Maybe there was a conspiracy, but Greg Abbott stopped it.

Maybe there was a conspiracy, but Greg Abbott stopped it.

It's over. The multi-state military training exercise known as Jade Helm 15 is done. There did not turn out to be any FEMA camps populated with anti-Obama patriots plucked from their homes by American special forces. Desert regions of the United States do not seem to have been turned over to ISIS or Russia in an attempt by the government to something-something-something. The tunnels connecting southwestern Walmarts to Mexico and/or underground prisons and/or underground military bases and/or chupacabra hatcheries, depending on which version you believed, have remained stubbornly undiscovered.

And all across the land, millions of Republican conspiracy-believers shrugged their shoulders and waited for the next conspiracy theory to slide itself under their door.



At one point, one-third of Republican voters and half of all Tea Party supporters feared that the federal government was “trying to take over Texas,” with another 28 percent of GOP voters saying that they were not sure whether or not the plot existed. [...] Unsurprisingly, the people who were pushing conspiracy theories about the military training exercise fell silent when it became clear that none of the scenarios they predicted had materialized.

This bears reflecting upon. One third of Republican voters and half of all Tea Party supporters at one point were inclined to believe that an American military training exercise of the sort that has happened on a fairly regular basis, during their lifetimes, was a ruse in order to allow the federal government to "take over Texas." The hubbub was such that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Military to "monitor" the exercise, just in case the American military really was up to something fishy.

We have a word for these people. It is a perfectly respectable English word that does not get used often enough because we do not generally like to attribute the worst to people, en masse, unless we absolutely have to, but it is the most accurate word to use in this situation and there's really no other word that will do. That word is dumbfucks. One third of Republican voters and half of all tea party supporters are, and we must look this conclusion right in the eye and not shy away, untreated and hopeless dumbfucks. The amount of dumbfuckery required to believe that the federal government is dispatching troops to "take over" the American state of Texas is enormous, and pundits who candy coat this by muttering about resentment or unusual partisanship these days are displaying a generosity that is doing nobody in America any favors at all. We must accept the truth—one third of current American Republican voters are extraordinarily, almost mind-bogglingly, well, stupid.

There is no "but" here. Yes, I realize that the general pundit body would find themselves out of work in a right hurry if they pointed out the obvious—that people who believe emailed claims that the sitting president has ordered the military to "take over" one of America's own states are dumbfucks—but there's no interpretation you might put on it that can possibly excuse away the rank conspiratorialism, the illogic, the possibly racism-induced, possibly prescription-drug-fueled, possibly just-plain-stupid stupidity of the people who stood up at public meetings to query about plans for martial law or who sent their friends updates on where our Great American Troops, all of whom are heroes and may not be badmouthed in any way if you consider yourself a True Patriot, were last spotted and what it might mean. These people hold jobs. They drive cars. God help us, they have children of their own.

And they are, despite all of that seeming everyday competence, such blazing dumbfucks that if an actual emergency hit their corner of America there is a real question as to whether or not they would help, or would at least get out of the way, or would instead consider this to be their moment to load up their five rifles and three handguns and Mad Max up their towns a bit for reasons that make sense only in their own heads. (This is not rhetorical; see the white vigilante groups that took to the streets post-Hurricane Katrina to shoot any black Americans that tried to flee Katrina flooding through their own, mostly white neighborhood. They shot at least eleven.)

There's nothing that can be done about it, of course. It may show the need for a robust education system, since having millions of Americans stymied by the basic illogic of the United States mounting an operation to take over Texas suggests our elementary schools are turning out spotty product, but the point of making it clear that these people cannot possibly be defended as having the wits of your average tree squirrel is that any reasonable analysis of the current political climate and spectrum needs to take into account the large number of Americans who have, either at some point before the inauguration of America's first non-white president or at some point after, lost their fucking minds.

As for Jade Helm, specifically: It is no more. It is an ex-parrot. One can presume that most adherents to the Jade Helm theory lost interest in the fizzling "plot" soon after it began and Not A Damn Thing Happened, while others waited out the entire event in increasingly crabby despair before sighing and accepting their non-defeat. That is one of the defining characteristics of being a dumbfuck, after all: you believe one thing is an existential crisis to America on one day, only to forget about it and become absorbed in a different existential crisis to America the next. It requires effort—you can't just land in it by accident. It requires paying just enough attention to be able to declare yourself one of the only persons in America who can really "see what is going on," but not so much attention that you become bogged down with details like rationality or proof.

Still, it's a shame one-third of Republican voters and half of all Tea Party supporters moved on so fast. If they had not, they might have noticed that after the still-secret exercises of Jade Helm 15, the state of Texas found itself an American state, and subject to American law. A coincidence? Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

