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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Political Weirdos
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So, she isn't saying not to ask for disaster assistance per se, she's saying not to comply with FEMA.
Given Loomer's other quite conspiratorial beliefs, my guess is that she believes FEMA will round them up into internment camps and then either use them as slave labor or forcibly reeducate them.
FEMA is one of the conspiratorial right's long existing bogey men. Based off of I think some executive orders signed under both JFK and Reagan, if a extraordinary national disaster or state of emergency is declared, the President has the power to relocate people to FEMA camps.
What this actually is, is basically in the event of the Soviets nuking the entire country to shit, basically martial law is exercised and the President gains a whole bunch of direct control over and exceptional powers to direct many federal agencies toward the aim of keeping as many people alive as possible.
What conspiracy theorists think it is, is that basically arbitrarily at any point the President can use FEMA to round up and 'deal with' any kind of political dissidents. It was most often invoked as the way that gun owners would all be rounded up during some kind of total gun ban.
I remember when FEMA-as-villain was a thing in the X-Files. Wild that it’s a conspiracy that survived so long.
And Deus Ex.
It features heavily in the DX franchise because ... well DX was written in Texas in the mid to late 90s, around the same time Alex Jones had a public access TV channel.
They quite literally could have just worked in half the conspiracies he mentioned, and that would have been about 80% of the more fantastical stuff.
I'd say they did a compelling job of weaving in batshit conspiracy stuff (it does make for dramatic storytelling, wild enemy types and locations) with ... fairly prescient actual stuff around the unchecked progression of capitalism and technology.
I can't believe I am saying this, but compared to a whole lot of modern media franchises, they actually did a lot of continuity work to make the FEMA thing make sense in HR as a plausible precursor to how much more widespread it was in the original.
I don't think it really features in IW at all, as by that point the US government doesn't... really exist, almost every where that still has a functional technological society is managed by a mixture of UN/WTO authorities and gigantic megacorporations.
Also I guess worth mentioning: DX accidentally contributed to conspiracy culture even further by 'predicting' 9/11.
When playtesting Liberty Island, enough people noticed that they'd cheaped out on the background worldbox/skybox by mirroring it, not including the Twin Towers, that they wrote it in a minor lore blurb that they'd been destroyed by terrorists in the early 21st century.
Game is set in 2052... but came out basically a few months to a year (depending on your region) before ... 9/11 actually happened.
And there had been prior terrorist attacks or attempts on the WTC involving bombs in vans and such. So if you’re writing a fictional future dystopia, it’s not an entirely unreasonable speculation.
If you actually look at what the paranoid/conspiracy minded R's believe, it's basically the x-files.
Like, seriously, some lazy but effective propaganda machine has taken episode after episode of the xfiles and made it a core belief of the right.
... I wonder if Rupert Murdoch... Nah..
Re FEMA. I was a young teen in the early www era. Alex Jones was a nobody, but he was all aboard the FEMA train. As were a number of extremist rw sites that, unfortunately, I ended up following.
That was about 35 years ago.
It's amazing what you can convince people of.
Also during hurricane Katrina, people getting raped and dying in the superdome, or whatever that stadium was in New Orleans, somehow really fed into the FEMA conspiracies. Though I’m pretty sure FEMA wasn’t even involved in that situation. IIRC It was local authorities, at least initially, that had directed people there without having any plan on how to handle them.
The most insane thing I remember from Katrina was Blackwater authorizing themselves to respond to New Orleans, (they received official approval after they were already on site) where they didn't provide any aide or assistance, but set up sniper teams on roofs and above water overpasses and sniped people they deemed to be looters, as well as confiscating any guns they found.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/08/secret-history-hurricane-katrina/
So I guess that kind of makes the 'black helicopters' conspiracy sort of true, lol.
Those same people upset about rape in the superdome don't care at all when it's homeless shelters
I have had the misfortune of seeing some recent Fox News coverage of the FEMA response to places like Asheville so far.
It is entirely, 100% absent of any mention that the reason FEMA is underfunded and isn't doing more faster... is because congressional Republicans recently voted down a bill that would have given them more funding.
Its also full of ... I mean, legitimate disaster victims, but they are incredibly sanctimonious and whiney about how they aren't getting any help, and how somehow this us all Biden and the Democrats fault.
... I've spent a year homeless, seriously injured to the point of being crippled, and spent the last year living in a roach motel trying to figure out how to get any permanent housing or aid from any existing resources.
I have less than 0 sympathy for someone whining that they are just deserving of help, that it should literally fly out to them on a helicopter, that the government should pay to rebuild their house or rehome them, pay for all their lost property.
... Especially when said sanctimonious people almost certainly voted for people who they should have known would cut aid and resources to themselves, and would almost certainly be completely fine with someone like me just dying in agony.
You're letting simplistic ads and movies tell you what those folks are like, and you forget the history behind them. Not everyone there, especially in the mountains, even votes or likes government. In general, most Americans do not vote. The people being interviewed are not representative of everyone - they are being interviewed to generate engagement for ads.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/09/07/opinion/red-neck-army-bloodiest-labor-battle-american-history/
Many of those people have ancestors who died for your rights. Most of those people would feed you and be kind to you if you spoke with them. Don't let propaganda convince you to give up community and empathy.
I knew someone who was homeless in the south (Louisiana) and all over the country for the last 3 years, living on the street. He said the south was very poor but generous with what they had, and always had really good hot food unlike the west coast. He said people were nice. He did end up getting trench foot there due to the wet conditions.
The south and everywhere is full of people like you and me, people who are queer or leftist or whatever discriminated group. And yeah there are also PoS too, but they deserve a working FEMA and proper disaster relief and tbh the Dems have a bad case of incompetence. If they were a medical doctor, they could be sued for malpractice, they've done so badly. So yeah it is the Dems' fault too.
The right project, so probably it's a confession also of their own plans for FEMA