Tony Greenstein on “The Most Important Half-Hour of My Life”

Anti-Zionism as “Terrorism”

BILL ASTORE

AUG 28, 2026

Until today I’d never heard of Tony Greenstein and his battle against being falsely accused by the British government of recruiting for and supporting Hamas. Why the accusation? What motivated it? It may not surprise you that he was quickly found innocent by a jury of his peers, because when you read what he actually wrote, you’ll clearly see none of what he said was pro-Hamas or pro-terrorism. As to why the accusation and what motivated it, Greenstein’s statement to the jury explains it quite well. In fact, his speech is brilliant and should be carefully read by all lovers of liberty and justice for all.

Here is Tony Greenstein’s speech. I first saw it at ColdType; I copied the text from Greg Hadfield’s site on Medium.

Tony Greenstein

1. WHY I AM SPEAKING TO YOU MYSELF

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

First, a word about why I have chosen to address you in person rather than through my barrister, Lawrence McNulty. My decision implies no criticism of Lawrence. It is simply this: when my liberty is at stake, I wish to speak to you directly rather than through someone else. It is my words that are on that indictment. When someone is accused of meaning something he never meant, he should be the one to tell you what he meant.

I am not a barrister. I hope you will bear that in mind. However what I will do is speak from the heart. I am seventy-two years old. I have been arguing in public for more than fifty years, and this may be the most important half hour of argument in my life.

The prosecution say that I invited people to support an Islamic group called Hamas while accepting that I didn’t support Hamas myself. Think about that for a moment. Why should I invite people to support a group that I don’t support and never have supported? It is illogical.

According to the Prosecution’s opening statement, although I did not mention Hamas by name in my X posts, my “reference to support for the ‘Gaza ghetto uprising’ — in that specific context, on that specific date — can only have meant support for Hamas”.

In order to sustain their case the Prosecution fixated on one sentence in a blog of 10 pages, concerning the congratulation of Hamas for a well planned and audacious attack. In other words if you ever say anything about any group then you are a supporter if not a recruiting sergeant.

In fact my blog is cut off in the Bundle. At 1060 words. In fact it went on for some 1935 words, including a leading article from an Israeli paper, Ha’aretz and two contributions from American Jewish political scientist, Norman Finkelstein. That is in addition to 2000 words in the comments.

Even on the one piece they produced they had to ensure that you didn’t see all of the evidence. Let alone produce uncut the 15 or so blogs that demonstrated that I didn’t support Hamas and never had.

According to the Prosecution logic Kemi Badenoch supporting Starmer’s decision not to make British bases available for the war against Iran means she supports the Labour Party.

It is like being told that the Pope has supported abortion by helping out women who have had abortion. The fact that you support one action of a group does not mean that you therefore support the group itself. That logic escapes the Prosecution, although it should be obvious that supporting one action of a group doesn’t mean supporting the group itself.

2. WHO I AM

Before I make my case, you are entitled to know a little of my background. Firstly I am a parent, with 4 children, 3 sons and a daughter. Although I am separated from my wife, Fiona she was in the public gallery yesterday with our 35 year old son, Daniel who is severely autistic. Fiona and myself are Daniel’s carers.

I went to Brighton Polytechnic in 1974 where I obtained an honours degree in Applied Sciences. In 1996 I obtained an MA in Colonial History from Birkbeck, London University and between 2000/2 I obtained a law degree from Sussex University and the following year a Legal Practice Certificate from the College of Law in Guildford.

Apart from being a blogger I have written for, among other papers and web sites The Guardian, New Statesman, Tribune Magazine (Orwell), Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Middle East Monitor, Open Democracy and many others

I was born in 1953, in the shadow of the Holocaust. The Holocaust had ended only eight years before. My father’s parents came to England from Poland and left the rest of the family behind. Nearly all of them died in the Holocaust in Treblinka extermination camp. My father mentioned it just once in his whole life. Just one sister, who jumped off a deportation train, is known to have survived. Over three million of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews were murdered.

My father was Rabbi Solomon Greenstein. In 1936 he stood at Cable Street, where the working people of the East End — Jews and dockers together — stopped Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts from marching through a Jewish neighbourhood. That is the house I was raised in. Not a house of quietism. A house where you stood in the road.

So I am extremely aware of the trauma caused by the Holocaust. It is not history to me. It is the empty chairs at my family’s table. But what I have always fought against was those who used the murder of 6 million Jews in order to justify the murder and genocide of others. That is why authored Zionism During the Holocaust.

I was brought up as a religious Zionist. In 1967, when Israel captured what is now known as Gaza and the West Bank, I shared in the joy of fellow Jews. None of us knew then what horrors would be visited on the indigenous Palestinians who lived there.

Then, at the King David School in Liverpool, I was asked to take part in a school debate on whether Zionism was Right or Wrong and because nobody else would take that side I agreed to play devil’s advocate. In the course of researching the topic I suddenly realised that I had grown up with a series of fabrications and lies. The refugees of 1948 had not left voluntarily on the orders of the Arab regimes. They had been expelled at the point of a gun, and after a series of massacres. The documents that proved it were classified and are still classified.

This was the pivotal moment of my life. From then on I became a Jewish anti-Zionist. And I learnt something my school had never taught me: that anti-Zionism had been the majority trend amongst Jews until the second world war. It is a Jewish tradition, as old as Zionism, and I stand in that tradition. Today 44% of young British Jews describe themselves as non- or anti-Zionist. We are not a curiosity. We are a tradition, coming back.

And I have lived that tradition the way most of our Jewish ancestors did. For fifty years I have opposed fascist groups on the streets. Because racism and fascism led to the holocaust. I was also a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

I am a Jewish socialist. The Palestinian organisation whose politics I have supported for decades is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — secular, socialist, founded by a Christian Palestinian, George Habash.

Hamas is an Islamist movement. Its full name is the Islamic Resistance Movement. Ask yourselves — is a Jewish secular socialist who has spent twenty years criticising political Islam and Hamas a plausible recruiting sergeant for it?

And as you weigh that question, understand what it is to be me, standing in this dock. Someone who has spent fifty years fighting fascism on the streets of this country. I never imagined it could happen here in the mother country of democracy that I would be facing 14 years imprisonment for writing a blog and tweeting under the Terrorism Act 2000.

3. HOW THIS CASE CAME TO YOU

At half past six on 20th December a dozen counter-terror police raided my home, seized my electronic devices, and arrested me — on the basis of a single tweet posted a month previously. We live, ladies and gentlemen, in dystopian and Orwellian times.

When I applied for the return of my devices, the officer in charge explained in a witness statement why they were keeping them. They needed, he said, to fully understand my “mind set and ideology” from my internet search history, and from how, “and indeed if”, I talk about Hamas with others away from the public domain.

Is it really the job of the police to act as amateur psychologists, inquiring into people’s minds?

There might be a justification for all this if they thought I was going to set off an explosive device. But that is obviously not the case. It was the police themselves who gave me bail the same day, with three relatively trivial restrictions — which, on appeal, Westminster magistrates watered down further. Clearly, they did not think I was a terrorist.

But the Terrorism Act has been creating a whole new category of terrorist. On the Home Office’s own figures, arrests under the Terrorism Acts have leapt in 2024 from around two hundred to more than three thousand in 2025 — a more than tenfold increase.

And the profile of the average terrorist has changed too. It used to be a 31 year-old man. It is now more likely to be a 59 year-old woman. You may ask yourselves whether the word “terrorist” has quietly been given a new meaning — and whether I am standing in front of you because of it.

And when they interviewed me, I did not hide behind “no comment.” as my solicitor advised me. I answered every question for over an hour, and came back three months later, voluntarily, and did it again. When they asked me directly whether I supported Hamas against the Israeli army, I gave them an answer I will repeat again, because it is my whole case:

“I would probably support the devil against the Israeli army. That doesn’t mean I support the devil in itself.”

