Why Kristi Noem hates FEMA

[underpants]

2. So this goes back to Pres. Carter and super fueled by Jade Helm 15 9 years ago?

The history of conspiracy theories about FEMA goes back to the agency’s founding under President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Far-right groups immediately started circulating rumors that FEMA’s disaster relief mission was a cover story for the true goal: Rounding up white Christians into concentration camps, so the “globalists” (read: Jews, people of color, feminists, queer people) could impose the “New World Order.” As usual with racist conspiracists, the psychological motivation is a combination of sublimated shame and defensiveness, manifesting in a victim complex. In the imagination of right-wingers, the “real” victims are white Christians, and it’s the people who were once subjected to slavery, concentration camps and genocide who are the oppressors.

But really, it was the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 that put the FEMA conspiracy theories into overdrive. Fears that a Black president would round up white people into camps spread rapidly, often aided by opportunistic Republican politicians. The Oath Keepers were one of the militias that formed after Obama’s election, based around a vow that they would not enforce imaginary efforts by the president to round up “patriots” into concentration camps. In 2015, the conspiracy theory grew even more pronounced, when fear about the “Jade Helm 15” Army training exercise tore through social media. Photos of soldiers undertaking standard training procedures in Texas were circulated as “proof” that the FEMA round-ups were about to begin. Shelters built to protect people from tornadoes were brandished as “proof” that the prison camps were coming.