The disaster problem

Climate change is making hurricanes, floods, and wildfires harder to prepare for just as confidence in the government’s disaster response is collapsing. Our friends at On the Media explore how FEMA became a target of conspiracy theories, political attacks, and a growing crisis of trust. Guests: Eloise Blondiau, senior producer at On The Media; Micah Loewinger, co-host of On the Media For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 1:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hey, Eloise.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 1:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Can you just introduce yourself, please?

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Yes, so my name is Eloise Blondio. I am senior producer at On The Media and I helped make American Emergency the Movement to Kill FEMA.

• 1:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  I'm a huge On The Media fan. I once ran into Brooke, the host of On The Media, at a wedding a couple of years ago. And when she said who she was, I like spat out my drink.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  That's such a fun surprise.

• 1:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  So tell me about this series you've been working on.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  So I made this series with our host, Micah Loewinger. And we were really interested in how we got to this very interesting political moment where storms and floods and fires are getting more extreme, more intense, less predictable. And the agency that is supposed to help us, help Americans during those kind of really scary events.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Is fighting for its life politically?

• 2:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  And we wanted to understand, how did we get here? How did this agency that's meant to save America become so distrusted? There was even this talk when Trump took office of getting rid of the agency altogether, which, when you look at the crises that are looming over us, is a very scary thought.

• 2:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, we talk a lot on the show about how climate change is making natural disasters more unpredictable. It does feel like exactly the time when you would want to have this agency around. And I was really interested to find out that a lot of the distrust around FEMA stems from conspiracy theories.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  The conspiracy theories that we see today around FEMA can actually be traced pretty much to the beginning of the agency. And I guess the important thing that I've realized about FEMA is that it's always struggled to earn the trust of the public it's been hoping to serve.

• 3:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Interesting.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  That is not a contemporary challenge for the agency. It's really been there since its creation.

• 3:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hmm. It feels like it parallels a lot of other stuff going on with federal agencies. You know, we did several episodes about the pullback of funding in federal science agencies like the NIH, the CDC, NSF. And it didn't occur to me really to connect that with FEMA. But it seems like a similar thing is happening with FEMA, and it comes from this sort of fundamental lack of trust.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that we're in a political moment where any kind of existing fault lines or instabilities in our, how our systems were set up, are being exposed. And I think that for a long time FEMA was able to do great work while contending with these challenges of earning trust from the public. And I think that they have struggled to meet the current political moment.

• 4:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  I think that could be said for a lot of agencies. And the current political moment is very complicated for a lot of reasons.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  It is so complicated. It is. And honestly, when I think about these conspiracy theories and how wild they are and how many there are, it's hard to imagine really what a good response to them would be in this current era.

• 5:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  We spoke to Willa Remus at The Washington Post, and he did a study of misinformation during Hurricane Helene. He said that FEMA's most popular tweet since Hurricane Helene reached 50 times fewer people than the false rumors.

• 5:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  Damn. Okay.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  It's really hard.

• 5:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  That is like the challenge that our government, you know, has to, has to rise to. But yeah, it's hard to imagine it right now.

• 5:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  So this is a four-episode series you guys produced. Our listeners are going to hear the first one in just a second. I wonder if you could just tee it up. What are they going to hear?

• 5:45Speaker 02

  In this episode, we really go back to the very beginnings of FEMA. And we find out some really surprising things about the agency and about what it was doing behind closed doors. And it also really sets up some of the problems that we see FEMA going through today.

• 6:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay. Thanks, Eloise.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 6:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  Here's on the media.

• 6:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  And that might be good.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Did you get everything you needed?

• 6:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  I feel great.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Well, I have to say, it's really weird being a guest as a producer, but you guys are very, very nice.

• 6:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Anytime I'm a guest on anything, I'm like...

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Like, are you sure? Are you sure? Like, do you want me to check that you're recording?

• 6:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  I know, I know. Seriously. I think I hear a noise on your end of the mic.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Great. I guess I was just wondering if when you intro, you could say American emergency from on the media?

• 6:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, like at that last bit.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  That's okay. Yeah.

• 6:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  Let's do it. Okay, I'll just, I'll just say it right now.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  Here's American emergency from on the media.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Storms, floods and fires are ever more extreme. And yet, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is fighting for its life.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  I've never been a big fan of FEMA. FEMA is very expensive and it really doesn't get the job done.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  How did the agency tasked with saving America become so despised? FEMA is a disaster. FEMA is a dirty word. So distrusted. People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  The FEMA plans to imprison American citizens have generated a lot of interest around the country.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  And defunded. We could see the next Katrina-level disaster based on the stripping away of FEMA that we have seen. Can the agency survive the stories that have been told about it? And can we survive without FEMA? Whenever there's a disaster, the first thing people say is, where's FEMA? American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA is a brand-new On the Media series. The first episode is coming up, right after this.

• 7:59Speaker 06

  From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  And I'm Michael Oeninger.

