Feb. 19 antiwar rally implodes, Scott Ritter blinks
A horseshoe theory inside job attacks its own rally
Aside from the back of some dude’s head playing guitar on their website, no musical acts have been announced for the Rage Against The War Machine rally to protest American involvement in the war in Ukraine, scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 19, at the Lincoln Memorial in DC. Not the “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” guys whose band name has been appropriated, nor anyone, not even an organizer’s buddy’s cover band. The only suggestion of music other than the back of dude’s head is sponsor Punk Rock Libertarians - are they gonna play?
Less than a week out, the petty soap operas instigated by online troll farms paid for by said war machine to disrupt the rally are working like a charm, from inside the rally itself. As Jerry Seinfeld would say, Prognosis Negative! At least two speakers have pulled out. None more holier than thou, Code Pink president Medea Benjamin banged her tambourine on Facebook to explain why she withdrew from speaking at the Feb. 19 rally. It’s like Medea fired up AOC’s IdPol Erector Set to concern troll her way to an HR approved Stochastic Terrorism memo. Her “staff” won’t let her, she says, because other speakers there might be icky.
The ickiest of those speakers used to be former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who carries with him like a millstone two old entrapment convictions like mine (I’ve only got one - yay me!). Thus my close interest. Since Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago, Ritter’s raised his profile worldwide via online interviews analyzing the war from his military experience perspective. He’s a breath of fresh air on the topic, thus beloved amongst an audience desperate for any solid, non-propagandized information at all about the war.
So, on January 15, a co-organizer of the rally, The People’s Party national chair Nick Brana (a veteran of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign), invited Ritter to speak. He would join much bigger name speakers like 87 year old American institution Ron Paul (who rarely speaks in public anymore), Jimmy Dore, Dennis Kucinich (my former congressman), Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein, Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone, and many others.
After the utterly predictable swarm ensued over Ritter’s entrapment convictions, Ritter was uninvited via email on Feb. 2 by rally co-organizer Angela McArdle, national chair of the Libertarian Party. Ritter posted McArdle’s email the same day, and fought back, as one should. Thanks to Ritter’s standing in online war coverage, support poured in online from all over the world, and most if not all of the other rally speakers threatened to pull out of the rally if Scott Ritter wasn’t re-invited. Ritter declared on Feb. 2…
“This is a defining moment. If I allow this action to go forward unanswered, then I am quitting in the face of adversity….The organizers of “Rage Against the War Machine” have made their decision. They caved into the pressures brought on them by the forces of American cancel culture.”
McArdle re-invited Ritter to speak almost immediately. But then on Feb. 7, the national Libertarian Party (again, whose chair is Angela McArdle), took a direct low blow dirty shot at Ritter in a formal statement.
“Scott Ritter is not a Libertarian, and we would prefer that he stay home from the rally as he originally proposed when event coordinators first confronted him about his criminal history. Libertarians hold as sacrosanct the rights of children to be free from abuse; his criminal convictions are despicable and contradict our values. In addition to his crimes, over the weekend he declared that he is not anti-war which directly contradicts the purpose of the rally. We think this event would be more successful without his involvement..”
Ritter caved. On Feb. 9, Ritter announced “I have decided to take one for the team,” in a post including the text of his “Best Speech I Never Gave” on Substack, a typically pedantic screed riffing off (of course) MLK’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. How original. Then, on Feb. 10, Ritter went to his YouTube program to auction off questions about all this with what’s known as “superchats” - viewers in the online chat paying money to have their question appear on screen. (Money = speech. Literally. Where have I heard that before? I digress.) After an hour waiting for that cash to roll in, someone named Ryan Milton anted up $49.99, to which Ritter joked he should have made it “a clean 50”.
Superchat duly collected, Ritter explained.
"The Libertarian Party decided I wasn’t antiwar enough... called me pro-war, a Putin apologist, and twice convicted pedophile…all the speakers said if Ritter’s gone we’re gone, so they put me back on. Then the Libertarian Party found a way to self destruct, they just blew apart…They wanted me to gracefully disappear, and I’m like, are you high? ....You have to fire me, and then I was gonna sue the living crap outta these people - they set up all the elements of a libel case…imagine the damages, I coulda turned it into millions of dollars.
Scott - trust me. I’m an attorney. For more than 20 years I’ve had the same very old entrapment conviction problem as you. Sadly, you are not, nor am I, a “sympathetic plaintiff”. No jury is awarding you a god damned penny, for anything, ever. Maybe long ago, this country produced juries that would, but America sure as hell doesn’t produce juries like that now, and won’t before we’re both dead. After 30 years of Joe Biden’s Crime Bill, even libertarians (!) are parroting Biden police state perpetual punishment. You’re lucky any of the other speakers stood by you at all, let alone all of them. Ritter then veers into delusional grandeur.
Angela the chair of the LP is a good person, she should never have allowed me to be invited because she wasn’t ready to take the heat…Nick has built something with potential and I didn’t wanna be the person who destroyed it, and that’s what would happen if I went to war against the Libertarian Party - it would have been destroyed, and that would have been put on me - I would have been the guy that destroyed this movement."
Icing on the proverbial cake, Ritter claims bailing on the Feb. 19 rally was “strategic withdrawal” in favor of…err…some other rally he hopes to hold in NYC a year and a half from now, with (you guessed it) more people than the one on Feb. 19, specifically, a million. It’s always a million. Will that one have music? Surprised Scott didn’t figure out some way to quote Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.
The establishment war machine likes a thing called “horseshoe theory”, in which left and right extremes are theorized to meet at the farthest extremes to cause fascism. Well, left and right “extremes” met within this rally’s organization to do nothing but implode themselves down a toilet, using precisely the establishment’s tools, while the war machine laughs like a hyena. Hope dude’s cover band performance of Puff The Magic Horseshit is gonna be worth it.