Remember Jade Helm 15?
Ten years ago, Jade Helm 15 took place in several southwestern U.S. states. It was a joint military exercise involving 1,200 personnel, and it was intended to train soldiers in the skills they would need to fight abroad.
Jade Helm wasn’t particularly unusual as far as military exercises go, but the scale of the operation was larger than most.
This led to some pretty wild conspiracy theories, mainly because the President at the time was, of course, Barack Obama.
Alex Jones amplified a lot of these conspiracy theories. There were theories that the military was going to take away everyone’s guns and stockpile them in shuttered Wal-Marts to be distributed to invading ground troops from China, which is kind of like a Mad Lib of your worst uncle’s inner monologue. There were also theories that the word “Helm” in Jade Helm was an acronym for “Homeland Eradication of Local Militants.” There was even a theory that the last day of the exercises — September 15, 2015 — was going to coincide with an asteroid hitting the Earth.
But the biggest and most mainstream conspiracy theory regarding Jade Helm — the one parroted by numerous voices on the right — was that it was the first step to Obama declaring martial law. And what could be a greater threat to our nation than the President replacing civilian government with military rule? Can you even imagine such a thing?
Ten years later, it’s pretty easy to imagine such a thing, since President Donald Trump just did it.
On Monday — the day I’m writing this column — Trump announced that he was putting the Washington, D.C. police department under federal control and deploying the National Guard to the streets of the nation’s capitol. He did this by declaring a “public safety emergency” and invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which allows the President to commandeer the D.C. police in “conditions of an emergency nature.”
And what exactly is the emergency? I’ll let the man himself answer.
“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capitol from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” Trump said to reporters at the press conference. “This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re gonna take our capitol back. We’re taking it back. … The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth.”
First off, that’s not true. In fact, violent crime has been declining in D.C. for the last two years. Secondly, we already had a Liberation Day. It was April 2, the day that Trump unveiled his tariffs designed to liberate Americans from whatever money was left in our wallets.
So how are we going to fight this fictitious surge in violent crime in D.C.?
“We have slums here,” Trump said. “We’re getting rid of them. I know it’s not politically correct. You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we get rid of the slums where they live. Caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets at all times of the day. They’re on ATVs, motorbikes. They travel pretty well. They fight back, until you knock the hell out of them. Because it’s the only language they understand.”
It’s been a few years since I’ve been to D.C., but I was unaware that it had become a lawless wasteland of violent ATV-mounted youth. Maybe instead of sending in the National Guard we should have Snake Plissken fly in on a glider.
For months now, there has been a sense that Trump has been itching to invoke martial law. But why now? This is the equivalent of Germany passing the Reichstag Fire Decree without first having a Reichstag fire.
It’s too early to tell how this is all going to pan out or why Trump has decided now is the time to fortify Washington, D.C. If I were to speculate, I would imagine that maybe something is about to hit the news — something Trump has either done or is about to do — that would lead to such massive protests that he feels the need to circle the wagons and protect himself.
On an unrelated note, release the Epstein files.
Column Sponsored by: Dr. Mensink
