FEMA conspiracy theories that have stoked chaos in the South date back to the 1980s

Published October 27, 2024 By admin with Comments 0

In the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton, an outlandish conspiracy theory about the Federal Emergency Management Agency that has percolated for decades started to reappear online. Now, the government agency is making one of its strongest pushes against the claim to date.

In a new section of its hurricane rumor response page published Wednesday, FEMA looked to put to rest the long-lasting conspiracy theory that’s followed it since shortly after the agency was founded. Known as the “FEMA camps” theory, it falsely speculates that the agency sets up camps meant to “detain people.”

On the page, the government agency wrote that it has recently set up temporary housing for staff responding to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in a few locations in western North Carolina. FEMA added that there are over a thousand FEMA staff in the state and that the lodging, which is protected by security personnel, is for staff and “not for any other purpose.” It called the “FEMA camp” rumors “all false.”

“‘FEMA camp’ rumors are founded in long-standing conspiracy theories intended to discredit our efforts to help survivors,” the page reads. “FEMA does not round up or detain people, does not enact martial law, does not set up internment camps, and does not secretly operate mining settlements.”

A FEMA spokesperson said the government agency addressed the rumor to “set the record straight” after “noticing a sustained volume of false and misleading information that impacted survivors and response efforts” about its responder lodging, which FEMA sets up by consulting with state and local officials.

In the past, FEMA has also set up temporary housing units for survivors, usually around 30 to 50 units in one area, depending on need. The spokesperson added that there are currently no temporary housing units for survivors in North Carolina.

In the past month, videos and photos of FEMA worker sites in the South were posted online, drawing hundreds of thousands of views and commentary speculating that they were actually “FEMA camps.”

“I imagine this could be where they take people who refuse to leave their properties,” one X user speculated last week.

The “FEMA camps” conspiracy theory is the belief that FEMA is a cover for what could become a “widespread domestic internment camp system to hold citizens deemed to be problematic or extremists,” Sara Aniano, a disinformation analyst at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told NBC News.

To most, the false conspiracy theory may seem far-fetched, but skepticism around FEMA’s intentions has stoked chaos in regions affected by the hurricanes, with one man arrested for allegedly threatening employees of the agency, and FEMA making adjustments to its workflows over safety concerns. The man was later released after paying a $10,000 secured bond.

An agency spokesperson said that for every natural disaster, FEMA has set up a rumor response page to address misinformation, including for Covid-19. When the agency begins to see a trend of misinformation circulating online, the spokesperson added, the agency will create a rumor response page. In recent years, the government agency has set up various rumor response pages about the winter storms in Texas, wildfires in New Mexico and Hawaii, and one for Hurricane Fiona.

When wildfires broke out in Maui last year, USA Today reported on the spread of the FEMA camp conspiracy theory after a Facebook user posted a video showing a series of shelters, captioning it “FEMA camps.” A FEMA spokesperson told USA Today the rumor was “false” and that the government agency did not build any housing in Maui at the time. Unlike with the hurricane rumor response page, FEMA did not appear to respond to the rumors on its page for the wildfires.

The conspiracy theories about FEMA first emerged several years after FEMA’s creation in 1979 by former President Jimmy Carter following a series of natural disasters in the 1960s and ’70s including 1969’s Hurricane Camille, which struck Mississippi and resulted in more than a billion dollars in damage and over 200 deaths. That same year, Carter signed another executive order that gave FEMA “the dual mission of emergency management and civil defense.”

Two years into the federal agency’s founding, a newsletter written by a right-wing, antigovernment movement called Posse Comitatus made one of the first-ever false mentions of FEMA detention camps, warning that “hardcore patriots” would be imprisoned in them, according to research from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The claim was false, but according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, it exemplified fears of federal overreach that helped propel the emergence of the U.S. militia movement

Content retrieved from: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/fema-conspiracy-theories-camp-carolina-north-south-rcna176447.