Pack Up Everyone
by digby
…you’re all going to camp. Stephanie Mencimer at MoJo reports:
Is there a covert government plan to forcibly evacuate up to 50 million people from the Gulf Coast and move them into FEMA trailers somewhere in Missouri and elsewhere because of the oil spill? Some of the nation’s survivalists are convinced that the Obama administration is plotting just such an operation. Last week, Greg Evensen, a former Kansas state trooper and a regular on the “Patriot” movement talk circuit, appeared on the Internet radio show “Shattering the Darkness” to warn listeners that government is moving to evacuate basically everyone from the coast of Texas to Cape Cod. Evensen says the move will come after these areas become uninhabitable due to an “oversaturation of benzene” from the chemical dispersants BP is using to try to clean up the oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, even an eco-tragedy can breed conspiracy theories. Interviewed by a man known only as “the Hawk,” Evensen predicted on May 27 that the evacuations would begin sometime around June 15, after the government brings together “people who can be engaged in combat”—possibly including foreign troops—and stations them at 500-mile intervals. He predicted that people as far north as Cape Cod might have to be evacuated, given that the oil is likely to end up “on beaches of England.” These events, Evensen warned, would show the “rolling thunder effect of how it will bring America to its knees,” to which the Hawk responded, “This could be larger than anything we could ever imagine.”[…]
The podcast of this show soon made its way into the Tea Party world and was circulating on various listservs this week, with headlines like “Forced evacuations of 40 million begin in less than two weeks. Anyone within a thousand miles of the Gulf of Mexico needs to listen to every word of this.” John Kaminiski, a “truther” who believes Jews blew up the World Trade Center, warned in an email that “If you don’t leave now, you will never make it. You will either die on the road, or in a FEMA camp. The troops are already in place.”
In an interview with Mother Jones, Evensen explained that he had heard about this massive governmental operation from a “buffet meal of state and local law enforcement” sources, many of whom find him—rather than the other way around—thanks to his media appearances and Internet postings. (Evensen lives in Michigan.) The podcast of this show soon made its way into the Tea Party world and was circulating on various listservs this week, with headlines like “Forced evacuations of 40 million begin in less than two weeks. Anyone within a thousand miles of the Gulf of Mexico needs to listen to every word of this.” John Kaminiski, a “truther” who believes Jews blew up the World Trade Center, warned in an email that “If you don’t leave now, you will never make it. You will either die on the road, or in a FEMA camp. The troops are already in place.”
Yes, I know. They’re all a bunch of fringe nuts, nothing to worry about. But as conspiracy theory scholar Michael Barkun wrote in A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America:
The danger lies less in such beliefs themselves than in the behavior they might stimulate or justify. As long as the New World Order appeared to be almost but not quite a reality, devotees of conspiracy theories could be expected to confine their activities to propagandizing. On the other hand, should they believe that the prophesied evil day had in fact arrived, their behavior would become far more difficult to predict.
Peter Daou tweeted a startling observation the other day:
Catastrophic #GulfSpill, #Sept11, #HaitiQuake, #04Tsunami… we’re witness to some of the worst disasters in recorded history
Add to that Katrina and the increasing anxiety that the American Dream might really be done for and you can see how some of this kooky stuff might not look so kooky to the New World Order and Left Behind despensationalist types who number in the millions in this country.
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