This has been a long standing conspiracy theory amongst right wing talk show hosts and other people. Basically the claim is that FEMA will imprison lots of people especially those with far right views using a emergency as a pretext. This conspiracy theory has been widely debunked already.
The interesting thing is now something like the conspiracy theory may happen in real life except ran by ICE instead of FEMA. I’m curious how people who previously propagated this conspiracy theory feel about Trump’s plan for a mass deportation. If you know anyone who’s into this conspiracy theory would you be able to ask them their thoughts on the FEMA camps and then bring up Trump’s mass deportation plan. I’m curious how’d they’d react. Let’s not assume because everyone is different. While trying to research this question I found one article from the right that showed deep concern about Trump’s plan: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/nov/20/deep-state-wants-terminate-constitution/ but I can’t really find much information otherwise.
They rationalize to themselves that whatever outrageous thing they used to be opposed to is just different when it’s their guy doing it.
I don’t think most people think things like this through, both liberal and conservative. For the most part they use corporate social media like Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok, and we know objectively that the algorithms feeding those users content are engineered to convince them that all of their opinions are correct (no matter how odd or outlandish) and to keep them perpetually outraged so they’ll continue to consume and click on ads. With AI proliferating, we’re now seeing the fast-tracking of false perspectives and information across the web.
Hell, for most of the last presidential election both sides were making excuses for the fact that they intended to vote for someone with clear, public, unavoidably evident cognitive decline. They didn’t think through that.