A panic pervades the internet: terrified talk of troops in American cities, federal shock troops brutalizing citizens and neighbors, the targeting of gun owners, mass surveillance, the deployment of militarized artificial intelligence, and the suspension of the Constitution. The year is 2015, and the far right is incensed.<\/p>\n
This was a period of intense American paranoia and anger, largely spurred by the right-wing meltdown over the consecutive victories of President Barack Obama. It was also a time of post-Snowden horror, as a nation realized it lived inside an unfathomably immense government surveillance dragnet endorsed and expanded by both political parties. It was in this moment that, for a certain segment of conservatives, Jade Helm 15 became an American crisis.<\/p>\n
A decade later, this imaginary emergency reveals much about the hucksters who pushed it and the tolerance of many Americans for state oppression \u2014 so long as they are not the intended targets. The cauldron of race hatred, federal violence, and surveillance brewed by the paranoiacs who pounced on Jade Helm has spilled over today not in the form of right-wing phobia, but right-wing policy.<\/p>\n
In July 2015, Alex Jones, at that point still little more than a punchline, issued a dire warning on his website InfoWars: \u201cThis is an emergency broadcast,\u201d Jones began, warning of an impending campaign to \u201cmilitarize police and to put standing armies on the streets to suppress the population and to carry out political operations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones was referring to publicly released Pentagon planning documents detailing Jade Helm 15, a military training exercise throughout sparsely populated swaths of the American South, from Florida to Texas. As is often the case when the dishonest have primary documents and a vast megaphone, Jones misstated nearly every detail of the materials. A map from what was essentially a large-scale military roleplaying game labeling Texas as \u201chostile,\u201d colored in red, was irrefutable evidence to Jones that the Obama administration was preparing to let loose the national security state on the conservative heartland.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not becoming a police state. We\u2019re already here.\u201d<\/p>\n
All of this was simple pretext, he claimed. The White House was leveraging the national security state to build the infrastructure for the federal paramilitary occupation of the country to choke out political dissent by force. Unwanted portions of the populations would be herded into Department of Homeland Security-administered camps, warned Jones and other stalwarts of right-wing paranoia. \u201cWe\u2019re not becoming a police state,\u201d he told viewers. \u201cWe\u2019re already here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though there was never any factual reason to suspect Jade Helm disguised a federal takeover, the broader paranoia was anchored in some fact. Jones claimed that the training exercise was connected to the broader militarization of American police agencies, a real trend he misconstrued as a leftist scheme against his audience. \u201cYou have massive military gear being cached \u2014 armored vehicles, machine guns, helicopters, night vision, Humvees \u2014 with the police departments around the country,\u201d Jones explained. \u201cIt\u2019s about suppressing the patriot population.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones was not alone. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott quickly endorsed InfoWars\u2019 ravings, deploying the state guard to \u201cmonitor\u201d Jade Helm so that \u201cTexans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed,\u201d as he put it in an April 2015 letter ordering their mobilization. Former Texas congressman Louie Gohmert suggested the White House was hoping to provoke an armed confrontation between the military and the administration\u2019s critics. \u201cIt is no surprise that those who have experienced or noticed such persecution are legitimately suspicious,\u201d he said. \u201cI understand the reason for concern and uncertainty,\u201d agreed Sen. Ted Cruz.<\/p>\n
Some Americans heeded the warning. The New York Times interviewed a Texas doctor stockpiling ammunition. Locals organized Jade Helm volunteer groups that monitored and recorded military movement. The Oath Keepers, a prominent American anti-government militia, described Jade Helm on its website as a \u201cPortentous government plan, a pre-fabricated and pre-constructed umbrella under which a black op by the Deep State\u2019s compartmentalized agencies could possibly \u2018Go Live\u2019 in a fantastic sort of Shock and Awe False Flag psycho-coup to jar the public mind of America through fear into acceptance of some nefarious policy the government desired, such as the establishment of Martial Law and the complete loss of individual liberty and our Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n
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These days, Jade Helm isn\u2019t talked about much because nothing happened. But in the decade since, there has been a near-total inversion of the panic that Jade Helm sparked. Largely unconcerned and frequently unconstrained by law, Trump has found in his Department of Homeland Security what Jones warned was coming a decade ago: a paramilitary force to terrorize political opponents and demographic undesirables. Eleven years past schedule, Trump and a docile American right wing have finally delivered the Jade Helm presidency.<\/p>\n
Federal agents ride in an armored vehicle during operations on Jan. 16, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn.\u00a0Photo: Adam Gray\/AP <\/p>\n
