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Writer's pictureAlex Baker

Ask Alex 030 - Jail Time for Posting a Petition? It's Orwellian and Kafkaesque.


Dreama drops by with a horrific tale where a judge sentenced her to 3 days in jail just because she made an online petition asking for a second chance at a custody hearing. Afterwards, the Judge issued a Protective Order simply because she showed up to a children's choir performance, and added a gag order. It's not legal, but it is...


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Orwellian. Kafkaesque. These words stand for a dystopian reality in which authorities have rigged the legal system with a facade of arbitrary rules that pretend to offer a justice system, when really, it is just a small group of totalitarian rulers doing what they always do, controlling, dominating and robbing everybody else.


Hello world, I am Alex Baker, your legal expert and resident anarchist. Still trapped in this Orwellian, Kafkaesque hell called Planet Family Court. Welcome to Ask Alex number thirty.

George Orwell, best known for his fictional novel 1984, and Franz Kafka, best known for his fictional novel called The Trial.


The Trial tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Does that sound familiar to you in your case?


While the investigation is going on, Josef is allowed to keep his job and remain free, but he is trapped in a seemingly unending struggle to understand the process. At one point Josef meets another guy in the system whose case has continued for five years, and who has gone from being a successful businessman to being almost bankrupt and is virtually enslaved by his dependence on his lawyer. Does this ring a bell?


Josef starts to realize the whole system is set up so that he cannot win no matter what. When Josef asks for help, one of the Court officials tells Josef a parable based on an ancient text of the Court, and that many generations of Court officials have interpreted the story differently. Hmmm. Ancient legal text that different judges interpret differently. Does that sound like the Constitution? Does it sound like Judicial Discretion, where the Law means nothing, and Judges make any orders they damn well please, for any reason, or for no reason, and there is nothing to be done about it?


They end up blaming Josef for his inability to follow the rules, and they execute him. Josef never even gets the satisfaction of understanding what the problem was to begin with. That certainly reminds me of my stupid restraining order, where the constitution says I am allowed to sue my ex wife, but the judge finds that because I am suing her, this means I haven't moved on with my life after the break up. It's hilarious once you look at it that way.


George Orwell's 1984 portrays a world of perpetual war, total government surveillance, rewriting history, and massive propaganda. Well, that very much describes today's world as far as I'm concerned. We are absolutely dealing with Orwellian concepts of:


  • Big Brother, which I call the Governmedia;

  • Doublethink, where for example, where our schools teach that it's bad to be racist, but but Critical Race Theory teaches that all White People are bad just because they are White;

  • Thought Police, who will have you fired from your job, deplatformed and silenced just for the

  • Thoughtcrime of expressing a political view on Facebook or Twitter;

  • Newspeak, where you can be put in jail for referring to your own son as He;

  • The Memory Hole, where the relatively good society that we used to have, you know, that place that millions and millions of people wanted to come to from all over the planet, is now a society supposedly founded on oppression and systemic racism; and

  • 2 + 2 = 5, where to cure all these problems our postmodern court system has completely abandoned the idea of right and wrong, and replaced it with libraries full of rules.


Rules. We don't have truth, or justice, or morality, or ethics, or principles. No, we have Rules. Endless rules, made up by Rulers. Orwell and Kafka are referred to as Dystopian fiction, Absurdist fiction, even Paranoid fiction. But Orwell and Kafka were not paranoid, at all. They were writing very realistic fiction. Yes, Orwell's prophecies needed a half century and technological developments to come true, but here we are.


Here we are. So what can we do about it? It is actually quite simple. We need to stop believing that anybody has the authority to rule us. Because they don't. And there are way more of us than there are of them. To get this across, we need to keep telling our stories.


If there is going to be any chance for you to get justice in your Court case, you must first figure out exactly how they are screwing you over, then have the courage to call it out. So welcome everyone. It's Mother's Day, 2021. To the moms, I won't insult you by wishing you a Happy Mother's Day, but how about a strong and a wise Mother's Day? An Orwellian and Kafkaesque Mother's Day? Welcome to Ask Alex.

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