Musk’s hurricane of misinformation has finally gone too far

With Hurricane Milton making its way to the Florida coast, Ryan Coogan explains why conspiracy theories promoted by right wingers on Twitter/X could make this terrifying disaster even worse – especially for Republicans

Being a Democrat sounds like hard work. There are all those satanic meetings to attend; all those vaccine microchips to keep track of; and, according to Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, they even control the weather.

Yes, the American political right has continued its rapid divorce from reality, amping up the conspiracy rhetoric in recent years to levels that your craziest uncle would call “totally reasonable and proportionate”. No claim is too wild, no story too out-there. It would honestly be funny, if it didn’t have the potential to get so many people killed.

The latest focus of their accusations? Hurricane Milton, the category five weather event that is about to hit the Florida coast, which experts have warned could result in death and devastation across the state. The National Hurricane Center has warned Milton could be “one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida”, while President Biden has said that properly following evacuation orders is a “matter of life and death”. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor even said the 15 feet storm surge could submerge entire houses, warning: “If you’re in it, basically that’s the coffin that you’re in.”

Yet despite the clear and evident risk of real harm, people like Greene are making hackneyed comic book villain claims about secret weather machines – and the internet has been rife with misinformation about the upcoming disaster. Accounts on Twitter/X have claimed that state and federal officials are preventing people from accessing hard-hit areas, that the government is basing it provision of aid on political affiliation, and that the entire thing is an elaborate land-grab scheme.

Many such posts have received millions of views, and few if any being taken down. Why would they, when the site’s owner is in the mix – yes, even Elon Musk has been getting in on the fun, tweeting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has diverted critical funds from hurricane relief to illegal immigrants.

The American Red Cross has said that the spread of such misinformation is harming relief efforts, saying that it “hurts people” and “disrupts our ability to deliver critical aid”.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “spreading misinformation about a natural disaster that has the potential to kill hundreds – perhaps thousands – of people is reprehensible, and in a sane world would be a criminal offence”, but you would in fact be mistaken. You see, we don’t live in a sane world. We live in a world where being that reckless with other people’s lives isn’t just acceptable – it’s actually a core part of the Republican political strategy.

It’s also something that Musk has a track record of ignoring – and often supporting – as part of his commitment to “free speech absolutism”, in which no form of misinformation is too harmful to warrant so-called “censorship”. We saw recently just how devastating such a mindset can be right here in the UK, when he helped worsen the far-right riots that terrorised communities up and down the country by amplifying posts by far-right provocateurs like Tommy Robinson and making comments predicting that “civil war in inevitable”.

That isn’t to say that Musk is being deliberately malicious in this specific instance. He has provided use of his Starlink system to areas affected by the weather – an objectively good deed not matter how you spin it, and one which has the potential to really help people. But if anything, that just makes his willingness to jeopardise lives in other ways even more strange. “Please, use my futuristic satellites to save as many people as possible – oh, also, Democrats gave all the hurricane relief funds to foreigners”.

Believe it or not, there was a time when believing in unhinged conspiracies was something of a fringe position, even on the right. Anti-vaxxers, climate denial, white nationalist talking points like the “great replacement theory” – these were all things that you’d see coming from minor parties at best, to be mocked or dismissed out of hand. Unfortunately, the prominence and unwillingness to challenge noted liars like Donald Trump, as well as the complete deregulation of sites like Twitter/X, have turned the fringe into the mainstream.

The thing that really baffles me about all of this, though, is what exactly there is to be gained here. The right are much more likely to buy into these conspiracy theories, so surely spreading ones that could harm them does nothing but harm your own base – often literally.

We saw this during Covid, as people bought into denialism so hard that they didn’t take the necessary precautions against the disease, and many of them died. Republican senator Herman Cain, for example, was tweeting about how Covid was a hoax right up until his death. Remarkably, he even continued to do so post-mortem, as the people running his account continued to push misinformation long after his passing. Say what you will about Republicans, but they’re committed to the bit.

Florida is, at the moment, solidly red. Even if you didn’t care about human lives at all, surely from the perspective of cold, hard political strategy you would want to keep those 30 electoral votes as safe as possible? That’s hard to do when you’re placing your voters directly in harm’s way.

This isn’t even just about conspiracy theories, though. If you were trying to kill as many Republican voters as quickly as possible, you couldn’t do it more efficiently than you could with mainstream Republican policy positions. The gun violence epidemic, particularly in red states, is being fuelled by Republicans’ steadfast refusal to entertain the notion that a tool whose only purpose is murder should be restricted in some way. They treat basic regulatory frameworks and public services as if they’re some kind of Communist plot. Their states are poorer, less literate and less healthy – and the kicker here is that none of this is new.

The right’s embrace of conspiratorial thinking is bad, but it’s really just the latest form that the Republican commitment to recklessness has taken. The entire party has completely abandoned not just common sense, but the basic acknowledgement of the laws of cause and effect. Everything is somebody else’s fault. Everything is some far-reaching, terrible conspiracy – anything to prevent them from having to face up to reality.

Unfortunately for them, reality eventually comes knocking one way or another. A huge dose of reality is about to hit the East coast, and it’s coming fast. Will it be a wake-up call for the climate deniers, the free speech absolutists, and the people who look for any excuse to demonise Democrats at all costs? I have a theory that it won’t make much of a difference at all.