The mainstream media unleashed a deluge of hit pieces targeting Alex Jones and Infowars over the upcoming Jade Helm military exercise after the issue finally began to draw serious attention.

The volley of negative press coverage arrived in response to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s perfectly rational announcement that Texas State Guard would monitor the drill to allay the concerns of residents and ensure that constitutional rights were not violated.

A CBS This Morning segment took clips from YouTube conspiracy theorists who said Jade Helm would herald the implementation of martial law and a “declaration of war on United States soil,” claims that Infowars has never made. At every turn we have stressed that the exercise serves to acclimatize Americans to the sight of troops on the streets and is part of a wider and manifestly provable agenda to prepare for civil unrest in America.

The CBS piece even conflates conspiracy theories about closed Walmart stores being used as staging grounds for Jade Helm – a baseless charge that we have already debunked.

In an Austin-American Statesman article which virtually no one read (it has just three comments at time of press), Jonathan Tilove throws the kitchen sink at Alex Jones, conflating “paranoia” about Jade Helm with issues like the presidential candidacy of Senator Rand Paul and even Infowars product advertisements that feature at the end of all our YouTube videos.

Tilove even cites a Media Matters hit piece on Alex Jones as if it represents an independent perspective. As has been documented for years, Media Matters is an Obama administration front group which holds “a weekly strategy call with the White House,” according to a 2012 Daily Caller investigation.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s David Knowles appeared to find it abnormal that any news outlet would even dare express skepticism about the military’s talking points on Jade Helm, which he regurgitated without question. Knowles also cited White House press secretary Josh Earnest’s dismissal of the issue as a sufficient rebuttal to the “conspiracy theories” about Jade Helm (as if that were somehow an impartial source).

Salon.com went further with the incendiary headline Right-wing lunatics think the military is planning to invade Texas, accusing anyone who didn’t accept the military explanation of Jade Helm at face value of, “metaphorically spitting right in the faces of U.S. soldiers”.

Right, because when the left criticizes or questions the actions of the U.S. military, that’s patriotic free speech, but when the right does so it’s some kind of horrific insult to everything America stands for, according to Heather Digby Parton, who goes on to characterize Governor Abbott’s announcement as a means of ensuring that the military is “not planning to turn Texas into Nazi Germany,” a sentiment that was nowhere to be found in his press release.

In their hit piece the Houston Chronicle quoted Glenn Smith, director of Democrat group Progress Texas PAC, who made sure to invoke alien abduction and Bigfoot in an effort to make concerns about Jade Helm seem even more kooky.

Raw Story took a similar approach, illustrating their hit piece with a frightened woman wearing a tin foil hat.

The mainstream media is resorting to its usual tactic of building strawman arguments and then attaching them to Infowars and Alex Jones in order to create the perception that we said Jade Helm would bring with it an outright martial law takeover.

By parroting pejorative ad hominems like “tin foil hat,” “alien abduction” and “Bigfoot,” these outlets are insulting the intelligence of the numerous residents who packed out the Bastrop County Commissioners Court this week – many of them ex-military – who calmly and rationally made it known why Jade Helm is of significant concern when placed in the context of decades of preparation for martial law and domestic disorder.

Isn’t it funny how the establishment press is first on the scene when they can quote some unhinged YouTuber spouting silly conspiracies, but is nowhere to be found when leaked U.S. military documents openly discuss plans to round up and incarcerate “dissidents” on American soil?

The creeping militarization of U.S. police and moves to use troops domestically in the event of civil unrest is far from a conspiracy theory – it’s a manifestly provable fact that no amount of establishment spin and smear tactics can hide.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.

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