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Harris accuses Trump of ‘playing politics’ with hurricane disaster relief
Kamala Harris has accused Donald Trump of “playing politics” with disaster relief amid growing criticisms that the former president has tried to exploit Hurricanes Helene and Milton with a flurry of lies and disinformation as he bids to gain the edge in the race for the White House.The US vice-president’s comments came amid increasing evidence that the two storms, which have left a trail of death and destruction in several southern states, are threatening to upset the calculus for next month’s presidential election.Asked at a town hall meeting in Las Vegas organized by Univision, the US Spanish-language TV network, to address complaints about the federal government’s response, Harris aimed pointed comments at Trump, although without naming him.“In this crisis – like in so many issues that affect the people of our country – I think it so important that leadership recognises the dignity [of those affected],” she said.“I have to stress that this is not a time for people to play politics,” she added, as she campaigned in the swing state of Nevada on Thursday.Harris’s comments followed a full-frontal attack on Trump – who has falsely accused the White House and Harris of, among other things, deliberately withholding aid from Republican areas and diverting funds to illegal immigrants – from Joe Biden.The US president accused Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, of spreading “outright lies”.“They’re being so damn un-American with the way they’re talking about this stuff,” Biden told journalists at the White House on Thursday. Addressing Trump specifically, he said: “Get a life, man. Help these people.”Trump and his running mate, the US senator for Ohio JD Vance, have maintained a drumbeat of criticism of Biden and Harris accusing them of deliberately engineering an inadequate response to Hurricane Helene in Republican voting areas, after the storm ripped through Georgia and North Carolina – two swing states vital to the outcome of the 5 November election – even while fellow Republican politicians have praised the recovery effort.The former president has called the rescue operation worse than the response to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas in 2005 – killing 1,400 – and left an indelible stain on the presidency of George W Bush.“This hurricane has been a bad one, Kamala Harris has left them stranded,” he told a rally in Juneau, Wisconsin. “This is the worst response to a storm or a catastrophe or a hurricane that we’ve ever seen ever. Probably worse than Katrina, and that’s hard to beat, right?”Harris has taken some time away from the campaign trail this month to participate in White House situation room conferences and meet staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which has led the response to the hurricanes. Helene was the deadliest since Katrina.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome Democratic strategists have voiced fears that the need to respond to the twin storms is depriving Harris of vital time in her quest to defeat Trump as the campaign enters its final weeks.Deanne Criswell, Fema’s director, has called the onslaught of disinformation and conspiracy theories “absolutely the worst I have ever seen” and warned that it is hindering relief efforts.With polls showing the election race tighter than ever, Trump has focused particular attention on Harris. “She didn’t send anything or anyone at all. Days passed. No help as men, women and children drowned,” he told a rally in Pennsylvania.He has put special emphasis on North Carolina, where polls show the two candidates neck-and-neck and which has a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Some Republican politicians have condemned the spread of misinformation but generally without naming Trump.Harris also told CNN on Wednesday. “It is dangerous – it is unconscionable, frankly, that anyone who would consider themselves a leader would mislead desperate people to the point that those desperate people would not receive the aid to which they are entitled,” she said. More
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Trial of Arizona officials who refused to certify 2022 election delayed until next year
The criminal trial of two rural Arizona county supervisors who initially refused to certify election results in 2022 will not occur before this year’s elections after it was again delayed.Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, two of the three supervisors in the Republican-led Cochise county, face charges of conspiracy and interfering with an election officer, brought by the Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes.The trial has been pushed back multiple times and is now set for 30 January 2025, the court docket shows. The delay was mutually agreed upon, the attorney general’s office said.Despite the county’s typically low profile, the trial is being watched nationally as elections experts anticipate a potential wave of local officials refusing to certify results if Trump loses. The red county, set on the US-Mexico border, has a population of about 125,000.Charges like those against Crosby and Judd should send a message to many of those who would consider taking similar actions, democracy advocates say.