In an article posted on his “Scott Ritter Extra” Substack page on July 14, former Marine and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter announced that he had closed the chat on his Telegram channel for 24 hours. “I made the decision after participants commented in response to a post I made about the attempted assassination,” he said.
In his original Telegram posting, Ritter warned that America finds itself in an “extraordinarily precarious situation” following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. “That an estranged citizen would convert his personal demons into an action designed to end the life of the person he blamed for what haunts him is sadly a byproduct of a society conditioned to accept violence as a means of resolving disputes, regardless of the underlying legality of the action.”
He pinned part of the responsibility for current conditions on recent interpretations of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but then added: “America has never before experienced a situation where the political environment itself has contributed so heavily to an atmosphere where political violence is openly advocated by a sitting President and his political party.
“The depiction of Donald Trump by President Joe Biden as a criminal who represents a direct threat not only to democracy but also the existential survival of the American Republic creates a causal linkage that leads inevitably to the attempted assassination. Biden’s words have been echoed by the Democratic Party and anti-Trump activists on mainstream and social media in such a fashion that it constitutes a veritable green-lighting of political violence against the former President.”
He went further to assert that “the Democratic Party is already being accused—with good reason—of politicizing and weaponizing the apparatus of judicial power to prevent Donald Trump from successfully challenging Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election, the articulation by Biden and his supporters of Trump as a threat to the survival of the Republic that must be stopped at all costs is little more that an open directive for political violence.