One longtime right-wing conspiracy theory is that federal government (or the Deep State, or whatever) has plans to order the military to go after American citizens, and those pushing such conspiracies make sure to point out that the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibits such things. Such conspiracies are right up WorldNetDaily’s alley and the Posse Comitatus Act has been invoked over the years:
- A 2012 article by John Griffing raged that President Obama “violated the Posse Comitatus and Insurrection Act, both statutes that are still recognized as having force, by authoring an executive order that transfers the power of declaring martial law from Congress to a Council of Governors,” insisting that this meant “a president had just claimed the power of a monarch, i.e. the power to deploy standing armies at whim within the nation’s borders.”
- A September 2013 article by Bob Unruh promoting a new Obama-bashing book by then-reporter Aaron Klein claimed that the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama “has likely violated the Posse Comitatus Act” through “the purchase of military-grade equipment and the execution of military-style training exercises.”
- A May 2015 article by Cheryl Chumley noted “a joint exercise of Fort Bragg special operations troops and sheriff’s deputies in Richland County, South Carolina” that ” bloggers and watchdogs” are “decrying what they perceive as a Posse Comitatus violation.”
- An August 2024 column by Joseph Farah claimed that “The Posse Comitatus Act provides a broad proscription against the use of soldiers in domestic law enforcement. But Congress and the executive branch have quietly chipped away at the law with exceptions seldom noticed by the fake media.”
But when President Trump deployed Marines to Los Angeles in a show of force to quell protests there, WND was singing a different tune. Unruh was quite cool with it in a June 9 article:
Hundreds of Marines are being dispatched to Los Angeles to help quell the anti-ICE riots there, leading President Donald Trump to assure Americans that the situation is “now heading in the right direction.”
Over the weekend hundreds rioted, burning cars and throwing rocks as federal officers who were making arrests in connection with criminal cartel cases, not issues involving illegal immigration.
The Washington Examiner reported sources said about 500-700 Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton would be tasked with protecting federal property and personnel.
Unruh made no reference to the Posse Comitatus Act, though he did quote the Wall Street Journal noting that the Marines “would not be directly engaging with protesters” because “cannot arrest protesters unless President Donald Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, with the president saying roughly an hour before the deployment that he did not consider the protests an insurrection.”