Remember Jade Helm? After a summer of heated racial justice protests that drove President Donald Trump to dispatch federal law...
Catherine Thompson at TPM:
Remember Jade Helm?
After a summer of heated racial justice protests that drove President Donald Trump to dispatch federal law enforcement officers to liberal cities — and prompted a sitting senator to call for the president to “send in the troops” against the American people — it’s quaint to look back on a crackpot conspiracy theory about former President Barack Obama enacting martial law.
“Jade Helm 15” was a multi-state military training exercise that took place in the summer of 2015 and spawned a constellation of delusions I wrote about as a TPM reporter covering right-wing extremism. The basic theory held that the exercise provided cover for Obama to declare martial law, and there were more outlandish offshoots, including speculation that China would amass troops in shuttered Wal-Mart locations around the U.S.
These ideas were objectively batty and easily mocked. It was a simpler time, when Trump hadn’t yet announced his presidential candidacy and “fake news” wasn’t yet part of our collective lexicon. Given what we know now about how conspiracy theorists and far-right groups manipulate the media and spread disinformation online, the path Jade Helm paranoia traveled was disturbingly straightforward and effective. Conspiracy theories percolated in the right-wing fever swamps of the internet, most notably Alex Jones’ InfoWars. Then politicians “just asking questions” amplified those theories and drew mainstream media attention.
TPM was one of few outlets consistently reporting on the far right in the years before Trump’s election because Josh and the team knew that fringe groups and characters like Jones have more influence on the GOP than the party acknowledges. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) first catapulted Jade Helm into national news when he directed a state-run militia to “monitor” the exercise, writing, “It is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) added fuel to the fire when he asked the Pentagon for more information, saying, “When you see a federal government that is attacking our free speech rights, our religious liberty rights, our Second Amendment rights. That produces distrust as to government.” These nods to a voter base primed for political conspiracy theories foreshadowed how the Republican Party would construct its own alternate reality under Trump.
There are consequences when a conspiracy theory jumps from fringe blogs to the nightly news, according to a 2017 Data & Society Research Institute report: “Even if the mainstream news was reporting on it in shock or disgust, it still led millions of viewers and readers to be exposed to these ideas.” So the possibility Russian trolls manufactured some of the chatter around Jade Helm, as former CIA director Michael Hayden has asserted, is worth noting. He claimed in a May 2018 interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that fake social media accounts’ successful promotion of Jade Helm wingnuttery gave Russia the green light for a much larger influence campaign. “At that point, I’m figuring the Russians are saying, ‘We can go big time,’ and at that point I think they made the decision, ‘We’re going to play in the electoral process,’” he said.
Hayden’s bold claim didn’t land with a splash. He didn’t back it up, and in the spring of 2018 there was more pressing news for reporters and readers to digest, including Trump’s separation of migrant families at the border and withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. But as Casey Michel reported at now-defunct ThinkProgress, there was evidence to support what Hayden said. Several fake Russian Twitter accounts and at least one Facebook account funneled readers to Jade Helm conspiracy sites. The conspiracy theories got substantial play in Russian propaganda outlets as well.
If Jade Helm was a dry run for Russian disinformation in the 2016 campaign, it also heralded acts of violence conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists carried out in 2020.
Jade Helm 15 was a conspiracy theory that was so untethered to reality that a lot of people thought it was laughable. 5+ years later, the conspiracy was the starting point for the manifestation of the sinister far-right conspiratorial mindset that is now prevalent in the GOP, which is no laughing matter.