And if the devil exists it exists amongst those who prohibit anaesthetics entering Gaza so that children have to endure amputations without the benefit of pain relief. The devil exists amongst those who deliberately starve children to death because they rationalise that those children will only grow up to be terrorists. It exists among those who bomb tent encampments and literally burn children and their parents alive. It exists amongst those who call Palestinians “human animals” the same phrase used by Himmler, the head of the SS about Jewish children in a speech on October 4, 1943 to senior SS Generals.

In a situation where there is a conflict, you support the oppressed rather than the oppressor. That is not support for an organisation. That is a moral position — one, I might add, with a rather long Jewish pedigree.

4. WHAT YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO DECIDE

Her Honour will direct you on the law, and what she tells you about the law you must take from her, not from me. But you know by now what the prosecution must make you sure of, and it is worth setting out plainly, because everything I say from here on hangs from it.

They must make you sure of three things. That Hamas was proscribed on 7 October 2023 — that is agreed, and always was. That my words in fact invited support for Hamas. And that I knew, at the time, that that is what I was doing.

Three things. All three. Sure of each.

Now notice what is not on that list.

It is not on that list whether you agree with my opinions about Israel and Palestine. It is not on that list whether you find those opinions congenial, or offensive — some of you may find that they are. And it is not on that list whether Hamas ought to be proscribed. That is the government’s decision. It is not mine, and it is not yours.

The charge is not holding an opinion. The charge is inviting other people to support an organisation, Hamas. Those are two different things — and every single question in this trial lives in the distance between them.

Hold on to that distinction, because I am now going to show you what I actually wrote.

5. WHAT I ACTUALLY WROTE

This case hinges on three short posts and one article. That is the entire alleged crime. So let us read it — carefully, the way the prosecution hopes you won’t.

First. Hamas is not mentioned. Not in the first tweet. Not in the second nor the third. Not once. The prosecution invite you to supply the name yourselves — because I did not supply it.

What I wrote was “the Gaza Ghetto Uprising.” And I chose the word ghetto deliberately, but not for the reason the prosecution imply.

Let me explain, for those of you who do not know the history. In the second world war, the Nazis walled the Jews of Warsaw, half a million of them into a ghetto — a sealed district, starved and diseased, from which the trains left for the Treblinka death camp. And in 1943 the young Jews who remained did something nobody expected. With a handful of smuggled pistols, against tanks and the SS, they rose. They knew they could not win. They rose because it was better to die resisting than to be led away quietly. It is one of the proudest moments in Jewish history.

The last surviving commander of that uprising was a man named Marek Edelman. And in his old age, Edelman wrote to the Palestinian resistance and addressed them as fellow fighters — much to Israel’s annoyance. When he died, Poland gave him a state funeral, a fifteen-gun salute, the President gave the oration. Israel did not send the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy. Edelman wasn’t a Zionist.

Edelman, who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, described Gaza as a ghetto. I have used his comparison for years before October 2023. Two million people, most of them refugees or the children of refugees, sealed into a strip of land under blockade for 16 years, where the majority are children who have never once been allowed out. When I wrote “ghetto,” I meant a ghetto. My blog supported the Uprising just as I would have supported the slave uprisings of the 19th century. That is a political opinion. It was a political opinion on 7 October 2023, and it is a political opinion now.

And here is the crazy thing. Read section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and ask what it would have made of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. If this Act had existed in 1944, they could have been classified as terrorists. So could the French Resistance. That is how widely this law is drawn — and it is worth remembering when you consider who it is now being pointed at. The definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2000 is no definition at all. It has been widely criticised, both by the Supreme Court in Gul and also by the Independent Reviewer of terrorism David Anderson QC as he then was.

Second. “PLEASE SHARE.” The prosecution say those two words are the invitation. Members of the jury, I have written a blog for 18 years. “Please share” means: read my article, pass it on, argue with it. Asking people to read what you have written is not asking them to support an organisation. If it were, every writer in this country would be standing where I am standing. My purpose was not to invite support for anyone. If I had wanted people to support a particular group I would have said it. I often ask for support for things such as the Al Tafawk kindergarten in Jenin. Nothing in the wording suggests that. The posts were advertising my blog. That is what writers do.

And here is what that “recruitment campaign” achieved. 56 views. 73 views. 58 views. Four shares between them. The prosecution’s case that this was an invitation to the public to support a proscribed organisation — is a fantasy that they have created out of nothing.

Third — the sentence the whole case rests on.”Whatever criticisms one can make of Hamas, we should congratulate them on this well planned and audacious attack.”

Note the words: “whatever criticisms.” Those are not the words of a recruiter. A recruiter does not open with the criticisms of the thing he is recruiting for. Those are the words of someone who has spent fifteen years making those criticisms in public — and I will show you the receipts in a moment.

And “well planned and audacious” — that is a description, not an endorsement. October 7 was well planned, and it was audacious. Israel had constructed a five billion dollar electronic fence, complete with drones, sensors and automatic machine guns, and it was breached in minutes. Retired generals said the same thing on television that week. Nobody raided their homes at dawn.

As for “Hamas should be congratulated” it is so obviously a figure of speech, not meant literally, that I am surprised that the prosecutor doesn’t blush every time she argues this.

And I will tell you what else I wrote that day, in the same article and its comments. I wrote that the retribution of Israel would be bloody and savage. I wrote to a commenter: “Graham, believe you me, I am apprehensive of the days ahead and Israel’s potential for genocide.” Apprehensive. Those are not the words of someone celebrating. They are the words of someone who feared exactly what was coming — and who, you may think, has been proved catastrophically right.

But you would not have read the latter comment because the version of the blog in your Bundle is only half the original (1060 words as opposed to 1935 words). The comments underneath were another 2,000 words and they too were not in your bundle. Why? Because it is clear that the conversation didn’t mention anyone joining Hamas. Anyone with eyes to see would understand that the blog was not an invitation to join Hamas.

It takes a certain malevolence to read that into the blog. And let it be clear that support for an action of a proscribed group is not the same as support for the group itself. expressing an opinion or belief that is shared by or coincides with the aims of a proscribed organization is not the same thing as expressing support for the organization itself That is or should be common senses. It is also good law as in the case ABJ decided recently in the Supreme Court.

So ask yourself the only question that matters. Where, in any of this, is the invitation? Did I ask anyone to join anything? Did I ask for money? Did I ask a single human being to take a single action — other than to read an article?

You may take those three posts and that article into your deliberation room and read them from beginning to end as many times as you like. You will not find it. It is not there. ‖

6. TWENTY YEARS OF MY OWN HEADLINES

The prosecution must also prove that I knew I was inviting support for Hamas. So let me show you what I have actually written about Hamas, over twenty years, under my own name. These are the titles of my articles:

We Support the Palestinian People of Gaza — not Hamas. March 2009.

Islamic Fascists Attack Children’s Summer Camp in Gaza. May 2010.

Hamas — Speaking with a Forked Tongue. December 2010.

The Lousy Hamas Government. February 2011.

Hamas Prevents Palestinian Students Studying Abroad. August 2011.

Hamas’s Attack on NGOs Resembles That of Israel. August 2011.

Hamas Pays the Price of Forced Islamicisation. April 2013.

How Israel Helped Create Hamas. July 2014.

Hamas Does Its Best to Make Palestinian Lives a Misery. February 2018.

Abbas and Hamas — Abuse and Torture of Palestinians. October 2018.

Ten years of headlines. I called them Islamic fascists. In print. In public. Under my own name. Do the titles of those blogs indicate support for Hamas?

And these are only some of them. You can be sure that if my writings helped the prosecution in any way, they would have given them to you to read rather than objecting to them.

I have spent my political life supporting the secular, socialist tradition of Palestine. So when the prosecution tell you that on the morning of 7 October 2023 I woke up and decided to become a recruiter for the Islamic Resistance Movement, you are entitled to ask: on what planet? ‖

7. WHY, THEN, AM I HERE? — ONE LAW FOR SOME

So if the words don’t say it, and the record contradicts it, you are entitled to ask the obvious question: why is this prosecution happening at all?