• 8:06Speaker 06

  Mica, this is the week.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 06

  The first episode of a brand-new four-part series that you and OTM senior producer Eloise Blondiau have been reporting out for months. It's about the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. And there is a ton of stuff in here that people won't have heard before. I'm excited. Let's do it.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Okay, thanks, Brooke. Hope you like it.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  We've come to North Carolina with a simple message for all the people of this region who were hit so hard by Hurricane Helene.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  At the beginning of his second term, amid all the chaos of the incoming administration, President Trump made his first trip to North Carolina.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  That message is very simple. You are not forgotten any longer. You were treated very badly by the previous administration and...

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Before he got on Air Force One, Trump called a press conference on the tarmac and casually dropped this bomb.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  I'll also be signing executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting rid of FEMA.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the agency that stands between America and climate destruction.

• 9:18Speaker 04

  I think frankly FEMA...

• 9:19Speaker 03

  FEMA is not good. The agency that helps people rebuild after they've lost everything. The agency that, while he was rambling, was providing aid to Californians suffering through the historic L.A. wildfires, as well as Helene survivors right there in North Carolina. It seemed like with a snap of his fingers, the president would be happy to see FEMA vanish. I think we're going to recommend that FEMA go away.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  I learned that employees at FEMA broke down in tears when they heard the news. Some replayed the president's speech over and over.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Anxious members of Congress spent the day calling into the agency's headquarters with a barrage of questions. Is the president serious? What happens when the next hurricane hits? If the president came to you and said, "You're my DHS secretary. Do you think I should get rid of FEMA?" What would you say? I would say, "Yes, get rid of FEMA the way it exists today." Kristi Noam, former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

• 10:18Speaker 06

  It has been slow to respond at the federal level, and that is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Before she got the boot this spring, Noam effectively set fire to FEMA. Preparedness programs were slashed. Unqualified leaders cycled in and out. Billions meant for survivors of storms, wildfires, and earthquakes were withheld or denied. Lives hung in the balance. The death toll in Texas, the flooding tragedy, it's up to 104 dead across six counties. That number includes nearly 30 children. After deadly floodwaters inundated Camp Mystic and other parts of central Texas, the agency's support lines left thousands of calls unanswered. FEMA's top leader at the time couldn't be reached for 24 hours.

• 11:11Speaker 06

  We live about a mile down the road from Camp Mystic, and we've already got two little girls who have come down the river. And we've gotten to them, but I'm not sure how many else are out there. The federal response to this disaster has come under scrutiny. Allegations that FEMA cutbacks meant delays in answering people's calls for disaster assistance and aid after the flood.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  In one telling, the dysfunctional response was Doge's doing. It's true, at the start of 2025, no agency was safe from Elon Musk's chainsaw. But that's only part of the story. For many years, fomenting under the surface was a deep-seated distrust of FEMA, which broke through during Hurricane Helene, just months before the 2024 presidential election.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants.

• 12:08Speaker 06

  Some on the right pushing conspiracy theories that they're blocking aid and seizing land from people here in North Carolina, and that is not true.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  An anti-government militia group known as Veterans on Patrol is claiming Hurricane Helene was caused by government-controlled weather weapons. The group called Hurricane Helene "an act of war."

• 12:31Speaker 03

  I knew from my years reporting on far-right militias that these groups often showed up after natural disasters to recruit, fundraise, and spit-shine their public image. But I never understood why they hated FEMA so much. So I started digging into right-wing media archives and found that the anti-FEMA lore went back decades.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps, to the New World Order, to the troops on the streets, the liberals are starting to...

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Alex Jones has made multiple films claiming to have discovered "secret prisons" operated by FEMA, and right-wing pundit Glenn Beck entertained this stuff when he was still on Fox.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  If you have any kind of fear that we might be headed towards a totalitarian state, buckle up. There's something going on in our country that is, uh, ain't good.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Over time, these paranoias seeped into the waters of mainstream culture. Are you familiar with what the Federal Emergency Management Agency's real power is? It was a major plot point in The X-Files. FEMA allows the White House to suspend constitutional government upon declaration ...of a national emergency. Think about that. Even with Kristi Noam replaced at DHS by Republican Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, the future of FEMA is still in jeopardy. This week, the administration announced that it was patching up some of the Noam-era cuts, but agency insiders say that it may take years to build FEMA back up to fighting strength. About a month ago, Trump repeated his antipathy for the agency.

• 14:03Speaker 06

  I've never been a big fan of FEMA. I like to keep it local. I like to see governors and neighboring states help each other as opposed to FEMA. FEMA is very...

• 14:14Speaker 03

  As I've followed the current day crisis at FEMA, I've wondered whether it can survive the stories that have been told about it. The misinformation, mismanagement, and genuine catastrophes that have made this agency one of the least popular among Americans. But for all its faults, and there are many, it's not clear we can afford to lose it.

• 14:35Speaker 06

  Extreme weather leaving so many across the United States wondering when they'll get a break. In July alone, there were five 1,000-year flood events.

