10) Paranoia Is Going Mainstream
In summer 2015, the military embarked on Jade Helm 15, a multistate training exercise that became a magnet for fringe beliefs. Some thought it marked the beginning of a violent federal power grab. Reports showed that anywhere between one-third and one-half of all Texans thought Jade Helm was a federal plot to take over the state. This might be funny if it weren’t for the potentially serious consequences. In mid-July 2015, the FBI arrested three men who had amassed a military-sized stockpile of weapons for killing Jade Helm trainees. Reports indicated that they were driven to action by conspiracy theories about the training exercise.
Scarily, these guys are only outliers in the sense that they intended to kill. Jade Helm paranoia ran so deep that US Representative Louie Gohmert publicly claimed that Obama had labeled Nevada, Texas, and California as “enemy states.” Rather than pour cold water on these conspiracies, some other frontline Republicans seemed to back him up. When people who are in the government are telling you the government is out to get you, it’s perhaps no wonder that people start stocking up on bombs. Why would some GOP veterans be fanning these paranoid flames? We’ll come to that in a moment. For now, we want to be clear that Jade Helm is only part of a larger paranoia fest that’s brewing. A small but significant number of people believe that Muslims are operating terrorist training camps across the Deep South. In the GOP, 54 percent of people think Obama is secretly a Muslim.These ideas are demonstrably false. They’re so far from reality that truth is barely a speck on the horizon. But no one seems to care. We’ve gone beyond the point where fringe beliefs are either on the fringe or capable of being rebutted with facts.
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