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October 14, 2024 48 mins

Do Democrats control the weather? Will FEMA raid your home? Garrison and Mia discuss why the misinformation ecosystem is getting worse and how fact-checking may not fix it. 

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation/680221/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/10/09/hurricane-helene-fema-funding-response-fact-check/75587360007/
https://www.fema.gov/disaster/current/hurricane-helene/rumor-response
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hurricane-milton-helene-fact-checking-conspiracies-rumors-2024-10-09/
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1844070899160359052
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/10/08/hurricane-milton-helene-recovery-trump-lies/75557458007/
https://www.news-journalonline.com/story/news/hurricane/2024/10/10/after-milton-desantis-denounces-online-hurricane-conspiracy-theories/75576038007/
https://x.com/SULLY10X/status/1843348003203232104
https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/amazon-alexa-error-sparking-conspiracy-theories-about-hurricane-milton-tiktok
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ai-girl-maga-hurricane-helene-1235125285/
https://x.com/KandissTaylor/status/1843080488115658942
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1844405108685275179
https://x.com/MollyJongFast/status/1844412719476379746
https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/hurricane-helene-brews-up-storm-of-online-falsehoods-and-threats/#
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/10/24266848/violent-threats-against-fema-swirl-on-social-media 
https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktok-misinformation-about-hurricane-helene-has-spurred-calls-violence-against-fema
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/hurricane-milton-misinformation-meteorlogist-death-threats-1235130352/

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
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

(01:07):
shit like that now?

Speaker 1 (01:08):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
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

(01:41):
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

(02:03):
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

(02:25):
checks aren't equipped to handle.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
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.

Speaker 4 (02:35):
So you never know.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Well, I mean, I do believe that fact checks aren't
gonna be the main solution here.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
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.

Speaker 4 (02:48):
It's great.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
That's kind of what I'm saying here.

Speaker 4 (02:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
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

(03:13):
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

(03:36):
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,

(03:59):
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,

(04:22):
commentators on Fox still insist that even though it's not
technically true, it still feels true.

Speaker 5 (04:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
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.

Speaker 4 (04:57):
Yes, which, oh boys, I.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
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

(05:55):
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

(06:17):
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

(06:40):
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,

(07:02):
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

(07:24):
been attributing the weather modification to a few different agencies,
including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Speaker 4 (07:31):
Yeah, sure of sure, no one's doing this, Like.

Speaker 6 (07:36):
Come on.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
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

(07:58):
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.

Speaker 4 (08:08):
That's chemtrails, Garrison, it's chemtrails.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
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

(08:32):
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

(08:53):
famously quite large, and it is impossible to determine the
path or cause one to happen. This just simply isn't true.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
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

(09:26):
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

(09:46):
like fucking unfathomable, like most human history like that.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
It's it's it's very challenging to alter the weather. It
requires it requires a lot of resources.

Speaker 4 (09:58):
No, it doesn't.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
It doesn't work very well, like to like shut down
factories across like half the country like it was fiasco.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
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,

(10:27):
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

(10:50):
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

(11:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
Do you know what isn't bullshit?

Speaker 4 (11:50):
Meya? Is it the products of services that support this podcast?

Speaker 1 (11:54):
It sure is?

Speaker 4 (11:55):
The MyPillow guy, you try to sell gold, now here.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
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

(12:20):
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

(12:42):
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

(13:05):
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.

Speaker 4 (13:17):
Uh huh yeah, by one by one, friend.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
You kind of have some people who think the government
can do this and others think it's because of fossil
fuels unquote.

Speaker 4 (13:26):
Oh my fucking guy.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
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,

(13:48):
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.

Speaker 4 (13:58):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
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

(14:22):
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

(14:45):
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.

Speaker 7 (14:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Very scary now. This other video has over seven hundred
and fifty thousand views on TikTok.

Speaker 6 (15:24):
Alexa, what kind of hurricane is Hurricane Milton?

Speaker 7 (15:29):
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.

Speaker 8 (15:40):
They've already predicted the outcome.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
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

(16:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
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.

Speaker 4 (16:58):
Oh no.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
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,

(17:19):
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

(17:41):
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

(18:04):
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

(18:24):
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,

(18:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
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.

