case, and he fell flat on his ass. Why. And Why was the press silent about it. (At the time, I read the reason proffered by the Times for Mueller’s loss, and it was so sickening and incredulous that I forgot it.)

From the very beginning of his campaign, Trump’s criminality and treason was visible to the naked eye. One of his lead campaign managers, Paul Manafort, had gotten millions of dollars from Russia and it was never, ever clear what Manafort did for Russia other the electing Trump. After Manaforte – and before Manaforte -- there were dozens of other incidents which completely unmasked Trump’s duplicity, depravity and deviousness.

I am not going to recount the sorry and sickening history of the failed prosecutions of Trump. You have heard it all before.

The bottom line:

If our crappy system of Justice can acquit someone stinking of sin as much as a 3-foot-long Norwegian rat in New York’s East River, then our crappy system of justice can and does put the sweetest people you’ve ever met behind bars.

American Jurisprudence Glares with all the Sadistic and Aristocratic Disdain of Louis the Fourteenth

Although our legal system went super easy on Donald Trump, our legal system loves to rip apart poor and middle-class people. In the remaining portions of this essay I will propound my fervent belief that our legal system is an enormous lie: While purporting to champion “justice,” it creates, faciliates and amplifies evil.

The Mentally Ill Are Being Tortured in Prisons

Years ago, millions of schizophrenics and other severely disturbed people rotted in institutions, far from family, from anything which could revivify their lives and their care was custodial and gratuitously cruel, i.e., those institutions were custodial as they gave them gruel, housed them in wards like animals in pens, and zonked them with mind-numbing drugs. They were cruel in their constant persecution and mockery of patients ala Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’ s Nest.”

And then things got worse

First, we let them out into the streets.

Nowadays, more and more of them are thrown into jail.

The mentally ill are usually completely antithetical to criminals. Whereas the criminal, usually, is deceptive and surreptitious as he wants to get away with something, the mentally ill person is sadly free of all designs on the world. He doesn’t try to take anything. Whereas the criminal is often sadistic, the mentally ill person is often masochistic. Whereas you want to punch a criminal out for beating to death and robbing an elderly couple, you SHOULD be on the verge of tears when witnessing a disturbed person give thousands of dollars away in charity and leaving nothing for himself. (Lillian Hellman wrote that a famous writer she knew had given tens of thousands of dollars to M.L. King and was living, in misery, in a single-room occupancy hotel.)

But of course, no one cries for the mentally ill person. (Mentally ill people are usually the butt of a comic’s jokes. One can’t slander blacks, Jews or gay people, but one will always get a laugh and get away with it for lacerating the loveless lives of the mentally ill. Mentally ill people are usually very lonely. And the godforsaken happy people find their loneliness so funny.)

Every so often, when I can’t sleep, I do something very masochistic. I watch C-Span, a news source which makes millions of Americans, including yours truly, long for the schlockiest, dumbest and most violent programs imaginable. I prefer Nascar or a gory Vampire movie to a 2-hour discussion, on C Span, of Jill Biden’s love of medicine, any day of the week.

Every so often, C span has a program which discusses wonderful judges who revere the law. These programs will extoll American justice and truth uncritically, reverently, and most of all stupidly, like Christian Parishioners marching enthusiastically for Herr Hitler.

And I want to barge into their splendid assemblies, flush with neo classical portraiture and golden fountains, and I want to shout at the top of my lung: As we are speaking, 100,000 mentally ill people are being hung from their toes, kicked in the balls, and told they deserve to die.

And so reader, dear reader, if you are willing to do one thing for me, all I ask is this: Stop Respecting People in Power. Remember what John Lennon said in “Working Class Hero”: “You have to learn how to smile as you kill if you want to live like the folks on the hill."

How the Courts of New York State, and the New York Pig (Sorry I mean to say Police) Department make people go to Court fifty times for one incident of smoking on the subway (Eventually making those poor people lose their jobs because of their numerous Court-mandated absences from work.)

