How hard is it to see disaster clearly? Barely one month before a contentious presidential election, with the country seemingly divided into alien epistemological spheres, a storm sneaked across the coast of Florida’s Big Bend and traveled inland from there, ultimately flooding large portions of several mountain states hundreds of miles from the ocean and thousands of feet from sea level, crumbling highways and washing away homes, killing 234 and inflicting damages, one estimate suggests, of $225 billion to $250 billion.
Both numbers are astonishing. Two hundred and thirty-four deaths makes Hurricane Helene, almost ignored by the national media until several days after landfall, the third-deadliest U.S. hurricane in the 21st century. The low-end figure of $225 billion represents more than half of the Congressional Budget Office estimate for the 10-year investments contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, meaning that a single storm had produced damages equivalent to more than five full years of federal outlays from what is often called by proud American lawmakers the most consequential piece of climate legislation the world has ever seen.
And even before the floodwaters receded from Asheville, N.C., where less than 1 percent of households in the county carried flood insurance, the flotsam of brain rot began to flow in.
Some of the sources were predictable, if ghastly — Donald Trump, for instance, lying about the indifference of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and insisting that FEMA had run out of money for disaster relief because it had spent so much on housing immigrants. Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that the storms themselves were weather weapons, directed toward Trump voters; Greene then followed up with a series of posts defending her contention that “they” controlled the path and intensity of storms and, indeed, all of the weather.
There followed waves of antisemitic posts about the mayor of Asheville and the public affairs director of FEMA. And on X, which Elon Musk had bought in the name of free speech only to gleefully police the speech of progressives, Musk, the world’s richest man, repeated rumors that emergency responders were blocking shipments of aid, prompting a frustrated secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, to publicly reply on the social media platform. On TikTok, there was not just rage about the limitations of disaster response but also rumors of FEMA blockades, black helicopters shooting at aid workers and land grabs by the federal government. “The people in Appalachia should NOT comply with FEMA,” Laura Loomer, a conservative influencer, urged her 1.3 million followers on X.
To many, it looked like the hurricane had broken our shared sense of reality and ushered in a catastrophic new low for information pollution. “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote. A Republican congressman from North Carolina put out a bulletin debunking the most egregious fantasies about Helene: “Hurricane Helene was NOT geo-engineered by the government,” for instance, and “FEMA cannot seize your property or land.” A state senator pleaded on Facebook, “will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk?”
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