In the spring of 2015, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called out the state’s national guard to monitor a military training exercise taking place in his state and across the Southwest in order to make sure that “Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”
Called Jade Helm, the exercises by some 1,200 special operations troops in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado were on terrain that “replicates areas Special Operations Soldiers regularly find themselves operating in overseas.”
And while the residents of Bastrop, Texas, may not have been flattered by their town being compared to Afghanistan, one would think that between Fort Sam Houston to their south and Fort Hood to their north, the good people of central Texas were quite comfortable with military maneuvers.
Maybe most, but not all of them.
At the end of the Obama administration, some Americans believed that the president, who they thought was secretly a Kenyan Muslim installed nefariously by globalist forces, was preparing to impose a dictatorship. To those folks, Jade Helm was just a cover story for a larger plan that had been taking shape over the previous six years in which the military would take control and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would operate detention centers, including at some closed Walmarts, to neutralize any resistance.
It was a kind of “Red Dawn” meets “The Manchurian Candidate” plot. Foreign enemies — probably the Chinese — would occupy rural America, but they would do it with the help of their plant inside the Oval Office.
You may never have been to Bastrop, Texas, but take my word for it that the likelihood of Xi Jinping wanting to close his iron grip around this former sawmill town of fewer than 10,000 people is low. I have been out to the Lost Pines Resort there: nice rooms, pretty good golf course, one hell of a club sandwich. But as a forward operating base for the People’s Liberation Army? Seems like a bad fit.
It seemed crazy then. Not that kooks would think kooky things. That’s what they do. Back in 1987, the Miami Herald obtained a leaked planning document authored in part with FEMA by then-Lt. Col. Oliver North for imposing martial law in the event of a nuclear war. The kooks of that age believed that Iran-Contra was only just an inkling of the secret government behind the scenes that was preparing to herd Americans into prison camps.
No, what seemed crazy about the Jade Helm story was that people in positions of respect and authority, particularly Abbott, were playing along. We knew why Abbott wouldn’t try to debunk the claims. If Chris Christie could get torched for taking Barack Obama on a disaster relief tour of New Jersey, what might happen if Abbott was spouting talking points for a secret Kenyan’s plan for a one-world government?
But the fact that Abbott got involved at all seemed risky politically and potentially dangerous. If the kooks get results, they’re inclined to think that a) they were on to something and b) they have power. Crazy, right?
A decade later, Abbott’s decision doesn’t look crazy. It was just a harbinger of 2025. Now it’s Democratic governors who are warning about internment camps and a federal occupation. It’s the blue states where the National Guard has become a political football. But the big difference isn’t the fact that the partisanship has changed, it’s that the feds are encouraging the paranoia, not trying to dispel it.
Last week, President Trump told the generals and admirals of our armed forces that he had ordered the creation of “a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances.”
“This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room,” he warned, “because it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”
In cities “run by the radical-left Democrats,” troops would be sharpening their skills. “That’s a war, too,” he said. “It’s a war from within.” As if to confirm his intentions, the president visited the USS Harry Truman on Sunday, where, rather than the stone-faced generals, he got a raucous reception from the uniformed sailors for a rankly partisan speech attacking Democrats.
You don’t even need to do the “If Obama …” game here. Imagine if Trump had said and done these things in his first term. Not yet 10 months into his second term, and the response from Republicans and members of the political press is essentially a shrug. Trump says so much that’s crazy or wrong or cruel that the people on his side and the people who cover him have learned to mostly just tune the president out.
But the people who fear Trump aren’t being so blithe.
Do I think that Trump will successfully use the regular military against the civilian population of the United States? No. He may try to some degree, but he will probably fail. Do I think that his adviser Stephen Miller will succeed in going around the court system and treat civilian criminals as enemy combatants? No. Nor do I think that the administration’s efforts to make antifa into a catch-all designation for the “radical left” in order to suppress dissent will succeed.
And I would tell the Americans today who believe that those Department of Homeland Security camps they’re building are actually going to house dissident Americans the same thing I told the people worried about Jade Helm a decade ago: Our courts and our military are strong and the members of those institutions take seriously their obligations to the Constitution. Whatever you may think of the president or his administration, you can count on those two pillars of our republic.
The big difference between now and then is that in 2015, I was asking people to believe what their government was telling them. Today, I have to tell them not to.
Stirewalt is the politics editor for The Hill, veteran campaign and elections journalist and best-selling author of books about American political history.
Source: The Hill
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