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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Serious question:
Why is she telling people to not ask for FEMA?
They immediately started out the gate proclaiming that FEMA is doing nothing and letting people just suffer and die.
In order for the facts to fit the narrative, they need people to suffer and die in spite of any effort by FEMA.
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.
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.
I remember when FEMA-as-villain was a thing in the X-Files. Wild that it’s a conspiracy that survived so long.
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.
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.
there is a whole thing on twitter about FEMA blocking aid, rescue helicopterss and shit. all based on "sources" texts to Loomer, Elon Musk, etc.
edit for better sources:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/after-deluge-lies-misinformation-hoaxes-helene-cloud-recovery-114526147
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/verify/fema-helene-donations-verify-10-3-2024/275-7f7c29c9-dcf0-4f1a-91e4-ead1aa4dd4d5
edit 2, from fema directly:
https://www.fema.gov/disaster/current/hurricane-helene/rumor-response
Some of the "rumors" addressed on FEMA's site certainly sound dumb as hell.
Thank you friend!
I'd assume the weird "Obama is going to use FEMA to set up concentration camps to round up all his enemies" conspiracy (Possibly updated to Biden, possibly not, they tend to also be the "Obama is using Biden as a secret third term controlling him from the shadows (and Harris will be an even secreter fourth)" type)
The Lib agenda leaked
Step 1: Using evil lib magic, control the weather, like what MTG said
Step 2: round up True Patriots into Concentration camps thanks to FEMA
Step 3: ???
Step 4: profit.
This goes further back than that. I remember the first x files movie really leaning into this conspiracy that FeMA could be used to basically take over the country. Of course back then conspiracy theories were fun and on the cringiest of folks actually bought into them. Not so much anymore.
It wasn't that the conspiracy shit was fun, but that the X Files were a fictional TV show. Stargate uses a metric fuckton of conspiracy shit too in their world building but only complete loons would take any of that seriously.
Agree to disagree. Back in the 90’s there were plenty of fun conspiracy theory shows on discovery and other channels that weren’t in the same vein as ancient aliens or other shows out today which are trying super hard to prove the theories as fact. They were campy and fun and not hosted by coke addled pseudoscience psychopaths with fake degrees.
Ancient aliens were a thing back then already. lol That's literally what Stargate's base plot is based on and one of the most famous book authors on that topic, Erich von Däniken, had been writing bullshit books since the 70s about it. I know way too much about all of this because I had the pleasure of growing up under all of this garbage.
No shit dildo, they're ancient. They're not talking about current day aliens.
Because those tax dollars going to it are not available to be stolen by Republican politicians.
She’s telling the folks who are being issued a stand down warning by FEMA not to comply. There are private entities attempting to render aid and medical flights that are being told to stop by federal crews and she’s telling them not to listen.
Are they being told that because they're causing an overcrowding hazard in the air? I'm willing to bet there's also a lot of individuals randomly flying drones around as well.
Edit: FEMA isn't stopping any rescue flights. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/10/05/interested-parties-memo-fighting-hurricane-helene-falsehoods-with-facts/
The first rule is don't become be another casualty.
Source?