“The fact that two supervisors who failed to certify results on time in the past are facing criminal charges does serve as a deterrent to other officials who might be considering obstructing the certification process in Arizona this year,” said Travis Bruner, the Arizona state policy advocate at Protect Democracy. “And I think that deterrent exists, even though the trial isn’t going to occur before the election.”Cochise county became a hotbed for election denialism after the 2020 election, as did the rest of Arizona, because Trump lost the state in an upset for Republicans. Crosby and Judd first tried to conduct a full hand count of ballots in their county in the 2022 midterms, a move which was deemed illegal. The quest for a hand count included support from Republican state lawmakers.Crosby and Judd then refused to certify the election until a court ordered them to do so, and even then, Crosby still did not vote to approve it. These actions have added costs to county taxpayers and gripped local meetings for many months.In US elections, local elections officials oversee the counting of ballots, often referred to as the canvass. County supervisors, like those in Cochise, then sign off on those results in what’s known as a certification. Think of the supervisors in these instances as scorekeepers, Bruner said. The supervisor’s role is to acknowledge the count, not act as a referee. This function is mandatory, not discretionary, he said.In anticipation of potential certification battles after election day this year, pro-democracy groups have emphasized the illegality of such refusals and the role the courts play in enforcing laws on certification. Whether a wave of certification delays or refusals actually occurs depends in large part on who wins the election, and the degree of the pressure campaign that comes afterward.These efforts likely won’t hinder the ultimate election results because courts will step in to require certification, but they can cause delay, allowing for disinformation to swirl and and sow doubt in elections, Bruner said.“What we’re seeing in Arizona and across the country is really that conspiracy theorists and folks who want to subvert election results, if they don’t like the results, have targeted the certification process as a place to sort of place their doubt in elections and try to change the results of elections that they don’t like,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA recent report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that 35 local elected officials across eight states had previously refused to certify election results and could be in a position to do so again this year.Crosby and Judd are two of them. Supporters of the two had previously told them they would cover their legal expenses, and an anonymous donor paid an initial $10,000 legal retainer. Crosby has sought donations on a crowdfunding site to help cover his legal expenses, as has Judd, though she’s brought in less money. Judd has said promises of funding never came to fruition because she was “small beans”.Crosby and Judd have not made any indication that they intend to stall certification again this year, and there has not been a local effort to install hand counts, though some in the county still want them. The primary election this year in Cochise didn’t see any disruptions.“They have been quieter recently as this court case has been playing out,” Bruner said. “You haven’t seen public statements from either of them suggesting that they would refuse to certify this time.”Judd is not running for re-election, but Crosby is. Democrats have seen more interest in their candidates for supervisor and recorder roles this year than in previous cycles, including from national groups that have given endorsements to boost their profiles. Theresa Walsh, a retired army colonel who is challenging Crosby in November, lists one policy statement on her website – election integrity.“Since the elections of 2020, many in our State and Cochise County have said that votes weren’t counted or weren’t correctly counted, that election results were tainted, changing the outcome of races,” her statement says. “As I learned as a pre-law student, you can’t just say it, you have to prove it. And that hasn’t happened. Because it didn’t happen. We have election integrity, we have systems we can trust.” More
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Kamala Harris lands second Vogue cover: ‘The candidate for our times’
Kamala Harris has landed her second US Vogue cover on Friday with a photograph by Annie Leibovitz that reads: “The candidate for our times.”“Only rarely are individuals summoned for acts of national rescue, but in July, Vice President Kamala Harris received one of those calls,” the glossy magazine, which has previously endorsed the candidate, said on X. “With President Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign, the world looked to Harris with hopes and doubts.”But the accompanying 8,000-word profile elicited little new about Harris’s policy positions if she is elected in November.“One of my first calls – outside of family – will be to the team that is working with me on our plan to lower costs for the American people,” she told the magazine.“It’s not just about publishing something in a respected journal. It’s not about a speech. It’s literally about, How does this hit the streets? How do people actually feel the work in a way that benefits them?”On the widening war in the Middle East, Harris said that while she could not anticipate the future, she would focus on creating “‘incentives’ for de-escalation and a ‘pathway’ for stability” and spoke of “Israel’s right to defend itself” and Palestinians’ “right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination”.“There’s been a language and a conversation around what’s been happening, particularly around Israel and Gaza, that suggests that this is binary. It’s not,” she said, adding: “You’re not either for this one or for that one.“A lot of the work that needs to be done,” Harris continued, “is a function of the circumstances at the moment. I can’t anticipate what the circumstances will be four months from now.”The publication spoke to the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was deeply involved in the effort to oust Biden from the ticket after the president’s disastrous debate performance with Donald Trump in June.Pelosi said: “We had wanted – we thought that there would be – an open convention” and Harris had recognized the conflicts within the Democratic party.