• 14:43Speaker 07

  Extreme heat is becoming a dangerous new normal. The record-setting storm measured not in inches, but in feet of snow. Hundreds of thousands are now without power in this freezing weather. The U.S. is experiencing a billion-dollar disaster every 10 days on average compared to every 82 back in the 1980s.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Over the next few weeks, we'll explore how the organization tasked with saving America came to be so despised and mythologized for a series we're calling "American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA." We'll hear about FEMA's identity crisis during Hurricane Katrina, how conspiracy theories have fueled violent threats against federal workers, and how a group of anonymous employees are fighting to keep the agency alive under Trump. For this first episode, we're looking at FEMA's secretive origins and the moment when Americans first learned that the agency was hiding things from us.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  On December 1st, 1974, heavy rain and fog rerouted a passenger plane over northern Virginia, some 50 miles from Washington DC. On its descent, the aircraft dropped into the forest below, cheering off the treetops and crashing into the side of Mount Weather. The two pilots were killed first, lanced by trees that burst through the cockpit. The rest of the aircraft crumbled into pieces, a mangle of shrapnel and the body parts of the 92 passengers and crew members. There were no survivors. One woman, whose parents were on the flight, said it seemed like the mountain had jumped up and bit the plane.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  News coverage of the day quickly turned to the blame game and the miscommunication from air traffic control amidst a violent storm. But our focus is something that was buried in the reports. When TV crews arrived at the crash site, they discovered, rather ominously, that Mount Weather had already been sealed off on the orders of federal security agents.

• 16:59Speaker 06

  The quick action was taken because the big jet had landed almost a mile away from a super-secret government installation, an underground complex of emergency offices set up for federal officials in the event of nuclear war.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  The crash had inadvertently uncovered a tightly-guarded Cold War secret. Inside Mount Weather was a massive covert facility. And somehow, that undersells it. Through a tunnel that burrows into the mountain, and behind a 34-ton blast door, lies a subterranean Strangelovean lair. A freestanding city with a hospital, a crematorium, an emergency power plant, and even a broadcasting studio. Everything that the White House and thousands of federal workers would need to run the country underground while millions melted on the surface.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  "I expect your people to save our government." That's what President Dwight Eisenhower told the first director of Mount Weather after it was built in 1955. It's still operated by FEMA today. It's actually being renovated as I speak. But back in the 1950s, Mount Weather was run by FEMA's predecessor, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the FCD, which poured billions into making America nuke-proof, or at least lulling people into the belief that with enough preparation, they might survive atomic hellfire.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  The FCD was behind this delightful, if slightly morbid, PSA, instructing schoolchildren to hide under their desks during bomb drills.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  For adults, the FCD organized Operation Alert, a series of dramatic exercises where millions of people acted out the day of their likely demise, emptying the streets of America's biggest cities.

• 19:09Speaker 06

  "While the sirens wail their grim warning, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers scurry for shelter against the attack. Riders and drivers taking cover in a realistic drill for a day all Americans pray will never come."

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Operation Alert was also the first time that Mount Weather saw action.

• 19:25Speaker 07

  "As soon as the alert sounded in Washington, President Eisenhower reached for his hat and strode to a waiting limousine to be driven to an emergency base of operations in the mountains outside Washington. Exact location kept secret."

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Kept secret until that terrible plane crash in 1974. Fortunately, nuclear obliteration never came, and Mount Weather was never truly put to use.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  But there's something ironic and revealing that a single storm brought more death and destruction to the base than 30 years of the Cold War. By the 1970s, it had become clear that the nuclear preparations had done little to protect America from an arguably greater threat.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  Coming up, if our government could build a secret city, it does kind of make you wonder, what else could they be hiding?

• 20:18Speaker 03

  This is On the Media.

• 20:40Speaker 06

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• 22:11Speaker 03

  This is On the Media. I'm Michael Lowinger. To better understand the current day crisis at FEMA and why so many Americans believe wild conspiracy theories about it, I wanted to dive back into the era it was created, when state leaders began to realize that all the focus on Cold War civil defense had left them vulnerable to Mother Nature.

• 22:32Speaker 07

  We just didn't have that many nuclear wars, which is great, but we do have a lot of natural disasters.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Garrett Graff is a journalist and author of a book about the origins of FEMA titled Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of Us Die. Before the agency was created, America's disaster response system was, well, barely a system.

• 22:56Speaker 07

  It didn't make sense for every state to be developing its own totally independent ability to respond to a hurricane, because in any given year, most states don't get hit by a hurricane.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Which became a big problem in the 60s and 70s, when the country was rocked by a series of record-breaking disasters. No one knows the full size of the disaster yet. In Betsy's wake, there's only darkness,

• 23:26Speaker 06

  confusion, and death. After suffering one of the most serious earthquakes in history, Alaska had to undergo the further ordeal of over 40 severe earth tremors. Imagine being there as the streets reared up around you like the scene of some terrible biblical retribution.

• 23:43Speaker 07

  They called her Camille. Born of the sea, she turned like a woman scorned. She screamed,

• 23:51Speaker 03

  and ripped, and flooded, and killed.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  These big disasters overwhelmed towns and counties and states, the big ones often do, but when they asked for help, the federal government was too disorganized to act quickly or efficiently, supplying extra ambulances, delivering food and water to survivors, fixing roads and power. Plants, each piece of the emergency management process could come from a different office or department. A hundred agencies might play a role. Navigating this patchwork of services and jurisdictions was a major pain in the ass for local leaders, especially during a crisis when lives are on the line and every second counts. Like in 1972, when another big storm hit.

