Did FEMA Really Build a Secret Lair in a Mountain?
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The first episode of a special series from On The Media’s Micah Loewinger about how a seemingly benign and important agency, FEMA, has become the subject of some of the wildest conspiracy theories.
FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is supposed to keep Americans safe from wildfires, hurricanes, and nuclear disasters. So why has it become so profoundly distrusted and maligned, to the point that President Trump has now threatened to totally dismantle the agency?
It turns out the agency has kept a number of secrets from the public over the course of its history – and that has led to the paranoia that’s proving an existential threat to FEMA today.
Thanks to “On The Media” for sharing this episode with us. You can listen to the rest of this series, “American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA”, over the next several weeks on the radio show or on podcast apps.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Today, and question everything, how did the agency in charge of helping us recover from hurricanes become the subject of such wild conspiracy theories? |
| 0:13.6 | Tell me about FEMA's secret plan to round up all the liberals in the country and put them in concentration camps. |
| 0:20.2 | What? |
| 0:21.1 | Our colleagues over at the fellow public radio show on the media from WNYC in New York have just |
| 0:25.7 | spent months trying to figure out how FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is |
| 0:30.7 | supposed to prepare America for worst-case scenarios, and not only natural disasters, remember, |
| 0:35.8 | but nuclear disasters as well, has become so distrusted, |
| 0:40.1 | despised, and now is having its funding dramatically slashed. On the media co-host, Michael Loenger, |
| 0:46.5 | has been reporting deeply on this and looking at the ways that kernels of truth about FEMA |
| 0:51.2 | and the actual secrets it is kept from the public have spawned fictional conspiracy theories and how all of this has led to the crisis that the agency is now in where Donald Trump is talking about closing FEMA altogether. |
| 1:04.3 | On the media is a kindred show of Question Everything. |
| 1:06.7 | It uses the media as a lens to look at everything that's happening in the world. |
| 1:10.4 | And today I'm excited to share the first episode in a special four-part series they put together about FEMA and the conspiracy theories surrounding it. |
| 1:18.4 | Here's Micah. |
| 1:20.1 | At the beginning of his second term, amid all the chaos of the incoming administration, President Trump made his first trip to North Carolina. |
| 1:28.8 | We've come to North Carolina with a simple message for all the people of this region who are |
| 1:33.4 | hit so hard by Hurricane Helene. That message is very simple. You are not forgotten any longer. |
| 1:41.1 | Before he got on Air Force One, Trump called a press conference on the tarmac and casually |
| 1:46.6 | dropped this bomb. I'll also be signed an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally |
| 1:52.2 | reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA. The Federal Emergency Management |
| 1:57.6 | Agency, the agency that stands between America and climate destruction. |
| 2:02.6 | I think, frankly, FEMA's not good. |
... |
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