Let me answer it with a comparison, and you may draw your own conclusions.

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham — Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria — was a proscribed organisation in this country until October of last year. While it was still proscribed, and while its leader, who became Syria’s President, still had a ten million dollar bounty on his head, eminent British public figures — Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, and Rory Stewart, a former Conservative MP — travelled to Damascus to conduct a friendly, filmed interview with him. This is a regime whose forces have killed thousands of Christians, Druze and Alawites because of their religion. They came home and were effusive in their opinions about him, to audiences of hundreds of thousands.

Nobody raided their homes at half past six in the morning. Nobody seized their devices to investigate their “mind set and ideology.” A decision was taken not to trouble them.

Now, when a law is implemented against certain people and not others, that goes against the first principle of the rule of law. Either laws are applicable to all, or to none. To apply them only to those whose opinions the government of the day disagrees with — that is the hallmark of a police state, not a democracy.

And you do not have to take the point from me on trust, because the same double standard is written on a larger canvas. Parliament made genocide and war crimes offences under the International Criminal Court Act 2001. Yet successive British governments have gone on supplying arms to what most of the world regard as a genocide in Gaza, and yet no minister has ever stood where I am standing.

This is not a new story. Nelson Mandela — whose statue stands today in Parliament Square, facing the Houses of Parliament — was described by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as a terrorist, and the movement he led as a terrorist movement. If this Act had been in force in those decades, that movement would have been proscribed — and anyone in Britain who wrote “we should congratulate them” would have been at risk of standing exactly where I am standing now. Mandela himself said:

“The West sees liberation movements as terrorist movements — and that is why I am accused of supporting terrorism.”

Now let me be precise about what I am saying, because it is not what the prosecution may pretend I am saying. I am not comparing any organisation to Nelson Mandela. The comparison is not between organisations at all. It is between governments — then and now — and how easily they attach the word terrorist to whoever opposes the policy of the day. Today, Mandela is widely admired. The label of terrorism should be applied to those who are terrorists not those who are not. ‖

8. THE STATE HAS ALWAYS PROSECUTED OPINIONS

Judges have always insisted that the trials before them are not political. They said it at the trial of Emmeline Pankhurst in 1912. Chief Prosecutor and Attorney General Sir Rufus Isaacs, emphasised that:

‘Suffrage is not the issue, it is the criminal behaviour of the suffragettes and their incitement to partake in militant activity at which 54 windows were broken.’

That was also the view of the Judge, Mr Justice Coleridge, who handed out a sentence of 9 months to be served in the second division of prison, despite the plea of the jury for clemency.

The Home Secretary immediately stepped in to have Pankhurst transferred to the First Division of prison — a division reserved for political prisoners. A century ago the state admitted what today it denies: that some prisoners were political.

And consider what this country has done, within my lifetime, with laws that prosecuted people for what they were and what they said. The law of blasphemous libel — repealed. The law of gross indecency, which criminalised sexual conduct between men and destroyed Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing was also repealed, and more than repealed: under the Alan Turing Law of 2017, every conviction was wiped out, as if it had never existed. Parliament itself has accepted that there are times when it has made mistakes, and the law of the day was wrong.

The Editor of Gay News, Dennis Lemon, was the last person sentenced to 6 months imprisonment suspended in July 1977 for blasphemous libel for suggesting Jesus was gay. The Judge at his trial, Alan King Hamilton, stated that homosexuality was responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire. The judge at Oscar Wilde’s trial bemoaned the fact that he could only sentence him to 2 years in prison.

Judges have nearly always been the fiercest opponents of free speech. The reason is simple. As the Law Society Gazette pointed out on 25 June 2019 ‘Senior judges “most socially exclusive” of all professionals, 75% are Oxbridge educated and 65% having gone to private school.

When the state prosecutes opinions, it always says it is prosecuting something else. And usually it eventually, apologises but usually too late.

Freedom of speech in this country was not granted to us from above, and it did not arrive with the European Convention. It was won through political struggle — at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, where cavalry rode down women and children; by the Chartists at Newport who were brutally slaughtered for peacefully demanding democratic reforms in 1839. People died for the right I exercised on 7 October 2023: the right to publish an opinion the government doesn’t like.

Benjamin Franklin warned: “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” George Orwell — a man who knew something about both socialism and dystopia — put it in one sentence:

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

And if you want the alternative philosophy — the philosophy of this prosecution — it was stated with admirable honesty by the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin:

“There is freedom of speech — but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”

Ladies and gentlemen, you may think that sentence sums up a dawn raid over a tweet rather well. I was arrested, not for anything I did, but for what I said. This case is not about terrorism. It is about freedom of speech.

This is why the government’s own Independent Reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson KC, was critical of the new terrorism laws. I quote from his 2014 Report on Terrorism Legislation :

a) To afford over-broad discretions to Ministers, prosecutors and police is undesirable in itself. As the Supreme Court maintained in R v Gul, 91 it leaves citizens in the dark and risks undermining the rule of law.

b) To render people subject to the terrorism laws whom no sensible person would think of as terrorists risks destroying the trust upon which these special powers depend for their acceptance by the public.

I have committed no violence. I have threatened noone. I have incited nobody. Nobody in this courtroom suggests otherwise. I wrote an article.

And for that article, I face a maximum sentence of fourteen years in prison. Fourteen years. For three posts and a blog. Ask yourself what kind of country are we becoming to send a seventy-two-year-old Jewish grandfather — a carer — to prison for fourteen years over three tweets and a blog article? ‖

9. YOU — THE LAMP THAT SHOWS THAT FREEDOM LIVES

Which brings me, finally, to you, members of the Jury.

Let me be clear about what I am asking of you, and what I am not. I am not asking you to set aside the law. Her Honour will direct you on the law, and you should follow her directions. I am not asking you to agree with my politics. You may think I am wrong about everything I believe, and it would change nothing about your task.

The role of the Judge is concerned with the law. The role of juries is to ensure justice is done. That is why successive governments have slowly whittled away at the right to trial by jury. The previous Justice Secretary David Lammy wanted to abolish them for half of those who are now entitled to a jury. I have no doubt that although Andy Burnham has stopped these proposals they will return.

Because here is what the law itself gives you. You are the sole judges of the facts, of the context, and of the meaning of words. Not the prosecution. Not the police analyst who selected the phrases. Twelve ordinary people, precisely because ordinary people know what words mean. The prosecution does not get to dictate that “please share my article” means “support Hamas.” That question belongs to you, and to nobody else in this building.

That is not an accident of our constitution. It is the whole point of it. Lord Patrick Devlin — one of the greatest judges this country produced — said:

“Trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.”

The jury, he said, is “an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man’s idea of what is fair and just.”

Dame Heather Hallett, who sat on the Court of Appeal for 14 years, 2005–17, gave the 2017 Blackstone Lecture on the role of the jury. She is Chair of the COVID Inquiry and previously of the inquiry into the terrorist atrocity on 7.7: She said:

A jury may refuse to convict in spite of the law and the evidence because it concludes that the law is an unjust law. The jury passes its verdict on the law. Secondly, it ensures that the prosecution and the judge are on trial.

There is a plaque inside the entrance to the Old Bailey. It commemorates the most famous legal case of all — Bushell’s. The jury in 1670, refused to convict two Quakers, William Penn and William Mead, for the crime of unlawful preaching. For that refusal the jurors were locked up for two nights without food, water, fire — or a chamber pot. They did not budge. And out of their stubbornness, in Bushell’s case, came the right that you now hold: the right of a jury to deliver its verdict according to its conscience and its convictions, and to answer to no one for it.

I am asking you to do something far more modest than those twelve did. I am asking you to read three posts and an article, in their full context, with your own common sense — and to answer honestly the only two questions in this case. Were those words an invitation to support Hamas? And was I, a Jewish socialist with twenty years of published criticism of Hamas, knowingly recruiting for them?

