I’m sure you recall a few years ago when the right wing had one of their perennial meltdowns over the supposed plan to put conservatives in “FEMA camps.” I case you don’t here’s a brief recap: The FEMA camps conspiracy theory is a belief, particularly within the American Patriot movement, that the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is planning to imprison US citizens in concentration camps, following the imposition of martial law in the United States after a major disaster or crisis. In some versions of the theory, only suspected dissidents will be imprisoned. In more extreme versions, large numbers of US citizens will be imprisoned for the purposes of extermination as a New World Order is established. The theory has existed since the late 1970s, but its circulation has increased with the advent of the internet and social media platforms. The US government previously interned US citizens in concentration camps during WWII and developed, but did not implement, contingency plans for mass internment of US citizens in the 1980s. This conspiracy theory had a huge revival during the Obama years and then died off when Trump came in. But as you may have noticed from that Wikipedia entry,the plot really took off during the Reagan years because his administration actually did develop some sort of plan for … FEMA camps. Rex 84B, short for Readiness Exercise 1984 BRAVO, was a classified scenario and drill developed by the United States federal government to detain large numbers of United States residents deemed to be “national security threats” in the event that the president declared a National Emergency. The scenario envisioned state defense forces rounding…