When church and state overlap, brutality follows, and justice bends with the whip. Blurred lines between religion and government produced the Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch trials, the Crusades, the Huguenot persecutions, and the brutality campaigns of the Holy Roman Empire, to list an easy few, all featuring sadism, torture, and bloodlust in the name of religion.

I’m usually glued to the TV when a president, sitting justices, and members of Congress come together in one room — separate branches in one hallowed space, a time capsule played forward from men in powdered wigs.

By now everyone reading this knows that Stephen Colbert was facing legal repercussions if he aired his interview with James Talarico on Monday’s Late Show. It’s also clear that Trump’s FCC is suddenly, just in time for the midterms, targeting left-leaning talk shows under the “equal time” rule, a rule that hasn’t applied to talk shows since 1959.

Parts of the winter world are frozen. Europe, the U.S. Midwest, and even Southern states are enduring the worst cold in years as the North Pole rapidly melts, pushing frigid Arctic air through a weakened polar vortex into non-Arctic regions.

Last week, I watched the Attorney General of the United States sneer at the rule of law and felt sick. I’ve been a federal trial lawyer for decades, and there was the titular head of American law defecating on it to applause from Fox News, who called Bondi’s performance “entertaining.”

Despite repeated judicial rulings rejecting Trump’s 2020 election claims, he persists. Proving that his ego burned through his prefrontal cortex and seared his last shard of reasoning capacity, after his attempt to extort Minnesota voter rolls failed, Trump’s FBI raided an election center in Georgia and seized them directly. Both acts were preludes to a dangerous fantasy, one that ends in “taking over” national elections.