Politics & Power Quote by William Kunstler

Kunstler is trying to yank “justice” out of the marble courtroom and drop it into the street, where legitimacy is earned, not declared. The line is built as a steady stripping-away: judges, prosecutors, wardens, police officers - each role that civics class frames as neutral is recast as an instrument. Repeating “tools of the establishment” isn’t redundancy; it’s a rhetorical verdict. If every gatekeeper is a tool, then the “system” can’t be appealed to as a referee. It can only be confronted as an opponent.

The specific intent is mobilizing, not merely descriptive. Kunstler isn’t offering a theory of jurisprudence so much as authorizing dissent: if justice is “brought about by the people,” then protest, organizing, jury nullification, and political pressure aren’t outside the legal process - they’re the only reliable source of correction when the process is captured. The subtext is radical but pragmatic: power concedes nothing to polite procedure unless it’s forced, and institutions that claim objectivity often function as shock absorbers for the status quo.

Context matters. Kunstler’s career ran through the civil-rights era, Vietnam, and the high theater of the Chicago Seven, when courts were experienced by many activists as stages managed to discipline dissent. His phrasing treats “America” less as an ideal than as a battleground over who gets to define fairness. The quote works because it refuses comforting complexity: it names a chain of authority and calls it a single machine. That bluntness is the point. It’s meant to make “justice” feel less like a promise and more like a task.