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If you weren’t plugged into conspiracy theories in the pre-Trump years, it’s hard to overstate what a big deal the military exercise Jade Helm 15 was. Or rather, it’s hard to overstate what a big deal conspiracy theory influencers and gurus wanted you to think Jade Helm 15 was.
An anodyne military exercise not unlike dozens of others turned into a magnet for conspiracism and paranoia, as old-school fears of martial law and FEMA camps fused with Obama conspiracy theories and nascent social media. For months, Americans traded rumors of abandoned Walmarts turned into prisons, missile batteries and “death domes” going up in pastures, maps being distributed to troops showing how the US would be divided up, fears of Islamic terrorism and alien intervention, Chinese soldiers flooding into the country, Texas put under federal control, and martial law declared for the entire country. Troops would be on the streets of every major city, America would be divided into UN-approved fiefdoms, and personal property and firearms would be confiscated.
It was the founders’ worst nightmare come true. And all of it, as Alex Jones claimed in a May 2015 broadcast, was to prepare us for a “conversion to tyranny,” turning our military into a police force trained for “domestic operations against American people.”
Though it was fully embraced by Texas Republicans, members of Congress, and militia groups alike, the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theory complex turned out to be vapor. The majority of the paranoia was idle chatter, but there were multiple arrests made of patriots planning to “resist Jade Helm” with pipe bombs, and one rancher who allowed the military to use his land was deluged by harassing calls and emails. But for those looking at Jade Helm as the opening shots of a UN takeover, only disappointment could be found. The exercise passed with none of the worst case scenarios traded by people like Alex Jones and his acolytes coming true.
Except, of course, when it did come true.
Ten years after Jade Helm, there were indeed armed American soldiers patrolling the streets of our cities for no reason, people being pulled out of cars and workplaces for random questioning and arrest, citizens disappeared into networks of prisons and extradition sites, and a president using the justification of “a lot of people wanting a dictator” to sign off on executive orders giving the military unprecedented police powers over Americans.
So were the Jade Helm paranoiacs gloating at seeing their predictions come true? Were they declaring their independence from government gone wild and locking and loading? Of course not. In fact, many were either denying any of this was happening or outright celebrating it.
Jade Helm landed right before the Trumpificiation of the far right, as Trump struggled to stand out in a crowded field of Republican candidates in 2015. With hindsight, it seems like the last gasp of the old-school anti-government conservative who talked endlessly of their preference to die on their feet rather than live on their knees. To them, the president – every president other than maybe JFK and Reagan – was a figurehead for the power-mad military industrial complex. They were all the same, interchangeable in every way that mattered, working together to keep our taxes high, our borders open, our working men down, and our government chained to special interests and gridlock.
Some even believed that it was only a matter of time before they shed the cloak of democracy and ordered their enemies rounded up. Freedom was always just one globalist machination away from being stripped for good.
Designed to simulate a military scenario requiring large scale special forces intervention, Jade Helm 15 was sponsored by the US Special Operations Command, and involved small military units operating in Texas, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Utah. Using about 1,400 Green Berets and other special operations troops, the exercise involved one side simulating an occupying force, and the other an organized resistance force. Most troops wore civilian clothes, and some even used civilian vehicles. And the exercises took place mostly in small towns and farmland. It’s not hard to see why a military that had spent over a decade fighting both the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgency would want to improve its anti-resistance training, and the exercise only different from other similar ones of the Iraq War era in its size and length,, going for two months from July to September.
The conspiracy theories started well before that. It’s hard to pin down who shared the first rumors about Jade Helm being carried out for nefarious purposes, but it’s easy to see when they went mainstream: March 19, 2015. On that day’s episode of Infowars, Alex Jones was joined by former soldier and future Proud Boy and convicted insurrectionist Joe Biggs, who had become a regular correspondent for Jones’ media empire. Biggs told Jones all about the pending “realistic military training” psyop Jade Helm, using a leaked map showing “permissive” and “hostile” states in red and blue.
In just a short conversation with convicted seditionist Biggs, who claimed he had been leaked information about the true purpose of the exercise, Jones essentially set the tone for an entire year of Jade Helm conspiracy theories. He declared it a “PSYOP in plain view for the troops to brainwash them, the local police and the citizens” and being done “in preparation for the financial collapse and maybe even Obama not leaving office.”
“This is just a cover for deploying the military on the streets, “Jones declared before launching into an ad for oregano oil.
