Over the weekend, a group of Texans gathered in Bastrop (outside Austin), concerned about the possibility of the federal government declaring martial law in Texas. This was reported in this morning’s Boston Globe. What’s the basis for this fear?
Apparently media operatives like Alex Jones have been piggybacking on a large scale military operation, called Jade Helm 15, to spread fear via his daily fear-fogger, The Alex Jones Show, a syndicated radio program. Many of those gathered in Bastrop no doubt got their information about this from Jones, and others on the outer fringes of the media.
Alex Jones using the fear-fogger.
At the same time, regardless of anyone’s political persuasion—trust in government is at an all-time low. The presidency of Barack Obama has been an abject failure, in my opinion. I’m also less likely than ever to trust anything that comes with a Washington imprimatur. I hold out little hope that the results of the 2016 horse race can alter the current trajectory.
To their credit, rather than dismiss this as some isolated group of cranks, I think that the report in the Globe perfectly illustrates the Balkanization taking place in America, the so-called United States. We’re states, alright, but the qualities of being united are displaying cracks and fissures.
Shooting up the parking lot at Walmart.
Then, there is this story of an airman, opening fire in a parking lot in Grand Forks, North Dakota, at a Walmart Supercenter. You can’t even go to Walmart these days without someone shooting up the parking lot. What’s this country coming to?
A nation of angry, distrustful, divided people, heavily armed, that’s what.
Dammit, Jim, someone changed a script on this page and it ate my beautiful comment! Now to start over.
Why isn’t it racist that Marcell Travon Willis shot up a bunch of white people in North Dakota? Will Obama give a tearjerker speech about how if he had a son, he could have looked like Travon? Given that Willis was 21, he likely had 3-4 years of service, and I’d like to know if he’d been deployed or done AEF rotations (4-6 month temporary deployments). PTSD is a bitch. #whitelivesmatter #alllivesmatter
Of course, the fear foggers wil spin that to how all veterans are just a hairtrigger away from going nuts and spraying up the malls with machine gun fire (not that the foggers know what a machine gun is, because most Americans don’t, either). Unless of course the veterans get rehired as cops, especially SWAT members. Americans kiss our ass with 10% discounts and “Thank you for your service!” but go to family court and watch what happens to the military man (never the woman, only the man) because the judge doesn’t want to take a risk that the military man isn’t a mass casualty incident waiting to happen. So the judge gives the children to the mother, awards punitive alimony and child support, gives the house and car and anything else to her as well. What’s that, 19 veteran suicides a day, 85% of which are tied to divorce? So when the serviceman sees that he’s been made a slave for the rest of his life and says Fuck that and puts a gun to his head, the judge feels warm and fuzzy that he knew all along that the serviceman was a danger.
But I digress. Yes, fear is the currency of the press, printed, televised, broadcast or netted. Fear keeps us reacting, keeps us from thinking, keeps us above all divided. Throw scary words at us, scary pictures, get the chemical and emotional response in the absence of any real physical threat, keep us all in a state of confusion where it’s easy to implant the ideas they (whoever “they” are) want us to absorb.
But OTOH, don’t the people of this nation have a lot to be angry about? Has our government ever been trustworthy? Given what we know of how these things work, Jade Helm 15 could be clearly seen in our future in the months following 9/11–thank goodness we had Saddam to be afraid of and distract our attention! And if you were an untrustworthy government working to steal everything from the people of this nation and give it to some faceless, nameless corporate entity, exercises like Jade Helm are just what you would want, along with the telly, etc. Especially when the only thing really in your way is the unpleasant fact that all those people you’re stealing from are heavily armed and just might wake up.
In the story about Willis, one of the Walmart employees said that he was rounding up people and getting them to the sporting goods section. The section with the guns and ammunition. Together. A solid plan when dealing with a random shooter or an untrustworthy government.
Lots here, in your comment, LP. Thanks for taking the time to post it after having the wonders of technology and tapping on a keyboard, take it away.
I just got to JH Kunstler’s CFN post for the week, posted of course on Monday, Memorial Day. This snippet fits nicely with what you wrote about the fate of veterans, fear-fogging, and the media’s complicity in perpetuating the on-going lies/myths.
Memorial Day is a dreary moment to have to face this onrushing calamity of rocket-propelled medievalism rampant — all those poor American soldiers blown up and mangled the past twelve years.
Kunstler continues bringing a necessary alternative narrative, and this week’s was a nice counter to all the happy poppycock about the so-called holiday and veterans found on Zuckerbook and elsewhere.
19 veterans killing themselves each day… that we know about. Alcoholism, car accidents, not tracked.
A very interesting statistic entirely overlooked in the conventional press is that more contractors have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than US military. I didn’t believe it, either, until I looked it up on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website which tracks deaths of government contracted employees. These aren’t Blackwater contractors, either. They are the burger flippers, the electrical wire runners, the truck drivers.
I used to look forward to the Stars and Stripes in the mess hall in Iraq, even though it was a crap rag. We didn’t get it for a few days. I went hunting through the SIGACTS. The Iraqi contracted to deliver the rag was murdered by his peers. The poor bastard just wanted to feed his family, and he died delivering that rag. I lost my appetite for it after that.
It was the same with the rockets that came onto the base from time to time. Rarely effective, although they killed three soldiers standing around outside the base store on the other side, a store run by contracted employees so we could have Cokes and pizzas and all that American stuff. Were they fired at us in hate? Mostly, no. The muj would offer a guy $100 or so to launch some mortars or unguided rockets at us. He got money to feed his family, and he fulfilled his obligation to jihad in the same action. Accurate? As accurate as unguided rockets fired from a moving pickup truck can be (moving because launching from a parked truck meant our counter-mortar batteries would have shells arriving on him in about fifteen seconds), which is to say, not at all.
I hadn’t read Jimmy the K this week, and will spin that most recent podcast of his as well.