• 24:38Speaker 07

  Many of the people here and others in the path of Hurricane Agnes were completely wiped out. Many of them feel that federal aid is too slow in coming and too little.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Trump says FEMA should return its responsibilities to the states, which is odd because states often bring in FEMA when they're unable to respond on their own. And anyway, it was the states that asked for FEMA in the first place. In 1978, the National Governors Association drew up plans for a streamlined, one-stop-shop for federal emergency response and delivered it to a sympathetic White House.

• 25:13Speaker 06

  Washington President Carter proposed merging five big federal emergency preparation and disaster relief agencies into one agency as part of his reorganization plan. Civil defense experts say it will provide much-needed communication between the state and federal levels.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  In 1979, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order giving life to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA was a federal Frankenstein with a dual mission: Cold War civil defense and disaster relief. I wish I could illustrate this moment by playing you like a triumphant speech from President Carter or some colorful news footage, but either that stuff never existed or no one thought it was important enough to archive. Even the earliest employees at FEMA were confused about how to talk about it.

• 26:01Speaker 07

  We had a new director there, and there was a message that went out to us that said that if we're referring to the agency publicly, we should say either Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA, because the word FEMA, he thought, sounded too much like a laxative.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  This is Leo Bosner, a retired FEMA official, who's taught me a lot about the earliest days of the agency. He was working as a flood insurance specialist with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in one of the offices that was folded into FEMA.

• 26:33Speaker 07

  We're all working along in the office, and one day they tell us, okay, everybody go down to photo ID, you're getting new photo IDs. We walk down the stairs. Get new photo IDs that say FEMA, turn in our photo IDs that say Housing and Urban Development, and then we're all told, we're all getting new job titles. And our new job title is Emergency Management Specialist. And I'm thinking, what on God's earth is an Emergency Management Specialist? Like, this is the end of my career. What kind of a dead-end job is this?

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Leo would spend the next 30 years at FEMA. He eventually found really satisfying work, helping hospitals and medical organizations prepare for floods, wildfires, and hurricanes. But less than two years after he started getting the hang of his new job, FEMA fell into a decade-long tailspin.

• 27:22Speaker 07

  The big shift really didn't come until 1980.

• 27:25Speaker 06

  Ronald Reagan appears to be heading toward a landslide electoral victory tonight across the United States.

• 27:32Speaker 07

  Ronald Reagan got elected president, and there's a super U-turn from Jimmy Carter, who was mostly all about social welfare, and Ronald Reagan was more about national defense.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  To run FEMA, Reagan picked someone who would stir up a lot of trouble for the agency: this man.

• 27:48Speaker 06

  Only a masochist with a death wish would accept the job of directing FEMA.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Army Colonel Louis Chafrida, speaking here with a caller on Larry King's radio show.

• 27:59Speaker 06

  I really don't believe that we can be saved if there is a nuclear war. I mean, how are you going to save me if you're blown up too? But you're not suggesting that because we both might be blown up by a nuclear war that we shouldn't have in place a system that would take care of us if there was an earthquake or a tidal wave or a hurricane or anything of that sort.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  While Louis Chafrida paid lip service to FEMA's disaster relief mission, he was quietly funneling most of FEMA's budget towards Cold War civil defense. Leo Bosner.

• 28:30Speaker 07

  All of a sudden, we start seeing all these military officers signing in at the login desk. We're going, why are these military people here? What, military people go to floods or something? And then we learn little by little that FEMA's mission was really, really going to be to get ready for the big nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  In the early 80s, Leo started to hear whispers about classified programs at the agency. Every day on his trip up the elevator at FEMA HQ, he'd ride by a secret fifth floor manned by a security guard. Mostly, he rolled his eyes at all the Cold War theater, wishing FEMA would focus more on preparing Americans for natural disasters. But he still wondered, what were they doing in there?

• 29:13Speaker 07

  The majority of its funding.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Garrett Graff.

• 29:17Speaker 07

  And about a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation's classified black budget, the special budget that Congress oversees that protects our most secret programs and capabilities. And FEMA, on a daily basis, is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession, so that in the event of a nuclear war, it knows where all of those people are, how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mount Weather bunker, and who would be best positioned to be the person who takes over as president of the United States in the event of a nuclear war.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  I wonder if this classified continuity of government planning helps explain why there was so little media about FEMA when it was first created. I think the feds just didn't want to draw attention to their secret plans. That said, the coverage did pick up when the agency launched a controversial new initiative. The head of emergency management, Louis Jefrida, says the heart of the proposal is crisis relocation.

• 30:27Speaker 07

  What we want to accomplish is taking the maximum number of people from high-risk areas to areas

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Of lesser risk. A mass evacuation program.

• 30:40Speaker 07

  There was sort of the sense of, well, if you could just get 20, 30, 50 miles away from a major city, you would at least have a chance to survive the initial blast from the nuclear weapons and then live into nuclear winter.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  Government officials estimated that in the worst case, 60 million Americans could survive an attack. Can you imagine all those urbanites swamping small towns and rural areas? News reports at the time featured a mixture of fascination and incredulity.