“It was easy for people to come to her because they knew she didn’t have bad feelings toward them,” Pelosi explained. “And then she – boom! – one, two, three, wrapped it all up. It was a beautiful thing.”The cover photo is likely to stir up less drama than a previous Vogue portrait three years ago that provoked a backlash for what critics deemed a lack respect for the first person of Black and south Asian descent sworn in as vice-president after she was photographed in sneakers.“Vogue robbed Harris of her roses,” wrote the Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan. “A bit of awe would have served the magazine well in its cover decisions. Nothing about the cover said, ‘Wow.’ And sometimes, that’s all Black women want, an admiring and celebratory ‘wow’ over what they have accomplished.”Vogue later amended the online picture with a more flattering image.“Obviously we have heard and understood the reaction to the print cover,” the editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, told the New York Times, “and I just want to reiterate that it was absolutely not our intention to, in any way, diminish the importance of the vice-president-elect’s incredible victory.” More
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Hurricane Milton has left two worlds in its wake. Elon Musk lives in one of them. The other is called reality | Marina Hyde
I increasingly wonder why Elon Musk is bothering trying to establish himself on Mars, and not just because it looks like a complete dump up there. (Seriously, if you think that’s beautiful, I have around a hundred thousand disused quarries I’d love to show you right here on Earth.) Watching Hurricane Milton play out on Musk’s platform and elsewhere cemented the notion that the goal of being on another planet along with millions of people had already occurred. The only problem is that this whole other planet is here, sharing meatspace with what we used to call “reality”.Once upon a time, relatively recently in the scheme of things, a looming natural disaster would have felt like a fairly ineluctable fact. You couldn’t “debate” a natural disaster any more than you could disagree with gravity. There is a point, we used to say, where you really can’t argue with reality. There is a point where shit gets real. But is there, any more? Certainly that point has receded much further over a still-darkening horizon than we might even have imagined back in, say, 2016, when people were warning of attempts to destroy the very notion of shared reality. In fact, it was already receding back in 2004, when a Bush administration official (widely believed to be Karl Rove) spoke disparagingly of what they called “the reality-based community”.In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene last month, and in the days leading up to Hurricane Milton’s landfall, it was possible to see the truly grim extent of the slippage in recent years. It wasn’t just in senior politicians using phrases such as “politicising the storm”, a way of talking about a terrifyingly destructive natural phenomenon that would once have seemed like a quote from a satire, but now seems a long-unremarkable part of daily discourse. Nor was it in the widespread questioning that the storm was even a natural phenomenon at all, with huge numbers out there on the platforms declaring it to have been literally “created” and “engineered” by the other side. It was the sense that whatever happened, people had a version of reality they would be sticking to. Their views are battened down and not even a hurricane is going to shift them.“Yes they can control the weather,” explained the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (on X, of course). “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” One customary reaction to Marjorie is to remark that it’s as if she’s on another planet. I so wish she was. The problem is that she and her fellow settlers are here, walking among all the agency officials and disaster experts and emergency workers who have to deal with reality as it presents itself – and not reality as whatever rubbish advances your cause that day.But on she sails, because the civilisation of Another Planet is considerably advanced. You no longer ask if life is sustainable on this planet. It is not just sustainable – it is sustained. Not only does it have well-established communications systems, but also a rapidly spawning language where words can mean their opposites. Another Planet has a thriving media, and a social media presence actively boosted and financially incentivised by the likes of Musk – which arguably had its coming-of-age party over these past weeks. Musk himself shared what he said was a note from a SpaceX engineer falsely claiming that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping … ” Don’t worry, only 41m people have viewed the post.In addition to oligarchs such as Musk, Another Planet has its own politicians who advance its interests, most notably Donald Trump, who has had what the polls suggest was a good storm. And don’t forget the foot soldiers. On TikTok, you could scroll through miles of fake videos of flooded Florida cities before Milton had even hit the areas purporting to be shown. After Helene last month, Fema launched a dedicated “rumour response” page. Barely two weeks on, the scale of the task has already overwhelmed defences. Rumour response pages were instantly rebranded as government cover-ups (the Jews were behind this one too, would you believe). According to an urgent dispatch