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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 int