The Playboy Symposium: Fiction, Facts and FEMA Camps

Back in 2015 I was working on a story about preppers—the folks who stockpile doomsday essentials such as canned food, water, guns and gold—and I talked to a woman who ran a store that sold supplies one might need at the end of the world.

“America is under a judgment from God,” she told me. “My belief is we’re going to go to bed one Friday night and wake up Saturday morning, and we’re going to be in a bank holiday. And when the banks open a week later, the dollar will be devalued by 50 percent. It’s set up like a house of cards—and when it comes down, it’s going to come down all at once.”

She explained that Americans would be rounded up and taken to massive concentration camps that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been building all around the country. In fact, there was one right by my house in Spokane, Washington, at the county fairgrounds. Her proof? “The fencing at the fairground now leans in,” she said. “It’s to keep people in.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard such a thing—the idea that the top section of a fence would turn its barbed-wire face inward to prevent those within its bounds from escaping—and I drove directly to the fairgrounds, made two quick loops around and saw that, no, the fences did not demonstrate any sort of inward lean. I didn’t have the heart to call her back and tell her.

Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, says the theory that Americans are being forced into government camps is a foundational tale of the militia movement. It’s part of the broader idea that “the whole rest of the world has been taken over by a globalist, socialist, tyrannical government that they describe as the New World Order,” Pitcavage says. “The United States is the last bastion of freedom.” For now.

Pitcavage read about the FEMA camps in a pamphlet as early as 1994. Around 2008 he noticed a resurgence of interest in militias and the FEMA camp theory.

“This is the time when social media really takes over the internet,” he says. Just like everyone else, the members of the militia movement flocked to the new platforms. “The internet allows things to spread very far, very fast,” Pitcavage adds. “It also allows many more people to accidentally come across a conspiracy theory.” Once restricted to paper flyers and dubbed VHS tapes, the FEMA theory was suddenly virtually boundless. And though the delivery method might have changed, the verbiage hadn’t.

“I found that fascinating,” Pitcavage says. “If this started in 1994, how could all these alleged hundreds of concentration camps not have been exposed over the following 15 years?”

He tells me it probably wouldn’t have mattered if I had informed the prepper lady that the tops of the fences at the fairgrounds weren’t actually leaning inward. Local militias often “investigate” suspected FEMA camps and other hot spots, reporting their findings to their followers. Last summer, after a leader of a local vigilante group claimed he had discovered evidence of a “sex camp” that victimized children in Tucson, militias including the Three Percenters allegedly planned to drive there from all over the country to look into it. Along with local police, the group found it was, in fact, an abandoned homeless encampment. But even that didn’t dissuade those who wanted to believe.

That’s common, Pitcavage says. Investigations often prompt conspiracy theorists simply to look elsewhere for evidence. “They set up an almost impossibly high bar of proof,” he says.

So where does it all lead? Obviously the government’s not going to comp to FEMA camps, offering a sheepish Walter White-style “You got us!” Nor can the theory by curbed legally-and Mike Wood, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Winchester, argues that we shouldn’t want that. It’s not a bad thing for a citizenry to be skeptical of its government. It’s when those theories turn violent-such as when a man brought a gun into a Washington, D.C.-area pizza joint because he believed it to be the center of a Hillary Clinton-supported pedophile ring-that they become an issue. At that point, when theories devolve into threats, social media platforms have the power to act. Last August, loads of content from conspiracy-theory godfather Alex Jones was banned from YouTube and several other platforms for violating rules about hate speech and bullying. Perhaps his most virulent-and viral-theory questioned the very reality of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which led to endless harassment of the victims’ parents.

“As private companies, Apple, Facebook and Spotify can decide what content appears on their platforms,” Lata Nott, executive director of the First Amendment Center at the Freedom Forum Institute in Washington, D.C., told USA Today after the ban. Despite the earth-spanning influence of social media, it isn’t the public sphere—and the First Amendment (theoretically, anyway) rules only over the latter.

But even forced off the internet, conspiracy theories can be impervious to evidence thanks to their own logical loophole. Rob Brotherton, author of the 2015 book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, tells me, “I’d go so far as to say that, logically, it’s impossible to disprove a conspiracy theory. They are inherently about secret knowledge. If the conspiracy was real, and if it was as good as the conspiracy theorists think it is, then of course there would be no definitive proof—that just means the conspiracy is working.”

So when someone like Jones is banned, or when fake news is removed from Facebook, it’s all too easy to say, “Of course they took it down. They know we’re right.” Social media allows the proliferation of good ideas and totally harebrained ones alike. But it’s belief, especially in our digital cacophony, that’s ultimately more powerful than truth.

This article appears in the Winter 2019 PLAYBOY.