03 FEMA Concentration Camps
Following the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Domestic Terrorism held hearings on the Patriot/militia subculture that bred and nurtured the bombers. Throughout the hearings, a running theme expressed by Patriots was a fear that "urban gangs," directed by Washington and possibly acting in concert with U.N. and foreign troops, would sweep in from the coasts, confiscate their guns, and round them up. This home-invasion force would hold down the streets during the imposition of martial law, then send the members of Patriot militias to internment camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which most Patriot groups consider to be "the executive arm of the coming police state."
You want to know why people believe the bullshit about ACORN? Why they don't bother wondering if the New Black Panther Party could manage to fill a school bus with their entire membership?
Hell, race war was part of the "hetler skelter" Charles Manson was trying to bring about with his "family" holed up in the hills. Don't think Manson was a lefty just because he had long hair and dropped acid. This meme is old, Hatian Revolution old.
On the other hand, the first time I heard of FEMA camps, it was a right-wing meme infiltrating into the left: they were supposed to have been built by Reagan (it's what Ollie North was supposed to have been doing at FEMA) in anticipation of military action against Nicaragua. No "Vietnam style" protests with the lefty leaders whisked off to camps. It all got mothballed when political opposition to a war was too great and they went with the Contras instead.
This factoid was floating around well after it would have taken place -- when I heard it a lot of people were digging into what was going on down there. And now that I think about it, I'm not sure
who I heard it from. It was on a lefty radio station, but it may have been one of the interviewers there who was more libertarian than lefty and was a vector for right-wing rumor-peddlers to drum up a new audience.
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