Remember the Jade Helm 15 military training exercise that begat the conspiracy theory that then president Barack Obama was coordinating the military to take over the state of Texas? The beginning of martial law was upon the Lone Star State and the rest of the country would follow, and the United States of America would become the Black Muslim Caliphate of Obama. Something like that. President Obama, ever diplomatic, later joked that there was no way First Lady Michelle Obama would allow him to stay in office for more than eight years.
The Jade Helm 15 training exercise came and went with not a single example of federal military overreach into poor old Texas. The Republican governor of the state “ordered members of the Texas Military to monitor federal troops in an upcoming two-month training exercise planned for the Lone Star State.” The conspiracy theorists and elected officials who promoted the true paranoia just moved on to the next bogus conspiracy involving the country’s first Black president. And now, in Portland, Oregon USA, the federal government—despite the increasingly alarmed demands from state officials to stand down—under orders from Trump and Barr “people in camouflage were driving around the area in unmarked minivans grabbing people off the street.”
These shock troops have maimed American citizens, kidnapped citizens, and destroyed private property. Their immunity is not a legal one except that Donald Trump and Bill Barr believe themselves to be the absolute law. Where you at, Oath Keepers? Where you at, myriad Second Amendment militia assholes? Where you at?
The Trump administration already began their Jade Helm totalitarian policies the first year of office. The so-called Muslim ban was just the beginning of trying to make being brown and Black illegal in our country. Since that time, every bogus conspiracy theory promoted by the Trump administration and transmitted to the base through spineless idiots like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have been promoted to serve one of two purposes: deflect any and all responsibilities for the Republican party and the Trump administration’s failures on other, non-white folks, and create a straw man that Trump and Barr’s secret police can exact military force over.
When Attorney General Barr and President Trump conspired to have the streets of Washington, D.C. violently swept clean of peaceful American protesters for a Trump photo op, Trump’s abuse of federal power seemed theatrically obvious to anyone paying attention. But right-wing outlets and others seemed less interested in pointing out the abuses of power than in retaining theirs.
And so, while Trump and his secret police have begun their takeover of an American city, Mike Pompeo, a overtly grotesque block of a person, and the secretary of state under Trump, told the world what Trump’s America is about: venerating the southern white racist secessionists who lost the Civil War. It’s a statement to America that Trump and his allies want things to go back to the way they were when slavery was still the law of at least half the land.
All of the big anti-federal government overreach groups have remained silent this whole time. in many cases, these groups have always been a part of the movement toward fascism. Like Trump, they’ve projected their own desires onto every liberal or progressive policy in the hopes that one day they would get to make the rules, with their guns in hand. The Oath Keepers and other Second Amendment bullshit artists have always been one thing and one thing only: white supremacist Klansmen dressed up in alt-white robes.
