Michael Loewinger

How are you going to do that?

60 million is still a lot of people.

That is the modern population of France.

Those people would need a functioning government and functioning infrastructure afterward.

This is where we start getting into the bizarre conspiracy theories that haunt FEMA today.

In 1982, in an effort to game out some of these post-apocalyptic scenarios, President Ronald Reagan signed a secret executive order to create a covert program called Project 908.

That's 9-0-8, but they called it 9-0-8.

It pooled billions of dollars in top officials from the National Security Council, FEMA, and the FBI.

the FBI was in charge of pre-identifying buildings that could serve as refugee camps.

If I have this right, basically you had FBI agents working undercover for FEMA, traveling around the country, visiting warehouses, car shops, casinos, Walmarts, helping identify businesses that could be used to house citizens after a nuke was dropped on an American city.

Yes, and often without telling the businesses that they were being scouted for these purposes.

There was thankfully never a need to construct these refugee camps.

but the secrecy went way deeper and darker.

Just five years after the launch of Project 908, a bombshell report from the Miami Herald revealed that before Jafrida was asked to help run FEMA, he'd written his master's thesis on how the military could quell race riots by detaining millions of black people and putting them in concentration camps.

Members of Congress were given a copy of his thesis during Jafrida's confirmation hearings, a horrifying detail that makes me think they considered this to be part of his qualifications for the job.

The most damning part of that Miami Herald piece, though, was news that Jafrida had worked with Reagan's National Security Council to write plans for declaring martial law and putting the country temporarily under a sort of shadow government.

And not just in the case of a nuke, but also in a so-called national crisis, like a war.

A bunch of this comes out in the late 1980s amid the Iran-Contra hearings and investigations.

It turns out that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who is the central figure at the White House of Iran-Contra, was also one of the planners for Project 908.

Oliver North was asked about these martial law plans during the Iran-Contra hearings.