Col Zone media, welcome to it could happen here. It is a beautiful sunny day in Atlanta, Georgia, which means I think they're all lying about the weather. They said this hurricane was going to come, and I'm fine, I don't believe them. It's all fake. Joined with me today is Mia Wong. I'm Garrison Davis. Welcome, di could happen here?
Welcome And it's hey, look it's it's cloudy in Portland. So clearly they were telling the truth. I don't know what's going on in your reality, but.
I can't believe that the Republicans have hijacked the weather control matrix and are aiming it at Portland, Oregon to wipe it off the map, to give Oregon to give Oragon's vote to Donald Trump in the next election.
You know, one of my foundational early political memories was discovering that, like the mid twenty tens era mayor of Ankara thought that NATO had an earthquake machine that they were setting off off the coast of Turkey in order to cause you namies during hurricane season, so that because so deep, NATO could destroy the Turkish economy, I hope. So now we thought that was very funny. And now every every single like major politician did America believe some shit like that now?
And I was like, Oh, everyone has something, not everyone has the same thing, but everyone has something crazy that they believe. And that's what we're talking about here today. So, oh boy, it is. It has gotten bad, folks.
Yeah.
As Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton brought widespread devastation to the southeastern United States, politicians, TV anchors, and influencers have been trying to weaponize the tragedy and the disaster relief effort for their own partisan electoral gain, particularly via the use of disinformation. Now, while the government's response to Hurricane Helene can certainly be criticized, bad faith attacks originating from the far right have spread wildly online and have been
boosted by Trump and Fox News. Many of these focus on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, with some of them connecting to like decades old conspiracy theories about
the agency. Yeah, so this episode, we're gonna go over some of the conspiracy theories and misinformation circulating about these hurricanes, but not necessarily to like debunk them, because like, I know who's listening to this, but I think it's actually more helpful to place them into the larger tapestry of conspiracy thinking leading into the election and discuss how modern misinformation has presented a whole new problem that simple fact checks aren't equipped to handle.
Hey, Garrison, you you are, you are very confident about that. But I personally know leftists who I have been friends with who believe the weather weapons shit.
So you never know.
Well, I mean, I do believe that fact checks aren't gonna be the main solution here.
Oh no, they're not gonna They're not gonna help that. I'm just saying, Look, there are believers everywhere for the eyes to see.
It's great.
That's kind of what I'm saying here.
Yeah.
Now, let's start by talking about Donald Trump and FEMA. Oh god, So some of the misinformation spreading about FEMA right now includes the claim that the age is only providing seven hundred and fifty dollars in aid to individuals affected by Hurricane Helene, when actually the seven hundred fift dollars payments are just the initial really funds to help with immediate needs. There's also been claims that FEMA only issues loans and any relief money received has to be
paid back. This isn't true. Only in rare cases when someone receives duplicate funds from FEMA and insurance does money have to be returned to FEMA. There's also been claims that if victims fail to pay back FEMA, they will then seize your property. This is also false. More on this later now. A TikTok video with over a million views claimed that FEMA is raiding people's homes to seize supplies.
This isn't true. FEMA doesn't raid people's healths. On a more racist note, it's claimed that FEMA has run out of money for hurricane victims because Kamala spent billions of FEMA dollars on housing for illegal immigrants. At a campaign rally, Donald Trump said, and I'm not going to do the voice the Harris Biden administration says they don't have money
because they spend it all on illegal immigrants. They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so that they could give it to their illegal immigrants unquote. This lie was also shared by Sean Hannity on Fox News, and even when confronted with facts that discredit this claim, commentators on Fox still insist that even though it's not technically true, it still feels true.
It may not be actually true that FEMA resources that could have been available in North Carolina have been given to migrants, but there's no question about the broader orientation of FEMA under the Biden Harris administration, which has been to channel huge amounts of money to communities and to non governmental organizations to help with the massive influx of migrants that they themselves have created.
And this is a fun one too, because like there is FEMA underfunding, but the reason they're FEMA underfunding is it Republicans keep voting not to give it more money.
Yes, which, oh boys, I.
Mean again, Like this is a big part of the Republican strategy, just making life worse for everybody so that everyone's more angry, so that people will vote Republican. And that is the strategy they want, because as long as they're as long as their base is doing badly and in like upset and angry, they will find some way to blame it on the opposition and then vote in Republican. This has been the conservative governmental strategy for decades.
Yeah, do all the terrible stuff and then blame the stuff that you did on immigrants, which yeah, good times, love this country great, still happening.
