There I was, minding my own business, drinking my coffee when my phone vibrated with a text. It was from my friend Amy. She was on a flight and overheard a conversation between a flight attendant and a passenger about how Hurricane Helene was a government-backed genocide. And the Department of Defense was in on it because they had a contract with a mine in North Carolina.
I couldn’t tell if I was more insulted as a climate communications professional, who’d spent more than a decade in various capacities trying to more clearly tell the truth about the climate, or as a writer of fiction. To add injury to the insult, I went to the internet to see if the cancer had spread and saw article after article confirming that it had. Then I turned to social media to see the classic liberal reaction: to point and laugh. To clown the person who spread it and the people who believe it.
These conspiracy theories are a lot of things, but they are not funny. First of all, they are damaging to relief efforts. Rumors can cause enough chaos and confusion that it becomes difficult to know where to direct resources. They can convince people that the aid they need either doesn’t exist or that it’s a trap — either way, discouraging them from seeking it. In fact, some of the accounts that have spread disinformation have called for the work of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to be violently interrupted. (Let me pause here to say that as a resident of New Orleans and as someone who experienced Katrina, it hurts my soul to defend FEMA, but here we are.)
We don’t need to reach back to ancient history to see the very real impact that imagined stories can have on the world. This recent torrent of pet-eating conspiracy theories turned into a reign of terror in Springfield, Ohio. Just a few years earlier, the idea of a stolen election caused bloodshed in the nation’s Capitol and the near overthrow of the government. In every case, it’s funny until someone — perhaps a lot of people — gets hurt.
In some conspiracy theories, like the one mentioned above, the Biden administration geo-engineered Hurricane Helene and now Hurricane Milton. Rumors spread that the “liberal” government is seizing land or intentionally harming Republican strongholds to manipulate the vote ahead of Election Day. People have also accused the same government of withholding resources from Republican areas, which is ironically reminiscent of the kind of politicized relief efforts that Trump was criticized for while he was president. The bogeyman: liberals. Sometimes, it even gets so specific as to blame liberal Jews.
Other rumors play on the idea that illegal immigrants are using the hurricanes as an opportunity to steal. On a recent episode of his podcast, Alex Jones even went so far as to assert that in the South, Blacks and whites don’t loot because they’re Christians. So any potential looting had to have been a result of illegal immigration. (If you’re old enough to remember Hurricane Katrina, I apologize if that made your head explode.) The bogeyman in this case: immigrants — or “migrants” as they’ve taken to calling them. Still, other rumors combine the two bogeymen to assert that the government, namely FEMA, is intentionally diverting resources away from Americans suffering from the storm and giving those resources to — you guessed it! — migrants.
It is human nature to try to find meaning in the world around us. As the world gets crazier and more unpredictable, the more prone we are to make up wilder, more fantastical stories. But once a conspiracy theory has a bogeyman, that means it has a target and that’s when things can get dangerous.
To be fair, these lies aren’t new, even the crazy ones. We’ve heard Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene blame wildfires on what others have derisively dubbed “Jewish space lasers” and seen rumors about them being intentionally set by anti-fascist activists. During the racial justice protests of 2020, there was fear of “outside agitators” infiltrating at least one city as hurricane evacuees. Some of the very same conspiracy theories we’re hearing about Helene and Milton appear to have been recycled from the 2023 Maui wildfire.
This is where climate denial has led us: confusion and uncertainty, fear and anger. It’s the perfect storm for disinformation to take root. We have a whole swath of the country that has been told for decades that climate change isn’t real and it’s a hoax. Now these same people are asking themselves why are these storms happening. Why are they getting worse? Why are they happening in these specific places?
And that brings me to the most frustrating thing about all of this: They’re so close. Going back to the conspiracy theory from my friend’s plane ride, I’d argue that there actually is a US government-backed genocide happening right now, it’s just in Palestine and not North Carolina. (And the International Court of Justice would agree with me.) But, moreover, climate change is the result of a massive conspiracy, full of cover-ups and collusion. Don’t believe the hype about “government inaction.” The government has been an extremely active player in the creation of this crisis, pouring gallons and gallons of fossil fuel on the fire. And climate change is genocidal, even ecocidal.
So why are folks running to invent new conspiracy theories when the real, undeniable conspiracy is right there? Because for them to change their mind would be to lose a very real part of their identity and, perhaps, to have to consider the possibility that some of their other beliefs may not be real either. And that might mean they need to find new communities or even new families. Changing your mind about something as colossal as the ground you live on and the air you breathe is not unlike coming out of a cult.
But we don’t treat people that way. We treat them like doofuses who fell for an obvious lie. Ultimately, who does that serve? Perhaps it’s time we start treating these people as what they are: victims of a manipulative, deliberate lie. And then turn our attention back toward the people who lied to them.
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