Tag: free speech

Freedom of Speech But Without Any Say

BILL ASTORE

JUN 01, 2026

I woke up this morning with a depressing reality in my head: Americans may have freedom of speech (be careful criticizing Zionist Israel, though), but we have no say. Those who have a say in (and sway over) “our” government are those with the most money and power. AIPAC is just one example of a powerful, highly organized, lobby that wields say and sway over “our” elected representatives. Other powerful lobbyists hail from Big Pharmaceutical companies, fossil fuels, Wall Street in general, the banks, and of course the military-industrial complex.

Generally speaking, Americans don’t want wars (Trump’s war on Iran is deeply unpopular) and they don’t want $1.5 trillion war budgets. Sorry, you have no say here. I may be able to write critiques of disastrous wars, bloated Pentagon budgets, and kleptocratic insiders, but it doesn’t move the needle because I have no say. 

This reminds me of when I wrote to my senator back in 2018 about endless wars and the military-industrial complex. The response I received is recounted in the article below.

(Re-reading my article for TomDispatch in 2018, I noted that the Trump administration was scheming for war with Iran back then, which led me to a letter I cited signed by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), warning that such a war would be catastrophic. The VIPS, professionals like Larry C. Johnson and Ray McGovern, have been proven right, but even they have no say. When it comes to the Iran War, Israel and AIPAC arguably have had the most say of all.)

Endless War and the Lack of a Progressive Critique of the Pentagon

brac_pentagon
The Pentagon has won the war that matters most

W.J. Astore (Written in 2018)

In my latest article for TomDispatch.com, I argue the Pentagon has won the war that matters: the struggle for the “hearts and minds” of America. Pentagon budgets are soaring even as wars in places like Afghanistan continue to go poorly. Despite poor results, criticism of the Pentagon is rare indeed, whether in the mainstream U.S. media or even among so-called liberals and progressives, a point hammered home to me when I contacted my senator. Here’s an excerpt from TomDispatch; you can read my article in full here.

A Letter From My Senator

A few months back, I wrote a note to one of my senators to complain about America’s endless wars and received a signed reply via email. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that it was a canned response, but no less telling for that. My senator began by praising American troops as “tough, smart, and courageous, and they make huge sacrifices to keep our families safe. We owe them all a true debt of gratitude for their service.” OK, I got an instant warm and fuzzy feeling, but seeking applause wasn’t exactly the purpose of my note.

My senator then expressed support for counterterror operations, for, that is, “conducting limited, targeted operations designed to deter violent extremists that pose a credible threat to America’s national security, including al-Qaeda and its affiliates, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), localized extremist groups, and homegrown terrorists.” My senator then added a caveat, suggesting that the military should obey “the law of armed conflict” and that the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) that Congress hastily approved in the aftermath of 9/11 should not be interpreted as an “open-ended mandate” for perpetual war.

Finally, my senator voiced support for diplomacy as well as military action, writing, “I believe that our foreign policy should be smart, tough, and pragmatic, using every tool in the toolbox — including defense, diplomacy, and development — to advance U.S. security and economic interests around the world.” The conclusion: “robust” diplomacy must be combined with a “strong” military.

Now, can you guess the name and party affiliation of that senator? Could it have been Lindsey Graham or Jeff Flake, Republicans who favor a beyond-strong military and endlessly aggressive counterterror operations? Of course, from that little critical comment on the AUMF, you’ve probably already figured out that my senator is a Democrat. But did you guess that my military-praising, counterterror-waging representative was Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts?

Full disclosure: I like Warren and have made small contributions to her campaign. And her letter did stipulate that she believed “military action should always be a last resort.” Still, nowhere in it was there any critique of, or even passingly critical commentary about, the U.S. military, or the still-spreading war on terror, or the never-ending Afghan War, or the wastefulness of Pentagon spending, or the devastation wrought in these years by the last superpower on this planet. Everything was anodyne and safe — and this from a senator who’s been pilloried by the right as a flaming liberal and caricatured as yet another socialist out to destroy America.