A famously reliable strategy. Trump's also lied about the governor of Georgia not being able to get in contact with President Biden to coordinate disaster relief efforts, when in fact they had spoken the day prior. Trump also claims that the federal government and the North Carolina Democratic governor have been quote going out of their way to not help
people in Republican areas unquote. This is also completely false that there were more isolated areas in North Carolina that were harder to reach, but people are trying to get there, and in fact, some of the hardest reach areas were actually immigrant communities who were too scared to like actually ask for federal help out of fear they would be deported. So like, yes, there actually is people really struggling to get a relief, but it's not by and large your
Trump voters. Like again, certainly the relief efforts managed by the government have had their fair share of problems. People are not getting all the help they need, but this is not a conspiracy by the Democratic governor to deprive
Republicans of hurricane relief, Like, that's not true. Now, Trump's falsehoods about the hurricane and the disaster response in service of his reelection campaign have signaled that it's aok for Republicans to spread all manner of hurricane conspiracy theories targeting the federal government. Oh boy, and this is where we're going to get into the newest conspiracy theories sweeping the nation. That the government controls the weather, all of the weather,
especially hurricanes. Now this is not a new conspiracy theory. Certainly, I'm so sick of the weather weapon shit. But the fact that we have sitting in congressmen including Martie Taylor Green from Georgia, who is riding this thing like a fucking horse, is a little bit wild. She has been posting NonStop the past week about how quote unquote they
control the weather. I wonder what they means. She has been attributing the weather modification to a few different agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Yeah, sure of sure, no one's doing this, Like.
Come on.
She has posted memes that that prove that they're controlling the weather because they list a whole bunch of weather modification patents Now, the funny thing is is that most of these patents are like over one hundred years old, if any of them are expired. Yeah, these patents contain plans to drop water from balloons to produce rain. That's
the weather modification she's talking about. She included a patent that includes like a way to use like airplane exhaust to blow away poison gas from like trenches.
That's chemtrails, Garrison, it's chemtrails.
It's absurd. All of these things are like are like ancient patents, and like weather modification is a real thing technically, like we have been trying to alter the weather. One of the pointed to like real technologies is cloud seating. Cloud seating is a small scale technology to alter cloud's precipitation, usually to increase the cloud's ability to produce localized rain by adding ice or condensation nuclei into the forming clouds.
This helps areas suffering from drought and low rainfall. Cloud seating has been jumped upon by Republican conspiracy theorists as proof that the government is actually engaging in a massive weather control operation, including to produce hurricanes. Now, hurricanes are famously quite large, and it is impossible to determine the path or cause one to happen. This just simply isn't true.
Yeah, And I mean the largest scale like attempts to manipulate weather that humanity has ever done, like on purpose, that wasn't global warming, was for two thousand and eight Olympics in Beijing, and it took It took the entire industrial, technological and scientific capacity of a nation of one billion people and putting like an unfathomable amount of resources and planning and like logistical capability at specifically not making it ran in Beijing for like a fairly small amount of
time and lowering the air pollution levels. They barely managed to pull that off. So they they sort of kind of made the weather better in one city for like two weeks, and that took a level of resource coordination like fucking unfathomable, like most human history like that.
It's it's it's very challenging to alter the weather. It requires it requires a lot of resources.
No, it doesn't.
It doesn't work very well, like to like shut down factories across like half the country like it was fiasco.
And like these people aren't actually like talking about that. They're talking about conspiratorial efforts from the federal government's illuminati to to like to like target hurricanes yea like on certain red states to alter the election. Like that, that's that's really what they're talking about. Conspiracy theorists and the right have pointed it to HARP University of Alaska Fairbrenks program, not the HARP that uses high frequency equipment to study
the upper atmosphere. According to Reuters, no atmospheric monitoring equipment do not alter the weather. Conspiracy theorists have also targeted Doppler radios and next rad basically like radar control systems and radio control systems, as being used to change weather patterns and cause hurricanes. This this, this isn't true. You can't change the weather with a radio or with radar. Again, like, we're not we're not debunking this because this is so no,
this is so ludicrous. But these are the conspiracy theories that they're invoking. And like and like HARP, conspiracy theories do go back quite a while. I've seen a few other things talking about like direct energy weapons and lasers from space or lasers from the ground pointed out the atmosphere which caused hurricanes to form this also isn't real. We cannot cause the hurricane deform. It's it's too big.