• 31:14Speaker 06

  My God, you're going to have modified anarchy after that sort of thing. How in the world are you going to coordinate the recovery and putting leadership back into place? How are you going to do that?

• 31:25Speaker 07

  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.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:56Speaker 07

  That's 908, but they called it 908.

• 32:00Speaker 03

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

• 32:06Speaker 07

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

• 32:15Speaker 03

  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?

• 32:41Speaker 07

  Yes. Often without telling the businesses that they were being scouted for these purposes.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  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 Jafreda 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 Jafreda'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 Jafreda had

• 33:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:51Speaker 07

  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.

• 34:14Speaker 03

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

• 34:19Speaker 07

  Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned at one time to work

• 34:25Speaker 06

  on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

• 34:29Speaker 03

  North was questioned by Texas Representative Jack Brooks. We see North pause and whisper to his attorney. Then the chairman of the hearings, Daniel K. Enoway, jumps in to respond on the government's behalf.

• 34:43Speaker 06

  I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area. So may I request that you not touch.

• 34:53Speaker 07

  Upon that, sir. I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan, a contingency plan, that would suspend the American Constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was, but I wanted to get his confirmation. May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage?

• 35:25Speaker 03

  The government never acknowledged any of this stuff until much of it was declassified years later. Louis Giuffrida ended up resigning from FEMA for totally unrelated reasons following a congressional fraud investigation. According to Senator Albert Gore, Giuffrida had spent $170,000 of federal money to build a house on federal property for his own use. By the start of the 90s, FEMA employee Leo Bosner was beyond tired of the dysfunction and the kooky national security schemes.

• 35:55Speaker 07

  Frankly, for me, once that stuff was in the rearview mirror, it's like, fine, that's the trash. I hope they come on Friday and pick it up and dump it to the landfill. There were some pretty nutty people working back there then. Fortunately, nothing much ever came of that, except they ate up most of our budget.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  He was eager for the agency to shift resources to preparing for floods and hurricanes. But all this doomsday planning had done a number on FEMA's reputation.

• 36:20Speaker 07

  I would talk on my off-duty time to people on Capitol Hill, news reporters, and say, "Look, this is a dangerous thing. We're ignoring these natural disasters." And I was having lunch with a news reporter one day, and I'm telling him this, and the guy's looking really bored. He says, "Yeah, Leo, that's all really bad, but tell me about FEMA's secret plan to round up all the liberals in the country and put them in concentration camps."

• 36:44Speaker 03

  What?

• 36:45Speaker 07

  Yeah. I said, "Buddy..."

• 36:47Speaker 03

  These people are so inept, they couldn't organize a two-car parade and they're never gonna round up everybody in the country. Come on, get out of here, will you? Leo didn't know it at the time, but those FEMA camps conspiracy theories had started popping up in fringe message boards on the early internet.

• 37:03Speaker 05

  The FEMA plans to imprison American citizens have generated a lot of interest in locating the potential prison camps throughout the country.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  This woman, Linda Thompson, a sort of godmother of the right-wing militia movement, made a 1994 documentary, America Under Siege, which warned that FEMA was part of the New World Order, a global authoritarian takeover that would require rounding up anti-government dissidents.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  These may be facilities that have other uses, but which could be quickly used to detain large numbers of people, such as this Amtrak facility in Beech Grove, Indiana.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Following in her footsteps a couple decades later were militia leaders like Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, one of the January 6 guys.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  A lot of stuff is dual-use. They put together a detention center or an emergency center supposedly for refugees from other countries.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  And, as I mentioned, Infowars host Alex Jones.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps, to the New World Order, to the troops on the streets.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  These FEMA camps.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  And Glenn Beck, when he was still on Fox News.

• 38:05Speaker 06

  I'm tired of hearing, you know about them? Sure. We've now, for several days, done research on them. I can't debunk them.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  After whipping up this paranoia, Beck did eventually debunk the theory with help from the editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics.

• 38:20Speaker 06

  This is an Amtrak repair facility in Beech Grove, Indiana. We set a crew there the other day and we got footage. Is this your video? Yes. And sure enough, what did we find? They're repairing trains in there.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Remember how earlier Garrett Graff told us about stores like Walmarts being scoped out by the government to be used as refugee camps? They don't exist, but people on TikTok and YouTube still like to make videos about them.

• 38:45Speaker 06

  It's like military-style entrance, kinda like a FEMA camp. Why in the hell does Walmart Supercenter need that? See the Walmart trucks?

• 38:55Speaker 03

  These videos are low effort and easy to laugh off, but I mean, if FEMA could operate amount weather, why not amount Walmart?

• 39:02Speaker 07

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

• 39:09Speaker 03

  Garrett Graff.

• 39:10Speaker 07

  In the early stages of the Cold War, J. Edgar Hoover at the

• 39:14Speaker 06

  FBI had pre-selected lists of suspected communists and political dissidents that he wanted to round up in the event of a nuclear war.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  Not to mention the fact that the US imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

• 39:30Speaker 06

  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.

