Disinformation? You’re Drowning In It!

And how we can fix it. Maybe!

We’re on a road to nowhere. (Photo by Justin Wilkens on Unsplash)

I have been hearing and reading a lot of the following sentiment over the last year or so, and it goes something like this:

The Trump administration knows something big and bad is coming and they are rushing to do all the terrible shit they can before whatever it is happens so they can have the upper hand when it finally does happen.

I usually hear this from people who say it like they are ashamed of thinking it, because it’s so conspiratorial or whatever, but I am here to tell you that if you’re thinking this, you’re completely correct. It’s not a secret. It’s one of the biggest underlying reasons for every single thing this administration does, especially around immigration and particularly the US-Mexico border.

That big thing? It’s climate change.

Not one second of this is happening in a vacuum. There is a plan behind all of it. It might be a thoroughly dumb, endlessly destructive, ghoulish carousel of horrors, but that is intentional. To put it plainly, the global far Right, which includes the Trump administration, has been planning for the climate collapse that it wants to accelerate the entire world to, because they think they can weaponize it against all the people of the world using disinformation, propaganda, and selective access to real-time information, as well as violence and removing their ability to recover from disastrous events such as fires or floods. (That’s called resilience targeting, and I’ll write more about that in another post.)

A non-Substack way to give us any amount of you’d like!

It’s been working so far!

Border fearmongering is part and parcel of climate disinformation. In fact, it might be one of the most important pieces of the climate disinformation puzzle.

Here’s how it works:

Climate change means we’re living in a very different world. In fact, I’m not sure Americans really have internalized how different the world already is, and how much more different it is going to be moving forward. Did you know the sea levels are SIX TO EIGHT INCHES HIGHER than they were a century ago? Did you know we’re about to see up to 12 inches of temporary sea level rise on the West Coast, like, this week? To say nothing of the massive wildfires, which have already destroyed many of the places I once lived!

Physical borders are also melting and dissolving as rivers swell or recede and glaciers melt and ocean and wind currents start doing weird shit. Vast, dramatic changes like this offer a lot of opportunities to the shitbags of the world, such as fossil fuel companies who knew about this all along but went ahead and covered it up and sickened and killed millions of people with their lies so they could continue to hoard our resources and wreck our planet.

Now we are contending with climate change-era fascism, where those same opportunists and their bullshitters are axing our ability to find reliable information so that they can leverage the horrors that are going to be coming at us to consolidate resources, such as, oh I don’t know, unspoiled food and fresh water.

They do that by — among other things — fearmongering about immigrants and borders to offer a permission structure to harm or harden them, which allows them to say what and who can and cannot leave countries, which in turn makes it easier for authoritarians to cling to their resources, which of course they do not share, or share with the public at large for a high price.

The alternate narrative to climate change, and what’s been used to distract a lot of Americans from the fact that rich entities don’t want to stop consuming and blaming everything on the rest of use, is the lie of “overpopulation.” It neatly leverages all that anxiety everybody feels about rising prices and heat waves and flooding and “hundred-year storms” hitting every year now and gives them a target to direct it at: other human beings.

But it’s not just other human beings, it’s specific ones. People who are visibly “different.” Immigrants. People of color. Disabled people. Trans folks. Mouthy women! OTHER.

Naturally, since this focus on climate change has now been linguistically and politically shifted to “population control,” there’s going to be a lot of interest by these assholes in reproductive rights. A lot of interest. Like the sort of interest that turns into a really fucked-up focus on getting to pull down little kids’ underwear and stare at their genitals at their school. It’s not an accident, it’s the whole ball of wax. (Climate change also affects reproductive health in myriad ways, which doesn’t get a lot of play for “some” reason!)

That’s also why fascists always look so much like pedophiles: Because they are. Because pedophilia at some level or another is always about having whole control over another human being, just like fascism and the global far Right. So of course there’s going to be a lot of effort put into discrediting mothers and women in general, right? Women, in our culture and in many others, tend to be the primary caretakers of children.

According to UN Women:

Climate change is a “threat multiplier” worsening gender inequality in conflict affected-areas

The impacts of climate change escalate social, political and economic tensions in fragile and conflict-affected settings — areas in which women and girls are already vulnerable to all forms of gender-based violence. For instance, in rural economies, a prolonged drought or powerful flood that hits local agriculture can destroy sources of income, as well as access to food and clean water. This can be the match that strikes the powder keg in areas of existing political destabilization.

Research shows that the instability and poverty that follow these climate-fueled conflicts lead to more instances of conflict-related sexual violence, human trafficking and child marriage.

Which brings me to trans and nonbinary folks. The reason these right-wing conspiracizing freaks are so fixated on you and your genitals, my trans friends and family members and loved ones and allies, is because you’re stepping outside their shitty little reproductive and population boxes. You don’t fit in to their neat little ideas of what they think they can push people — mostly women and children — into. Plus, you’re way hotter than they are, but not in a “global warming” sort of way. Also, the people pushing anti-trans ideology the hardest are either creepy, weird perverts, or protecting the creepy, weird perverts in their lives. OTHER.

So that all leads to what we’re seeing right now: Dipshits frothing at the mouth about imaginary “security breaches” at the border while they put little toddlers alone into detention prisons before forcing them to face immigration court without a lawyer and getting trafficked, I mean deported, to who knows where; rights getting stripped from women and even the meaning of “woman” debated by a bunch of sorry-looking men with indifferent personal hygiene, who couldn’t get anywhere near their ex-wives without a court order anyway; and just straight-up Nazis marching around everywhere talking about sterilizing the Jews or whatever stupid bullshit Nazis are into right now. (I don’t actually care what they’re into, they’re Nazis, and I wish they would goose-step their way right off a fucking cliff.)

This is definitely going to be the year a lot of us find out that climate change was real all along real, what with the strongest-in-a-thousand-years El Niños and Kelvin waves hitting our coastlines. It will also give you an up-close-and-personal look at where the last decades of lies has been taking us!

It sucks and it is probably going to suck a whole lot more, and our leaders have shown us time and again, since Hurricane Katrina really (the aftermath of which I also covered! But that’s a whole other story!), that they are absolutely not up for the task.

So in the absence of leaders who actually know what they are doing and aren’t committed to leveraging climate change into making a whole lot of money for them and their shitty little friends, we have each other. And that’s kind of all we have right now, but it isn’t nothing. It’s all we need.

But you need to know the truth, and it is this: Climate change is real. Bad people are lying to you for their own gain. The people showing up at borders are climate refugees, and what's more, they have been for decades. That is how much you have been lied to.

It won’t hurt anybody to have compassion. In fact, having compassion and creating ways for yourself to survive and work with others is the only way we’re going to get out of this mess. We have to do it together. It’s on all of us to step up and help one another, because it’s the right thing to do — and because it could be any one of us next.

That is how you build the resilience that we are gonna need to defeat climate change and fascism, and really fuck off the fascists, who are counting on the rest of us either getting tired of fighting or simply falling into line as though we are all a bunch of university administrators or some shit.

We fight by stepping up for each other, looking out for one another, and never stopping.

It won’t be easy, but it can be done. Don’t let these lying fuckers win!