Michael Loewinger

The challenge of a lot of these conspiracies is that they have a germ of truth to them.

Garrett Graff.

In the early stages of the Cold War,

J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI had preselected lists of suspected communists and political dissidents that he wanted to round up in the event of a nuclear war.

Not to mention the fact that the U.S.

imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

I think FEMA has always been in a difficult place.

And this is true, by the way, across all of the continuity planning and doomsday planning.

You just can't talk about these classified bunkers and classified operations, even if you're trying to debunk conspiracies.

The secrecy in and of itself is naturally going to feed conspiracy theories.

Absolutely.

The kicker to all this is that some of what the conspiracy theorists warned about is happening, just not to them.

This past July, FEMA, under Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland Security, revealed a new program.

FEMA allocating $608 million in state grants for construction of detention centers.

Migrant detention centers, part of Trump's mass deportation program.

The announcement came right around when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis opened Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious facility in the Everglades.

And while he built the jail using state emergency funds intended for natural disasters, he claimed that federal reimbursement was on the way.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirms Florida did submit an application to FEMA and were awarded two days ago the full amount Florida applied for, $608 million.

The coverage made it sound like the money was in Florida's bank account.

But at time of recording, those FEMA funds have actually been held up by Trump's Justice Department.