Speaker 4 (19:22):
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
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

(20:05):
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.

(20:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:40):
Bait, right like, yeah, you will never regret liking this post.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
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

(21:06):
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

(21:29):
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.

(21:52):
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

(22:17):
my god. So do you know what I can't hate enough?

Speaker 4 (22:20):
Nope?

Speaker 1 (22:20):
No. Do you know what I love dearly with my
full my full life force?

Speaker 4 (22:27):
Is it products and services?

Speaker 1 (22:29):
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

(22:50):
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

(23:11):
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

(23:34):
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

(23:55):
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

(24:16):
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.

Speaker 9 (24:27):
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?

Speaker 1 (24:39):
When if you if you like.

Speaker 10 (24:41):
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

(25:04):
before Helene even happened.

Speaker 9 (25:06):
Why would a country want to have a hurricane be
strong and hit its own country.

Speaker 10 (25:11):
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.

Speaker 4 (25:30):
Rig the elign even control the weather.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
Yes, very compelling stuff coming out of the Trump rallies.

Speaker 4 (25:37):
Jesus Christ, I'm.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
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

(26:00):
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

(26:21):
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,

(26:42):
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

(27:02):
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.

Speaker 4 (27:21):
No, not the health Ranger.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
No, do you know do you know who the health
Ranger is?

Speaker 4 (27:30):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (27:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:42):
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.

(28:04):
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,

(28:25):
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

(28:46):
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

(29:07):
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

(29:30):
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

(29:53):
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

(30:17):
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

(30:40):
and local emergency management, they are unnecessarily putting their own
lives and the lives the first responders at grave risk.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
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.

Speaker 4 (31:00):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Who could possibly have predicted this? The rawn decentis team
has been replaced by the lizard people. I swear.

Speaker 9 (31:07):
No.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
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

(31:29):
one clip from this guy who was interviewed on MSNBC
talking about how his family has been refusing help in
North Carolina.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
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

(31:58):
this freaking con man. I don't understand it.

Speaker 11 (32:02):
Well, it's absolutely heartbreaking about your father in law. I'm
so sorry to hear it.

Speaker 6 (32:08):
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

(32:31):
begging us to get him to accept help, and he
won't do it.

Speaker 1 (32:36):
Wow.

Speaker 6 (32:39):
And I guarantee you I'm not the only one. I
guarantee you I'm not the only one.

Speaker 11 (32:48):
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.

Speaker 6 (33:00):
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.

Speaker 4 (33:22):
And it sucks.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
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

(33:48):
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

(34:12):
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

(34:34):
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

(34:58):
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

(35:21):
or failed to immediately assist to their best ability, they
can be arrested or shot or hung.

Speaker 4 (35:26):
On site unquote Christ.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
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

(35:50):
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

(36:12):
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

(36:34):
with misinformation and threatening messages like stop lying about the
government controlling the weather or else unquote.

Speaker 4 (36:40):
Great.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
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

(37:03):
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

(37:24):
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

(37:47):
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

(38:07):
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

(38:30):
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

(38:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
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

(39:35):
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

(39:55):
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

(40:16):
that you might be wrong bustling fucking sucks, yes, and
is hard, and sometimes you just don't want to know totally.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
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,

(40:46):
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

(41:06):
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

(41:27):
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,

(41:53):
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,

(42:14):
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

(42:35):
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

(42:57):
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

(43:20):
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

(43:40):
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

(44:02):
don't know. I mean, do you do you have any
closing thoughts?

Speaker 4 (44:06):
You know?

Speaker 2 (44:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
So me, you're advocating to dose your Republican family members
with LSD? Is that what I'm hearing?

Speaker 2 (44:29):
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.

Speaker 4 (44:38):
Seen this work.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
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

(45:01):
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.

Speaker 9 (45:21):
Right.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
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

(45:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
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,

(46:29):
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.

(46:53):
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

(47:14):
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

(47:36):
on what's currently going on with the hurricane misinformation. It's
really bad. Yep, it could happen here.

Speaker 8 (47:46):
It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
find sources for it could happen here, listed directly in
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