THIS is just sick, and stupid, and I do not understand how anyone who reads or hears this propaganda can consider it seriously and believe it as truth. There is no way that anyone with a normal, functioning brain can listen to any of this and believe it as fact, you have to have something wrong with you mentally and or physically if you think any of this is true. from the Washington Post.
Officials face antisemitic attacks over Hurricane Helene response
Report finds Elon Musk’s X is fueling conspiracy theories that risk undermining rescue efforts and preparations for Hurricane Milton.
October 8, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Top officials in North Carolina and at the Federal Emergency Management Agency responding to Helene are being subjected to a flurry of antisemitic attacks, causing some of them to fear for their safety as they prepare for another hurricane to strike Florida.
The attacks, which include wild claims that Jewish officials are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery or even seize victims’ property, are being fomented largely on Elon Musk’s X. Antisemitic tropes have commingled on the site with false rumors and conspiracy theories amid the chaos of the recovery effort, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).
The online vitriol is compounding the challenges facing emergency management officials dealing with the aftermath of Helene and readying a response to Milton, a Category 5 hurricane barreling toward Florida. The volume and virulence of the X posts have dismayed experts who warn that they risk undermining lifesaving response measures.
“We’re seeing an alarming trend of antisemitism being included now in false narratives around pretty much any breaking news event,” said Isabelle Frances-Wright, ISD’s director of technology and society. “This portends a grim outlook for the information ecosystem, both on X itself but also on other platforms where these narratives trickle into and evolve.”
The report focused on 33 recent viral X posts that spread misinformation about Helene, which made landfall in Florida as a major hurricane last month and caused at least 231 deaths and widespread devastation in six states.
The posts collectively attracted 159 million views, even though their claims were thoroughly debunked by local residents, FEMA, the White House and other government officials. Ten of the posts contained antisemitic sentiments and collectively drew 17.1 million views.
In comparison, FEMA, which leads the federal response to Helene, drew just short of 2.6 million views for its 10 most popular posts on Saturday and Sunday.
The report noted that antisemitic sentiments were largely directed at three individual officials: FEMA director of public affairs Jaclyn Rothenberg, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Asheville, N.C., Mayor Esther Manheimer. Many came from accounts that have also trafficked in other forms of misinformation on X, including false claims about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, the war in Ukraine, and the 2020 presidential election.
As of Monday evening, X had not removed any of the 33 posts, three of which received “community notes” appending fact-checks or additional context to the original post, according to ISD. While X’s rules prohibit hateful tropes or personal attacks based on ethnicity or religion, the company, previously known as Twitter, has pulled back on content moderation and reinstated prominent accounts banned for violating those policies since Musk bought it in 2022.
X did not respond to requests for comment.
FEMA has created a webpage devoted to debunking false rumors about Helene, and Rothenberg has used her professional X account to rebut several falsehoods. The replies to those missives have been studded with antisemitic comments questioning whether she is more loyal to Israel than to the United States because of her Jewish heritage.
The posts attacking Rothenberg racked up more than 4 million views in only 24 hours starting Friday, according to the report. One post accused Rothenberg of “treason” and repeated a false claim by former president Donald Trump that FEMA has used some disaster relief money to help migrants in the United States illegally.
When Rothenberg locked her personal account Friday and Saturday to protect against the abuse, she faced further attacks for doing so. While her verified government account remained unlocked, one user responded, “I thought gov’t accounts could not be protected. She thinks she can hide behind her nose.” (Jews have historically been portrayed in antisemitic films and Nazi propaganda with large, hooked noses, according to the Anti-Defamation League.)
Rothenberg, a political communications veteran who worked for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, said she has never experienced so much misinformation and abuse.
“The fact that people are spreading misinformation and antisemitism is really disheartening,” she said. “Our jobs are to communicate information that helps people on their worst day, and the misinformation is having a negative impact on the people that need our help the most.”
Another post that has acquired nearly a million views features photos of Rothenberg, Mayorkas and Manheimer and identifies each as “jew.” Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and Mayorkas, a Cuban-born Jew whose relatives were murdered by Nazis, did not respond to a request for comment.
X users have also heavily targeted Manheimer, whose city was deluged by flooding brought by Helene. One post that garnered more than 36,000 views shared a photo of Manheimer accompanied by a caption that played on an antisemitic trope and claimed she “truly hates America.”
Manheimer, who surveyed the damage from Helene during a flight on Marine One with Biden last week, said she worries about her safety and that of other Jewish officials in the hard-hit region.
“Our community’s priority is managing this crisis and addressing the immediate needs that exist in Asheville and Western North Carolina,” Manheimer said in an email, adding that the comments create “a personal safety concern while trying to execute the work needed to move us through this catastrophe.”
The falsehoods online also threatened the safety of the general public, Frances-Wright said.