from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, just 33 posts containing claims debunked by Fema, the White House and the US government had already been viewed more than 160m times before Helene hit.Meanwhile, Another Planet has harnessed sophisticated technology in the form of AI. When told an AI image she’d shared of a sobbing child in a canoe with a puppy was entirely fake, RNC committee member Amy Kremer said she didn’t care and was leaving it up because it was “emblematic”. We’re now in an era when Another Planet feels confident enough to let you behind the curtain, because you’ll still believe it anyway. Kremer butching it out is just the latest version of JD Vance’s insouciant declaration last month that, of course, he creates false stories such as pets being eaten by Haitian immigrants. He does it, he says, so that the media “actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people”.Maybe most worryingly, Another Planet constantly suggests it will defend itself by force if necessary. One way to fight a “weather weapon” is by making a death threat against a meteorologist. Or, indeed, multiple death threats against multiple meteorologists. Another way is call for militias to attack Fema for “withholding aid”. Another way is to threaten to shoot first responders. Again, honestly the only problem with this community is that it’s right here on Earth. I’m sure they’d say that we in the world’s reality-based community are occupying them – but it’s pretty finely balanced. Ask me again in a month, by which time it might feel as if they are occupying us.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live More
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Mark Milley fears being court-martialed if Trump wins, Woodward book says
Mark Milley, a retired US army general who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, fears being recalled to uniform and court-martialed should Trump defeat Kamala Harris next month and return to power.“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley recently “warned former colleagues”, the veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward writes in an upcoming book. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”Woodward cites Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist now jailed for contempt of Congress, as saying of Milley: “We’re gonna hold him accountable.”Trump’s wish to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who criticized him in print has been reported before, including by Mark Esper, Trump’s second secretary of defense. In Woodward’s telling, in a 2020 Oval Office meeting with Milley and Esper, Trump “yelled” and “shouted” about William McRaven, a former admiral who led the 2011 raid in Pakistan in which US special forces killed Osama bin Laden, and Stanley McChrystal, the retired special forces general whose men killed another al-Qaida leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in Iraq in 2006.Milley was able to persuade Trump to back down, Woodward writes, but fears no such guardrails will be in place if Trump is re-elected.Woodward also describes Milley receiving “a non-stop barrage of death threats” since his retirement last year, and quotes the former general as telling him, of Trump: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.”Milley spoke to Woodward for his previous reporting. Woodward now reports the former general as saying: “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.“A fascist to the core.”Woodward, 81, made his name in the 1970s with Carl Bernstein during Watergate, the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. Woodward’s new blockbuster, War, will be published on Tuesday. His fourth book at least in part about Trump – after Fear, Rage, and Peril – stoked uproar this week with the release of revelations including that Trump sent Covid testing machines to Vladimir Putin early in the coronavirus pandemic, and that Trump has had as many as seven phone calls with the Russian president since leaving office.Milley was chair of the joint chiefs of staff from 2019 to 2023. His attempts to cope with Trump have been widely reported – particularly in relation to Trump’s demands for military action against protesters for racial justice in the summer of 2020 and, later that year, Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the election to Biden.Last year, marking his retirement, Milley appeared to take a direct swipe at Trump, then a candidate for a third successive Republican presidential nomination.“We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or tyrant or a dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” Milley told a military audience at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia. “We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”Since then, Trump has brushed aside Republican rivals to seize the nomination, campaigned against first Biden then Harris, and survived two assassination attempts. Less than a month from election day, he and Harris are locked in a tight race.In office, Trump memorably insisted senior military officers owed their loyalty to him, even reportedly telling his second chief of staff, the retired marine general John Kelly, US generals should “be like the German generals” who Trump insisted were “totally loyal” to Adolf Hitler during the second world war. Kelly mentioned military assassination plots against Hitler but Trump was not convinced.As told by Woodward, in 2020 Trump became enraged by pieces McRaven wrote for the Washington Post and the New York Times – writing in the Post that “there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil” – and comments McChrystal made on CNN, calling Trump “immoral” and “dishonest”.