10 Conspiracy Theories People Actually Believe
4. FEMA Death Camps
At some point, for some reason, the United States government will imprison huge numbers of its citizens in vast camps. The instrument of this outrage is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose disaster relief goal is a smokescreen to cover up their real purpose of acting as the nation's jailers.
Except none of this is true because the FEMA death camps theory is particular bizarre and inexplicable. The evidence in favour, which includes FEMA stockpiling large numbers of body bags, is easily explained by the fact that FEMA's supposed to do exactly this in preparation for potential disasters.
The theory originated with grubby right-wing extremist groups like Posse Comitatus and rises and falls in popularity depending on how much they feel threatened by the 'left'. Like many such theories, it also owes a lot of its resilience to being mentioned in the X-Files.
No matter how many death camp sites are demonstrated to be railway facilities, National Guard bases or even outright fakes using satellite images of North Korean labour camps, the FEMA conspiracy theory keeps propagating itself. This in spite of the fact that FEMA, being the same agency that took several days to get drinking water to the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina, probably couldn't take over a petting zoo.