Police hand out thousands of tickets for minor, misdemeanor offenses: Spitting in the subway, minor fist fights, defacing advertisements in the subway. Maybe they should pay a fine ( I think not.) In any event, the criminal perp is ordered to appear in Court for a hearing.

On the date of the hearing, the arresting officer is not present. The state asks for an adjournment, and our dangerous and vile perp is instructed to return to Court on that adjourned date.

On the adjourned date, the officer once again is not present, and the matter is once again adjourned to a later date.

The New York Times reported that some misdemeanor defendants have gone to Court as many as 50 times because the officer is not present and the state requests, and gets, an adjournment on 50 consecutive occasions.

Of course, the misdemeanor Defendant could oppose the request for a second adjournment, arguing that he shouldn’t have to cancel so many days of work just for spitting in a park.

However, the Defendant does not know he can oppose the request for an adjournment. And in our allegedly wonderful system of justice, no one will tell the Defendant that he can oppose the request for an adjournment.

American Jurisprudence is governed by laissez faire, the same philosophy that governs American economics. This philosophy says that if a rich man swallows up a poor man, the government shall not try to save the poor man’s life, or tell the poor man that he too can request an adjournment – or can ask that a case be thrown out because he has missed five days of work showing up and on each occasion the state requested and got an adjournment.

For example, suppose A and B are fighting it out in Court. Suppose A is winning, but B would win if he made argument X. Suppose the Court knows that B would win with Argument X. Traditionally, American Courts will not make Argument X on B’s behalf. A will win. The only honest inference: This is Court sanctioned Mugging.

The Tyranny of the Trial Court Judge

Keeping Stuff Out of the Record

A lot of people suffer from the delusion that all wrongs can be righted by appealing an unjust decision. Many lamentable dispositions can be corrected by appeal. However, the great majority of infirm decisions will not be corrected by appeal.

On appeal, one can only argue about issues that were raised in the record before the lower Court.

One cannot complain about something if it isn’t in the record of the proceeding in the Lower Court. How does the Court screw the good man ? It keeps everything that helps him out of the record.

For example, progressive Congresswomen Elizabeth Holtzman once fought a Judge’s tyrannical shenanigans which resulted in an unjust Judicial decision. Among other things, Holtman wanted to complain about the Judge’s vulgar and disgusting impersonation of a certain sexual act at issue in the case. However, Holtman was not able to complain about the Judge’s behavior because it wasn’t in the Record on Appeal.

Why was it not in the record on appeal? Because the Judge threw the stenographer out of his chambers before he elected to impersonate a particular sexual act.

The Judge Has Broad Discretion regarding his Judicial Housekeeping and Discovery – and his broad discretion makes him a juridical despot.

A litigant usually wants to submit a reply brief to respond to the other side’s opposition brief. His adversary may have made specious and deadly arguments which must be answered in a reply brief. However, the attorney who wants to write a reply brief may have a fever of 105 and pneumonia. Under the circumstances, he should be granted an adjournment, and most judges will give him an adjournment.

However, suppose the judge hates his guts. Suppose the judge hates the politics that imbue his litigation. He can screw him, justice be damned. He can say no to an adjournment even if the attorney is dying with fever.

Very simply, the Lower Court Judge has “Broad Discretion” in managing his Court room, and that includes the right to deny adjournments which would seem wholly appropriate to anyone who doesn’t have wet dreams about fire and brimstone.

Indeed, the Supreme Court has denied petitions to halt executions because the papers were filed a day late. The Supreme Court has said that it would have excused the lateness, but the trial judge has broad discretion to do whatever tickles the fancy of his warped soul that has lived on this earth too long.

And, if that were not enough, the guy with the pneumonia suffers a second time because he wasn’t granted more time to put in his papers. He can’t make argument x, his winning argument, in the appellate Court because argument x is not in the record, and it was not in the record because he was not given more time to put in reply papers, which would have raised argument x, in the argument before the lower court,

Also, the trial court has broad discretion in discovery, a process in which each side sizes up the other side by asking questions and getting documents from the other side. One might have a strong need for tax filings which are highly relevant to the suit. Suppose the judge hates you and rules against you. Your position on appeal might be correct, but you will be impeded by the prejudicial doctrine that the trial court has broad discretion in supervising discovery.

