Perverting justice for private gain and public tyranny was refined by what even the high-minded jurisprudential aristocracy look down upon as lowlife hacks who administer the ethical cesspool of family law. In fact, today’s vendettas against Trump are rendered possible and plausible only by decades of judicial persecution of ordinary, defenseless citizens.

No-fault divorce did not remove “acrimony” from family law or any other legal process, and it was never intended to do so. No-fault justice simply eliminated the rule of law in the United States by allowing legal proceedings against innocent people—citizens neither charged nor suspected of any legal wrongdoing, who can be made to feel the full force of the penal apparatus, minus the standard safeguards enjoyed by accused criminals. Courts that launch legal actions against private citizens without telling them their infraction (“fault”) are dispensing not justice but systematized injustice and tyranny. That the main tools of their peculiar trade are other people’s children renders those courts to be nothing less than horror chambers. Ellis experienced the logical result. Once we crossed this line into legal nihilism, the degeneration of the justice system into an extortion racket became inevitable.

Ellis found himself in a Kafkaesque nightmare, where guilt is determined and punishments like expropriation and incarceration are inflicted not by rules of evidence and due process of law but by psychotherapists spouting psychobabble and by social workers implementing the ideology they learned in women’s studies courses. It is a world where having family members incarcerated without trial is not only possible but rewarded as a shrewd litigation strategy. It is a legal underworld where no punishment is so unjust, cruel, or unusual that it cannot be rationalized as being “in the best interest of the child.”

Some points merit more attention, like his discovery that social workers “had threatened Dana [his wife] with taking our boys and placing them into foster care if she did not immediately procure a restraining order and file for divorce.” This may not excuse her taking advantage of the corrupt system, but it does illustrate that women too become its prisoners. Having enlisted social workers to eliminate the fathers, many mothers find that the goons then remove the children from them as well.