Armored personnel carriers today carry masked, heavily armed, pointlessly camouflaged federal commandos through American cities that voted against the president, backed by a sophisticated national surveillance apparatus. Trump and his lieutenants, beneficiaries of an American right-wing reshaped by the likes of Jones and his audience, make real and explicit the quiet fantasizing attributed to Obama\u2019s during Jade Helm, speaking openly of American communities as hives of the enemy. In September, Trump announced impending deportation operations in Chicago with a doctored image depicting the city under attack by napalm, captioned \u201cChicago about to find out why it\u2019s called the Department of WAR.\u201d<\/p>\n
The notion of ideological foes not as electoral enemies but legitimate targets of violence is no longer the stuff of conspiracy podcasts, but the political mainstream. Trump referred to a need to stamp out the \u201cenemy within\u201d the United States in September speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, suggesting the unconstitutional use of the military to \u201chandle\u201d them, and mused about using American cities as \u201ctraining grounds\u201d for the Pentagon. Gun-toting agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Custom and Border Protection are the foot soldiers of a government that describes its people as terrorists. They have been joined at times by actual soldiers, Marines and National Guard members, deployed illegally in cities like Los Angeles where the president\u2019s policies are unpopular.<\/p>\n
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Since Trump\u2019s speech, DHS agents have shot 12 people, killing four of them. Minneapolis residents describe the experience of ICE and CBP\u2019s surge as something akin to a military occupation. Where Obama\u2019s Jade Helm fell short in the collective imaginations of the InfoWars right, Trump\u2019s second term has succeeded in wielding DHS as an ideological cudgel. After Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti were gunned down by DHS agents, the department\u2019s justification for dispensing the death penalty on the sidewalk \u2014 that they were both domestic terrorists bent on killing federal personnel \u2014 quickly disintegrated in the face of video evidence. All that was left was a rationale more foreboding than anything Jade Helm truthers attributed to the Obama administration, a shrug that boils down to this brutal view: That\u2019s what they get for wanting this to stop.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWas he simply walking by and just happened to walk into a law enforcement situation and try to direct traffic and stand in the middle of the road, and then assault, delay, and obstruct law enforcement?\u201d CBP\u2019s Greg Bovino wondered of Pretti at a press conference. \u201cOr was he there for a reason?\u201d (Pretti\u2019s reason for being there that day was clear, having been filmed from multiple angles: to legally observe and record the agents who then killed him.)<\/p>\n
The idea that merely opposing the president\u2019s immigration policy is reason enough to warrant summary execution is, if not stated outright, now on the lips of many right-wing commentators. It\u2019s an implicit threat that the next person to record a masked cop on their block could receive the same.<\/p>\n
Immigration authorities have brought to life the id of Jade Helm not just through overt displays of force, but also through the vast intelligence and surveillance apparatus within DHS.<\/p>\n
In May 2015, InfoWars correspondent David Knight warned that Jade Helm would involve the collection and exploitation of enormous reams of personal information. \u201cThey analyze the data, and then because you stick out in some way, now you\u2019re treated as if you\u2019ve already had due process, as if you\u2019ve already been found guilty of a crime,\u201d resulting in the government kicking down the doors of innocent people. \u201cIf you understand the technology that\u2019s involved, then you\u2019ll see that Jade Helm is more of an intelligence operation using geospatial intelligence mapping,\u201d claimed InfoWars correspondent Lee Ann McAdoo. \u201cAnd as information from low-level surveillance technologies such as stingrays and predictive policing programs are all getting siphoned up into NSA data centers, a detailed global map will continue to grow with near-endless stats on all individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n
This much was true \u2014 in broad strokes, if not the specifics \u2014 back in 2015 and even more so today. DHS has steadily amassed for itself a security state within the security state, one now plump with record funding under a Trump second term clinched with the promise of a ruthless immigration crackdown. \u201cWith a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency\u2019s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years,\u201d the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote last month, \u201cICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thanks to the unregulated market in commercial surveillance technology, DHS has little need for a spy agency like the NSA.<\/p>\n
Thanks to the unregulated market in commercial surveillance technology, DHS has little need for a spy agency like the NSA. Last fall, ICE reactivated its contract with spyware-maker Paragon, which makes software that can remotely break into a smartphone. DHS also makes ample use of phone-cracking tools like Cellebrite, and has been purchasing warrantless access to cellphone location data since at least 2017, providing a turn-key means of tracking virtually anyone, anywhere, while bypassing the Fourth Amendment entirely. A 2023 DHS inspector general\u2019s report found that both ICE and CBP consistently used this data illegally. Smartphone-based face recognition makes suspects out of anyone DHS agents might encounter on the street, immigrant and citizen alike.<\/p>\n
Some in the InfoWars orbit speculated the word Jade itself \u201cmay or may not be an acronym for a military-developed artificial intelligence,\u201d columnist Mark Saal observed in 2015. Like other facets of the Jade Helm freakout, this fear managed to be prescient despite its own baselessness. What\u2019s unimpeachably true today is that DHS uses a litany of sophisticated artificial intelligence tools, including those provided by Palantir, a longtime military and intelligence contractor that has previously aided the NSA and continues to provide analytic and database services to ICE.<\/p>\n
