If you find yourself on FEMA’s website, chances are you’re already in the worst situation. No one thinks about the Federal Emergency Management Agency until their house is reduced to a pile of rubble and all the roads in and out of your city disappear from the map. Or, for example, when you see something on TikTok that the government is rounding up people in Florida and preventing them from leaving before a devastating hurricane. FEMA works almost exclusively in natural disasters, so there’s a bleak logic to dedicating pages on its website to fact-checking the growing list of hurricane-related conspiracy theories.
“FEMA is not detaining people in Florida and not stopping evacuations.” One of the entries reads“FEMA does not control traffic flow or stop traffic, which local officials control. This is a harmful rumor that can put lives at risk.”
It was just days and weeks before parts of North Carolina, Georgia and Florida were isolated by the rapid arrival of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. It goes without saying that it is important to provide timely and reliable information in the hours and days following an emergency. But one of the major obstacles in somehow providing relief to the victims of the storm is convincing a section of the public that In fact, the government did not create the crisis with the weather machine.,
We have been living in an era of misinformation flourishing for years, fueled by Facebook scandals and foreign election interference and COVID-19 vaccine truthers. It’s easier than ever to find facts online that fit your beliefs. But now FEMA has been reduced to trying to explain to people that the Federal Aviation Administration is not restricting airspace over recovery areas and that relief money is not being directed to immigrants, and that’s just Donald Trump. Particularly common are the lies spread by Trump and his ketamine-soaked lamprey Elon Musk, and his army of sycophants AI-trained on Joseph Goebbels’ student films.
There’s also Alex Jones, who is still in the process of selling his Rush Limbaugh memorial plates To cover losses of $1.5 billion He is grateful to the families for calling the Sandy Hook shooting a hoax, which runs counter to government-sanctioned weapons. Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene hasn’t stopped talking about how “they” control the glorious climate machines pointed at red states, sprinkling in lazy antisemitism just to add to the panic.
Needless to say, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is not smuggling that technology Cobra used to threaten GI Joeand yet, Meteorologists are receiving death threats and there are Adopting a tone more familiar to resistance fighters: “Killing meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” If these feel like dark times, that impulse isn’t entirely wrong. Insurance fraud used to be one of the worst things that can happen after a natural disaster. We have elevated it to a terrifying new category of social threat. Propaganda is not just being weaponized to win elections; It is being deliberately used as a campaign strategy at the expense of real human lives. It’s toilet time in America.
We can thank a party whose war on reality is the defining pillar of its grievance-based politics. Climate change, 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 for Republicans. Who better to embody this than Trump, a man who has never lied a minute on earth for no reason in the service of something he craves, even if his showman instincts are as old as a bottle of Fanta Who is collecting cigarette butts in the late sun. ,
How lucky he and the Republican Party are to live in an era where Silicon Valley innovation is completely in support of griftocracy. The era of AI has come Not notable for its leap in achievementBut carelessness and lack of shame Of people pouring billions of dollars into machines that distort reality. Now it’s all crashing together at the worst possible time. Jason Koebler has started calling it at 404 Media The “fuck it” era of AI.,
This is exactly the type of AI-generated slop that has gone viral time and time again on Facebook during the last year And other platforms and about which I have written many times. However, something very disappointing is happening with this particular image. A certain section of people, who have seen and understood that it is AI-generated, do not care that it is not real and did not happen. For them, this image represents a sentiment that is politically useful to them.
Posturing through this is a nihilistic worldview, thanks to a class of sarcastic would-be princes who see the world as a series of fantasy stories to be played down. largely inactive Truck of the future. It’s not that Musk is closing the gates on Twitter to allow conspiracies to clog everyone’s feeds, but that he himself spreads the mess. He enjoys it. You can attribute it to the terminal brain, but beyond that Musk and his cringe-boy dancing people like Peter Thiel and others in Trump’s shadow cabinet of villains Who are actively dedicated to dismantling democratic processes and the role of government in improving people’s lives.
These are people who don’t consider the consequences to be real, because they are not real to them. But from now until Election Day we are in a season of nothing but results. Hundreds of people have died and millions are without power across the Southeast. People in some parts of the country are looking for minimum means to survive; It is going to take a long time for life to get back to “normal” for many families. There is real value here in access to basic information free from the static interference of political activists and filth-mongers. The days of what social media could provide are gone. FEMA has been limited to trying to advance the marketplace of ideas.
I keep thinking about the small towns in western North Carolina that are popping up in the news. By most accounts, Hurricane Helene nearly destroyed the village of Chimney Rock. cataclysmic wave of water and mudDemolishing houses, bridges and changing the course of rivers. The stone tower from which the village got its name started falling stones into the valley. miraculously, Only one death was reported.
It took only a few days for Chimney Rock to become notable for another reason when a meeting of local officials was soon held to request state and local assistance. an insidious plan Confiscating land for lithium mining.
People were stranded in the city of Pensacola, just north of Chimney Rock, on the other side of Mount Mitchell. Flood water came from nearby drain and river The only road in and out of the city was left impassable. A few days after the water receded and the city began assessing the damage, an assistant fire chief named Bradley Boone was left in tears. Shot a video to share some informationThey are scrambling supplies as fast as they can, moving them to central locations in the city so that no one can catch them. They are working on providing basic facilities like showers and laundry for the people. But Boone spends just as much time in the video talking about the rumors. “It’s not scary for FEMA to come, it’s comforting,” he tells the camera. “They have money we don’t have. We will welcome them when they come.”
He further said, it is not true that hundreds of people are missing, or that supplies are running out. Boone says there has been no widespread violence. He explains that people in Pensacola do not have electricity or internet at this time, so his message is largely for the benefit of the outside world.
“I’m trying to save my community,” Boone says. “I don’t have time… I don’t have time to chase every Facebook rumor.”