And the thing about this stuff is like these are all old conspiracies, right, but it's like these are things that used to be Like like you would you would walk into a room full of guys who believe that nine to eleven was staged with holograms and that MKA Altra successfully produced mind control that was originally developed by North Korea, and those people would laugh the like harp
idiots out of the room. Yeah, it was a conspiracy seen by other conspiracy theorists as like too obviously bullshit, Like.
Do you know what isn't bullshit?
Meya? Is it the products of services that support this podcast?
It sure is?
The MyPillow guy, you try to sell gold, now here.
We go get your gold. All right, we are back. But yes, these conspiracy theories have existed for a long time talking about some degree of the government's ability to influence natural disasters and like big weather events. People have tried to blame forest fires on lasers. Specifically the Maui fires from a few years ago, they said were actually caused by direct energy weapons to get people to flee their land so that it could be seized by the
federal government. All this kind of stuff. Now, like some of them also point to like geoengineering, right, they say that although geoengineering is said to conduct climate change, it actually causes climate change. Geoengineering, there's technically a few forms, but the one that we're talking about basically like injects aricized chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. Obviously reflecting some lights, not going to make a hurricane worse, but whatever,
this has gotten really bad. This has taken over a significant portion of the online right to the point that even people like Dysantis are having to come out and say, hey, guys, no, this this, this isn't real. In a press conference, Dysantis claimed that there are in fact weather conspiracies quote on both sides.
Uh huh yeah, by one by one, friend.
You kind of have some people who think the government can do this and others think it's because of fossil fuels unquote.
Oh my fucking guy.
Asisis communication director later reiterated the claim, saying, quote the government controls the other crowd, and the global warming and climate change alarmists are two sides of the same coin. Unscientific agenda, motivated and unhelpful. Following a storm, weather is weather, unquote Jesus Christ. So even in their refutation of the weather controlling conspiracies, they cannot help but dip into some climate denial conspiracies. We love to see it.
Oh my god.
Now I think like hurricanes and natural disasters are uniquely susceptible to misinformation. During times of crisis, people try to search for information to relieve stress, and they often don't take the extra time to verify said information. Whenever a new natural disaster strikes, old footage and videos circulate, being passed off as current events. Conversations and arguments about climate change and climate denial also spark during natural disasters, leading
to a surge of climate change conspiracy theories. While this is nothing new, the way people are getting information is changing with the increased use of AI, chatbots, personal assistance, and image generation. There was this TikTok trend ahead of Hurricane Milton where you ask in Amazon Alexa what the result of the hurricane was going to be before it hit landfall. I'm going to play this video that has over two million views on Twitter.
Alexa how many labs were lost? During Hurricane Milton. Overall, extreme Hurricane Milton caused twenty one point three billion dollars in damages and caused two hundred and sixty two fatalities October eighth, twenty twenty four, twelve to fifteen pm Central Time.
Very scary now. This other video has over seven hundred and fifty thousand views on TikTok.
Alexa, what kind of hurricane is Hurricane Milton?
From fandom dot com. Hurricane Milton was an extremely powerful Category five hurricane that caused widespread damage across its path in October twenty twenty four.
They've already predicted the outcome.
Under why so that would may have given you a hint about what's going on here. Obviously, Alexa doesn't know the future, nor has the government pre programmed data about its secret weather control program into your echo di Alexa just pulls from information it finds online, in this case fandom dot com Hypothetical Hurricanes wiki Are You Fucking? Which is a wiki which is a wiki based comprehensive database
of hypothetical tropical cyclone articles that anyone could edit. Unquote, you know, I said I said as a I said as a joke.
A couple of years ago that we were about two years out from the QAnon people discovering the plot of metal gear solid and believing it was real. But like, we're so close to that now we are two months out from them from from an AI telling them the plot of metal gear solid and then believing the patriots secretly control the government.
They're quoting from a fandom wiki on fake hurricanes that people make for fun and can be manipulated in the lead up to a hurricane, specifically to cause this type of reaction. Again, like as a bit right, it's it's absurd now to go even further into this AI singularity hell hole.
Oh no.