“As commander-in-chief” of US armed forces, Woodward writes, “Trump had extraordinary power over retired commissioned officers. It was within his authority to recall them to active duty and court-martial them. But it had only been done a few times in American history and for very serious crimes. For instance, when a retired two-star [general] was charged in 2017 with six counts of raping a minor while on active duty in the 1980s.”So Trump summoned Milley and Esper. The president demanded action but the two men told him not to seek to punish McRaven and McChrystal, because they had a right to voice their opinions and because it would backfire, drawing attention to their words.“The president didn’t want to hear it,” Woodward writes.So Milley switched tack.“‘Mr President,’ Milley said. ‘I’m the senior military officer responsible for the good order and discipline of general officers and I’ll take care of this.’“Trump’s head whipped round. ‘You really will?’ he asked skeptically.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“‘Absolutely,’ Milley assured him.“‘OK, you take care of it,’ President Trump said.”Such dramatic Oval Office scenes are familiar from previous books by Woodward and legions of competing reporters and former Trump officials. According to Woodward’s new reporting, Milley did take action after fending Trump off, calling McRaven and McChrystal and warning them to “step off the public stage”.“‘Pull it back,’ Milley said. If Trump actually used his authority to recall them to duty, there was little Milley could do.”Woodward then quotes Milley speaking this year about his fear that Trump will seek to punish his military critics if he returns to power.McRaven, now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Milley’s fear of retribution and whether he shared it.Trump has given such figures plenty of reason to worry. Among proliferating campaign-trail controversies, the former president has frequently voiced his desire for revenge on opponents and critics, including by using the FBI and Department of Justice to mount politically motivated investigations. At rallies, Trump has frequently told crowds: “I am your retribution.”The Utah senator Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, was recently asked about possible consequences of his own opposition to Trump including votes to convict in both his impeachment trials.“I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word,” a “suddenly subdued” Romney told the Atlantic. “So I would take him at his word.”Woodward also reports Milley’s harrowing experiences since stepping down as chair of the joint chiefs.“Since retiring, Milley had received a non-stop barrage of death threats that he, at least in part, attributed to Trump’s repeated attempts to discredit him.“‘He is inciting people to violence with violent rhetoric,’ Milley told his wife. ‘But he does it in such a way it’s through the power of suggestion, which is exactly what he did on 6 January” 2021, the day Trump incited supporters to attack Congress, in hope of overturning his election defeat.“As a former chairman, Milley was provided round-the-clock government security for two years. But he had taken additional precautions at significant personal expense, installing bullet-proof glass and blast-proof curtains at his home.” More
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Digested week: ‘Just moving’? Tell that to Florida zookeepers
MondayAlong with death and divorce, moving makes up the trinity of what are supposed to be life’s most stressful experiences (assuming you don’t live on the Florida coast). On Monday, literally two and a half months after it left the US, my ship came in carrying among other things a large sectional sofa, a 200lb oak bookcase and 84 boxes of assorted personal effects, including an old colander with dried spaghetti stuck to the side and a tea strainer with a hole at the rim. The entire day was like a workshop on the consequences of poor decision-making.Apart from the books, I hadn’t missed any of the stuff and had come to the conclusion I’d be fine if it wound up at the bottom of the ocean. Instead, three men hauled the shipment up three flights of stairs while I dithered in the kitchen, occasionally popping my head round the door to assuage my anxiety by saying things such as: “At least it’s not raining!” and “Your job is so hard!” I hate myself sometimes.And while moving in is less stressful than moving out, it’s still brutal enough to make you wonder what exactly the problem is. Seeing all the things you invest meaning in out in the world, sad and undefended; wondering if your essential self is inextricably tied up in a bunch of 30-year-old birthday cards and some scraps of fabric you no longer fit into; the sinking feeling of never quite being able to out-run your stuff. Or maybe it’s just the stress of having large bodies crash into your walls, knocking chunks of plaster off at the corners. In New York, one of my movers had tried to counsel me while I watched everything go out the door. “It’s not life or death,” he said. “It’s just moving.” But I don’t think I agree.TuesdayPoliticians running for office in the UK are often forced into photo opps in pubs, pulling pints like the world’s most ill-at-ease bartender. In the US on Tuesday, Kamala Harris cracked open a beer with Stephen Colbert on his CBS late show and it was hard to tell just how awkward it was. The show tapes in New York, so the studio audience was ecstatic, but Harris still occupies a strange zone between someone who is highly polished and charismatic and a person who struggles to seem anything but wooden in public appearances.View image in fullscreenUnlike poor Rishi Sunak and his football gaffe around the Euros, in her of-the-people performance on Tuesday night, Harris sailed through the sports section, smartly ducking Colbert’s NFL question about Pennsylvania’s Steelers v Eagles with a pivot to her