I know what you’re thinking: What choice does Warren have but to play it safe? She can’t go on record criticizing the military. (She’s already gotten in enough trouble in my home state for daring to criticize the police.) If she doesn’t support a “strong” U.S. military presence globally, how could she remain a viable presidential candidate in 2020?

And I would agree with you, but with this little addendum: Isn’t that proof that the Pentagon has won its most important war, the one that captured — to steal a phrase from another losing war — the “hearts and minds” of America? In this country in 2018, as in 2017, 2016, and so on, the U.S. military and its leaders dictate what is acceptable for us to say and do when it comes to our prodigal pursuit of weapons and wars.

So, while it’s true that the military establishment failed to win those “hearts and minds” in Vietnam or more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, they sure as hell didn’t fail to win them here. In Homeland, U.S.A., in fact, victory has been achieved and, judging by the latest Pentagon budgets, it couldn’t be more overwhelming.

If you ask — and few Americans do these days — why this country’s losing wars persist, the answer should be, at least in part: because there’s no accountability. The losers in those wars have seized control of our national narrative. They now define how the military is seen (as an investment, a boon, a good and great thing); they now shape how we view our wars abroad (as regrettable perhaps, but necessary and also a sign of national toughness); they now assign all serious criticism of the Pentagon to what they might term the defeatist fringe.

In their hearts, America’s self-professed warriors know they’re right. But the wrongs they’ve committed, and continue to commit, in our name will not be truly righted until Americans begin to reject the madness of rampant militarism, bloated militaries, and endless wars.

Shame on the Congress, Shame on the Generals, Shame on the Warmongers

Friendly Fire in the U.S. Senate

BILL ASTORE

MAR 07, 2026

Brian McGinnis, a U.S. Marine Corp veteran, was wounded in action protesting the Iran War in the U.S. Senate. Thrown down, his arm broken, McGinnis was a victim of friendly fire from the Capitol police and Senator Tim Sheehy, who decided he’d join the police in wrestling McGinnis out of the hearing room.

McGinnis’s “crime”? Using his freedom of speech to declare that no one wants to die in a war for Israel.

You can watch it all here. (You can hear the bone crack in his arm.)

This is what happens in America when you stand up and speak truth to power. The powerful already know the truth. Their response is either to ignore truth-tellers or to silence them, sometimes with extreme prejudice.

This Marine, this patriot, exercising his Constitutional right of free speech before the Senate, became yet another casualty of the U.S./Israeli War on Iran, a victim of a deliberate and unconscionable act of friendly fire. All he wanted was to have his voice heard; all he got in return was a broken arm and a most violent silencing, even as U.S. senior leaders in uniform steadfastly ignored him.

Again, this Marine was wounded in action; his action was to speak truth before the powerful, but they don’t traffic in hard or noble truths, only in easy and convenient lies.

Shame on the U.S. Senate, shame on the military’s senior leaders, and shame on the Trump administration for waging an illegitimate, unconstitutional, and illegal war against Iran and against legitimate and courageous dissent in America.

The Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty in 1967

Liberty threatened, then and now

BILL ASTORE

MAY 10, 2025

As a teenager in the late 1970s, I read about Israel’s “Six-Day War” in 1967. The account I read was sympathetic toward Israel, respecting the audacity of its sneak attack on the Egyptian and Syrian air forces and its Blitzkrieg in the Sinai. But it also mentioned the Israeli attack on a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Liberty, a signals intelligence ship that was monitoring the war in international waters. The Israeli air and sea attack killed 34 crew members aboard the Liberty and wounded another 173. The ship, heavily damaged, never sailed again and was later sold as scrap.

The USS Liberty, post-attack

The Israeli government claimed the attack was unintentional and a mistake. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest the story is far more complicated. Yet I was thinking this morning about how the Trump administrations’s strenuous attempt to criminalize critical speech vis-à-vis Israel is yet another assault on liberty. Once again, the ship of liberty is endangered in the U.S., yet the U.S. government is content to look the other way, or even to collaborate with the attackers.

Let me be clear: Those Americans who criticize Israel for its actions in Gaza are exercising their liberty. We are free to speak, and indeed we should speak freely on crimes against humanity, for that is what ethnic cleansing in Gaza is: a crime against humanity.