A Twitter user tried to debunk that first video I played, predicting the death toll. In the replies, this other user wrote, quote, there was a Hurricane Milton in the year two thousand. Please before you post, at least try to fact check with grok unquote. They include a grock AI screenshot that reads, quote the name Milton has been used for one hurricane
in the Atlantic Basin. Hurricane Milton occurred in two thousand. However, for the twenty twenty four hurricane season, there was another Hurricane Milton, thinking it the second time this name has been used for an Atlantic hurricane unquote. So in argument then ensued about which AI is correct. Quote. Grock and chat GPT disagree on the existence of a prior hurricane Milton. Groc says, prior to the twenty twenty four hurricane season,
there were no hurricanes named Milton in the Atlantic. Next, I asked chat GPT Hurricane Milton, which occurred in the year nineteen ninety caused a significant damage, particularly in Mexico, made landfall. I asked chat GPT a second time. Was there a Milton hurricane in two thousand? CHATJBT said, yes, there was a Hurricane Milton in two thousand. It formed
in the Eastern Pacific in late December. You know. Another person replied, saying, Groc states a two thousand hurricane named Milton struck struck Nicaragua in two thousand, but it doesn't show up on the National Weather Services hurricane tracking charts for two thousand unquote. Very curious. It's insane. It's insane.
These people are using chat GPT and Grock AI as search engines, and when they hallucinate fake data, they're alleging some kind of conspiracy theory to suppress data on a previous hurricane Milton, I mean, and it's also just worse, like having like this person condescend being like, please before you post, try to fact check with grok. You're like, what the fuck are you talking about? Groc is a comedy AI chat bot that's going to generate you, like
a nonsense response. It's not a fact checking tool. It's not even a search engine. They're just hallucinating data that people are then passing off as real information.
I think I kind of feel for these people in the sense that, like, if you live through the twenty tens, the thing that you were able to do, and that you were trained to do, was if you had a question, you would type it into Google and sometimes it would give you the right answer.
Yeah. Right.
But now it's like a machine has been created that answers to question what if Google never gave you the correct answer? And all of these people have been trained that they can put this into the Internet and it will give them the correct answer, except now we have a machine that destroys the entire Amazon every single second in order to generate the wrong answer.
Well, and like specifically because of how these like aisystems have been politicized with like Elon Musk and stuff like. Republicans view it as like a political imperative to use them over the Democrat leaning like search engines, and people aren't just turning to AI and loop search engine. They're also using TikTok now using x as their own search engine to get reliable information from users instead of actually like verified information online which you can find with a
little bit of searching. So all this is creating a quite volatile scenario where misinformation is spreading at a faster pace and it really ever has before now, just like in the Springfield pet eating hoax. People on the right are also spreading AI images as evidence of how the Biden Harris government failed their disaster relief response after Hurricane Helene. The most circulated image is of a crying little girl wearing a life vest holding a wet puppy. Oh no,
she is sitting in a boat surrounded by floodwater. This is this is pure boomer.
Bait, right like, yeah, you will never regret liking this post.
Rolling Stone traced this AI image to a Trump web forum called patriots dot Win Oh God, and like users there quickly saw that it was ai, but that didn't stop its spread online. The image got on Twitter and was spread around after being posted by Utah Senator Mike Lee, who has a dark mega profile picture. I'm going to
quote from Rolling Stone. Quote. Laura Lumer called the image sad, quote, tweeting from a post by Buzz Patterson, columnist for the conservative blog Red State, who wrote of the picture, our government has failed us again. Amy Kamier, RNC, national committeewoman for the Georgia GOP and the co founder of Women for Trump, tweeted on Thursday that the image has been quote seared into my mind unquote. Informed that she was
not looking at an authentic photo. Kermer doubled down, y'all, I don't know where this photo came from, and honestly, it doesn't matter. There are people going through much worse than what is shown in this pic. So I'm leaving it up because it's emblematic of the trauma and the pain people are living through right now. Unquote. Oh my god.
So I get like at this point, people know they're spreading fake information, but they're doing it anyway because it helps them, Like they are willing participants in the complete removal of reality from their constituent's brains. A mega Twitter account posted this AI photo with the girl in the puppy and wrote, quote, Kamala doesn't have enough money for this child. I can't hate this administration enough. Unquote Oh my god. So do you know what I can't hate enough?
Nope?
No. Do you know what I love dearly with my full my full life force?
Is it products and services?
