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It's something of an election year tradition for dark conspiracy theories to circulate during the waning months of the U.S. presidential campaign, with rumor-mongers warning of an imminent military takeover by the power-hungry incumbent (regardless of which party that incumbent represents). In August 2016, after a round of the usual false rumors about the President surreptitiously granting himself unprecedented powers via executive order, etc., a JPEG image popped up on social media purporting to be a scan of a U.S. Army memorandum announcing that training and preparation for martial law would begin on 8 September 2016 at Fort Carson, Colorado. Albeit riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors — not to mention the nonsensical claim that the Bill for the Executive Order Enacting Martial Law has been put into effect — the document instantly went viral and was shared on conspiracy web sites such as Red Flag News, and via YouTube in videos like this one: However, given that examples of unclassified U.S. Army memorandums are plentiful online, the document would have been very easy to fake — and, in fact, it was faked. When we queried officials at Fort Carson about the memo on 22 August 2016, we received the following response:
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