Jade Helm was this huge
military exercise taking place across the entire Southwest; with some states
designated friendly, some designated unknown, and some, like Texas, designated
hostile.
Jade Helm began in earnest on July 15…and has just ended.
Jade Helm, according to the Washington Post, was
an exercise involving elite units from four military branches. It was intended
to simulate the uncertain environment that our military might face at some
point in the not-too distant future. It didn’t actually turn out that way.
The right-wing conspiracy nuts
drove around, taking video of abandoned Walmarts surrounded by fences, shipping
containers and construction equipment, and claimed that was proof that the
government was turning these Walmarts into
detention centers for
American citizens.
This was the ultimate evidence that the evil, socialist,
communist, fascist dictator in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, was
working to detain and eliminate “real” Americans who were a threat to him and
his regime.
In early August, one insane
conspiracy theorist actually fired two shots at service members at Camp Shelby,
while another (who may have actually been the same man) fired shots at the
Joint Forces Training Center. A “person of interest” was taken into custody,
which some took as proof that they were, in fact, doing the nefarious things
the conspiracy nuts said they were.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, along
with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), also jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon,
looking into Jade Helm and making grandiose claims that they were just trying
to ensure Americans didn’t lose their freedoms, their civil rights, and
whatever else the right thinks President Obama is trying to take from them.
Now that it’s ending–rather
quietly, we might add–what have we learned? First off, Jade Helm is hardly the first time the
militaryhas done this. That didn’t stop the right wingnuts, though,
from running with the story when plans began making the rounds on the Internet.
The pictures, the posts to social media, the videos, all of it smacked of the
terrible, paranoid delusions that permeate the far right.
Oddly enough, the Post piece says that former Texas
governor Rick Perry was a voice of reason during the brouhaha, urging residents
to calm the eff down, more or less, while Cruz and Abbott stoked the fears
surrounding Jade Helm.
Suzanne Nagl, a spokesperson for
the Army Special Operations Command, said in an email to the Post:
“At this time, we do not have any lessons learned to share since we have not yet conducted an after-action review of the exercise, but we do believe the exercise overall was a success.”
And what did the rest of us learn
from this? Well, there was no military takeover of Texas, or anywhere else,
first of all. We also learned that the military has designated various states
as “hostile territory” in past exercises like Jade Helm, and there was no
takeover resulting from those exercises either.
But really, what we learned is
that the right wingnuts, who hate Obama and think he’s really the worst kind of
tyrant imaginable, are out of their ever-loving minds with fear and hate.
In
the end, Jade Helm ended exactly the way we said it would – quietly, and with
no American citizens arrested, detained and taken into custody simply for
disagreeing with the government on something.
These people will probably claim
they were successful in preventing Obama from actually taking over Texas, and
the U.S. in the days to come. That’s how these people work. The truth is, a
takeover wasn’t what was planned in the first place, but hey! They’ll think
what they want.
Author Rika Christensen is an experienced writer
and loves debating politics. Engage with her and see more of her work by
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