On June 3, former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter was prevented from traveling to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. Three armed Customs and Border Patrol officers snatched his passport at the airport, telling Ritter that they were following State Department orders. No reason was given for the seizure.
Whatever the legal pretext for confiscating Ritter’s passport, it’s clear that the real issue is that Ritter’s political views are not aligned with those of the regime in Washington. If Ritter had been traveling abroad to a conference to echo the US government’s talking points, he would have had an uneventful trip and would still have his passport.
Ritter’s passport seizure exemplifies the DC regime’s ever-accelerating crackdown on dissent. On the previous day, June 2, one of the regime’s leading propaganda mouthpieces, the failing Washington Post, had published a vicious smear all but calling for the prosecution of Grayzone journalists. According to the Post, some of those journalists had worked with, or been interviewed by, sanctioned foreign media outlets.
It seems that the regime occupying Washington, DC is increasingly reluctant to allow Americans to travel to conferences abroad, to interact with foreign media, and even to question official narratives while based in the US—as Alex Jones learned the hard way. At the same time that Ritter and The Grayzone were being persecuted for communicating with foreigners, Alex Jones was stripped of his ownership of Infowars. Like Ritter and The Grayzone, Jones and Infowars have had the temerity to question official narratives. And while that is not yet officially a crime, it might as well be, since the authorities have shown ever-increasing willingness to bend both civil and criminal law to target nonviolent dissidents.
Passport Seizures Are Unconstitutional
Blinken’s State Department violated the Constitution when it seized Ritter’s passport for political reasons. The McCarthy-era practice of denying passports to dissidents was outlawed by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in June 1958, among whose beneficiaries was the famous singer and communist sympathizer Paul Robeson. “In a 5-4 ruling…the Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional the State Department’s denial of a passport because of a citizen’s political beliefs.”
Mainstream media have shown no interest in reporting on Blinken’s blatantly unconstitutional violation of Ritter’s right to travel. Since June 3 I have used Google to fruitlessly search for MSM stories on the incident. Today, eight days after the passport seizure, here is what a Google search for “Scott Ritter passport” returns:
At the end of the list we find anti-Ritter pieces in the Albany Times Union, Ritter’s local paper, and Yahoo News Singapore. That, along with a Quora question, is pretty much the extent of the mainstream coverage.
Google’s #1 suggestion for those interested in the issue is the Kyiv Post’s hilariously over-the-top propaganda rant “Why Scott Ritter’s Passport Seizure Is Long Overdue.” That masterpiece of unintentional comedy, seemingly outsourced (by Langley or Tel Aviv?) to a regime hack in Dubai who writes like a hysteric overdosing on captagon, sounds like something Stalin might have commissioned to smear someone lined up to be shot after a show trial:
Given his penchant for cozying up to enemies of the free world and shamelessly monetizing his deep-seated abhorrence of everything the United States stands for, it is high time draconian action were taken by the current administration to bring Scott Ritter back down to earth. Although he gallivants around the globe under the guise of “waging peace”, nothing would please the erstwhile intelligence operative more than laying the blame of a Russian victory at the feet of President Joe Biden, who he has had an axe to grind with ever since his famous 1998 dressing down in Congress by the then senator over focusing on issues “above his pay grade.”
“Draconian action” to bring Ritter “down to (meaning ‘under’?) earth” because he opposes Biden…that sounds a lot like a death threat, doesn’t it? The fulminating editorialist, writing under the name Sahil Menon, apparently would have preferred that the regime shoot down Ritter’s plane, not just his passport.
Is Sahil Menon a nom de plume of the notorious American tranny Ukro-Nazi Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, who has long been in the habit of calling for assassinations of American dissidents? Does he/she/it want to see Ritter share the fate of Gonzalo Lira, the American alternative journalist who was kidnapped, tortured, extorted, and murdered by the Washington regime’s Ukrainian proxies for the crime of telling the truth on YouTube?
Since “Menon,” an obscure hack and hideously awful writer, had “his” unhinged hit piece promoted to #1 by Google, we may assume that it represents the regime’s official view. How else would “he” know that:
What landed Ritter in hot water, however, was disingenuously passing off his recent visits to Russia as bridge-building pilgrimages when they were nothing more than social-climbing escapades during which he ended up rubbing shoulders with and being glad-handed by untold senior government figures.
Talking with “senior government figures”?! That’s the same crime Tucker Carlson committed when he interviewed Vladimir Putin. It’s called “journalism.”
Even worse, according to “Menon,” is the possibility that Ritter might be “flirting with the idea of seeking asylum in Russia.” In other words, if he’s being persecuted by the American regime, moving to another country is tantamount to a crime, and the regime is justified in seizing his passport to prevent him from escaping their clutches. When your government starts thinking that way, it’s time to pack your backs and leave before it’s too late.
Would the Fall of the Biden Regime Change Anything?
Obviously the Biden regime brooks little disagreement. Donald Trump knows that better than anyone, as he desperately tries to fend off a swarm of questionable civil and criminal prosecutions.
But would Trump be any better? As he flails around for funding, Trump has sold out to the hardline Zionist billionaires led by Miriam Adelson. And it’s Zionists, the real American Deep State, who are presumably driving the persecutions of “Hamas cheerleaders” like Scott Ritter and the GrayZone. They’re also persecuting and silencing student protesters, professors, law reviews, musicians, famous commentators, and anyone else who doesn’t like genocide.
It seems all-too-likely that a second Trump regime would go ultra-Zionist, surpass Biden, and complete the shredding of the Constitution begun by his predecessors. But whoever wins in 2024, it’s highly likely that polarization-driven civil strife will give the party in power an excuse to invoke an emergency, crack down on opposition, and consign the American experiment to the history books.
The USA is not the same country I grew up in. A nation that once prided itself on not just tolerating but encouraging vigorous debate has become the land of the unfree—a country of cowed conformists kowtowing to mainstream bromides that nobody really believes but few have the courage to openly challenge. Meanwhile, the Zionist Occupation Government, frustrated in Occupied Palestine but virtually unopposed in Occupied America, gets bolder and nastier every day.
If you, unlike Scott Ritter, still have a passport, you might want to consider using it—and getting out while you still can.
Now They're Seizing Passports?!