Tag: alex jones

Jade Helm 15, Ten Years Later

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

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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.

A Few Lines About “Cocaine-Gate”

Mike Rothschild

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

It often takes just one offhand remark, misinterpreted picture, or joke that doesn’t land to start a conspiracy theory that subsequently never goes away. We’ve seen it happen time after time – World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein’s comment that the firefighting team working to save WTC 7 should be “pulled” serving as “proof” that the building was a controlled demolition, John Kasich mistakenly saying John McCain was “put to death” rather than “laid to rest” being “proof” he was executed, a very stupid joke by Joan Rivers about Michelle Obama being transgender sparking over a decade of conspiracy theories that she’s actually a man, and so on.

Sometimes this happens organically, but many times it stems from a conspiracy influencer seeing or hearing something and deciding it’s something else – usually something they can use to drive traffic to their website or product.

So it went on Sunday May 11, when Alex Jones announced on Twitter that he had broken a “DEVELOPING SCANDAL,” which was a short snippet of a video that he claimed showed three world leaders getting blasted out of their minds on cocaine.

The text with the tweet, accompanied by a short video, reads:

DEVELOPING SCANDAL: Macron, Starmer, and Merz caught on video on their return from Kiev [sic]. A bag of white powder on the table. Macron quickly pockets it, Merz hides the spoon. No explanation given. Zelensky, known cocaine enthusiast, had just hosted them. All three of the “leaders” look completely cracked out.

Jones followed up his “scandal” with a video titled simply “BREAKING: It’s Coke” where the inexplicably slimmed down Jones rambled for over four minutes, followed by several minutes of ads, about how the leaders of France, Germany, and the UK were “lit up like Christmas trees” while reiterating that Infowars is one of the most accurate media sources in the world.

It’s not. The the three leaders on the train back from Kyiv were not feverishly trying to hide their Bolivian marching powder from the press, and a cursory analysis of the video showed that the “bag of coke” was a tissue that Emmanuel Macron hid because he probably didn’t want to look like one of those people who blows their nose and leaves the tissue out. And the “coke spoon” was obviously not that, likely either a stirring spoon or a Bamboo Knot cocktail pick. It doesn’t actually matter, because the “bag of coke” is so clearly not a bag a of cocaine and actually a crumpled tissue that it immediately renders the rest of Alex’s conspiracy moot.

But we all know that conspiracy theories like this aren’t designed to stand up to scrutiny. They’re designed to be shared in anger and disgust, which generates income for their originators. And this one was shared big time, getting over ten thousand retweets in its first day of existence.

Jones spent most of his Sunday show touting his “discovery” as proof that the European leaders trying to drum up support and sympathy were Ukraine were nothing but blasted out druggies. Still, the story started to draw pushback from skeptics who pointed out that Macron was clearly hiding a tissue, and even from other conservatives who claimed Jones was making them look like fools. For his Monday show, Jones mentioned “cocaine-gate” only once, but when other conspiracists starting turning against him, he went back on the offensive, structuring much of his Tuesday show about the non-scandal, and declaring “of course that’s cocaine on the table” and that they’re so drugged up that they’re going to start a nuclear war and we’re all going to die.

In the case of “cocaine-gate,” it’s too early to tell if this is a conspiracy theory that will stick. Given the trajectory of other instant-boil conspiracy theories of the past few years, it likely won’t. Stuff like “Michelle Obama is a man” sticks because it came from an earlier time when there weren’t as many theories like it popping up every day, nor were there as many vectors for these theories to find new audiences. It used to take time for a conspiracy theory to worm its way into our brains, but that timeline has now crunched years into days, and we are hit with so many of these things that many never get a chance to really take root before they’re replaced by something equally absurd.

But “will anyone remember this in a week” might not even be the right question to ask. The right question, like most other conspiracy theories, is why did people believe this in the first place? How stupid do they think the leaders of three of the most powerful countries in the world are to leave evidence of their drug usage out for the cameras of numerous news outlets to see? Surely, some people were sharing the video out of curiosity or disgust. But it’s clear that many people believed that the most powerful politician in France was hurriedly hiding a bag of blow that he’d accidentally left out – just one thread on r/conspiracy on Reddit has hundreds of affirmative comments agreeing with the hypothesis.

