Since Trump going into office he seems to have completely lost it, glazing Trump at every opportunity as though he’s this big peacemaker in Ukraine. Ofc he never was a socialist but he used to have very reasonable takes especially on Ukraine. I feel this is a consequence of a lack of dialectical materialism but I can’t exactly put my finger on the exact mechanisms at play.

  • Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    4 days ago

    Scott Ritter’s house was raided by the Biden admin, so he is understandably pissed at them. Scott Ritter also knows people in the Trump administration personally, so he clearly hoped that he would have more influence over Trump and co’s actions. He has never ‘glazed’ Trump. He had hopes Trump would follow through on his peace plans.

    Now that he sees that isn’t the case, Scott is also becoming quite vocal at criticizing Trump. He has repeatedly come out against the Houthi airstrikes.

  • ☭CommieWolf☆@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    4 days ago

    He was reasonable on not just Ukraine but also the Middle East, that is until his house was raided by the US intelligence agencies shortly before the US elections last year, and ever since then he’s suddenly turned into a government narrative parrot. I’d put money on him being compromised, they probably either found or planted something on his hard drives and he’s very incentivized to not get uppity.

    • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
      0·
      4 days ago

      No way they needed to plant anything on his drive. Dude has been convicted of child enticement and his defense was, I kid you not, “I knew I was talking to an officer so therefore I committed no crime because they were an adult and we were roleplaying”. He didn’t even deny it and still doesn’t.

      I’ve always felt that he took up the anti-imperialism mantle to try and clear his name so that when you look him up online you come across his many youtube appearances instead of the court case. Because he started being a public figure after he was convicted if I have my timeline correct.

      • Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.ml
        0·
        3 hours ago

        The F? He got ‘convicted’ for child enticement after he started agitating against the Iraq War. He was a US weapons inspector in Iraq, and was on the ground checking for WMDs pre-war and found none.

        I’ll cite some previous comments I made, with sources:

        https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5319924/4836806

        Just in case anyone brings up his weird history of child sexual offenses, he was never prosecuted for harming actual children. Both prosecuted offenses were supposedly sting operations (aka entrapment) by FBI and police, which makes them super suspicious. For example, the first one in 2001 was conveniently timed to interfere with his anti-Iraq War advocacy.

        The US government seized his passport in early June just to stop him from attending the St. Petersburg Economic Forum and derail his planned tour of Russia, where he would’ve gotten more coverage of his antiwar advocacy.

        I would not be surprised if the FBI makes up a new sex offense charge based on this raid to try to shut him up about Russia, since that got the media so riled up the last 2 times. Another kind of bogus charge also wouldn’t be a surprise.

        https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5319924/4838261

        The 2001 sting operation was so conveniently timed that even Fox News had to point out how sus it looked: Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter: Timing of Arrest Reports Suspicious

        Before he publicly came out against the Iraq war and denounced all claims of Iraq having WMDs, AIPAC even tried to buy Ritter off for 6 million dollars and a lifetime of luxury in exchange for him making up shit about how evil Iraq is. Ritter turns them down because he would not lie about Iraq’s WMDs.

        Ritter talks about this on Danny Haiphong’s show here.

        Ritter’s non-cooperation obviously has made him a massive target, especially because of his deep knowledge on the ground in Iraq and the military apparatus.

        If Scott really just wanted to molest children for free, why didn’t he simply go to Israel and get his million-dollar book deal? After all, that’s what all the Zionist pedophiles in the U.S. do.

        Scott Ritter isn’t a principled socialist due to his military background and career. Still, he is a valuable voice for anti-US-empire military analysis, since leftists with military training are few and far between. Politically, he falls in the same camp as military-analyst-turned libertarian anti-imperialists Ray Mcgovern, Larry Wilkerson, and Larry Johnson.

        We do not and should not listen to libertarians’ proposals of domestic policy, but on fighting imperialist American foreign policy we are aligned.

  • OrnluWolfjarl@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    4 days ago

    He bought into Trump’s promises for peace pre-election and now he can’t believe he was wrong. To be honest, a lot of otherwise reasonable good commentators have gone down this path.