If you find yourself on FEMA's website, odds are you are already in a worst-case scenario. No one thinks of the Federal Emergency Management Agency except when their house has been reduced to a pile of debris and all the roads leading in and out of your city have been washed off the map. Or, for instance, when you see something on TikTok about the government corralling people in Florida and preventing them from evacuating ahead of catastrophic hurricanes. FEMA works almost exclusively in natural disasters, so there is a bleak logic to devoting pages on its website to fact-check a growing list of hurricane-related conspiracy theories.
"FEMA is not blockading people in Florida and preventing evacuations," one of the entries reads. "FEMA does not control traffic flow or conduct traffic stops, which are handled by local authorities. This is a harmful rumor that can put lives in danger."
It's been a matter of days and weeks since parts of North Carolina, Georgia and Florida were carved apart by the rapid succession of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. It goes without saying that providing timely and reliable information is vital in the hours and days following an emergency. But somehow one of the bigger obstacles to delivering relief to victims of the hurricanes is convincing some swath of the public that the government did not, in fact, manufacture a crisis with a weather machine.
We've been living in an age of flowering disinformation for years, graduating from Facebook scams and catfishing to foreign election interference and COVID-19 vaccine truthers. It's easier than ever to find the facts that suit your beliefs online. But now FEMA has been reduced to trying to convince people the Federal Aviation Administration is not restricting airspace over recovery areas and that relief money isn't being diverted to immigrants, and those are only the lies specifically spread by Donald Trump, and his ketamine-soaked lamprey Elon Musk, and their army of sycophants AI-trained on the student films of Joseph Goebbels.
There's also Alex Jones, still in the process of selling his Rush Limbaugh commemorative plates to meet the $1.5 billion in damages he owes families for calling the Sandy Hook shooting a hoax, in a frothing fit over government sanctioned weather weapons. Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has not stopped talking about how "they" control fantastic climate machines pointed at red states, throwing in a sprinkling of lazy antisemitism just to spice up the panic.
It should go without saying that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is not trafficking in the technology that Cobra used to threaten G.I. Joe. And yet, meteorologists are getting death threats and are taking on a tone more familiar to resistance fighters: "Murdering meteorologists won't stop hurricanes." If it feels like dark times, that impulse is not entirely wrong. Insurance fraud used to be one of the worst things you could attempt following a natural disaster. We've catapulted past that into a horrible new category of societal menace. Disinformation is not merely being weaponized to win an election; it's knowingly being used as a campaign tactic at the expense of actual human lives. It's toilet hours in America.
We can thank the party whose war on reality is the defining pillar of its grievance-based politics. Climate change, just like violence based in America's history of white supremacy, a woman's bodily autonomy, or the mere existence of transgender people are all open to interpretation to Republicans. Who better to embody this than Trump, a man who has never known a minute on earth without a reason to lie in service of something he covets, even as his showman instincts have aged like a bottle of Fanta collecting cigarette butts in the late day sun.
How fortunate he and the Republican Party are to live in an era where Silicon Valley innovation is in full support of the griftocracy. The age of AI has been notable not for its leaps in achievement, but the recklessness and lack of shame of the people pouring billions into the machines that warp reality. Now all of that is crashing together at the worst possible time. Jason Koebler over at 404 Media has taken to calling it the "fuck it" era of AI:
This is the exact same type of AI-generated slop that has gone viral time and time again over the last year on Facebook and other platforms and that I have written about numerous times. Something very disheartening is happening with this particular image, however. A specific segment of the people who have seen and understand that it is AI-generated simply do not care that it is not real and that it did not happen. To them, the image captures a vibe that is useful to them politically.
404 Media
Posting through it as a nihilistic worldview, thanks to a class of sneering would-be princelings who approach the world as a series of hypotheticals to be run down by the largely inoperable truck of the future. It's not that Musk is simply leaving the gates down on Twitter to allow the conspiracies to clog up everyone's feeds, but he shovels the shit himself. He revels in it. You could attribute it to terminal brain, but beyond Musk and his cringe-boy dancing are people like Peter Thiel and others in Trump's shadow cabinet of villains who are actively dedicated to dismantling democratic processes and the government's role in making improvements in people's lives.
These are people who do not see repercussions as real, because they are not real for them. But from now until election day we're in a season of nothing but consequences. Hundreds are dead and millions are without power across the Southeast. People are searching for the bare minimum to stay alive in parts of the country; it is going to be a long time for many families before life resembles anything close to "normal." Having access to basic information free of the static interference of political operatives and shitposters has real value here. The days social media could provide that are long gone. FEMA is reduced to trying to out-shout the marketplace of ideas.
I keep thinking about the small towns in western North Carolina that have been popping up in the news. From most accounts, Hurricane Helene all but destroyed the village of Chimney Rock in an apocalyptic wave of water and mud, crashing homes into bridges and altering the course of rivers. The stone tower that gives the village its name sent boulders hurtling down into the valley. Miraculously, only one death was reported.
It took a matter of days for Chimney Rock to become notable for another reason when a meeting of local officials to request state and local aid was soon spun into an insidious plan to seize land for lithium mining.
Just north of Chimney Rock, on the other side of Mount Mitchell, people in the town of Pensacola were left stranded. Flood waters from a nearby creek and river left the lone road in and out of town impassable. In the days after the water receded and the town began to assess the damage, a bleary-eyed assistant fire chief named Bradley Boone shot a video to share some information. They're wrangling supplies as fast as they can, getting them to central places in town for anyone to come grab. They're working on getting basics like showers and laundry for people. But Boone spends just as much time in the video talking about rumors. "FEMA coming in is not scary, that's comforting," he says to the camera. "They've got money that we don't have. When they come in, we'll welcome them."
It's not true there are hundreds of people missing, or that supplies are running out, he continues. There has not been widespread violence, Boone says. People in Pensacola don't have power or internet at the moment, he points out, so his message is largely for the benefit of the outside world.
"I’m trying to rescue my community," Boone says. "I ain’t got time ... I ain’t got time to chase every Facebook rumor."
