Boy howdy, does America ever need a good, hard debunking.
It seems like my first week here is definitely showing me what I missed in disinformation trends while I was out wandering in the wilds of local news organizations that recoiled, nay, quailed at the slightest mention of countering propaganda.
Today we are dealing with disinformation narratives and what they actually function as, and I get to show you exactly how it works with a story that came out this week. Gather round and let me show you exactly why I am so mad and yelly all the time!
Here’s the headline: Trump approves disaster relief funds for 7 red states, after denying aid to blue states.
The story is exactly what you might think — the Trump administration is denying aid to blue states, and supplying aid to red states, which becomes clear if you just look at a list of disasters over the last year or so and see who got helped and who didn’t. In the meantime, and this should still be shocking, he coupled each red-state announcement with a specific endorsement of some chud running for office in that state. I mean, it should be clear anyway, but there’s a lot of Americans running around in sheer denial, and that includes many prominent members of our national and local media!
Feast your eyes on this shit sundae!
This comes less than a week after this administration’s Department of Homeland Security issued a report claiming that FEMA “ignored homes with Trump signs” in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton.
Okay, so. Here’s what really happened, because I have a sense of object permanence and can remember all the way back to two years ago. FEMA crews went out to help Floridians in an election year plagued by partisan violence, and one employee advised a crew to avoid knocking on doors of homes that had Trump signs displayed, because Trump enthusiasts had been attacking FEMA agents everywhere due to terminal conspiracy theory brain and way too many guns.
That employee, whose only sin was putting that into writing for the demented next administration to find, was fired during the Biden administration in November 2024. There were news stories about it, even, because the Daily Wire was blogging about it (lol) and because we have a bunch of lazy lickspittles taking up space in our national media who think right-wing dipshit bloggers are worth listening to. Hot tip! They aren’t! They’re dumb and spiteful, and not even in a fun way. They just want to do racisms and misogynies without anyone telling them to shut the fuck up!
So now the administration says it’s gone and fired three more employees and making it sound as though it was an ongoing practice rather than just 11 homes that got skipped by door-knockers. They weren’t even denied aid! They just didn’t get someone from the federal government knocking at their door, which to me seems pretty prudent given what’s been going on for the last decade or so! (FEMA crews also didn’t knock on doors of homes that displayed “no trespassing” signs, “no soliciting” signs, or too much debris to get to the door, per the Tallahassee Democrat, which based on its name is definitely not getting any disaster aid funding!)
“The recent OIG report […] cites disaster response activities that FEMA has already investigated, publicly addressed, and no longer practices,” admitted the DHS press release despite that, but of course no one is going to read that little tidbit under that blaring headline, either.
You know what actually got in the way of aid getting to where it needed to go in 2024? Rampant fucking disinformation! It was the disinformation that had already been circulated about FEMA that made its workers so wary about going to homes proudly displaying that they were QAnon enthusiasts to begin with!
FOR EXAMPLE, and to be clear, these bullet points ARE LIES:
(LIE): FEMA has run out of money for disaster relief. Because of the immigrants!
Obviously this is not true, but immigrants have been a reliable punching bag for the global far Right for years now, because the global far Right, to a man, are racists and eugenicists. Also, they have a vested interest in hardening borders, because they are trying to leverage climate catastrophes into resource consolidation. That’s why such a large proportion of these lies has revolved around non-white people and immigration, because they want to use people to be their “resources” too. And here we are.(LIE): FEMA CAMPS.
I cannot believe people are still falling for this one. It was old when I first heard it, way back when I was a babby CBS radio reporter covering Hurricane Katrina from the Houston Astrodome, which I thought at the time was going to be the worst disaster I ever covered. Oh, what a sweet summer child I was. It was also my first real exposure to climate refugees and internally displaced people, climate disinformation, and resilience targeting, which I will be discussing in later posts!Naturally, I didn’t know what the hell people were talking about at the time. FEMA camps, what? Anyway, that one was also circulated by right-wing ghouls to get people good and scared and mistrustful of government agencies, because that’s the whole point to these lies — to break down trust in our democratic pillars and institutions by weakening them from without and within. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was never empowered to arrest people and put them into camps, because that’s not what FEMA does. They do earnest post-disaster cleanup type things, or at least they did. Now, of course, who knows what they are empowered to do? These rumors are also a great way to get people to refuse housing support, which over time pushes down funding priorities.
(LIE): The government isn’t coming to help, it’s coming for your land.
Well, you assholes, don’t you feel stupid now that your shitty houses remain intact and unbulldozed? The Biden administration didn’t take your land away, but the Trump administration sure has. But that didn’t stop a ton of dimwit separatists from insisting that it was just around the corner and that the “Democrat Party” were going to take red-blooded white-boy American homes and give them to dirty immigrants!