Yeah, it's the products and services that supportant this podcast. Listen to them. We will be right back afterwards. Okay, we returned to conclude our Hurricane miss and fo rundown. So why is this stuff catching on? Like, like, what's happening that's causing this to be so much worse than usual? What's going on? Why is this spreading right now? To answer that question, I'm first going to read a tweet from Candice Taylor, a Georgia candidate for governor back in
twenty twenty two. Quote, the weather can and is being manipulated. Wake up. Stop being ignorant or plain stupid. There's no such thing as coincidence. The most important election in the history of America is thirty days away. Pray Georgia voting has been compromised, and I don't know if we will be able to get all of our early voting days in. Now a hurricane is coming straight for Florida. These two
states are necessary for a Trump victory. No coincidence, So of course this is all a conspiracy to send hurricanes specifically at red states to compromise Trump's ability to win the election. A woman at a Trump rally explained that the government is using cloud seating to make the hurricanes worse, and that this was pre planned because Amazon Alexas already
knew the information about the hurricanes ahead of time. Her reasoning was that the hurricane damaged land could be seized for lithium mining by Mala Harris's husband, and that the weather was controlled to rig the election against Trump. Now, this little tidbit about Kablo's husband, that's a nice little anti semitic jab in there. Of course, the Jews are
controlling the weather to do lithia mining. Why not. I'm not going to play a short clip from this interview, not the whole thing, because it's way too long and she rambles about cloud seating for longer than I want to include, but I will include this one short clip.
You're implying that the government made a hurricane stronger to hurt its own country, the United States of America. Correct, And what would be the gain of that?
When if you if you like.
There's been people out there, if they have an alexa, I don't know. If you've heard that and they've asked what caused Milton right, you can go on there now. It's already predicted the number of jas and the amount of it's already predicted. It you on a Google, it won't do that. If you ask it about Halleen, it'll tell you the government actively used seed clouding. This is before Helene even happened.
Why would a country want to have a hurricane be strong and hit its own country.
Because they want to control certain places. And if you're looking at where the hurricanes going, it's a lot of red states. If you're looking at the counties in North Carolina that were hit, there are all of them. Twenty six out of twenty eight, eight of those counties were for Trump. They're doing whatever they can because they can't.
Rig the elign even control the weather.
Yes, very compelling stuff coming out of the Trump rallies.
Jesus Christ, I'm.
Going to quote from a Media Matters article on hurricane misinformation and conspiracy theories. Quote. A video with over sixty four thousand views has on screen text that reads were at the point of Revolution. It features a user speculating for over six minutes that Hurricane Helene was somehow part of a plan to suppress white Republican votes. Quote. You might be able to speculate that this is something to do with the fact that these are largely white rule
Appalachian areas that have been affected. They're looking at it like this, this election is three weeks from now. We've just wiped out the complete and total infrastructure for all these towns and cities. That's great because guess which way these towns leaned. They leaned red. These were largely Republican leading towns. As far as they're concerned, they could all die and they don't care because that's just one less vote for Trump. Unquote. Yes, Asheville, North Carolina famously famously
a Republican town, famously the conservative paradise of Asheville. Now, a lot of these conspiracies also link up to very old like FEMA conspiracies. Right, There's been conspiracies about FEMA since like the nineteen eighties, they've been heavily tied in
with the militia movement. The formation of the Oathkeepers was in response to FEMA concentration camp conspiracy theories, basically that they'll use natural disasters and FEMA to like round up patriots to do some kind of new world order, or that they're gonna use FEMA to seize your land, so then you're gonna be put in a FEMA concentration camp. Very old conspiracies. Now these have kind of fed into
the current conspiracy matrix regarding the hurricanes. I'm gonna quote from this one guy on Twitter called the health Ranger.
No, not the health Ranger.
No, do you know do you know who the health Ranger is?
Yeah?
The health Ranger is is a frequent Alex Jones guest. Yes, yes, like an anti vax guy. And he's a whole He's a whole thing in in this whole conspiracy universe.
I hate him so much he does. And this is this is what he says about the current hurricanes. Quote No, in cunning intel all caps, FEMA is waiving ungodly amounts of money at private security firms right now, begging for security contractors to station at Florida to prevent Floridians from returning to their homes and businesses after the storm hits. The evacuation orders are to push people out of Florida
and keep them out. Reportedly, Delta Force personnel advising FEMA at the top devising denial of area enforcement plans which will be enforced at gunpoint if required. I'm told FEMA is practically panicked to get enough armed personnel on site, anticipating a tremendous amount of resistance from displaced people who
want to return home to salvage whatever they can. This is the next step up the escalation ladder as the federal government wages war against the American people, as we saw FEMA carrying out in North Carolina, actively hindering rescue efforts to maximize starvation and death to the people. Do not escalate. Hold your ground peacefully and firmly. This looks a lot like a J six style trap to provoke an insurrection and declare martial law to cancel the election.