And understand that your answer will not stay in this room. If these three posts are terrorism, then the word has a new meaning for everyone in this country. Every student who shares an article. Every pensioner who retweets the wrong opinion. Every writer, every blogger, every one of your neighbours with a social media account and a view about a war. Can it really be the law of England that any of them — that any of you — will be condemned to fourteen years of prison for a tweet? You have the power, today, to answer that question. Whatever you answer is, it will be remembered long after this trial is forgotten.

If you are left in doubt as to whether I was genuinely inviting people to support a proscribed organisation — you must acquit. That is not politics. That is the law. ‖

10. FINALLY

I told you at the beginning what it is to be me, standing in this dock. Let me end with why it should matter to you.

I was born eight years after the gates of the camps were opened. It was British soldiers who opened the gates at Belsen. Whatever quarrels I have had with British governments — and you have heard today that I have had many — I have never once doubted what that meant.

I do not say that to ask for your sympathy. I say it because my family’s history taught me one thing above all others. The moment that matters is never the loud one. It is the quiet one — when ordinary, decent people are asked to go along with something that does not sit right with them, and they do, because it is easier, because the language is technical, because someone in authority has assured them that it is necessary. I ask you to ensure that no one else goes through what I have experienced.

Not merely a case like this hanging over my head for 3 years, but the harassment that I have experienced from the State. Five times in the past two years I have been debanked for what is called ‘regulatory reasons’. First was Nationwide Bank which I had been with for a quarter of a century, then HSBC which closed an account my wife and I opened for our son, Daniel’s disability benefits. Then First Direct which I had been with 33 years, just 3 fewer than the bank itself existed. Then this year Santander and Kent Reliance building society.

It is clear that some agency of the state — the NCA most likely — fed false and malicious information to the banks and under money laundering legislation they are not allowed to tell me.

Lord Lane, Lord Chief Justice of England from 1980 to 1992, put it best of all in a House of Lords debate on April 7 1989:

“Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn’t stand on the doorstep with toothbrush moustache and swastika armband — it creeps up insidiously… step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realises that it is gone.”

You are twelve ordinary people, and this is one of the quiet moments. You are not being asked to make a protest, or to change any law. You are being asked to look at three short messages and one article, and to answer, on your conscience: was that an invitation to support Hamas — and did I know that that was what I was doing?

Although I am on trial today, it is really freedom of speech in this country that is on trial. The pretext for this attack is terrorism. However that is all it is. A pretext. I will finish with a quote from one of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, who said:

‘Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither’.

Thank you members of the jury.

*****

Coda: Sadly, I doubt the British government cares that they lost this case. The intent was (and is) to silence anyone with the temerity to take a public stance against mass murder in Gaza. Tony Greenstein’s prosecution was about setting an example, and even though he was acquitted, the long and laborious fight he had to wage to clear his name will likely deter others from expressing “unpopular” opinions about Zionist Israel. All credit, then, to those who refuse to be deterred—who refuse to be silenced despite threats of prosecution.

Ridding the World of Nuclear Weapons

W.J. Astore

A Seven-Point Plan to Reduce the Risk of Nuclear War

AUG 25, 2026

If Stephen Covey can make millions off the “7 habits of highly effective people,” surely I can make millions off a seven-point plan to reduce the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

Seriously, I recently came up with seven ideas to reduce the risk of nuclear war, and then I used the amazing power of ChatGPT to turn those seven ideas into a policy platform statement (see below). It did a fair job of it, though the prose is a bit boring.

I believe my seven-point plan would make the world a safer place. It would save America trillions of dollars through the cancellation of the Sentinel ICBM, the B-21 bomber, and the Golden Dome missile shield.

Here’s my simple seven-point plan of highly effective Americans:

1. A U.S. policy of no first use of nuclear weapons.

2. A commitment to global START talks to make major reductions to nuclear weapons arsenals, with the eventual goal (if possible) of total nuclear disarmament.

3. The end of Golden Dome and a revival of the ABM treaty.

4. Reconfiguration of the U.S. nuclear triad. Cancellation of the Sentinel ICBM and the B-21 Raider. Gradual retirement of Minuteman III ICBMs. U.S. nuclear deterrence to be centered on the most survivable leg of the triad: the Navy’s Ohio– and Columbia-class submarines.

5. Job loss associated with the cancellation of major nuclear weapons systems to be alleviated through investment in civilian infrastructure (roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and the like).

6. Major educational efforts to alert the world to the dangers of nuclear winter, weapons, and war.

7. An end to the Russia-Ukraine War and the alleviation of tensions between the U.S./NATO and Russia. Similarly, a reduction in tensions around similar potential nuclear flashpoints (e.g. the U.S./Taiwan versus China).

This devastating scene from “Terminator 2” must always remain science fiction.

*****

And here’s the policy statement generated using ChatGPT to flesh out that plan.

The continued existence of nuclear weapons remains the gravest threat to the survival of modern civilization. Although the Cold War ended more than thirty years ago, approximately 12,000 nuclear warheads remain in the arsenals of the world’s nuclear powers, with the overwhelming majority held by the United States and Russia (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute [SIPRI], 2025). At the same time, deteriorating arms control agreements, renewed great-power competition, and regional conflicts have increased the risk that nuclear weapons could again become instruments of war. The objective of U.S. nuclear policy should therefore be clear: maintain strategic stability while steadily reducing the probability that nuclear weapons are ever used. This platform advances seven mutually reinforcing initiatives designed to move the United States and the international community toward a safer and more secure world.

The first pillar of this platform is the adoption of a No First Use policy. The United States should formally declare that it will never initiate the use of nuclear weapons and will employ them only in retaliation against a nuclear attack. Such a declaration would reduce the danger of miscalculation during international crises and lessen the incentives for adversaries to launch their own weapons out of fear of a preemptive American strike. A No First Use doctrine would also strengthen the long-standing principle that nuclear weapons exist solely to deter nuclear aggression rather than to serve as instruments of battlefield warfare or coercive diplomacy. By embracing this doctrine, the United States would signal that nuclear weapons are political weapons of last resort, not usable military tools. Such leadership could encourage reciprocal restraint by other nuclear powers and reinforce global norms against nuclear use.

Second, the United States should recommit itself to comprehensive strategic arms control negotiations. Building upon the achievements of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) process and the New START Treaty, Washington should seek substantial bilateral reductions with Russia while laying the groundwork for future multilateral negotiations involving China, France, the United Kingdom, and other nuclear-armed states. The long-term objective should remain the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons if rigorous verification mechanisms and international security conditions make that goal achievable. Although complete nuclear disarmament cannot occur overnight, history demonstrates that negotiated reductions are possible. Since the late 1980s, U.S. and Russian arsenals have declined dramatically through verified agreements without undermining either nation’s security (U.S. Department of State, 2024). Renewed arms control would reduce costs, increase transparency, and decrease the likelihood of nuclear confrontation.

Third, the United States should discontinue pursuit of the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system and instead seek negotiations leading to renewed limitations on nationwide strategic missile defenses comparable to those established under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Strategic stability has historically depended upon the recognition that neither side can realistically expect to escape devastating retaliation following a nuclear attack. Large-scale missile defense systems risk undermining this stability by encouraging competitors to expand or modernize their offensive arsenals to overcome perceived defensive advantages. The result is an action-reaction cycle that fuels expensive arms races without improving long-term security. Reviving mutual constraints on strategic missile defenses would restore an important principle of Cold War arms control: that deterrence is strengthened when neither nation believes it can successfully fight and win a nuclear war.

Fourth, the United States should restructure its nuclear forces to emphasize the most survivable component of its deterrent. This platform therefore supports cancellation of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program and the B-21 Raider nuclear bomber while gradually retiring the aging Minuteman III ICBM force. America’s nuclear deterrent should instead rest primarily upon the Navy’s Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines and their Columbia-class successors. Because ballistic missile submarines are exceptionally difficult to detect and destroy, they provide a secure second-strike capability that guarantees retaliation against any nuclear aggressor. Maintaining a credible submarine-based deterrent would preserve strategic stability while eliminating the unique dangers posed by land-based missiles, which must remain on constant alert and may create pressure for rapid launch decisions during crises. A submarine-centered deterrent would continue to protect the United States while reducing the risks associated with hair-trigger nuclear postures.

