Tuesday, January 19, 2021

THEY THINK WE'RE GOING TO PUT THEM IN CAMPS

President-Elect Joe Biden intends to ask the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help set up COVID-19 vaccination centers. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who's an ambitious Republican and thus is not only required to denounce everything Biden does but must also make it seem sinister and apocalyptic, has decided that "vaccination centers" is not the correct term.
During a news conference in Cape Coral on Tuesday, DeSantis said Biden’s plan to use federal disaster agency and the National Guard to build COVID-19 vaccine clinics across the country would be a “big mistake.”

“I saw some of this stuff Biden’s putting out, that he’s going to create these FEMA camps, I can tell you, that’s not necessary in Florida,” he said....

“Just think about it: If you come in and tell FEMA to create some type of camp, how long is that going to take?” DeSantis said. “And then are you going to divert vaccines from my efforts here?”
DeSantis knows exactly what he's doing when he uses the expression "FEMA camps." The notion that FEMA might set up detention or extermination camps in America has been widespread for years, and the people most likely to believe it are right-wingers. The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote about this in 2010:
FEMA camp stories have been around a long time. Almost three decades ago, back in 1982, a newsletter of the extreme-right and anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus warned that “hardcore Patriots” would be imprisoned in FEMA detention camps. Some versions during the militia heyday of the 1990s had urban street gangs like the Bloods and the Crips, rather than domestic or foreign troops, rounding up antigovernment patriots.

Conspiracy theorists often point to a front-page story in The Miami Herald back in 1987 as proof that, in the words of one of them, “FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and thus will head up all operations.” The story reported that between 1982 and 1984, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North had helped draft a secret contingency plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread domestic dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad....

The plan was written for President Ronald Reagan in case he ever wanted to take such action. The newspaper also obtained a copy of a FEMA official’s 1982 memo that it reported was similar to a paper then-FEMA director Louis Guiffrida had written 12 years earlier. In the 1970 document, Guiffrida reportedly advocated martial law in case of a national uprising by black militants and the transferring of at least 21 million “American Negroes” to “assembly centers or relocations camps.”
Reagan was president in 1982. Richard Nixon was president in 1970. So, naturally, this is seen a liberal plot.

Meanwhile, Fox News -- presumably trying to get back in the game after Newsmax TV and One America News Network stole its thunder -- has been talking about reeducation camps.
Fox News dedicated multiple segments on Monday and Tuesday to a new conspiracy theory, baselessly floating the false idea that Democrats, "big tech," and the news media are pushing for "reeducation camps" or forms of "reprogramming" in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill.

"Is the plan of Couric and others to cram everyone into a digital reeducation camp, or are they gonna set up a concentration camp like that for the Uighur Muslims in communist China to make sure everyone gets reeducated and deprogrammed?" co-host Dagen McDowell asked former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on the 12 p.m. hour of "Outnumbered."
That's in response to an appearance by Katie Couric on Bill Maher's HBO show.
"What do you do about people who are in the government who don't believe in our way of government?" Maher ... asked Couric in an exchange that was not shown on Fox.

"I mean, it's really bizarre, isn't it, when you think about how AWOL so many of these members of Congress have gotten," Couric said in the clip shown on "Outnumbered," referring to Republican lawmakers who still dispute the results of the 2020 election along with President Trump.

"But I also think some of them are believing the garbage they are being fed 24/7 on the internet, by their constituents, and they've bought into this big lie," Couric said. "And the question is, how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump?"
Yes, they think we literally intend to round them up and force them to recant. And:
Primetime host Sean Hannity also ran a segment on the same theme on Monday night, specifically using the term "reeducation camps."

They're not mentioning FEMA on Fox, but I'm seeing FEMA mentioned on Twitter in response to this story:
A dozen members of the National Guard have been removed from inauguration duty as the federal government screens troops involved for security concerns, senior U.S. defense officials said Tuesday....

The troops include at least two with possible sympathies for anti-government groups, said two U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Ten were removed for reasons that defense officials declined to detail but said didn’t involve extremism....

Army Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, declined to provide specifics about the troops alleged to have expressed common cause with anti-government groups but said they had made “inappropriate comments.” One of them was flagged because of concern within his unit, while the other was reported anonymously, defense officials said....

The 12 troops represent a tiny fraction of the 25,000 guardsmen deployed in Washington for the inauguration....
So 25,000 Guard members are being deployed, and a whopping two of them have been accused of anti-government sympathies -- not conservatism. But on Twitter, that's fascism:


See? These folks don't need Trump. They're going to be like this with or without him for the foreseeable future.

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