How the New York Courts Allow Attorneys to Serve Patently Fraudulent Documents on Laymen, Intimidating them and Inducing Unjust Concessions.

I am referring to subpoenas in New York State.

Suppose A sues B. Before the trial, A may want to get information about B. Some of the information may be Possessed by C. A wants to make C answer questions about B.

A can do this by serving a subpoena on C, stating that C must answer A’s questions.

The subpoena does not have to be signed by a Judge

However, attorneys, with the contrivance of companies that mass produce Subpoena forms, make laymen think that the subpoena has been ordered by a Judge, when in fact it doesn’t even require a Judge’s order. (Actually, if one believes that one shouldn’t be compelled to testify, one can move to quash, or throw out, the subpoena)

The form printed by Blumberg’s states that a Judge has ordered the subpoena even though the subpoena doesn’t require a Judge’s order.

The first time I drafted a subpoena, I was amazed. (They don’t discuss this stuff in law school, where the law is gussied up into some gallant profession even if it really is nothing but a whore acceding to a rich man’s whims)

I said to my boss, Will Mait, at Hender & Murray (On the 96^th floor of Tower B of the World Trade Center), “It has a space for a Judge’s signature. What name am I supposed to put in. This has never been approved or signed by a Judge.”

Will Mait said, “Sign the Name of any New York County Supreme Court Judge.”

My boss told me, essentially, to forge a Judge’s name. This is the way subpoenas are drafted by the grey-suited grafters of the New York Bar.

This has certain effects: The guy who gets the subpoena, believing that a Judge has Ordered him to answer, may answer thoroughly and obsequiously. If he knew the truth, that a) no judge signed he subpoena, and b) that he can move to quash the subpoena if he thinks it improper (It may seek irrelevant material, it asks for information it already has, the proponent of the subpoena is just trying to give him a heart attack) then he would not cough up information that might damage the interests of himself or his friend who is a party to the suit.

There are many more examples which buttress my point. I have no time to proffer more examples. But keep in mind: The oxygen which fuels the legal system has nothing to do with a drive to do justice. Rather, the legal system is fueled by a lying yen to make a killer’s wounding knife appear to be a surgeon’s healing scalpel, a deadly poison appear to be a gentle, rousing fillip for one’s heart, and it teaches the devil to smile like Mother Mary. I prefer the revolutionary justice of a Bolshevik Firing Squad.

How and why American Liberals May Soon be Hated the Way the Jews of Europe Were Hated.

Hannah Arendt, the author of the Origins of Totalitarianism and one of the keenest scholars of European political apoplexy in the Hitler era, posited an usual and original theory of anti Semitism: She said that Christians wanted to annihilate the Jews because they had lost all respect for the Jews and because the Jews, despite their wealth, were bereft of power because they had no land they could call their own.

A Jew might own factories, Greco Roman art and sumptuous castles in Bavaria, but without an army, without a police force, without guns and grit and a riling raucous call to war, they would be called to no place but their doom.

American liberals seem very much the same. Just as the Jews scaled the heights of European professional, artistic and scientific excellence, Harvard, Columbia and Yale are dominated by liberals. But Americans ask of liberals just what Europeans ask of Jews: They glitter and gleam, but do they have any power. Or are they always destined to lose.

Many Trumpers look upon all the prosecutions of Trump, and his almost total exoneration, as proof positive that Trump is an Olympian Nordic God of Holy War while liberal Jewish lawyers are Nettlesome gnats who carp and complain in nagging Soprano voices which will never shatter any glasses but may find its whole world smashed to smithereens in a second Kristallnacht.

So Liberals: Make your next lawsuit against Trump, if there is a second suit, a legal juggernaut that is impervious to attack or defeat.