• 39:50Speaker 03

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

• 39:54Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  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 Noam'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.

• 40:41Speaker 06

  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.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  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. Florida officials say the money is still likely, but who knows? Despite that uncertainty and many legal attempts aimed at closing it, Alligator Alcatraz remains open.

• 41:13Speaker 06

  Amnesty International says immigrants held at the ICE jail in Florida were shackled inside a two-foot-high metal cage and left outside without water for up to a day at a time. In a new report, they also detail unsanitary conditions, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy.

• 41:32Speaker 07

  And while Governor DeSantis says the conditions are up to standard, the families of migrants being held inside are calling it a concentration camp.

• 41:40Speaker 06

  That is the most...

• 41:41Speaker 07

  Real FEMA camp ever built.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  What do you think it says that FEMA would actually use public funds for the very thing that has been a far-right boogeyman?

• 41:54Speaker 07

  I mean, there is something uniquely dystopian about a right-wing government elected on the backs of the anti-government conspiracies that it is now implementing.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Coming up, for the first time, FEMA finds its groove.

• 42:18Speaker 06

  They ought to change the name because the old FEMA has a pretty bad name and the new one they're running now is a crackerjack agency.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  This is On the Media.

• 42:41Speaker 05

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. Being curious is endlessly rewarding. There are few better feelings, in my opinion, than asking a question and then having that question lead you down a rabbit hole. Might even be the beginning of a new set of interests that was not on your radar beforehand. Maybe you're looking up at the night sky one night and you start to wonder what the most distant thing you can see with a naked eye is. One place to start searching for answers to a question like that is TikTok. First, you might discover a video about the Andromeda Galaxy. And then, next thing you know, you're learning how to find different stars

• 43:23Speaker 05

  or how to identify constellations or how different astronomical discoveries got made or how constellations got their names. You don't need serious equipment to make serious discoveries. Start with a simple question and suddenly you're somewhere you never expected to be. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore. At tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 43:56Speaker 01

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• 44:30Speaker 03

  This is On the Media. I'm Michael Lowinger, and you're listening to the first episode of our series, American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA. In my reporting, I learned that FEMA's Cold War mission, to save America from nuclear war, was met with a lot of suspicion, and understandably so. Case in point, when I was digging around in the National Archives, something that caught my eye was a tape curiously labeled FEMA Blues.

• 44:59Speaker 05

  Seattle, Washington. Now, Seattle did a spunky thing the other day.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  It turned out to be a comedy special from a guy named Mark Russell, which aired in 1982. He starts with this hokey bit about Luis Jefrida's nuclear evacuation plans. In an apparent effort to coax Seattle officials into participating, FEMA had offered to subsidize the city's mass relocation, which the city refused.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  They turned down their allotment from the Federal Emergency Management Administration. I think it really stands for feeble exercise in mindless administration. You know what Seattle's allotment was? $17,000. Can you imagine that? I guess the money went to provide each resident with a free roadmap and a granola bar. And so, yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  After a bit of vamping, Russell calls up his band, The Buzzards.

• 45:51Speaker 05

  It's our spunky, feisty little band. We only do this once a year.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  To perform a song that I think captures the zeitgeist in the 80s.

• 45:58Speaker 05

  Hit it, fellas! I got those.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  According to its critics, FEMA's leaders were either mounting a comically pitiful defense against the nation's most pressing threat, or they were burning resources that would be better spent on responding to Mother Nature. Leo Bosner, that OG FEMA employee,

• 46:45Speaker 03

  was in the latter camp. As the 80s went on, he was busy trying to warn the press.

• 46:49Speaker 07

  I was kind of in my whistleblower mode, letting them know that FEMA was spending all of its time doing nuclear stuff and not doing anything for these natural disasters.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  If Ronald Reagan's FEMA was too active, too conniving, George Bush Senior's FEMA had the opposite problem. It was out to lunch. Daddy Bush left the agency leaderless for over a year, and he was punished for it in 1989 when a Category 5 storm came barreling off the Atlantic.

• 47:17Speaker 05

  Two weeks after Hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina, it's FEMA that is in the eye of the storm. Only about 20% of FEMA's budget goes for disaster relief. FEMA is trying to live down a reputation for being slow, stingy, and distracted.

• 47:31Speaker 07

  South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings today accused FEMA of raw incompetence. They're the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever worked with in my life. FEMA did a terrible job.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Leo Bosner.

• 47:44Speaker 07

  But I think the feeling was, wow, that's a once-in-a-hundred-year thing. Except three years later, Hurricane Andrew hit in 92.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Another Category 5, one of the strongest in Florida's history.

• 47:56Speaker 07

  And FEMA was on the front pages.

• 47:59Speaker 07

  of the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew.

• 48:01Speaker 05

  If we do not get more food and water in a very short period of time, we are going to have more casualties because we're going to have people who are dehydrated, who are without food.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  After the storm, as journalists started digging into FEMA's dysfunction, they discovered a political backwater filled with unqualified Bush appointees.