Jones would make over a thousand references to Jade Helm in the coming months, essentially using everything he had spouted to future convicted seditionist Joe Biggs as the foundation for a vast network of interlocking theories. He would add even more details as he went, claiming that “Jade Helm” was actually an acronym for “Joint Assistance for Development and Execution, Homeland Eradication of Local Militias” Jones and other hosts and callers would claim the exercise would lead to large scale roundups, multiple states would be taken over, false flag attacks would be carried out through Jade Helm and blamed on patriot movements, and even that the plot was a ruse to allow a Chinese invasion of the US and the replacement of the dollar with the yuen as the global currency of business.
Other conspiracy theorists tied Jade Helm to classic 90’s conspiracy theories about black helicopters and global government, or claimed it was preparation for martial law due to an upcoming comet strike. And unlike future large scale conspiracy theories like QAnon, which had no real Russian disinformation component, it came out a few years after the exercise that Russian bot networks had worked hard to push Jade Helm conspiracy theories, possibly in a trial run for the 2016 election.
Once September 2015 came and went without martial law or mass executions in abandoned Walmarts, Jones quickly shifted his narrative. Jade Helm was never more than a “conditioning exercise” to get Americans used to troops on the streets – never mind that the actual exercise specifically did not involve large numbers of troops on the streets of major cities. Any mention of martial law or gun confiscation or government takeover came from other people putting words in his mouth, not him. Having failed to end with martial law and mass slavery, Jade Helm couldn’t be the thing that Alex was warning us about, because that would mean Alex was wrong. It was merely setting up the actual thing that Alex was warning us about.
Except then the thing that Alex was warning us about happened. In response to non-existent “riots” after ICE raids in LA, Trump federalized and deployed the CA National Guard and a contingent of Marines. Then he did the same to Washington DC, under the guise of “stopping crime” after a DOGE staffer was beaten up. Trump is now threatening to do the same thing to other cities – send in troops whether they’re wanted or needed, keep them there for however long he wants, arm them with loaded weapons, and give them unprecedented and likely illegal policing powers.
Moreover, Trump has acted like the worst caricature of what the far right feared from a president run amok. The election of Donald Trump inverted everything that the far right believed about government overreach and executive power. Government being the “problem” and not “the solution to the problem” was usurped by a egomaniacal huckster who claimed he was “the only one who could fix it” and “right about everything.” Increasingly, he demanded more public and obvious displays of praise and tribute, shaking down colleges and companies for payments and holding cabinet meetings where his secretaries would go around the table and one by one slather him with obnoxious devotion.
It was everything the right once hated about the Soviet Union and China and even their perception of the UN – a central leader making the nation revolve around him, suppressing dissent, taking control of agencies and corporations, and elevating himself to a nearly godlike figure. This wasn’t what presidents did, and it’s not what Americans wanted from their president. It demanded a response in keeping with how Americans respond to tyranny.
Or not.
Jones has been all over the place about Trump, veering from unquestioned support to accusations of failure, and back again. But Jones has celebrated Trump’s military deployments, extolling the “troops in the streets” that he once decried with Jade Helm. Trump’s possible military takeover of Chicago is “his duty,” as he put it in his August 22nd show, where he even admits it’s a slippery slope to gun confiscation, but also necessary because of a tortured logic involving fake crime stats and “the left.” Trump’s troop deployments are “liberation day” from drugs and the homeless and gangs.
“Thank God for Trump,” Jones declared a few days earlier. “He’s doing the right thing and it’s beautiful., and it’s all constitutional.”
Ultimately, the far right wanted Jade Helm, they just wanted it on their terms and to be rolled out in the way they wanted. They wanted it arresting the “deep state” and “making the streets safe again” from the people they deemed to be dirty and dangerous. They can easily rationalize their worst fears coming true, because they were never really afraid of it in the first place. All they wanted was someone they like to be in power, and then that person can use and abuse any lever of government or the military they want. Their fear always stemmed from them being rounded up – not undocumented immigrants and peaceful protestors. They always wanted those people rounded up.
It’s not clear if Trump will actually deploy troops to more cities, and if he does, that those troops will do anything other than what soldiers in LA and DC have done, which is snarl traffic with checkpoints and make videos for the White House’s social media accounts. Some are now picking up trash in DC, because there was nothing else for them to do. There’s no indication there will be large-scale roundups, nationwide martial law, suspended elections, or any of the other worst case scenarios offered up for what Jade Helm was “really” about.
But the fact that we’re even seriously talking about any of this, rather than dismissing it as paranoid conspiracy fodder, shows how far we’ve fallen and how perilous these times are. Not that the conspiracy influencers who pushed Jade Helm fear for a year care. What matters to them is selling t-shirts and making sure their audience knows how much they love Trump. Principles and democracy can’t hold a candle to that.
Mike Rothschild 
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