Fifth, reductions in nuclear weapons programs should be accompanied by a robust economic transition strategy for affected workers and communities. Defense conversion should not leave engineers, skilled tradespeople, or manufacturing workers unemployed. Instead, federal investment should redirect this highly skilled workforce toward rebuilding America’s civilian infrastructure. Roads, bridges, water systems, electrical grids, schools, hospitals, public transportation, and renewable energy facilities all require substantial modernization. Redirecting resources from unnecessary nuclear modernization programs toward infrastructure would strengthen both national prosperity and national resilience while ensuring that communities dependent upon defense spending continue to enjoy stable employment opportunities. National security should be understood not only in military terms but also in terms of economic strength and public well-being.

Sixth, the United States should undertake a major educational initiative concerning the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. During the Cold War, public awareness of nuclear dangers contributed significantly to support for arms control agreements. Today, however, much of that awareness has faded. Educational programs in schools, universities, museums, and public media should explain the immediate effects of nuclear explosions as well as the broader environmental consequences identified by contemporary scientific research. Studies indicate that even a limited regional nuclear conflict could inject sufficient soot into the upper atmosphere to reduce global temperatures, disrupt agriculture, and threaten food supplies for billions of people (Robock et al., 2007; Xia et al., 2022). Greater public understanding of these consequences would encourage informed democratic debate and reinforce international efforts to prevent nuclear war.

Finally, this platform recognizes that arms control cannot succeed without diplomacy. The United States should actively pursue negotiated settlements that reduce tensions among the world’s major nuclear powers. Ending the Russia-Ukraine War through diplomacy consistent with international law and the sovereignty of states would substantially reduce the risk of direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. Likewise, sustained dialogue with China should seek to reduce military tensions surrounding Taiwan and establish reliable crisis communication mechanisms that lessen the danger of accidental escalation. Military deterrence remains necessary, but deterrence alone cannot provide lasting peace. Stable diplomatic relationships, confidence-building measures, and regular communication among adversaries are indispensable components of nuclear risk reduction.

Taken together, these proposals offer a coherent strategy for reducing the likelihood of nuclear catastrophe while maintaining a credible national defense. They reject the assumption that greater security necessarily requires ever-expanding nuclear arsenals and instead affirm that diplomacy, strategic restraint, and international cooperation provide more durable foundations for peace. The nuclear age has demonstrated that humanity possesses the capacity to destroy itself. The challenge of the twenty-first century is to demonstrate that it also possesses the wisdom to prevent that outcome. This platform seeks to move the United States toward that safer future.

References

Robock, A., Oman, L., & Stenchikov, G. L. (2007). Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals. Journal of Geophysical Research, 112(D13).

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (2025). SIPRI Yearbook 2025: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security.

U.S. Department of State. (2024). New START Treaty.

Xia, L., Robock, A., Scherrer, K., et al. (2022). Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection. Nature Food, 3, 586–596.

If you’ve read this far, thank you! Let’s help rid the world of nuclear weapons, or at least greatly reduce global nuclear arsenals.

On Violence

The Slow Strangulation of Compassion and Empathy in America

BILL ASTORE

AUG 21, 2026

Today I ran across this brief description of a new movie, “Mutiny,” that will sound very familiar:

“Mutiny” stars Jason Statham as yet another rogue hero out to right wrongs in the most violent ways possible. It’s set mostly on a ship being used for human trafficking. Other plot shenanigans, conspiracy theories, and the like abound … But you’re here for the carnage. On that score, ‘Mutiny’ delivers.

How inspiring! Another rogue hero out to set the world right while amassing a very high body count in gruesome ways. I’ve been watching movies like this since “Dirty Harry” with Clint Eastwood in 1971. (Loved that movie, by the way, despite Pauline Kael’s warning about its fascist leanings.)

One thing you can say about American culture: it loves righteous violence.

As the U.S. government enables genocide in Gaza, as it sends and sells deadly weaponry around the globe, as it brags about having the world’s most lethal military, as its commander-in-chief promises to exterminate ancient civilizations as with Iran, Americans should recognize we are immersed in an ultra-violent culture, one that advocates exterminatory violence, even seeing it as righteous and God-sanctioned.

For decades now, we’ve looked the other way as the U.S. military has transitioned to a professional caste of “warriors” and “warfighters” rather than a citizen military drawn equally from the people and dedicated to lawful defensive action only.

It’s not that the U.S. military was ever “woke”: it’s that the U.S. military has never stopped waging wars and killing people, whether in the name of spreading freedom or in service to Zionist Israel.

We as Americans are meant to revel in our ability to dominate. Collectively, we see ourselves as the “rogue hero” of so many action films, killing evildoers in all sorts of creatively violent ways. We’re high on our own supply of warrior-violence.

It reminds me of this article I originally wrote back in 2013. Like the Roman Empire, we have no use for compassion. “Strength and (militarized) honor” is the cry. No mercy to America’s enemies. Evildoers must be eradicated. 

Anyhow, here’s that article I wrote 13 years ago, before anyone could imagine men like Trump and Hegseth in charge of America’s vast military machine.

Bread and Circuses in Rome and America (originally posted in 2013)

The expression “bread and circuses“ captures a certain cynical political view that the masses can be kept happy with fast food (think Cartman’s “Cheesy Poofs” on South Park) and faster entertainment (NASCAR races, NFL games, and the like). In the Roman Empire, it was bread and chariot races and gladiatorial games that filled the belly and distracted the mind, allowing emperors to rule as they saw fit.

There’s truth to the view that people can be kept tractable as long as you fill their bellies and give them violent spectacles to fill their free time. Heck, Americans are meekly compliant even when their government invades their privacy and spies upon them. But there’s a deeper, more ominous, sense to bread and circuses that is rarely mentioned in American discourse. It was pointed out to me by Amy Scanlon.

In her words:

Basically ancient Rome was a society that completely revolved around war, and where compassion was considered a vice rather than a virtue… [The] Romans saw gladiatorial contests not as a form of decadence but as a cure for decadence. And decadence to the Romans had little to do with sexual behavior or lack of a decent work ethic, but a lack of military-style honor and soldierly virtues. To a Roman compassion was a detestable vice, which was considered both decadent and feminine. Watching people and animals slaughtered brutally [in the arena] was seen as a way to keep the civilian population from this ‘weakness’ because they didn’t see combat…

Scanlon then provocatively asks, “Could our society be sliding towards those Roman attitudes in a bizarre sort of way?”

I often think that America suffers from an empathy gap. We are simply not encouraged to put ourselves in the place of others. For example, how many Americans fancy the idea of a foreign power operating drones in our sovereign skies, launching missiles at gun-toting Americans suspected by this foreign power of being “militants“? Yet we operate drones in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, killing suspected militants with total impunity. Even when innocent women and children are killed, our emperors and our media don’t encourage us to have compassion for them. We are basically told to think of them as collateral damage, regrettable, perhaps, but otherwise inconsequential.

Certainly, our military in the last two decades has put new stress on American troops as “warriors” and “warfighters,” a view more consistent with the hardened professionals of the Roman Empire than with the citizen-soldiers of the Roman Republic. Without thinking too much about it, we’ve come to see our troops as an imperial guard, ever active on the ramparts of our empire. War, meanwhile, is seen not as a last course of defense but as a first course to preempt the evil designs of the many hidden enemies of America. Our troops, therefore, are our protectors, our heroes, the defenders of America, even though that “defense” treats the entire globe as a potential killing field.

Scanlon’s view of the Roman use of bread and circuses — as a way to kill compassion to ensure the brutalization of Roman civilians and thus their compliance (or at least their complacency) vis-à-vis Imperial expansion and domestic policing — is powerful and sobering.