And yet…it’s clearly a tissue, and also very stupid. So what are we doing here?

The idea of the leaders of Europe being blasted on cocaine while making life-and-death decisions fits in with the general idea that Jones and other far-right propagandists have been pushing for years: these are elites who live and pleasure themselves in worlds of decadence that the rest of us will never set foot in. It’s a huge part of what made QAnon take off: it promised the downfall of the power brokers who waste our money on weird rituals and Satanic ceremonies and drug-fueled anti-family mayhem while the rest of us suffer and fight over scraps.

(Why did these same conspiracists fall in line behind Donald Trump, who has made a career out of professional displays of obnoxious opulence while philandering his way through three marriages and multiple sexual assault accusations? Don’t ask for it to make sense, it never will.)

This one “works” in particular because Jones and his ilk have spent years alleging that Vladimir Zelenskyy is some kind of drug addict who’s “obviously on methamphetamine and so many other drugs,” flying into Hitlerian meth-fueled rages where he orders more helpless Ukrainians to die in his Satanic war on the Christian bedrock of the west. It’s a huge part of the opposition to western funding of Ukraine’s fight against Russia, and is all over the media output of conspiracy influencers. To these people and their fans, Putin is the bulwark against evil, and the decadent west is the evil – though it’s fascinating that all of the references to Zelensky being a drug addict come after Russia had invaded his country. It’s almost like they didn’t know anything about him, then all decided they knew everything about him.

So in the Alex Jones/right wing conspiracy universe of leaders who answer to Satan and get hammered all the time, the idea of three of Europe’s heads of state all doing coke while on a goodwill tour for a fellow cokehead makes perfect sense. Of course they all get together and do blow and shoot meth and hunt children while they conspire to push their transgender Magog nuclear war agenda. Why wouldn’t they all be on drugs?

And he’s instilled his value system into his fans, pumping out hours-per-day of paranoia and conspiracism, all meant to explain why the have nots have nothing and the haves have everything, how they’re trying to destroy the west and the family and freedom, and how you can stop it by sharing Alex’s videos and buying Alex’s products.

That is literally what a huge part of his show is about – buying supplements and shirts and survival equipment. Just the 2024 episode where he claims Zelensky is “obviously on methamphetamines” features Jones mentioning his “products” dozens of times, overprices wellness shit like “nano super blue toothpaste” and “Ultimate Turmeric Formula” and “Immune Gargle Mouthwash.”

So when people get agitated about the “drug use” of European leaders, they’re really just serving themselves up as marks for the long-running con game of the far right influencer sphere: come for the outrage, stay for the products. In that sense, it doesn’t matter at all what Starmer and his cohorts were doing or not doing. As long as you’re angry about the potential of them doing something, you’re in the right spot to mainline more Infowars and purchase more Infowars swag.

All that super immune gargle mouthwash isn’t going to buy itself, you know.

Rush Limbaugh Doesn’t Think Hurricanes Are Fake

Mike Rothschild

Let me get this out of the way now: I think Rush Limbaugh is a sausage casing stuffed with norco-infused Twinkie filling. I think he rots brains and poisons hearts and has a truly harmful effect on the people who listen to him.

But I don’t think he thinks hurricanes are fake.

You’ve probably noticed we’re in the middle of a hurricane pandemic, with Harvey having laid waste to Houston, Irma bearing down on Florida, and Jose and Katia forming up. If this were a SyFy Channel movie, we’d be at the point where all the hurricanes merge into a hypercane, and the war-happy president orders the hypercane be broken up with nukes, but all the nukes do is make the hypercane a nuclear hypercane, and the only person who can stop it is Michael Dudikoff, or his millennial equivalent.

(side note, I will absolutely write this movie for money)

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