• 48:21Speaker 07

  Congressional records show that while at most federal agencies, there is only one political appointee for every 3,000 government agencies. At FEMA, there's one for every 300. So the election for the president was only like three months later.

• 48:34Speaker 05

  This election is a clarion call for our country to face the challenges of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the next century.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Bill Clinton, the first Democrat to take the White House in 12 years, had seen how FEMA's reputation had dragged his predecessors. Unlike them, he understood that natural disasters are media spectacles, predictable, high-stakes dramas that generate a steady stream of coverage. So when Clinton came into office, he did something radical. He appointed somebody actually qualified to run FEMA, somebody who would fundamentally transform the agency from a liability to a government success story. A man named James Lee Witt, who had served as the Arkansas Director of Emergency Management when Clinton was governor.

• 49:24Speaker 05

  As governor of Arkansas, when I went to work for him there, he said, if it affects people's lives and it's going to be in the media, then I want to know about it.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  This is Witt speaking with C-SPAN in 1996.

• 49:37Speaker 05

  Can you tell us the story of your very first meeting with Bill Clinton? Absolutely. I know we'll forget it. It was in 1974. And I was coaching a little league baseball team in Dardanelle, Arkansas.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  When they first met, Clinton was a law professor and congressional candidate, and Witt ran a local construction company.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  You didn't go to college. No. Do you ever have any second thoughts about that? Sure, I guess anyone that has never been to college wished they had gone. But when I grew up, I was working. What did your father do? He was a farmer.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  Suffice to say, Witt's humble beginnings did not hold him back. And when he came to FEMA in 1993, he became the first leader in the agency's 14-year history with any professional experience managing domestic disasters.

• 50:25Speaker 07

  Witt comes in, and that's when he totally started turning everything around.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  How did he do that?

• 50:30Speaker 07

  Well, a lot of it was really common sense. He knew there are all kinds of problems internal to FEMA. So he sends a memo to all hands, first official action, open door policy. So all of a sudden, he's getting all these employees coming in and giving them an earful of all the problems in the agency.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  He collected all these ideas and got to work reorganizing the agency for what he called an "all hazards" approach to emergency response.

• 50:57Speaker 07

  Okay, if the FEMA employees might be needed in a disaster, what kind of jobs are they going to have to do? Let's train people for those jobs. He also made rosters of who would be on duty, when, during the disaster. And he said, "Okay, we're going to divide the employees here like into three teams: the red team, the white team, and the blue team." Yay, the flag, right? If you're on the red team, you're on call for disasters during January, February. If you're on the white team, you're on call. Then he even breaks it down into night shifts and day shifts. Now, this does not take like a PhD in higher mathematics to come up with this. And people could say, "God, this is common sense." And my answer is, "Yeah, but nobody did it before."

• 51:39Speaker 03

  And when did you get a sense that like people out there in the public were taking notice?

• 51:45Speaker 07

  Well, that was one of the other really smart things that Mr. Witt did. Back in the Cold War days, FEMA kept the news media at bay, like, "Go away, keep out, keep out, keep out." And so that just added the suspicion. Well, Witt opened the doors to it. The news media could come into our emergency operations center, right there in Washington, DC, and they could observe things, and they could even interview us.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  Witt relished speaking with the press. He seemed to genuinely want to explain how the agency worked. Within a year of joining FEMA, he began chipping away at its secret black budget, declassifying much of that doomsday planning and diverting a whole bunch of its resources to natural disasters. The agency began to see the fruits of all these new reforms during Witt's first major test as administrator.

• 52:33Speaker 05

  It started in 1993 with the flood on the Mississippi River. Affected nine states. And the devastation was just unreal.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  The water kept on coming. Small river towns were swallowed up. Over 54,000 people were forced to evacuate and leave behind homes and belongings. Though it was far from perfect, a New York Times headline about FEMA's actions following the floods reads, "In This Emergency, Agency Wins Praise For Its Response." The tide was turning for FEMA's reputation.

• 53:06Speaker 07

  They ought to change the name because the old FEMA has a pretty bad name and the new one they're running now is a crackerjack agency.

• 53:14Speaker 05

  President Clinton and I was talking about it and Governor Carney in Missouri.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  James Lee Witt.

• 53:19Speaker 05

  And I said, you know, Mr. President, we can't let people build back in those areas that flooded. And we were able to buy out on a voluntary basis and relocate people out of the floodplain so they'd never flood again. In Missouri alone, we bought out over 4,000 pieces of property.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  30 years later, this type of policy is considered a core tenet of good emergency management. Recent studies vindicate Witt's approach. Research shows that for every dollar spent on mitigation, $6 are saved down the line.

• 53:54Speaker 07

  During the 90s, FEMA had gotten to be so well-known. In 1996, President Clinton publicly elevated James Lee Witt to cabinet level, saying he's done such a great job here. That's how it was.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  You could probably tell from the way he talks about it, Leo Bosner was so proud of his agency during the 90s. Some of its greatest work, he says, was visible on one of the darkest days for the country.

