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Trump, a favorite of right-wing conspiracy kooks, stokes left-wing paranoia

1 1
07.10.2025

In the spring of 2015, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called out the state’s national guard to monitor a military training exercise taking place in his state and across the Southwest in order to make sure that “Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”

Called Jade Helm, the exercises by some 1,200 special operations troops in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado were on terrain that “replicates areas Special Operations Soldiers regularly find themselves operating in overseas.”

And while the residents of Bastrop, Texas, may not have been flattered by their town being compared to Afghanistan, one would think that between Fort Sam Houston to their south and Fort Hood to their north, the good people of central Texas were quite comfortable with military maneuvers.

Maybe most, but not all of them.

At the end of the Obama administration, some Americans believed that the president, who they thought was

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