Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's case is a marvel of the legal imagination: to quash a sex scandal that might have crimped his chances, Donald Trump bought the silence of a porn actress, therefore that $130,000 sum is an unreported campaign expense and the former president belongs in jail. Could it be, though, that Democrats' real goal is to avoid running against Ron DeSantis, so firing up the MAGA faithful is an effort to ensure that is how things play out in the primaries?

What next? Is the Russian nuclear threat a veto of any effective response to Putin's aggression? Would this not signify the death of NATO? Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson and other like-minded isolationists, you are fools

Cannibalized by the green Left in the inner cities, faced with declining union membership and the loss of support from the working and lower-middle classes in the regions and outer suburbs, Labor should savour its post-election triumphalism while it can. The Liberals took their lumps this time, next time the demographic pain will be theirs

What is so often called 'the science' has little in common with the scientific. Take CMOs and climateers, for example, who presume a papal authority when invoking their alleged expertise, all doubts and doubters fit only to be damned. Thus are dominant narratives born and sustained, rendering sceptics fit only to be shunned and damned

Chief medical officers have become the fonts of all wisdom and knowledge, gurus whose dictates our elected representatives insist must be accepted without question. Politically, it's a neat trick to offload responsibility with a shrug and variations on 'we heed the experts'. Practically, that refusal to lead has fostered a multi-faceted disaster for which no end is in sight

Like Hitler, Xi has nibbled, cribbed and bluffed to build his militarised islands, abrogate the Hong Kong accords and persecute the Uighurs. So far opposition has been minimal, as was the case when Germany reclaimed the Rhineland, but what if he moves on Taiwan? A ring of nuclear-armed neighbours would seem the best way of denying that question its answer

For those who still regard the State as servant, not master, to see a significant section of the population bleating its approval of a pyjama-clad lady's arrest for no greater crime than a dissident Facebook post was to despair. COVID isn't the only plague. Amongst conservatives, an epidemic of spinelessness

Being branded 'batshit crazy' for expressing concern that a once great state is led by a liar and policed by brass-encrusted apparatchiks is hardly likely to restore confidence in a police force beset by scandals, from stitching up a cardinal to turning Lawyer X against her clients. If Daniel Andrews is allowed to continue, his police will become the enemy of the people, not their defenders

Why are so many of our education, media and business elites totally unmoored from traditional belief and culture? The loss of civilisational confidence, I would suggest, obviates any need for the jackboot to enforce conformity with the new ethos