Don't play into their hands. Unquote. This unhinged diatribe got over ten thousand likes and was spread wildly around Twitter. A few days ago, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue posted in an article documenting this current conspiracy ecosystem, and they included one TikTok video that stated, quote to my North Carolina families, please, I know it's hard, but please do not take that seven hundred and fifty dollars. It's alone, and if you don't pay it back, they will seize
your property. In response to this, FEMA clearly stated that FEMA cannot seize your property or land. Applying for disaster assistance does not grant FEMA or the federal government authority or ownership over your property or land. So now we have these conspiracy theorists which are being boosted by Republican officials, basically encouraging people to resist help from FEMA, to not evacuate and like all of this puts themselves and others
in great danger. Right, you might say, well, if conspiracy theorists don't want help from FEMA, like what's the harm? Right these people have like kids, Like these these people have families. It's not just them that are going to be affected. If they're refusing to evacuate their family from the path of a hurricane and like their kids die, that's super fucked up. If they're refusing like help from FEMA to feed themselves in their family, that's not a
good sign of the current state of this country. Yeah yeah, like it's bad. Ron DeSantis's pres secretary had to come out against the unhinged ramble from health ranger on Twitter. She quote tweeted his post saying spreading lives like this could have serious consequences. If people in evacuation zones see this and decide not to evacuate despite warnings from state and local emergency management, they are unnecessarily putting their own lives and the lives the first responders at grave risk.
Unquote wow the wow, Well the fucking Rhondas sandus Is press person. The leopards are finally eating your face if you joined the lepredating face party.
Wow.
Who could possibly have predicted this? The rawn decentis team has been replaced by the lizard people. I swear.
No.
Like things got so bad that in DeSantis' like emergency declaration, he had to specifically put in language that stated that law enforcement will help ensure that people can return to their property after the evacuation has ended. Like goofy, goofy, shit God and just like in general, all these FEMA conspiracies are preventing people in need from requesting a badly
needed help from the agency. I'm going to include this one clip from this guy who was interviewed on MSNBC talking about how his family has been refusing help in North Carolina.
My father in law lives just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, and he was badly damaged by Hurricane Helene. And he has refused all FEMA help because he's a hardcore Trumper and he believes, he literally believes that he accepts anything from FEMA, they're going to take his house. I don't understand how so many people are under the spell of this freaking con man. I don't understand it.
Well, it's absolutely heartbreaking about your father in law. I'm so sorry to hear it.
It's you know, and it's hard. It's hard, just it's hard to even imagine it. I mean, he lost almost everything and he's refusing all help from the federal government and complaining to us that he doesn't have food, that he doesn't have the stuff he needs, and yet he won't accept the help. What the hell are we supposed to do. We're not in a position to be able to fly across the country and help him. There's people begging us to get him to accept help, and he won't do it.
Wow.
And I guarantee you I'm not the only one. I guarantee you I'm not the only one.
I wish there was something I could say as to you know, I don't know, is there. Does he have access to any electronics where you could send him some information debunking this and that he might be We've.
Done all of that. We've done all of that. We've sent him, We've sent him all the THEMA bulletins, we've sent him all the stuff from the fact checkers. He doesn't believe it. He thinks it's all. He just believes Trump literally again, he just it's a cult. He's a cult member. I'm sorry to say it. He's a he's a cult member, and he's my father in law.
And it sucks.
That's pretty bad. That's devastating, and I think that is very resonant to a lot of people right now. And how this whole like conspiracy missymphi eqos system that's been getting worse slowly over the course of the eight years, has just like ruined families and puts people in like constant active danger. Now, these conspiracies have also led to threats against FEMA workers and meteorologists for both being a
part of the conspiracy and for controlling the weather. Yeah, I'm going to read a quote from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Quote. Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government. This includes calls to send a militias to face down FEMA for the perceived denial of aid, and that individuals should quote unquote shoot FEMA officials and the agency's emergency responders.
Unverified claims, but attacks on FEMA representatives have been used to glorify and encourage violence unquote. Media Matters archived a TikTok video threatening FEMA employees which received over two hundred thousand views, saying, quote deer, FEDS and FEMA, if you're trying to deny people access to help in the affected area, be advised we're still under the War on Terror Emergency Declaration. If you violate your constitutional oath to protect and assist,
the charge will be treason. Punishment can mean being unalived immediately by the citizens you are withholding aid from unquote on TikTok. They're threatening to un alive governmentations. Another mineo states quote public notice we the United States of America had declared FEMA personnel engaged in obstructing local rescue efforts in the area impacted by Hurricane Helene to be enemies
of the state. A FEMA personnel offer any further obstruction or failed to immediately assist to their best ability, they can be arrested or shot or hung.
On site unquote Christ.
