I should know better by now, but still I felt slightly queasy at the weekend as I read post after post on social media explaining that Hurricane Milton had been created by a hurricane-making machine and deliberately fired at Florida by the Deep State and its Democrat witch-queen.
I say I should know better because none of it was new. After all, it has been less than a fortnight since Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene responded to Milton’s predecessor, Hurricane Helene, by tweeting: “Yes they can control the weather”. And even that wasn’t much different to her 2018 effort, when she took time out from blaming “Zionist supremacists” for flooding Europe with Muslims to speculate that forest fires in California might have been caused by “lasers” fired at Earth from “space solar generators” funded by, among others, the Rothschild family.
She is also not alone. If you Google HAARP — an acronym for the US government’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Programme, a real thing that is apparently peering into the ionosphere — your computer will immediately turn into a hyperventilating, swivel-eyed young man describing in detail but without any evidence how the large transmitter in Alaska has for more than a decade been causing earthquakes, weaponising the weather and controlling human minds.
What felt new at the weekend though, was the stark absence of a large, authoritative, confident bloc of experts refuting it all as medieval bunkum, over and over again. This was most clear on X. I know the platform has often been synonymous with awfulness, but five years ago if you’d curated your feed properly you could have followed a hurricane through the eyes and minds of climate scientists and good journalists, constant updates from local authorities, and hundreds of contributions from people affected by flooding.
But that was before the platform was, to quote George Monbiot, emuskulated. Since then, experts have left in droves, while Elon Musk’s algorithms have increasingly amplified content by and for conservatives and supporters of the far right. Great if you want updates on how the Great Replacement of white people is going (reality spoiler: it’s not) but for climate news, not so much.
At the weekend the change was startlingly clear. It wasn’t just that most of the posts on my feed were either from twitching TikTok clots or people insisting that the Nasa aircraft tracking Milton were in fact herding it towards Tampa in an act of climate terrorism.
Instead, what stood out was how little of anything there was. It was like going back to a busy street market you used to know, a rough, exciting place where treasures shared tables with obvious fakes, and finding it deserted except for someone selling four rolls of overpriced toilet paper and someone else standing on a box, yelling about demons.
Unfortunately, it’s not just on social media where it feels like the experts — or even just people who’ve read more than one holy book — have either gone silent or have simply gone. A fortnight ago US vice-presidential hopeful JD Vance attended a political fundraising event hosted by a self-proclaimed apostle named Lance Wallnau, a person who has publicly shared the view that Kamala Harris is controlled by demons but hides this fact through the practice of witchcraft — essentially, that she is casting spells to hide her true identity.
Now, I know American papers of record can’t run Watergate-style headlines warning the secular world that Trumpism is now clearly a vehicle for religious regime change in the US: they’re far too busy explaining that civilian deaths in Lebanon are the fault of Lebanese who didn’t respond fast enough to Israeli orders to evacuate their own county.
But surely there comes a moment when cautious, balanced reportage has to step into a more urgent and active role. And is that moment, oh I don’t know, when a politician who might have the nuclear codes six months from now is currying favour with someone straight out of the 13th century?
I mean, it’s one thing for the Washington Post to claim that “democracy dies in darkness”, but with all due respect there is a very good chance American democracy is going to be mortally wounded in just more than three weeks, in the full glare of the world’s cameras, and all the press is doing is transcribing the rambling thoughts of its attackers.
Again, this crisis goes back years. Since Trump rode his escalator into history we’ve watched the US media being hopelessly outplayed as the white right endlessly brands it corrupt and dishonest even as it enlists it to legitimise people such as Wallnau, lying awake next to their permanently pregnant sister-wives, dreaming of how best to shape the US state so that they can all be Bronze Age kings.
This week’s vacuum on X brought home to me what it might feel like when the media shrivels away entirely and we are left with nothing but the superstition, quackery and hem-kissing of the medieval town square. Far worse, it felt like a little taste of what might happen if the people using Trump for a religious revolution in the US succeed.
They say you don’t know what you had until it’s gone. I never thought I’d say that about Twitter. Please God, let us never have cause to say it of the US.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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