The role of Palantir alone within DHS is the stuff of InfoWars reverie: The company is building a tool \u201cthat populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a \u2018confidence score\u2019 on the person\u2019s current address,\u201d according to a recent report by 404 Media. In contract documents renewing ICE\u2019s use of Palantir case management software reviewed by The Intercept, the agency notes that the company has a \u201ccritical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE.\u201d The case management system alone ingests data from across the federal government, including the FBI\u2019s Criminal Justice Information Services, Department of Justice databases, the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, and the Office of Biometric Identity Management, among others.<\/p>\n
Omnipresent data collection in the name of Homeland Security has allowed for novel means of taunting and intimidating the president\u2019s critics. In a video clip that began circulating on X last week, a masked DHS agent is seen recording a car\u2019s license plate with his phone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy are you taking my information down?\u201d the woman asks. \u201cBecause we have a nice little database,\u201d the agent replies. \u201cAnd now you\u2019re considered a domestic terrorist.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear what \u201clittle database\u201d the agent was referring to, or on what grounds recording a video on a public street would be considered an act of terrorism. Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Intercept there is \u201cno such database.\u201d McLaughlin would not answer when asked repeatedly whether DHS endorsed its personnel threatening to place people on a domestic terrorism database it now claims does not exist.<\/p>\n
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A national security presidential memorandum issued by Trump in September, known as NSPM-7, explicitly labels certain political and ideological stances \u2014 including \u201canti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity\u201d along with unspecified views on race and gender \u2014 as forms of domestic terrorism.<\/p>\n
The Jade Helm presidency hasn\u2019t matched the scope and scale of what Jones et al. hallucinated a decade ago. But Trump\u2019s DHS \u2014 a department already plagued by bipartisan abuse, brutalization, and overreach since its founding \u2014 represents in spirit and practice exactly what far-right and right-libertarians once warned was a genuine emergency.<\/p>\n
Though it made no effort to attach itself to facts, Jade Helm fearmongering touched, glancingly, on some uncomfortable truths: The federal government is willing to use force, surveillance, and extraconstitutional power to suppress dissent. But the greater truth revealed in the intervening decade is that for many Americans, these abuses aren\u2019t a problem so long as it\u2019s someone else\u2019s back pushed onto the concrete, someone else\u2019s car windows smashed, and someone else dealing with the pain of a chemical irritant.<\/p>\n
Far-right commentators and elected officials are making clear that their opposition was never to authoritarian violence or state terror, but instead to being subjected to that violence and terror themselves. The contingent of the country that swore to avenge Ruby Ridge and Waco now seem mostly content to cheer on more of the same beneath X videos. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The far right is making clear that their opposition was never to authoritarian violence or state terror, but instead to being subjected to that violence and terror themselves.<\/p>\n
When the administration blamed Alex Pretti\u2019s death on his wholly legal gun ownership, having failed to slander him as an \u201cassassin,\u201d even the National Rifle Association, which once derided federal police as \u201cjackbooted government thugs,\u201d felt obliged to claim he was \u201cantagonizing\u201d ICE, even while defending his right to bear arms.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe now know that Alex Pretti was a violent agitator who repeatedly went out armed to deliberately instigate physical confrontations with law enforcement,\u201d conservative commentator Matt Walsh posted on X. \u201cHe is not a victim. He was not a mere \u2018protester.\u2019 And he got what was coming to him. Simple as that.\u201d<\/p>\n
InfoWars\u2019 Jade Helm coverage is now seemingly scrubbed from the site. With a friendly president in the White House, the publication has shifted from condemning the Pentagon as the harbinger of American apocalypse to joining its official press corps. But the spirit of the old anti-state paranoia of InfoWars remains \u2014 just inverted entirely in the state\u2019s service.<\/p>\n
Headlines like \u201cCould the Minneapolis Rioters Be Using Automatic License Plate Recognition Systems?\u201d are what the Jade Helm-believers now wonder about dragnet surveillance. \u201cWatch Two Brave ICE Officers Fight Off A Violent Leftist Mob That Invaded Their Hotel!\u201d is the formerly paranoid right\u2019s assessment of DHS. The notion of camouflaged agents in the streets is cause for celebration, not an \u201cemergency broadcast\u201d of 2015. \u201cA War Has Erupted On The Streets Of America, And It Is Going To End With Martial Law In Major U.S. Cities,\u201d InfoWars warns today, paired with an AI-generated image of federal officers defending themselves from an antifa onslaught.<\/p>\n
Eleven years after Jade Helm, this is forecast with at least a little excitement.<\/p>\n
The post Welcome to the Jade Helm Presidency appeared first on The Intercept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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