Yes, lawfare is a problem.
And yes, the use of a nation’s own legal machinery—sometimes by foreign actors, sometimes by domestic zealots with foreign funding and domestic robes—is a deeper problem still.
But the strange thing is how often people speak of it as though it were a hurricane.
A force of nature.
An unavoidable weather event.
It isn’t.
It is architecture.
We built it.
Which means it can be altered.
Amended.
Cut back.
Or, where necessary, abolished.
That is the part modern bureaucratic societies seem almost psychologically incapable of remembering: institutions are not sacred geology.
They are artifacts.
Human-made contraptions.
And contraptions can be dismantled.
What we cannot keep doing is manufacturing the very tools used against us and then acting scandalized that someone picked them up.
If a weapon exists, someone will use it.
That is not cynicism.
That is anthropology.
If a loophole exists, it will be exploited.
If a procedural cudgel exists, someone will swing it.
If a legal labyrinth can be weaponized, eventually it will be.
Iron law.
People treat this as some tragic corruption of otherwise innocent systems.
No.
It is often the foreseeable consequence of designing systems that invite abuse.
Stuff a civilization with books full of vague, contradictory, often nonsensical rules and regulations, and sooner or later those books stop being safeguards.
They become ammunition.
And then citizens find themselves governed not by law but by interpretive warfare.
By process.
By procedural ambush.
By whoever can weaponize complexity fastest.
At which point one should perhaps stop blaming only the opportunists.
Consider welfare abuse.
A perennial moral melodrama.
Who is to blame?
The abuser?
Certainly, in part.
But what of those who built a structure in which abuse became easy, rational, and often rewarded?
That question is less emotionally satisfying, which is why people avoid it.
But it is the more serious question.
The abuser is often incidental.
The architecture is the real scandal.
And the same applies here.
This obsession with denouncing every fresh abuse while refusing to prune the machinery enabling it is civilizational masochism.
One might as well install revolving doors on a vault and denounce thieves.
At some point one must look in the mirror.
Do we wish to be ruled by proliferating cliques of activists, litigators, NGO clerics and professional moral entrepreneurs—many making very comfortable livings manufacturing crises and monetizing outrage?
Or by something closer to sane structures?
Because these are not equivalent arrangements.
The present system systematically amplifies the ruthless.
That is what excessive proceduralism does.
It favors those most willing to exploit friction.
Those least burdened by scruple.
Those for whom law is not principle but instrument.
And sensible voices?
They drown.
Not because reason is weaker.
Because reason does not scream as effectively.
Politics has become a sport for the loud.
An arena rewarding theatrical aggression, symbolic combat, and permanent indignation.
Substance, meanwhile, is treated almost as a handicap.
It complicates pirouettes.
And politicians live by pirouettes.
One must forever spin.
Dodge.
Gesture.
Feign gravity while saying nothing fatal.
Actual substance makes the dance harder.
So naturally the dance prevails.
But again—
this is designed.
Or at least permitted.
Which means it can be undesigned.
The answer to weaponized law is not merely lamenting those who weaponize law.
It is reducing the arsenal.
Fewer absurd rules.
Fewer activist openings.
Less interpretive fog.
More hard limits.
More simplicity.
Less priestcraft.
Because complexity does not always protect liberty.
Often it strangles it.
There is a strange modern superstition that every problem demands another layer of regulation.
Usually the opposite is true.
Many problems persist precisely because too much has already been layered on.
Sometimes civilization advances not by adding.
But by cutting.
By removing.
By saying this no longer serves.
And if foreign actors can use domestic legal structures to wound the country itself, perhaps the indictment falls first on the structures.
Not merely those clever enough to exploit them.
If something can be used, it will be used.
That was never the mystery.
The mystery is why societies keep forging blades and then behaving surprised at the blood.