“Two million dead on the side of the patriots”: How Alex Jones’s “Jade Helm” conspiracy theory got very dangerous very fast - Salon.com

Couple the Jade Helm theory with another Jones theory about a forthcoming civil war, and it’s no wonder why angry white guys with firearms are freaking out. Just over a year ago, Jones said on his show:

“[The government] needs the police and the military to wipe out the liberty movement, and we wipe them out. […] I estimate in the civil war, 300,000 police will die. I estimate that if the military marches out against the gun owners, half a million dead. Two million dead on the side of the patriots. Won’t matter, we’ll have another 10 million where that came from. But it’ll be a real war once they start it.”

Therein lay the seeds of his Jade Helm theory. It’s all about the military and the police provoking the “liberty movement” into a shooting war. And now, a year later, shots are actually being fired. What Jones doesn’t seem to realize (or maybe he does) is that this kind of rhetoric speaks directly to the itchy-trigger-fingered militiamen and self-styled revolutionary cosplayers who believe that, yes, the government is going to attack them and seize their weapons, so they should be ready to counterattack. And this is evidently defined as “patriotic.”

“Two million dead on the side of the patriots”: How Alex Jones’s “Jade Helm” conspiracy theory got very dangerous very fast - Salon.com