Do readers recall the incident three years ago when someone tried to kill the US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh? That person was last week sentenced to a paltry eight years in prison (barely a dozen times more than a disliked tweet can get you in Britain these days). This eight-year sentence, by the way, is far below the sentencing guideline for attempted murder and is being appealed by the Department of Justice. All the same, the incident is a good illustration of how captured by the left are our legacy media and lawyerly castes. One of the big three US TV networks, NBC, described this convicted assailant as ‘a woman’ despite the fact this person has a penis, a prostate, no breasts, no uterus, and trillions of XY chromosomes without a single XX one to be found. He’s a man. You know it. I know it. Your progressive friends know it. But the sentencing judge made relevant this man’s desire to be a woman. And, of course, that same NBC network had described the assailant as ‘a man’ only half a year ago. The brains of so many in the legacy media and the lawyerly caste have been infected with wokery and left-wing progressivism and identity politics that the old established norms are under serious threat. The cases in the UK of treating those opposed to mass immigration differently to the way pro-Palestinian activists are treated are now legion. Two-tier policing is as obvious there as was the senility of Joe Biden from nearly the start of his administration – though that same left-leaning legacy media repeatedly denied Biden was anything other than ‘his best self ever’ (right up until the first scheduled debate with Trump when it was so obvious to those who don’t follow the news closely that the Dems had to try Kamala instead, probably making the mistake of switching too soon – not too late – because Kamala is nearly as vacuous as Biden, just a lot younger, and any exposure to the public at all was lethal to her chances).

By the way, this widening divide between the lawyers and judges and mainstream media types (on the one hand) and your average voter (on the other) has been clear for years. We saw that in Australia in spades during the whole Voice debate. We have some 38 law schools in this country packed full of legal academics and yet by my count only four of us were prepared to come out publicly against that woeful proposal. The Yes proponents were myriad. The same lopsided support for this identity politics proposal was evident as regards our judges and our lawyers. One top barrister even implied those on the No side were motivated by racism. And, of course, support for the Yes case dwarfed that for No in the legacy media. Be clear;  today’s lawyerly caste has been educated in very left-wing law schools and the median lawyer’s and judge’s political views are standards of deviation to the left of the median voter’s views.

We see this with views on mass immigration and even illegal immigration. In Britain. In Canada. In the US. And yes, here in Australia. We see it with regard to democratic politics even, and the response to what is sneeringly described as ‘populist parties’ (though for the life of me all that term seems to mean in the mouths of sanctimonious progressives is that the party has adopted policies that they don’t like – but are nevertheless popular with voters – as regards big-ticket culture war issues and immigration and judicial activism).

This has come to a head in the US and will be doing so in Britain and Canada soon.  In the US, Trump is fighting back on all these culture war issues, and he’s winning. And the progressive left is apoplectic about it. The border is closed and Trump is deporting people, as many as possible. He has taken on the affirmative action, anti-merit DEI brigade everywhere he can. And, boy, oh boy, is he fighting the climate change crusaders. On all these issues the gap between the average view of voters and lawyers is wide. So too between the average view of voters and mainstream journalists.

And there are some big issues looming in Britain and Canada. Start with the former.  The UK Conservative party, the one that reneged on just about every promise it made to voters over its 14 years in office, is doing so badly in the polls that it now has realised it needs to move in a big way towards the positions of Nigel Farage and the Reform party that has a massive lead in all of the British polls. So the Tories are now, at last, promising to deport hundreds of thousands of people per year. They have promised to undo Tony Blair’s constitutional reforms that in my view have deeply wounded the British constitution, the world’s most successful. That will mean repeal of the statutory bill of rights, known as the Human Rights Act. It will mean resiling or withdrawing from at least two big treaties, including the European Convention on Human Rights which has been judicially remade in quite remarkable and ‘favourable to progressives’ ways.  And the Tories did this solely because Farage and Reform are going to do so. But take it from me; the exact same bifurcation of society that we are seeing in the US we will see in Britain when Reform wins (by itself or with Tory support) after the next election. I guarantee you that you’ll see some serious rearguard actions by the lawyers and judges with as much support as the legacy media can give them. Now Mr Trump has shown that these groups can be overcome. But you have to have a backbone and a willingness to fight, neither of which we see in Australia’s Liberal party.

As for Canada, a big battle is looming there as regards its entrenched, potent Charter of Rights. This was brought into being in 1982 without being put to a referendum or made the subject of an election. Since then it has completely changed my native Canada. The unelected judges there are now more powerful, I think, than even the top US judges.  Nearly every social policy decision is made or shaped or has to be signed off by the judges. And what looms? Well, to bring this Charter of Rights into existence Pierre Trudeau some four decades ago had to insert a ‘notwithstanding clause’, a provision that allows the elected legislators (for some of the rights, not all of them) to override the judges’ view. Quebec makes use of it a fair bit. A few other provinces have occasionally. But nationally the Tories have not ever invoked it – the judges pretty much never are inclined to invalidate left-wing legislation. Nevertheless, the judges are now mooting rewriting this provision to make it weaker and give themselves even more power. It’s like the Canadian judges want to copy the incredible judicial activism of India’s and Israel’s judges.

This will be a test. We are living through the biggest inflation of judicial power in the common law world ever, under an alliance of progressive left-wing parties and the lawyerly caste and top judges and the legacy media. If they can’t win in the court of public opinion, well, there are other courts aren’t there?