Yet the U.S. government, which essentially agreed to look the other way in response to Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, is now looking the other way as free speech in America is suppressed, or even twisting denunciations of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza as anti-Semitic hate speech.

Liberty is something precious, and we as Americans are supposed to admire and applaud Patrick Henry and his sentiment from 250 years ago: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

If we as Americans have the right to criticize our own government, which we do, we certainly have the right to criticize foreign governments, including, of course, Israel. Yet, judging by U.S. mainstream media coverage and the words of government spokespeople, American citizens actually have less scope to criticize Israel than any other country, including their own.

Liberty attacked and abridged is liberty denied. How long before liberty itself in America, rocketed and strafed and torpedoed, is decommissioned and sold for scrap, just as the USS Liberty was? 

Addendum: There are many books and videos about Israel’s attack on the USS Libertyand what was *really* behind it. I’m not an expert on the subject, but the official story of a regrettable “mistake” is decidedly fishy. Wikipedia does a decent job of summarizing a complex subject. Here’s an excerpt to ponder:

Some intelligence and military officials dispute Israel’s explanation.[79] Dean Rusk, U.S. Secretary of State at the time of the incident, wrote:

I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn’t believe them then, and I don’t believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous.[80]

What Good Is Democracy If You’re Unable to Speak?

W.J. Astore

A Lesson from “The Matrix”

In “The Matrix,” Agent Smith asks humanity’s hero, Neo, “What good is a phone call if you’re unable to speak?” It’s a powerful scene and perhaps the creepiest in the film.

What good is democracy, America, if you’re unable to speak? If your opposition to genocide in Gaza leads to you being labeled a terrorist and sent away to a place where your voice won’t be heard. If your shouts for peace, for greater fairness, for real change are simply drowned out by the “speech” of those with vastly more money than you, thus vastly bigger and louder megaphones.

Who does Donald Trump listen to, small donors who send him $20 or $200 or Miriam Adelson who gave him $100 million? Who would you listen to if you were Trump? Small wonder he’s Making Israel Great Again (MIGA).

Broadly speaking, Americans don’t want a war with Yemen. They don’t support Israel’s annihilation of Gaza. Yet your wants simply don’t matter. You have no say. Not when billionaires and powerful corporations have already bought “your” president and “your” representatives.

Public funding of elections is absolutely essential to curbing this corruption. Despite what the Supreme Court claims, money isn’t speech, and corporations are not citizens. Money is money, and those with the most money shouldn’t be allowed to use that money to drown out the voices of everyone else.

Oh, in the scene above, you’ll note that Neo is “bugged.” We’re all bugged as well. It’s called a Smart phone.

With the Twitter Files, Democrats Support Government Censorship of Lawful Speech

W.J. Astore

Welcome to the era of state-sponsored thought police

Yesterday, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Their testimony, and the risible reactions of Democrats on the subcommittee, are well worth watching; I watched the entire hearing, which lasted 140 minutes. Kim Iverson has an excellent summary here which lasts about 23 minutes. As Iverson notes, the Democrats on the subcommittee demonized the journalists while supporting censorship of ordinary Americans for political advantage, a clear violation of freedom of speech and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Shellenberger and Taibbi, “so-called” journalists according to Democrats

Clearly, the Twitter Files have revealed government-directed censorship of lawful speech. The reactions and strategy of the Democrats on the subcommittee were as follows:

  1. To smear the two journalists who volunteered to appear before Congress as “so-called” journalists; as being biased witnesses in favor of the right (even though Shellenberger testified he’d voted for Biden, and Taibbi described himself as a traditional ACLU liberal); as having the basest of motives, such as taking payments and otherwise profiting from their journalism; and of being willing or unwilling dupes of Elon Musk.
  2. To repeat, again and again, that Russia massively interfered in the 2016 and 2020 elections, therefore government-directed efforts to suppress “foreign interference” in U.S. elections was both legitimate and praiseworthy.
  3. To associate Elon Musk with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and other alleged bad actors, thereby suggesting that the Twitter Files are tainted and compromised by foreign information ops and influence.
  4. To defend the FBI and other government agencies like the DHS and CIA as trustworthy and reliable defenders of truth as well as upholders of the First Amendment.
  5. To suggest that the journalists involved posed a “direct threat,” e.g. to workers at Twitter, not the federal government or powerful corporations like Twitter itself or Facebook.
  6. To imply the subcommittee’s purpose wasn’t about free speech at all; that its purpose was purely political and intended to advance right-wing agendas.
  7. Specific to the Hunter Biden laptop story, one Democrat implied the hard drive could have been altered, thus calling into question the validity of emails and other data on that drive.
  8. To change the subject by accusing Republicans of being worse offenders since they’re trying to ban books; also that Donald Trump is worse because he jailed one of his opponents.

Not one Democrat on the subcommittee expressed concern about the peril of state-sponsored censorship and suppression of free expression. Indeed, the Democrats took pains to portray the journalists in front of them as the real peril, along with Russia, Elon Musk, Republican book-banners, and other bad actors.

It was all rather amazing, a “shit storm” to quote Kim Iverson.

Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with 30 years’ experience, dismissed as an Elon Musk tool by Democrats

So many important points made by Taibbi and Shellenberger could easily get lost in this political shit storm, which I suppose was the Democrats’ strategy. Here’s a short list of those points:

  1. As Taibbi said, state-directed censorship on Twitter didn’t just affect the right but also people on the left and publications like Consortium News and Truthout.
  2. We’re looking at an emerging censorship-industrial complex, an unholy alliance between government and private corporations to filter, constrain, and otherwise control information sources. A form of “digital McCarthyism.”
  3. Ordinary Americans are being deprived of their free speech rights without due process. Not only that: some are de-platformed and then denied access to pay sources (like PayPal) as punishment. So, not only can’t you speak freely: you also can’t support yourself financially.
  4. Government calls (in this case by the FTC) to investigate the backgrounds of Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other journalists involved in the Twitter Files creates a chilling effect on journalism. As Shellenberger noted, it’s reminiscent of the Stasi (secret police) in East Germany.

Democrats on the subcommittee had no interest in any of this. Their strategy was to dismiss the hearing as politically motivated and the journalists involved as greedy opportunists handpicked by Elon Musk (whom, you might recall, was associated with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and perhaps Hitler, Stalin, and Darth Vader).

Interestingly, I learned a new word in the hearings: “pre-bunking.” Apparently, the Democrats in 2020 knew the Republicans had Hunter Biden’s laptop, so they engaged in an exercise to “pre-bunk” the release of embarrassing details from that computer. To wit, mainstream media “journalists” were encouraged not to follow the “Pentagon Papers” model of publishing leaked and legitimate material quickly. Rather, they were primed not to cover such a story, or to cover it as a case of Russian disinformation.

And that’s exactly what the mainstream media did in October 2020: as a group, they wrongly dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop revelations as Russian disinformation as the government worked hand-in-glove with Twitter, Facebook, and others to suppress the story as malicious and false. As we now know (and as was known then), the Hunter Biden laptop story was well-sourced and accurate. There was no Russian connection whatsoever. (Kudos to the Democrats for their dirty tricks here; even Richard Nixon couldn’t have done it better.)

Again, Democrats on the subcommittee showed no interest in or concern about an emerging censorship-industrial complex and its suppression of free speech rights. They painted the journalists before them as bad or sketchy actors and the FBI and other government agencies like DHS and the CIA as the good guys, working selflessly and without bias to protect us all from the “dangerous” ideas of our fellow citizens.

Welcome to the era of state-sponsored thought police, brought to you by your Democratic friends in Congress.

Addendum (3/11): All those Democrats so eager to pillory Taibbi and Shellenberger: they all took an oath to support and uphold the Constitution.

I’m not sure there’s any more fundamental right to that oath than freedom of speech.

If you take your oath seriously as a Member of Congress, your focus at the hearing should — must — have been on upholding that fundamental right against government-directed interference and censorship.

Yet none of them mentioned this or their oath — their sworn duty — to the Constitution.

This is worse than mendacity; they are derelict in their duties as representatives and public servants.