Tara McGowan: A Storm Season October “Surprise”

By Tara McGowan

Ask any climate scientist, activist, or fact-trusting person and this election cycle’s October surprise shouldn’t really surprise you. And yet it might. 

The category three storm that recently made landfall on the west coast of Florida is the second catastrophic storm to hit the region in less than two weeks. Meteorologists and government officials are warning that Hurricane Milton will ultimately be even more devastating than Hurricane Helene, which took the lives of over 100 Americans and devastated entire towns hundreds of miles from any coastline with unprecedented flooding and storm damage.  

Extreme weather disasters are nothing new, of course. Weather has been having its way with our planet for as long as we can measure. But storms of this magnitude – and this frequency – are new, and can unfortunately no longer be defined as “natural” disasters. But if you’re someone who primarily gets your news from right-wing media outlets, you’ll probably stop reading – or trusting me – right about here. Science and facts have a way of doing that to those lost to the Fox-hole. And that’s no accident either.

But if you are still here, imagine your home and your town being leveled. Imagine grieving the loss of cherished friends, neighbors, and family members while facing the prospect of needing to rebuild everything, while struggling to get access to clean water or electricity. Now imagine you’re going through this unthinkable trauma, and you start to hear over and over from your coworker, your neighbor, your favorite television host, or even the former president, that you’re not going to get any help rebuilding your home and life because the “Democrats in charge” gave all the federal disaster relief funds to other countries like Ukraine – or to those “illegals taking all the jobs.” 

Unfortunately, this is what thousands of displaced, scared, and grieving Americans are hearing – and believing – in the communities that have been hit the hardest by Hurricane Helene – and will soon be hearing in the next wave of towns and communities struck by Hurricane Milton. 

A wave of disinformation is targeting those people, including ridiculous AI-generated images that have gone viral before being flagged by platforms as fake, like this one of Trump in a lifejacket walking through knee-high water. 

No, Trump isn’t wading in floodwaters to help people. He’s traveling comfortably in his jetliner, or putting around his golf course, dreaming up ways to lie to them.

In my 15-year career working at the intersection of journalism and politics, I have become an accidental expert on disinformation and misinformation – how it is created and why, how and where it spreads, and the lasting, sometimes irreparable damage it can do. In 2020, just weeks before a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, instigated by a Big Lie by the sitting president, I wrote a piece warning about the danger of not taking this right-wing disinformation more seriously – and predicted the escalating threat to our democracy it would ultimately pose. 

Now, just a few weeks before the most consequential election in our nation’s history – where our basic rights and freedoms are on the ballot – our first October surprise has arrived: a dangerous disinformation campaign that is ruthlessly sowing chaos and confusion and hurting very real relief efforts on the ground, all to score political points with voters.  

Weaponizing human tragedy for political gain is not a new strategy for Trump or the MAGA movement, however. It has been a core tenet of their playbook from the start. For as long as I have monitored Fox News, Breitbart, and now even more extreme right-wing outlets like OANN and NewsMax, I have watched right-wing talk show hosts and Republican politicians weave entirely fictional but emotionally triggering stories out of thin air that are then spread like wildfire online and at the local level, with deadly results – from the higher propensity of COVID-related deaths in deeply Republican regions across the country to the brave Capitol Police officers who died as a result of the Jan. 6 attack.  

This new disinformation won’t only hurt the thousands of people who will be dealing with the aftermath of these storms. It also has the potential to hurt all 335 million Americans by swinging a small percentage of votes in two states Trump needs desperately to win the election and keep himself out of jail: North Carolina and Georgia. In 2020, Trump won North Carolina by just over 74,000 votes. He lost Georgia to Joe Biden by just 11,779 votes. 

So it can be no surprise that Trump and right-wing media moved more quickly than some relief efforts could to shape the narrative reaching impacted communities in these states, targeting people in a state of immense shock and vulnerability who could be impressionable to a story giving them someone to blame. 

This campaign of lies is only going to get more aggressive over the coming weeks, and this strategy isn’t just a symptom – it’s the bug. Because what we’re seeing playing out in North Carolina and Georgia right now is exactly what Trump and his Republican Party are offering the American people in this election: more confusion, more chaos, and more life-threatening destruction. And it’s up to all of us to drown out their lies, and hold the liars accountable — with our voices and our votes. 

Tara McGowan is the founder and publisher of COURIER.