Now, a lot of these conspiracy theories are also heavily anti Semitic, talking about like the religion of local officials, like I think, like the mayor of Asheville, and just in general, combining these weather control conspiracy theories with FEMA conspiracy theories, saying that like the Jews are somehow controlling all of this, and like that's just a recurring aspect of these conspiracies that I feel like it is it is worth mentioning, especially because like the right is like
trying to weaponize claims anti Semitism to attack the Democrats on Israel right now, which is absurd because the Democrats are extremely pro Israil but still their constituents are going to be spreading all these like very unhinged any Smitic conspiracy theories about Jews controlling weather and using FEMA to hurt Christians in the Appalachians, all that kind of stuff.
Now it's not just threats against FEMA officials. Death threats have also been targeted against meteorologists, as Rolling Stone documented in an article last week. Quote I've been doing this for forty six years, and it's never been like this, says Alabama meteorologist James span. He says he's been inundated with misinformation and threatening messages like stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else unquote.
Great.
A Washington, D C. Based meteorologist named Matthew Capussi said, quote for me to post a hurricane forecast and for people to accuse me of creating the hurricane by working for some secret Illuminati entity is disappointing and distressing, and it's resulting in a decrease in public trust unquote. So
like again, like, why is this all had happening? A part of it is because the election is upcoming and people are trying to find reasons to think why Trump might lose, and they're saying that the hurricanes are actually a plot by the illuminati to make Trump lose the election via having these storms controlled by Jews and Democrats to target Republican areas. But like, what has changed in the actual ecosystem to allow this to feel like it's
so much worse than what it usually has been? And I've kind of decided that everyone is now Alex Jones, Like everyone has become their own little mini Alex Jones. Platforms have changed in the past eight years to create massive social and financial incentives to go viral, So now everyone is just doing what Alex Jones did, right, Like Alex Jones learned that he could make a profit saying all kinds of crazy shit on air, and now other people have also learned this lesson. This is a part
of I think, what's going on now? How does everyone has the capacity to go viral by saying whatever crazy shit they can during a moment of crisis. A few days ago, there was a really good article in the Atlantic by Charles Rozel titled I'm running out of ways to explain how bad this is. This is going to be linked in the sources below. I recommend you give it a read, but I'm going to read a paragraphic from it here. Quote. This is more than just a
misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts. First that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes,
but willing participants. This reality fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and intentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and every large event into a shameless content creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance then change their fundamental beliefs about the world. Unquote.
I know, Mia, we've been talking about this misinformation problem in the chat, and I know you had some comments you wanted to you wanted to share.
Yeah, there was a Oh god, where did I first hear? This might even a philosophy episode. There's a bunch of philosophical stuff about how ignorance works and about how it's not just like ignorance, isn't just the state of not knowing something. You have to actively create it, right, You have to you have to go out of your way not to seek the information that would that would sort of like you know, cause you to have to know, or cause you to change your worldview, or cause you
to like have to confront what your beliefs are. So people actively sort of construct this this reality around themselves. They don't have to do anything that ever sort of challenges their own views. And this is something that you can see, I mean, you see it happening all over the place. And this is one of the things that where sale It's like gets right. That is important is that like people are active participants in the construction of
their own universes. And now there's there's a financial incentive, there's a social incentive, and there's also a cognitive incentive, which is that like having to deal with the fact that you might be wrong bustling fucking sucks, yes, and is hard, and sometimes you just don't want to know totally.
Yeah, I mean, and this is something that like myself, Robert and you have been talking about increasingly the past few years. It feels like misinformation is an outdated model to understand our current predicament, right, Like misinformation is no longer meant to like actually change minds or persuade people.
It's just a mechanism to construct and reinforce false realities, like in the in the In the recent Meme of Politics episode, I talked about how AI images of trans athletes or of immigrants stealing pets like these aren't meant to convince anyone of their authenticity, but they exist in lieu of evidence to help people maintain their reality tunnel.