“When you already have these narratives that the government is bad, that FEMA can confiscate your property, and then you layer on to that FEMA is controlled by the Jewish ‘deep state,’ it just further undercuts people’s trust,” she said.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has apologized for her past embrace of the conspiracy theory that the Rothschild family used lasers from space to start wildfires, repeated a similar trope last week. “Yes they can control the weather,” she wrote on Thursday in an X post. (Greene, who was banned from Twitter in 2022, was among those whose accounts Musk reinstated when he bought the company.)
A spokesman for Greene did not respond to a request for comment.
ISD’s findings track with a trend that researchers have been observing since Musk took over, said Yael Eisenstat, a senior policy fellow at the multi-university research center Cybersecurity for Democracy.
When Musk reinstated the accounts of “so many known extremists and white supremacists,” Eisenstat said, “he signaled to everyone on this platform that engaging in the worst kind of antisemitism and conspiracy theories and targeting people was fair game.”
Andy Carvin, managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, said the inability or unwillingness of online platforms such as X to disincentivize the spread of such rhetoric has created a “perfect storm of weather-related disinformation and conspiracy theories intertwining with anti-government paranoia and antisemitic rhetoric.”
“What’s particularly worrying is the potential for online threats to escalate into real-world political violence,” Carvin added. “Federal, state and local emergency management officials have a difficult enough job to do responding to natural disasters, and now some of them are having to deal with doing that very job with a potential target on their backs.”
Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.
Opinion Help vs. lies: Hurricane relief is a microcosm of the election stakes
As is often the case with Trump, his lies carry the whiff of projection. As CNN reported: “Trump is actually accusing the Biden administration of an act very similar to something he did as president. In 2019, Trump’s administration moved $155 million meant for FEMA disaster relief to support immigration enforcement.”
Tragically, the consequences of Trump’s lies fall on the victims of the hurricanes and on immigrants, whom Trump falsely accused of receiving funds needed by those who have lost homes and businesses. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” warned that the disinformation is “demoralizing to all of the first responders that have been out there in their communities helping people.” Criswell went on, “We’ve had the local officials helping to push back on this … truly dangerous narrative that is creating this fear of trying to reach out and help us or to register for help.” In the midst of its herculean effort, FEMA has had to expend time and resources on a “Hurricane Rumor Response” operation.
Meanwhile, Republican governors continue to praise the federal agency’s effort. Brian Kemp of Georgia, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Bill Lee of Tennessee have all lauded FEMA’s responsiveness. And, in anticipation of the Category 4 storm Milton, even MAGA Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had to concede, “Everything that we’ve asked for, the administration has approved.”
Trump’s baseless attacks on professional public servants are a sign of his contempt for fact-based, functional government. It should not be lost on anyone that Project 2025 lays out a plan to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with his cronies. If you want chaos, imagine the likes of Stephen K. Bannon, Stephen Miller and their minions deciding which Americans get disaster relief. Without professional, permanent staff to remain loyal to the mission of the agency, everything will boil down to who kisses the president’s ring.
It does not take much imagination to contemplate how, in a second Trump term, we would be inundated with false weather reports and claims about the climate change “hoax.” The problem of extreme weather would grow more daunting if government data were to become unreliable.
We already know Trump is more than willing to politicize the distribution of aid. That has been his response time and again when confronted with natural disasters. “As California battled the deadliest wildfire in its history in 2018, Donald J. Trump … initially opposed unlocking federal funding for the state,” the New York Times recalled. “But Mr. Trump shifted his position after his advisers found data showing that large numbers of his supporters were being affected by the infernos, said the officials, who have both endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election.”
Trump’s behavior should be disqualifying for any presidential candidate, and echoing his lies or remaining silent in the face of his destructive disinformation should be similarly so for his Republican apologists. It is, however, unsurprising that he would double and triple down on inflammatory rhetoric for his base rather than try to make any inroads with other voters. Ignoring the chance to boost himself in the eyes of those outside of the MAGA cult, he has drawn damning headlines and given Harris an opportunity to appear presidential.
“There’s a lot of mis- and disinformation being pushed out there by the former president about what is available, particularly to the survivors of Helene,” Harris told reporters on Monday. “It’s extraordinarily irresponsible. It’s about him. It’s not about you.” She emphasized that “FEMA has so many resources that are available to folks who desperately need them now.”
The contrast between Trump and the current administration’s all-hands-on-deck response, including multiple visits from President Joe Biden to reassure victims, could not be more stark. (Harris has also made repeated visits to affected areas and reached out to boost the morale of FEMA workers.) The choice for voters boils down to competent and compassionate government, on one hand, or a return to a presidency characterized by nonstop demonization and disarray. Trump simply is not capable of serious or compassionate leadership — or even faking it. (One cannot help but recall his presidential visit after Hurricane Maria to Puerto Rico where he lobbed rolls of paper towels at the crowd.)
Whether it is spreading disinformation about Haitian immigrants, hurricane relief or covid-19, Trump’s lies serve to bolster his own ego (he alone can fix things!), undermine faith in democratic government, foment resentment against marginal groups and enrage his cult. This has been the conduct of right-wing authoritarians throughout history. The real disaster would be allowing such a figure to regain office and wield the power of the federal government against his enemies and the most vulnerable Americans.
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