• 54:18Speaker 07

  That April morning in 1995, where all at work like normal, all of a sudden... A plume of smoke rising in the air. If you are in... Anywhere downtown, you've probably heard it and felt it, an explosion of some kind. People are yelling because on the TV screen, oh my God, there's been a bomb in Oklahoma City. We have been able to confirm right now, an explosion at the federal court building downtown. Within like a few minutes, my pager's going off, and we're seeing all this action suddenly, very organized action going on. Our regional office in Texas, within one hour, was on the phone with Oklahoma, and they decided that what was needed most from FEMA was our specialized search and rescue teams

• 54:59Speaker 07

  who had special tools and training to go into collapsed concrete buildings, which is not a simple thing to do. And our search and rescue teams were then deployed there within a couple of hours. So they were quick. Oh yeah, that's when you could really see that FEMA is real and we could do things.

• 55:15Speaker 05

  The reinforcements showed up tonight. At the center of it all, of course, is the bombed out shell of the federal office building, and in its shadow, the exhausted, who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris, encountered its dead, and seen up close why they call it terror.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  The bombing was part of an alarming trend. Anti-government extremists were becoming more active and more violent. After the attack, the White House brought in a new number two official at FEMA, a man with experience monitoring and investigating terrorism, including far-right militias.

• 55:51Speaker 05

  I'm Mike Walker, the deputy director of FEMA, and I'm one of the newest employees of FEMA.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  Mike's a legend in the business. Tim Manning held the same deputy director role during the Obama administration. Now he's a professor at Georgetown University, but earlier in his career, Mike Walker was his mentor. Mike's been confirmed by the Senate. He's held a number of senior roles. He's been around, seen, and been part of just about everything in the past 40-plus years of emergency management and homeland security. When Tim was preparing for his own Senate confirmation hearings, Mike warned Tim about the job he was about to take at FEMA. Mike told him a story that's never been reported before now. It happened in 1999. He's in the new role at FEMA. He was gone a lot. Those are very...

• 56:36Speaker 07

  Very demanding jobs, traveling around the country dealing with disaster response.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  He was commuting often between FEMA headquarters in DC and his home in West Virginia, where he lived with his wife.

• 56:47Speaker 07

  He needed help around the house, and there was a person in the neighborhood who came by and offered his services as a handyman.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  For a few weeks, the handyman comes by to repair windows, fix doors, whatever it might be, and Mike and his wife were pretty happy with his work, until...

• 57:03Speaker 07

  He got a call from the FBI one day, asking if he knew who this person was. Mike said, "Well, yeah, he's our handyman, doing work for us." And the FBI said, "Well, he's not. He's actually undercover. He's a militia member who was sent here to get close to you and watch your movements, figure out your patterns, try to collect information. He's there surveilling you as a spy."

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Oh, my god.

• 57:29Speaker 07

  Fortunately, nothing dangerous ever happened for Mike or his family. I suppose having an undercover militia operative in your home for a time is dangerous in itself. I don't know whatever kind of dangerous plots might have been in the works before the FBI figured out who he was and what was happening and interdicted.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  I mean, when I hear this story, it doesn't sound real. It sounds like a movie, like noir.

• 57:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, I wish it was noir fiction. It's the kind of thing that you're always worried about, and, you know, you think about in the middle of the night, is my family safe? And am I doing all the right things? And you think about that as like, oh, that's so far-fetched. That would never happen. But, you know, here, it did happen.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  When I first heard this story, I thought it could be explained simply by the rise of extremist militia groups in America. But the more I learned about FEMA, its secretive origins, its unhinged leadership under Reagan, the more I realized that the agency that was born of the paranoias of the 20th century had been met with paranoia in return.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  While reporting this series, I spoke to FEMA workers from just about every era of the agency. And I've heard too many stories of threats from conspiracy theorists to chase them all down. But for now, here's one more. A FEMA official from the 90s told me that he'd seen FEMA head James Lee Witt walking around with a US Marshal security detail, but never learned why. After some digging, I discovered that in 1998, Witt was asked to meet with the FBI. An agent told him that a militia group had been selling VHS tapes with his home address and information on his kids and wife. The death threats were credible enough that Witt was told to stop taking public transportation to work

• 59:22Speaker 03

  early in the morning. As you'll learn in the coming weeks, these plots against FEMA's leadership foreshadow its current day unraveling. But in the early 2000s, as FEMA was forced to shape shift after 9/11, it wasn't anti-government militias that ultimately took down the agency that James Lee Witt built.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  FEMA as an independent agency, as an organization that responded for eight years to the American people's needs, that has been destroyed. It's not there now.

• 59:52Speaker 03

  Next week, in episode two of my investigation, "American Emergency," FEMA gets swallowed up by the Department of Homeland Security and the war on terror.

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  They have driven a stake in the heart of emergency management in this country as we know it.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  That's it for this week's show. This series is reported and hosted by me, Michael Oeninger, with additional writing and reporting from

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  Me, Eloise Blondiau, On The Media's senior producer. Jared Bartman designed the artwork for this series. Our fact checker is Tom Coligan. Original music and mixing from Jared Paul. "American Emergency" was edited by executive producer Katia Rogers.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  Special thanks to Samantha Montano and Michael Cohen. "On The Media" is produced by WNYC. See you next week.