At the same time, the Obama administration is increasingly couching violent military intervention in humanitarian terms. Deploying troops and tipping wars in our favor is done in the name of defeating petty tyrants (e.g. Khadafy in Libya; Is Assad of Syrianext?). Think of it as our latest expression of “compassion.”

All things considered, perhaps our new national motto should be: When in America, do as the Roman Empire would do. Eat to your fill of food and violence, cheer on the warfighters, and dismiss expressions of doubt or dismay about military interventions and drone killings as “feminine” and “weak.”

At least we can applaud ourselves that we no longer torture and kill animals in the arena like the Romans did. See how civilized we’ve become?

*****

A propensity or even a preference for violence remains a major problem in our society. It’s a rejection of humane values, a redefinition of what it means to be human. Brutalization—a retreat into barbarism—is seen as not only necessary but admirable. Scary stuff.

Give me some “rogue heroes” who solve problems without killing everyone around them—that are brave in resisting the siren call of violence and yet more violence.

Preying On the Poor

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

BILL ASTORE

AUG 18, 2026

Back in 2012, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a sobering article for TomDispatch on how poor people are used as piggy banks by the rich and by local, state, and federal governments. It’s a form of extractive “capitalism” that seems endless until the poor are bled dry. Nowadays, the Trump administration is making major cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs for the poorest among us. Poor people don’t seem to have rich lobbyists to protect their interests.

If only!

Coincidentally, today I leaned a new acronym courtesy of the New York Times: BNPL, or buy now, pay later. These are loans that encourage you to make purchases now that you may not be able to afford “later.” Naturally, interest payments are involved. Of course, there are apps for this for your Smart phone. The BNPL option seems targeted toward the middle class, which makes sense. You can only bleed so much from the working poor.

Here’s an excerpt from the NYT story:

Lending apps can now cover your electricity bill, your health insurance, your water bill, your visit to the dentist, even your mortgage or rent. Use one to pay a $200 bill today, and it might subtract $25 from your bank account every week for two months, plus a few bucks for fees.

My colleague Stacy Cowley, who covers consumer finance, has a smart story about the loans. They’re becoming the “working capital for the modern middle class,” a market expert told her. “Consumers are using it more for essential, everyday things.”

The gist of the story is that BNPL apps can be a good thing. “Working capital for the modern middle class”—who can be against that? But shouldn’t we focus on higher wages for workers so that they can afford to pay their bills now without resorting to loans that charge “a few bucks for fees”?

My dad, who worked in factories for years until he got a civil service job as a city firefighter, always reminded me that the rich have neither much sympathy nor use for the poor. Except to prey on them, as Ehrenreich notes below.

Preying on the Poor

BY BARBARA EHRENREICH (Posted in 2012 at TomDispatch)

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.

It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.

The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009 for failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her 16-year-old son’s incarceration. When she received a back paycheck, she thought it would allow her to pay for her son’s jail stay. Instead, it was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration.

Government Joins the Looters of the Poor

You might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the amounts that are stolen, coerced, or extorted from the poor, but there are no official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to turn to independent investigators, like Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America, who estimates that wage theft nets employers at least $100 billion a year and possibly twice that. As for the profits extracted by the lending industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. — How the Working Poor Became Big Business, says the poor pay an effective surcharge of about $30 billion a year for the financial products they consume and more than twice that if you include subprime credit cards, subprime auto loans, and subprime mortgages.

These are not, of course, trivial amounts. They are on the same order of magnitude as major public programs for the poor. The government distributes about $55 billion a year, for example, through the largest single cash-transfer program for the poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit; at the same time, employers are siphoning off twice that amount, if not more, through wage theft.

And while government generally turns a blind eye to the tens of billions of dollars in exorbitant interest that businesses charge the poor, it is notably chary with public benefits for the poor. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, for example, our sole remaining nationwide welfare program, gets only $26 billion a year in state and federal funds. The impression is left of a public sector that’s gone totally schizoid: on the one hand, offering safety-net programs for the poor; on the other, enabling large-scale private sector theft from the very people it is supposedly trying to help.

At the local level though, government is increasingly opting to join in the looting. In 2009, a year into the Great Recession, I first started hearing complaints from community organizers about ever more aggressive levels of law enforcement in low-income areas. Flick a cigarette butt and get arrested for littering; empty your pockets for an officer conducting a stop-and-frisk operation and get cuffed for a few flakes of marijuana. Each of these offenses can result, at a minimum, in a three-figure fine.

And the number of possible criminal offenses leading to jail and/or fines has been multiplying recklessly. All across the country — from California and Texas to Pennsylvania — counties and municipalities have been toughening laws against truancy and ratcheting up enforcement, sometimes going so far as to handcuff children found on the streets during school hours. In New York City, it’s now a crime to put your feet up on a subway seat, even if the rest of the car is empty, and a South Carolina woman spent six days in jail when she was unable to pay a $480 fine for the crime of having a “messy yard.” Some cities — most recently, Houston and Philadelphia — have made it a crime to share food with indigent people in public places.

Being poor itself is not yet a crime, but in at least a third of the states, being in debt can now land you in jail. If a creditor like a landlord or credit card company has a court summons issued for you and you fail to show up on your appointed court date, a warrant will be issued for your arrest. And it is easy enough to miss a court summons, which may have been delivered to the wrong address or, in the case of some bottom-feeding bill collectors, simply tossed in the garbage — a practice so common that the industry even has a term for it: “sewer service.” In a sequence that National Public Radio reports is “increasingly common,” a person is stopped for some minor traffic offense — having a noisy muffler, say, or broken brake light — at which point the officer discovers the warrant and the unwitting offender is whisked off to jail.

Local Governments as Predators

Each of these crimes, neo-crimes, and pseudo-crimes carries financial penalties as well as the threat of jail time, but the amount of money thus extracted from the poor is fiendishly hard to pin down. No central agency tracks law enforcement at the local level, and local records can be almost willfully sketchy.

According to one of the few recent nationwide estimates, from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 10.5 million misdemeanors were committed in 2006. No one would risk estimating the average financial penalty for a misdemeanor, although the experts I interviewed all affirmed that the amount is typically in the “hundreds of dollars.” If we take an extremely lowball $200 per misdemeanor, and bear in mind that 80%-90% of criminal offenses are committed by people who are officially indigent, then local governments are using law enforcement to extract, or attempt to extract, at least $2 billion a year from the poor.

And that is only a small fraction of what governments would like to collect from the poor. Katherine Beckett, a sociologist at the University of Washington, estimates that “deadbeat dads” (and moms) owe $105 billion in back child-support payments, about half of which is owed to state governments as reimbursement for prior welfare payments made to the children. Yes, parents have a moral obligation to their children, but the great majority of child-support debtors are indigent.

Attempts to collect from the already-poor can be vicious and often, one would think, self-defeating. Most states confiscate the drivers’ licenses of people owing child support, virtually guaranteeing that they will not be able to work. Michigan just started suspending the drivers’ licenses of people who owe money for parking tickets. Las Cruces, New Mexico, just passed a law that punishes people who owe overdue traffic fines by cutting off their water, gas, and sewage.

Once a person falls into the clutches of the criminal justice system, we encounter the kind of slapstick sadism familiar to viewers of Wipeout. Many courts impose fees without any determination of whether the offender is able to pay, and the privilege of having a payment plan will itself cost money.

In a study of 15 states, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found 14 of them contained jurisdictions that charge a lump-sum “poverty penalty” of up to $300 for those who cannot pay their fees and fines, plus late fees and “collection fees” for those who need to pay over time. If any jail time is imposed, that too may cost money, as the hapless Edwina Nowlin discovered, and the costs of parole and probation are increasingly being passed along to the offender.

The predatory activities of local governments give new meaning to that tired phrase “the cycle of poverty.” Poor people are more far more likely than the affluent to get into trouble with the law, either by failing to pay parking fines or by incurring the wrath of a private-sector creditor like a landlord or a hospital.

