The Right’s Lies about Hurricane Helene Hit Like They Were Meant To

FEMA workers in Asheville, North CarolinaMadeleine Cook/FEMA/Planet Pix via Zuma

The scale and depth of the lies about Hurricane Helene have been breathtaking—and they are far from over, even as the next storm gathers force.

Hundreds of people have died or lost their homes and been displaced from Helene, as lies about the storm and recovery have emanated from politicians, conspiracy peddlers, and far-right figures. These lies have done a number of things extremely well: demonized migrants, focused blame on the government and especially FEMA, and cast doubt on the established science of human-created climate change. The false claims have been picked up and further spread by ordinary people trying to make sense of what’s happening in their communities.

There were signs that the disinformation about Helene would be especially bad. Before the rain even stopped, people like Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene got to work tweeting about how “they” can control the weather. (She has since tripled down on the claim, by, for instance, tweeting an instantly-debunked image of patents supposedly created for weather modification.)

With the storm coming during a bitterly partisan election year, there’s obvious incentive for Donald Trump and prominent backers like Greene, Elon Musk, and the QAnon-peddling retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn to spread lies about the current administration’s disaster response. FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on Tuesday that misinformation around the storm has been “the worst I have ever seen.” 

On Tuesday, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online extremism, released a report on the deluge of antisemitism and violent threats FEMA and other public officials have faced since the storm. The ISD researchers found that false information on Twitter has been especially widely viewed, with just 33 posts “containing claims debunked by FEMA, the White House and the US government” amassing 160 million views.

“The situation exemplifies a wider trend,” the report warns. “Increasingly, a broad collection of conspiracy groups, extremist movements, political and commercial interests, and at times hostile states, coalesce around crises to further their agendas through online falsehoods, division, and hate. They exploit social media moderation failures, gaming their algorithmic systems, and often produce dangerous real-world effects.”

The lies about Helene spread so widely because they were amplified, ISD found, by large and established conspiracy-peddling accounts, ones that have previously made claims about election fraud and spread antisemitic and anti-immigrant ideas like the Great Replacement theory. “Their role as amplifiers here reveals how diverse groups converge on moments of crisis,” ISD’s analysts wrote, “to co-opt the news cycle and launder their positions to a wider or mainstream audience.” 

Twitter is again serving as a useful driver for this activity; ISD wrote that accounts on the platform used by their analysts were “automatically served antisemitic posts on X after viewing three posts in the dataset that implied there was Jewish control of government agencies such as FEMA.” The recommended posts made claims about Jewish control of public institutions in the US, ISD wrote, as well as about “the nose sizes of figures in public office.” 

Both news media and FEMA have lagged behind the conspiracy peddlers in responding to these lies. FEMA created a webpage on October 4, eight days after Helene made landfall, to “respond to rumors.” By then, though, the things they sought to debunk—that FEMA is out of money, or that it will confiscate supplies donated by volunteers—had already spread far and wide, with a disinformation network ready to seize on and amplify any possible useful claims that might sustain them. In one instance, a Tennessee woman posted on Facebook that FEMA was “confiscating” supplies donated to Helene survivors. Large conspiracy websites like Natural News seized on and promoted this claim, even after she made her post private and shared a second post the agency saying the agency did not “fully take” the items.  

In addition to antisemitic claims, there has also been a marked increase in anti-immigrant sentiment following Helene, with powerful figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk falsely claiming that FEMA had taken money from hurricane relief efforts and used it on undocumented people elsewhere.

“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you!” Musk tweeted on October 4. “It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.”

Such claims seek to focus rage and blame on two useful groups: government officials and immigrants. And these lies dovetail with another persistent and widely-spread false claim, that the Biden Administration either caused these hurricanes to happen through weather modification, or “sabotaged” the response to them in order to drown rural voters who favor Trump. 

All of these claims both coalesce useful anger against the Biden administration and, given it is less than a month from Election Day, can be used set up nebulous claims of voter fraud for future use. “Now you know why FEMA is hindering the recovery efforts,” tweeted conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones earlier this week, resharing a post from Politico about how the aftermath of Helene could “swing” the election. 

The claims have worked so well, it is virtually inevitable the same playbook will be used for Hurricane Milton as it makes landfall this week. Indeed, ISD’s analysts found evidence that “incoming weather events are already being used to perpetuate the same false narratives,” pointing, for instance, to a Twitter post that read, “The Biden Harris administration are sending Hurricane Milton to the remaining Trump strongholds ahead of the 2024 presidential elections to finish the job.”

The false narratives are even affecting conservative conspiracy peddlers in their own right, like Florida governor Ron DeSantis. On Wednesday, as Hurricane Milton approached, DeSantis pleaded with residents to evacuate if asked to do so by local officials, taking pains to reassure them, contrary to rumors online, that FEMA would not keep them from returning home when safe. 

“We live in an era where if you put out crap online, you can get a lot of people to share it and you can monetize that,” DeSantis said. “That’s the way it is.” He asked people to be “careful about the nonsense that gets circulated. And just know that the more titillating it is, the more likely it is that somebody is making money off of it. And they don’t really give a damn about the wellbeing and safety of the people who are in the eye of this storm.”