Now I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have some nice immigrants as my neighbors than some nasty, unhygienic, tacky racist pieces of shit. But alas, those rumors weren’t true, and so they persist.
That’s just a smattering of the lies that were circulated around Hurricanes Milton and Helene in 2024, but they’re also pushed in slightly different forms (to make them seem new and local) every time there’s a natural disaster. The idea is, as I said, to destroy faith in a free democracy and all its pillars, and to replace it with something much worse. (What, you may ask? Well, we’re soaking in it!)
Now imagine you’re a 24-year-old FEMA worker, and your task is to go knock on the doors of people who have been melting their brains on this type of shit for 10 hours a day on Facebook for the last decade and who probably own all sorts of fucked up weaponry that they’re probably going to point right at your face, and it’s hot and humid and stinky and full of mosquitoes too. Wouldn’t you start thinking about avoiding certain places too? It’s not like conspiracy theorists haven’t murdered government workers before. Let them figure out how to navigate that shit on their own!
So, anyway, that report comes out a week ago, and then there’s this story — which actually cites sources and lists supporting evidence — about Trump himself denying aid to states that didn’t go red and fall over themselves to get him elected, to which I say, buddy, I got real bad news about your polling numbers.
A WEEK AGO
I am old enough to remember back in the Olden Times when Joe Biden was president and started talking about disinformation, which was right around the same time all the debunkers lost their funding! I’m sure that was just a coincidence, though.
Okay. So. We have this one crew talking about this one thing that didn’t even happen anywhere that I can see and which resulted, eventually, in perhaps four people getting fired over the course of several years. But it’s made headlines, and no one reads much other than headlines any more, except for you, of course, my darling readers. And headlines propel so much of the news consumption these days that it almost doesn’t matter what the story says.
But now this conspiracy theory has been cemented into the mind of the public as fact, and that includes really bad people, fascist people who don’t really believe it but want to leverage that belief to get theirs, because they hate Americans and despise democracy and want us all dead or at the very least safely out of the way so they can return to their true loves: diddling little girls and causing mass suffering.
And now everyone has it shrunk down neatly to a little nugget of an idea in their pea brains: FEMA under the Biden administration denied people aid based on political affiliation.
And that means they have now given themselves permission to do it “back” to us. That’s the gravest danger of all of disinformation, which as you can see often contains little tiny pieces of the truth at its core, making it difficult to properly debunk: Once conspiracy narratives get into policy, they act as permission structures for the desires of the very worst, most fucked-up creeps among us.
Don’t believe me? Take a look around. They aren’t doing it because they’re stupid and clueless; they aren’t doing it because they’re hypocrites. They’re doing it to destroy democratic institutions and our trust in one another. It’s been deliberate all along.
𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛’𝑡 𝑑𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑡 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦’𝑟𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑝𝑖𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑙𝑢𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑠; 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛’𝑡 𝑑𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑡 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦’𝑟𝑒 ℎ𝑦𝑝𝑜𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑠. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦’𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑦 𝑑𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑐𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑐 𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟. 𝐼𝑡’𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔.
Don't take it from Ms. Binkowski. Sure as hell don't take it from me.
Take it from them. Read "Project 2025." Read what they themselves say out loud and in public every time the topic of "democratic institutions and our trust in one another" comes up.
Margaret Thatcher said it out loud and bluntly in 1987: "...who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
Reagan said it all the time, sneering at the very notion of public service or obligation. To the Right, anyone who claims to be serving a greater good is the biggest liar and obviously a thief. When the Right gets control over public resources, they steal them. So obviously everyone else does too, and just lies about it.
The entire goal of the current Right is to destroy civil society. In America sure, but everywhere. They say so openly. They think they will remain the wealthiest and most powerful, and won't be constrained by anything if they can wreck it all.
Doesn't occur to them that police protect them more than they protect me. Or that their wealth is almost entirely abstract and doesn't exist if the electricity (and therefore the internet) goes out and stays out; or if people lose faith they can trade money for goods and services, reliably.
It's crazy, but the extremely rich believe they are no longer Homo Sapiens like the rest of us. They think they've evolved into a superior species, like Ann Rice vampires or something. No shit, they do. Hence the quacks selling them stuff so they can live 200 years, and they think it will work.
Seriously, these people are crazy. Their destroying FEMA is only the tip of the iceberg with these people.
This is a great field guide to the lies.
Crucially these lies are the main point of the rightwing media human centipede. Said centipede is funded by millionaire and billionaire *pocket change* and exists to leverage rightwing-owned social media networks and their algorithms. And even worse, it leverages the ability of rightwing viewers and randos to rapidly spread misinformation due to epistemic closure.
Every single forced meme meant to hurt people with disinformation uses this dynamic. The consumers of that waste then find it justified that aid to nominally "blue" areas is hampered. And that's one reason Republicans pay no political price for hurting New York City's recovery after Hurricane Sandy. Or any time they shit on a "blue" area facing a disaster.