Once you have been deemed a criminal, you can pretty much kiss your remaining assets goodbye. Not only will you face the aforementioned court costs, but you’ll have a hard time ever finding a job again once you’ve acquired a criminal record. And then of course, the poorer you become, the more likely you are to get in fresh trouble with the law, making this less like a “cycle” and more like the waterslide to hell. The further you descend, the faster you fall — until you eventually end up on the streets and get busted for an offense like urinating in public or sleeping on a sidewalk.

I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on the poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken seriously even when it’s committed by millionaire employers. No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on. These are no-brainers, and should take precedence over any long term talk about generating jobs or strengthening the safety net. Before we can “do something” for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them.

*****

OK, that’s the end of her fine article.

America seems to be conducting a great experiment to see how much money can be funneled upward to the richest among us before the impoverished lower orders either revolt or die or are incarcerated (perhaps in the new camps under construction by ICE). All this is overseen by a cartoonish billionaire, Donald Trump, whose most famous tagline is “You’re fired!” (Perhaps soon an AI bot will do the firing.)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …

Betrayal

A Major Theme in American Politics

BILL ASTORE

AUG 20, 2026

A major theme in U.S. politics is betrayal.

I know: politicians lie. Who knew? But the lies are so blatant, so fundamental (if that’s the right word), that it’s hard not to despair.

Consider Barack Obama. As a candidate he was a beacon of hope and change. He told Planned Parenthood that signing the Freedom of Choice Act would be the first thing he did as president. Once in office, he said it was not his highest legislative priority—and it never got done. He allied himself with neoliberals and Wall Street and bailed out the banks in a process begun by George W. Bush (remember the TARP?) even as millions of Americans defaulted on their home mortgages. In 2011 he offered little meaningful support to the Occupy Wall Street movement as the police in New York and other cities dismantled the encampments. He escalated the Afghan War (promise kept!) and became (according to the 2013 book Double Down) “really good at killing people” via Predator and Reaper drones. His health care plan was much like Romney care as he abandoned the public option. After he left the presidency, he cashed in big time through books, media deals, speaking fees and other ventures, with Forbes estimating his net worth at more than $70 million. (I got a fundraising letter from him last week asking me to send $25 to the DNC. Instead, he could donate a few million or sell his mansion on Martha’s Vineyard.)

Obama said he was the hope and change for Americans to believe in. He proved to be a very smooth con man.

Consider Donald Trump. He promised to put Americans first, to end wasteful wars, to take on the military-industrial complex, and to restore American “greatness.” Instead, he’s waging a costly and apparently losing war with Iran and he’s throwing buckets of mega billions at the Pentagon as he chops away at educational, Medicaid, food/SNAP, and other funds for the working classes. Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and his family, showcasing a brazen greed that might make Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi blush. He’s a one-man wrecking crew for faith and trust in the government.

Trump said he was the man to make America great again. He’s proven to be an abrasive but nevertheless very successful con man.

Back in the Reagan days, we were told government was the problem not the solution, and that it had to be downsized radically (the Pentagon, of course, was exempt from downsizing). An untrustworthy and spendthrift federal government is most definitely a problem today as the U.S. national debt just soared past the $40 trillion mark.

And where does half of federal discretionary spending go today? To wars and weapons, to the Pentagon and Homeland Security, to more nukes and golden domes, together with more schemes to enrich Trump and his oligarch cronies. If that’s not bad enough, Trump is seeking $500 billion more for the Pentagon in FY2027. Remember he vowed to take on the military-industrial complex? He’s feeding it instead.

Betrayal. Small wonder that Americans are despondent as well as angry. And why perhaps so much effort is being exerted to redirect that anger away from the betrayers-in-chief and toward other “enemies.” Even “Marxist-communists” are back—the “enemy” that will not die, as if Marxists are pulling the strings and reaping the profits in Washington, DC. It’s laughably absurd. 

“Throw the bums out!” is a mood in America today. But will new politicians actually have principles to serve working-class Americans? How do you reform a system where money basically equals speech and where lobbyists exert enormous power? Stay tuned as the great American experiment plays itself out.

This Mighty Scourge of War

The Most Terrifyingly Honest Sentence Written by a U.S. President

BILL ASTORE

AUG 13, 2026

Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, often described as a prose-poem for its surprising brevity and deep meaning, is the most moving work of political discourse I’ve ever read. In that short speech, Lincoln captured the horrific nature of war and the terrible burdens of an American history built literally on the backs of slaves. In describing that great civil war, he did not mince words about its “mighty scourge,” nor on its connection to that so-called peculiar institution of slavery:

Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’

My dad’s old silver certificate featuring Abraham Lincoln

After that terrifyingly honest sentence, Lincoln then extended an olive branch to the defeated South and indeed to the entire nation:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

We should think of war as a scourge—the most sweeping and biting of whips, capable of inflicting the most horrendous of tortures to human flesh.

Lincoln’s speech is dated March 4, 1865. More than a century later, another politician of integrity would refer to the awful scourge of war: Tony Benn, a member of the British Parliament, here in 1998:

The words of Lincoln and Benn resonate with hard-won truths. How awful it is today that war is sold to us as noble and honorable and just, the province of warriors and warrior-states, as if that is something admirable.

U.S. leaders’ pride in military lethality and global prowess are sure signs of the death of reason and democracy in America.

Telling Headline at the New York Times

Trump Is the Real Victim of Gaza and the Iran War?

BILL ASTORE

AUG 11, 2026

Caught this headline at the New York Times this morning (8/11):

Top News

Trump Wants to Move On From the Middle East. It’s Not Letting Him.

President Trump is eager to declare success in Iran and Gaza, but he is struggling to impose his will in either conflict.

*****

Poor Donald Trump! He “wants to move on” from his violent illicit affair with Iran and the Middle East, but his mistress won’t let him. He just has to keep pummeling Iran until she sees sense and lets him go.

The mainstream media always presents war as something inflicted on U.S. presidents, a weighty burden over which they have no control, their iron cross to bear. It’s ludicrous and loathsome.

Mary McCarthy

It reminded me of what Mary McCarthy said about the American press during the Vietnam War—the way that war was framed as a burden LBJ had to carry and for which he should earn our sympathy. Disgusting, right?

Back in 2009, I wrote about that for TomDispatch; here’s an excerpt.

Even now, we speak too often of “Bush’s war” or, more recently, “Obama’s war.” Before we start chattering mindlessly about Iraq and Afghanistan as American tragedies, we would do well to recall what McCarthy had to say about the war in Vietnam: “There is something distasteful,” she wrote, “in the very notion of approaching [Vietnam] as an American tragedy, whose protagonist is a great suffering Texan [President Lyndon Baines Johnson].”

Yes, there is something distasteful about a media that blithely refers to Bush’s or Obama’s war as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans suffer. For American troops, after all, are not the only ones paying the ultimate price when the U.S. fights foreign wars for ill-considered reasons and misguided goals.

If only U.S. presidents like LBJ and Trump could do something to stop these terrible wars! They want to move on, they want peace, but Southeast Asia or the Middle East or some other foreign region just won’t let them.

Right … What U.S. presidents really learn is that it’s far far easier to start wars than to end them, that other peoples have a say as well, and that imposing one’s will (nice euphemism for bombing Iran and facilitating genocide in Gaza) is difficult because other countries and peoples do object to being bombed and murdered.

P.S. Note how Gaza is framed as a “conflict.” Note the conceit that Trump is actually trying to impose his will there to end the “conflict,” even as Zionist Israel pursues a genocide and land grab there with total support from Trump.

Promise Peace, Deliver War

Of Presidential Betrayal

BILL ASTORE

AUG 10, 2026

U.S. presidents since Lyndon B. Johnson, if not before then (think here of Woodrow Wilson’s false promises in 1916 to keep America out of the Great War, known now as World War I), always promise peace, especially while running for office. Trump is the most recent example here. Yet whether Democrat or Republican, as soon as they become president, it’s war and more war. LBJ led America into the disastrous Vietnam War; Trump led America into the ongoing disaster of the Iran War; and the overseas wars just never seem to end, whether George W. Bush is issuing the orders or Barack Obama.

