An outrageous new lie is being spread about hurricanes, and I can’t even
Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:
As climate disasters increase in frequency and severity, we are faced with still another grave threat: misinformation, along with its more sinister sibling, disinformation.
As strong evidence that the writers of 2024 have jumped the shark, we have to begin today’s discussion with a simple fact: The government cannot control the weather, let alone create catastrophic hurricanes that it can send at will.
Yet because of irresponsible conspiracy mongering by political leaders, with a healthy assist from online influencers and amplification by foreign actors, this bizarre claim became a top priority that many leaders, both Democratic and Republican, had to spend valuable time debunking, when they could have been focused on saving more lives and property.
It’s tempting to simply laugh, but just as with the insane and false claims about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, this disinformation also carries serious and dangerous consequences. In today’s piece, I discuss how we got to this point and how political leaders and experts are pushing back. I also will place this particularly weird claim in the larger context of everything else we are seeing to help make the otherwise nonsensical make a bit of perverted sense, at least in terms of the political value it contains for those seeking to undermine our democracy.
“They can control the weather.”
In a press conference yesterday, President Biden’s exasperation was evident as he shot down the newest conspiracy theories around relief efforts and hurricanes. Biden noted that “even one congresswoman” was “suggesting I control the weather and implying I’m sending it to red states.”
“This stuff is off the wall. It’s like out of a comic book,” Biden declared.
He’s talking of course about the Jewish Space Lasers QAnon lady, Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Moscow), whose tweets around the hurricanes have reached new levels of both stupidity and dangerousness.
In one particularly off-the-wall tweet, viewed five million times as of this writing, Rep. Greene attached a video of a speech by CIA Director John Brennan from eight years back. Director Brennan at the time was discussing innovative ways to use aerosols to deflect the sun’s heat to reduce climate change. But in Greene’s smooth, hollow brain, that somehow became “Yes they can control the weather”—implying the hurricanes were manmade and not the long warned about by-product of an overheated ocean following decades of increased carbon in the atmosphere.
Note how she provides ample cover for her ignorance, telling her followers that anyone who counters or ridicules her claims “is lying to you” and that this is all part of some massive cover up and “the people” know it. (As Jimmy Kimmel pointed out last night on his program, Greene used to say bad weather was God’s way of punishing liberal sinners. Funny how that changes when it’s her region that is hit by it.)
Rep. Greene also posted a map of the areas affected by Hurricane Helene, with an overlay of an electoral map by political party, implying strongly that the hurricane was created by Democrats to hurt the political chances of the GOP.
Notably, however, when Democrats presented the North Carolina legislature, which has a GOP supermajority, with a proposal to extend the time for affected voters to register and to allow absentee votes more time to arrive, not a single GOP legislator voted in favor of it.
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But experts are worried about more than their own safety or the difficulty of their jobs. A sharp decrease in public trust during severe weather crises could lead to some terrifying outcomes. As Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), who served as director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management for two years, warned on MSNBC, “At some point in time, we’ll see people tell residents not to evacuate because the hurricane’s not really hitting you.”
If that sounds implausible, we’re already seeing versions of that from large, influential accounts on the right. The troll account Catturd (again, I can’t believe I have to write about this) declared last night that, due to the changing wind speeds of Hurricane Milton, “I’ll never listen to weather channel again.” As of today, that was viewed 2.4 million times.
Why lie about the weather?
There’s something particularly sad when the weather—one of the last, normal topics of conversation, even between people of divergent political views—is no longer uncontroversial. Victims of the hurricanes cannot even commiserate without the threat of political backlash.
“How did you ride out the hurricane?
“You mean the one you Democrats sent here to destroy us?!”’
Never mind that this government weather machine seemed to batter the Gulf and the Caribbean during Trump’s presidency, and he never bothered to turn it off or order it to stop.
Our foreign adversaries have long viewed the ignorance of U.S. voters as an exploitable weakness. They understand that during crises, Americans historically have come together and stood united, helping each other out wherever we can without regard to political viewpoint. And that is precisely why they have targeted these crises now, to spread rumors about the government seizing lands, bulldozing whole towns and hundreds of bodies in massive cover ups, and apparently now even generating and directing the deadly hurricanes in the first place.
Bad political actors thrive where there is little common factual ground remaining for the public to stand upon. Their goal is to continue until it has all been swept away, the zone flooded from a storm surge of shit, to coin Steve Bannon’s infamous strategy.
Jay Kuo rightly calls out the far-right climate-denying conspiracy theorists pushing dangerous lies about Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
The Guardian: How could hurricane misinformation affect the US election?
