Establishment news outlets attack Jade Helm conspiracies and alternative media

By Alex Thomas

(INTELLIHUB) — Within the last 48 hours multiple mainstream news outlets have attacked the alternative media and any coverage of Jade Helm that doesn’t automatically believe the military’s official reasons for the multi state realistic training exercise.

The attacks purposefully conflated questions or opinion pieces about what may happen during Jade Helm with the legitimate facts put forward in actual news pieces by the alternative media.

When Jade Helm 2015 originally became public knowledge through reporting done by the alternative media, various mainstream newspapers attacked what they called Jade Helm conspiracies. On April 22nd, the Houston Chronicle attacked Intellihub and other alternative news outlets for questioning the Walmart closures.

“News of the Army’s operation Jade Helm stirred up widespread fears and deep mistrust of the American government in a sizable bloc of the public. Thousands of tweets, dozens of online publications and plenty of Chron.com commenters sounded the alarm of an impending military takeover.

Now the virtual world of alternative news has added a new twist to the tale: Walmart is in on it, and there are secret underground tunnels.

Multiple websites drew links between the suspiciously swift and simultaneous closure of a half dozen Walmarts nationwide and the military training drill that will have some of America’s most elite units–Green Berets and Navy SEALS among them–trying to blend in to the civilian population in Texas and the Southwestern states.“

Instead of acknowledging that the piece linked to Intellihub was an obvious opinion piece written by one writer, the Chronicle claimed Intellihub itself had said the Walmarts were “being converted into giant entrance facilities.”

“But bloggers have different ideas. The website Intellihub, the “Civilian Intelligence Agency,” suggested the Walmarts are being converted into giant entrance facilities for a network of underground tunnels the military will use to transport troops across the country.“

“If you came to this page from the Chron.com article you should know that our website itself did not say the things we are quoted as saying, rather it was an opinion piece by ONE WRITER that appeared on our site,” stated our response at the time.

“This is equivalent to The New York Times editors and owners being quoted as believing everything in their opinion pages. (something that would never happen) The corporate media always try to attack and marginalize sources outside the mainstream and this is a perfect example.”

Now, with the announcement by Texas Governor Greg Abbott that Jade Helm would be monitored in Texas, the mainstream press has gone into full-scale attack mode with at least 5 different articles published in the last two days specifically attacking any alternative reporting on Jade Helm.

From Bloomberg to Salon to the Austin-American Statemen, the attacks attempted to make it look like anyone talking about Jade Helm in the alternative media is saying Jade Helm will result in a martial law takeover. In reality, most legit alternative media has always said that Jade Helm is most likely a massive training scenario for future civil unrest in America.

Infowars reported:

“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 headlineRight-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 attacks seem to be coordinated as they all follow a similar pattern of connecting all the opinions and theories about Jade Helm with any questioning of the realistic training exercise all together.

Clearly some of the theories revolving around Jade Helm were less credible than others but that is in fact the beauty of a free press. Opinion writers can theorize over what is going to happen and come together to confirm or debunk different ideas. This does not mean that any one site is saying as a whole that the Walmart closures are connected or that citizens will be detained during Jade Helm.

Sadly, this isn’t simple confusion by the mainstream press, they absolutely know that sites like Infowars and Intellihub aren’t claiming these theories as fact but are expecting the public to believe their propaganda rather than actually going online and reading the alternative media.

Video courtesy of NextNewsNetwork/YouTube

About the Author

Alex Thomas is a reporter who has worked in the alternative media for over three years. His work has been featured on numerous news outlets including Infowars and RT. Alex is an exclusive weapon of Intellihub.

Read more articles by this author here.

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