An information researcher at the University of Washington named Michael Cawfield wrote an article earlier this year about how a whole bunch of Mega people started to deny the authenticity of those videos of Kamala Harris's rally in that Detroit hangar showing like a massive, massive, huge crowd with Air Force one or Air Force two landing and her getting off, with these meg people saying that this was, like ais is fake, There was no way the crowd would be
this big, and they invented a whole bunch of reasons for why that this photo must be fake and this this wasn't fake. This was a real photo. This was easily verified. There's like video evidence from multiple sources showing that this is a real thing that happened. But Cowfield wrote, quote, the primary use of misinformation is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to
maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Unquote, and yeah, I don't believe in giving these people a degree of passivity, right like. This is an active choice that they are doubling down and reinforcing and creating their
own reality tunnels to live in. And I think the other aspect of this, this is something that Robert was talking with me last night, is like the people also propagating this, the people creating the environments to make this happen, are also willing participants, right like this, This is a big reason why Musk bought Twitter, is so that it purposely could turn into the current conspiracy like shit show
that it currently is. Facebook used to be where conspiracy theorists gathered to post their weird boomer opinions, and now it's Twitter alongside just actual, useful, verifiable information, and now because these two platforms have kind of combined, how we have so much conspiracy content on Twitter. It also just damages the use of Twitter as a platform to look
for real information. And I think you can see the same thing with TikTok, with its very loose content moderation policy regarding like factual information and the fact that people use TikTok as its own search engine, creating its own ecosystem of misinformation, fully isolated away from the rest of the Internet. And this project to like wear down collective
reality is a long term project by the right. You could look at the John Birch Society and other anti communist groups from the fifties who used to deliberately put out fake articles about communists infiltrating Fox News, and a whole bunch of conservative mass media like talk Radio was created at least in part as a reaction to Nixon being forced of office, and a lot of the same people funding right wing media are also pushing for charter
schools and attempts to destroy public education. Like it's all an intentional effort to make people's media literacy go completely down the toilet and propagate entire false versions of reality. In service of a few rich people, and that's what our current situation is right now. And I don't know if this way to stop it. As you heard in that clip from MSNBC, like fact checks don't work anymore, because that's not like the point of any of this.
It's not meant to actually persuade people. It's only meant to reinforce what they already want to believe. So what do you do in a world post fact checking? I don't know, and we're gonna have to find out. I don't know. I mean, do you do you have any closing thoughts?
You know?
I will say, one of the few things I've ever seen that's gotten someone out of something like this is just sometimes it doesn't always work like this, but every once in a while, you could have an experience that is so cognitively shattering to everything that you'd believed that it just implodes.
So me, you're advocating to dose your Republican family members with LSD? Is that what I'm hearing?
Well, No, what I'm advocating is that the people who think that China is a socialist state be sent to China and have to interact with members of the Chinese Communist Party, because I have.
Seen this work.
It does work, it can I've seen it happen. You can't talk to these people for more than five minutes. But I mean, you know, a sort of more serious note, I mean, this is something that you know, you're trying to fight emotions on a sort of intellectual level, and so like, if you want to deal with this, I don't. I think you have to kind of be working on a sort of like emotional actfective register. And that sucks because it's you know, it's effectively the abandonments of politics
as politics. It's arguably just a complete retreat into fascism. But you know, if you take the sort of understanding as one of the elements of it, as fascism is reducing all politics to aesthetics.
Right.
But we've hit this point where there's no centralizing viewpoint,
like central reality tunnel that most people are in. And that's largely partially because of these people trying to destroy it, and partially because the people who were running the mainstream media blew themselves up by lying about I Rock and then by spending thirty years insisting that like neoliberalism was the greatest economic system ever and then two thousand and eight happening, and so, like you know, we're in this position where the people who had built the guardrails blew
it up in order to make money and push your political jenas, and now a bunch of other people who want to just destroy everything inside those rails are just like detonating bombs inside of all of our like psychological concies.
I mean, I think the guy who was talking about his stepdad in Asheville is correct. It is a cult, and you have to treat it like you would treat a cult. You can't fact check them out of this. You have to treat them like your friend just joined scientology. Some people might just choose to completely cut the person off because they find it too dangerous, and that's fine, but I think there should be others that remain as
a lifeline to the person. Right if they ever one day realize, oh no, I'm in a cult and I need help, there needs to be a way for them to get out. Yeah, there needs to be a lifeline for them to escape. And this is the only way that like quote unquote, cult deprogramming has worked. You can point to like people who've gotten out of the QAnon conspiracy theory, like this is the only tactic that actually works.
It's reliant on the courtesy of others, right, It's reliant that you have to put yourself in a degree of danger by maintaining contact with this person that is kind of dangerous because they are in this like very volatile cult. There needs to be some lifeline for them. And I think that's really the only way that I know of right now that shows a degree of success in getting people out of this like fucked up conspiracy matrix. And it sucks, and it's not easy, and most people promoting
like cult deprogramming are hacks with pseudoscience. And it turns out like this is just a very emotional problem and it requires unfortunately emotional solutions that a simple Reuter's fact check will not suffice. So anyway, that is my rundown on what's currently going on with the hurricane misinformation. It's really bad. Yep, it could happen here.
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