LBJ lacked the courage to resist the siren call of war

I had this thought as I re-read a comment from Mike Murry, a frequent Bracing Views contributor and an astute student of U.S. political and cultural history. Murry, a Vietnam War veteran, had this to say back in 2018:

Then, in the first semester of my senior hear in 1964, JFK’s successor as President: Lyndon Johnson, started his campaign for re-election, promising not to send us American boys to fight a war in Asia that Asian boys could fight themselves. He sounded just like Donald Trump did last year [January 2017], before assuming office. Johnson beat Goldwater in a landslide. The American people did not want another Korean War and made that overwhelmingly clear. But President Johnson betrayed us all, the way all U.S. Presidents now regularly do. Every one of them without exception preaches peace to win election. Then they invariably give their generals the wars that they demand. It happens every time. The stunning cynicism of that betrayal by President Johnson, I think, severed once and for all time any sense of “patriotism” that I might once have felt for the “America” of my youth. From that point on, I became an alien in my own land. My government would later send me abroad for the worst possible reasons, to do the most unnecessary and shameful of things. That same me never came home again. Someone else did. A damaged, but better man, I think. But much less an “American” one.

Today, the most important act to restore America is to end these needless and disastrous wars overseas. And not just overseas but here at home, as Trump promotes the malicious and mendacious notion of an enemy within, often labeled as the “radical left” with “terroristic” tendencies.

Nothing, I think, is more important to America’s health now and in the future than ending wars that waste so much, that kill and destroy so many, and that estrange our own citizen-soldiers from their country.

Random Sunday Thoughts

On Long Wars, the DSA, Aborigines, and Democracy in America

BILL ASTORE

AUG 09, 2026

On a very warm and humid Sunday morning, here are a few random thoughts for today:

1. It’s rather amazing that the U.S./Israel War against Iran has entered its six month with no end in sight. Remember when the Trump administration suggested it would last no longer than eight weeks? The war is holding the world economy hostage, apparently for “greater Israel” and continued U.S. dominance of trade in fossil fuels. I say “apparently” because the war doesn’t make much sense to most Americans, who are in the main against it. The only selling point Trump keeps repeating is that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, even as Israel is allowed to have up to 300 of them. His own intelligence chief told Trump that Iran was not working to field a nuclear weapon, but the Israelis told him otherwise, and we know who Trump is most obeisant toward.

2. Patrick Lawrence has a great piece on the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, and how they want to abolish ICE and possibly the presidency itself while defunding the police, the Pentagon, and other instruments of authority and coercion. One sympathizes, but it’s neither a practical nor a winning political message. So I wrote this comment at his site:

Echoing George McGovern, “Come home, America.” You can’t abolish or dismantle everything. But we can downsize the imperium and reinvest in America rather than “investing” in more wars and Zionist Israel.

If the DSA wants to make a contribution, it should focus on that — downsizing the empire, putting the American people first, rather than dreaming of abolishing everything. For what will replace it?

Make the lives of average Americans better, more affordable, more livable. Clean up our environment. And forget the magical thinking and empty posturing.

Come home, America. Come home from wanton, wasteful, and immoral wars.

3. I was breezing through “The Devil’s Dictionary” by Ambrose Bierce and stumbled on his acerbic definition of “Aborigines”:

1. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.

2. Considerate persons who will not trouble the lexicographer of the future to describe them.

Bierce, a veteran of the U.S. Civil War, didn’t mince words here. There are always “persons of little worth” to oppressors who’d prefer that they leave or die. What was true of aboriginal peoples of the 19th and early 20th centuries is true of the Palestinians today: they are seen as obstacles to be overcome, even as terrorists to be exterminated.

4. Antiwar forces in America remain fragmented, and that’s partly by design. To oversimplify, you have the so-called radical left, which is antiwar, sometimes anti-military, often as critical of America as it is of empire, versus the “unpatriotic” (to Trump) right, which is anti-dumb wars, generally pro-military, and animated by putting “America first.” Left and right have much in common: they want less war, less militarism, and more investment and support for Main Street USA. If they could combine, they would make a formidable force against the MICC and incessant warfare. Which is why each side is encouraged to distrust and even hate the other, i.e. the “radical left” is told the right is racist and reactionary and the “unpatriotic right” is told the left is woke, arrogant, and un-American.

The MICC and “Deep State” know that these two groups must be kept divided. They must never be allowed to cooperate in meaningful ways.

5. Ike said only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry could tame and reduce the anti-democratic forces unleashed by the MICC. Note how Ike said nothing about the left or right. Being for democracy, freedom, and liberty isn’t a right or left issue. The same applies to being against war and killing and massively wasteful military budgets. These are human issues that should unite everyone irrespective of political allegiances.

Caveat: Any foolishness written above is on account of the heat, but fortunately I’ve been told global warming is a Chinese hoax. Stay cool, everyone.

The Militarized Insanity of this American Moment

A “Top Ten” List

BILL ASTORE

AUG 04, 2026

There’s so much militarized crazy in America today that it’s entirely overwhelming. Here’s a “top ten” list:

1. The illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran.

Remember when Trump told us he wouldn’t start wars? Remember when attacks on Iran began, the Trump administration told us they’d be over in a matter of days, perhaps a few weeks, ending in Iran’s total defeat? Instead, the U.S. government and military is engaged in yet another disastrous losing undeclared war that is unsupported by most Americans. As if our opinions matter!

2. The continued blanket support of Israel’s genocide against Gaza, pogroms in the West Bank, and demolition/seizure of land in Lebanon.

The Trump administration remains 100% committed to the project of a “Greater Israel,” no matter how many Palestinians suffer and die in the process.

3. The obscene $500 billion increase in military spending in FY2027.

The U.S. military hasn’t won a major war since 1945. It’s failed eight audits in a row. The “punishment” is a vast increase in military spending in the next fiscal year.

4. The escalatory and nearly impossible Golden Dome proposal.

The golden dome missile defense system is a golden boondoggle for weapons makers. It’s unlikely to work, and if it does, if only partially, it may make nuclear war more likely.

5. The unnecessary “modernization” of the nuclear triad at a projected cost of $2 trillion.

U.S. militarists still believe the nuclear triad is the Holy Trinity. It isn’t. Land-based ICBMs and nuclear bombers should be scrapped as obsolete. The Navy’s Trident-missile-firing submarines are all the U.S. needs for nuclear deterrence.

6. The continued headlong pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI) and the ongoing empowerment and enlargement of the surveillance state.

AI combined with ever-more intrusive cameras and digital monitoring is creating a dystopic “Big Brother” state. Imagine sweeping AI with a steroidal Homeland Security; now imagine the total disappearance of privacy.

7. The war against the ICC and UN and indeed any legal check on U.S./Israeli aggression.

As the U.S. and Israel engage in global aggression, they attack institutions such as the International Criminal Court and the United Nations that attempt to limit and stop that aggression.

8. Related to (7), the proposal to merge the U.S. military with Israel’s for research and development, intelligence sharing, and the like.

Incredibly, the Trump administration is proposing a merger between the U.S. and Israeli militaries that would compromise U.S. national security at the highest levels of classification. Obedient to Aipac and Israeli imperatives, Congress seems prepared ultimately to support it.

9. Continued environmental damage due to war and military operations and the complete disregard of climate change.

Rarely in the U.S. do you hear any talk of how war and global military actions accelerate global warming and aggravate environmental damage. Check out the documentary by Abby Martin, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” and her interview with Chris Hedges.

10. The abandonment of the citizen-soldier tradition in the U.S., the embrace of a warrior ethos, and the increasing contempt for diversity within the military.

The last war America won (with serious help from allies like the Soviet Union) was World War II, also the last time America had a true citizen-soldier military. Since then, America has increasingly embraced a warrior ethos. And while diversity used to be a hallmark of the U.S. military, it is now under attack as “woke” by Pete Hegseth.

There you have it: ten signs of America’s increasingly militarized madness. Greater sanity would involve the reversal of all of these.