home town 49ers. But her response to Colbert’s chuckley invitation to swear about Donald Trump (“it starts with a W, there’s a letter in between, and the last letter’s F”) was sufficiently coy and self-satisfied to make one wonder about its utility beyond anyone-but-Trump-ers.WednesdayA scene straight from Hitchcock in a video taken in Washington state this week, where a woman who had, for years, been feeding the local raccoons woke up to find her house surrounded. A single raccoon is cute; 100 of them – bearing down on a house with hungry looks on their faces – is a horror movie, particularly when you discover that raccoons fall into that category of “cuddly looking animals that on a bad day could kill you”. The local sheriffs were called to disperse the hoard and issue the woman, whose name has not been released, with a stern advisory to quit encouraging them. It’s a lesson one hopes that might reach the lunatics who feed pigeons (and rats) in the city.ThursdayAs Hurricane Milton makes landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast, most of the coverage rightly focuses on the threat to human life. But two stories of volunteers staying behind to care for the animals delivers a much-needed antidote to stories of horrifying destruction. At the Turtle hospital in the Florida Keys, conservationists gently move the rescue facility’s cohort of giant turtles out of the tidal pools to stop them getting bashed. And at Tampa zoo, a team of 12 workers elect to ride out the storm to protect more than 1,000 animals from harm, chopping up weeks’ worth of food for them and, Old Testament-style, moving them into storm-proofed containers.Meanwhile CNN anchor Anderson Cooper flies down from New York to put himself in harm’s way, gets hit in the face by flying debris while live on air, and mutters sheepishly, “Well, that wasn’t good, we’ll probably go inside shortly.” Bloody idiot.FridayIt’s that jolly time of year again in which we are offered the opportunity to slash an artery while attempting to gut a pumpkin, station it on our sideboards until it fills the room with the smell of rotting veg, then watch it slowly collapse in on itself while leaking orange fluid. For some, this year, there may be a get-out in the form of a national pumpkin shortage, which has hit Britain due a combination of a cold wet spring, slugs, and an unmistakable gift from the gods to those of us who find seasonal craft projects more stressful than moving. More
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Hurricane misinformation signals how US election lies could intensify
Alex Jones, the longtime conspiracy theorist liable for millions for defaming school shooting victims, started a broadcast this week with one of his favorite topics: weather manipulation.“All right, I did a lot of research and a lot of preparation the last 30 years for what I’m going to be covering today,” he said. “Coming up, I’m going to do a big presentation for everybody on what’s really going on with weather weapons.”Amid two hurricanes – one of which hit two swing states – formerly fringe characters like Jones contributed to a swirl of conspiracy theories, many becoming uncomfortably mainstream. The weather was being controlled, some of the theories went, to prevent Republicans from voting and fend off a Trump victory.The misinformation since Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina and Georgia and Milton hit Florida offers a test run for how election day could go – and it’s not looking good.Social media sites like X, Facebook and TikTok all gave a platform to hurricane truthers and politicians who saw an opening to spread doubt and distrust of government. That distrust in some cases then led to threats and harassment against aid workers, meteorologists and government officials.The hurricanes hit at a crucial time in the US election calendar – about a month out from November’s presidential contest. Because Helene hit two swing states, turnout could be affected by the storm’s devastation and affected states are considering rule changes to accommodate people who may not have transportation or identification. Those changes will become fodder for allegations that the election will be rigged.“This is the singularity of rumoring: procedure change, powerful people, aid money, location changes, swing states,” said Danielle Lee Tomson, the election rumor research manager at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. “My bingo card is filled up.”Already, many on the right, encouraged by Donald Trump, have claimed Democrats are trying to steal the election through a variety of means, none of which are proven.“Add a hurricane to that, and you have a compounded and highly opportunistic situation to jump in and create rumors or narratives or frame certain events for political gain,” Tomson said.Voters in hurricane zones are likely uncertain after losing their documents, being displaced from their homes, and losing access to reliable transportation. That uncertainty creates a vacuum where rumors can grow, and people with incentives to capitalize on the uncertainty can step in and advance their political goals.They can – as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has – double down on the weather manipulation claims. They can – as Donald Trump has – falsely claim federal disaster funds have run out because it instead went toward migrants.“There are a lot of good reasons to critique aspects of Fema from an emergency management perspective,” said Sarah DeYoung, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies disaster response. “But critiquing the way the system unfolds according to the National Response Framework is a little bit different than blatantly false information about funding being diverted to support illegal immigrants instead of hurricane victims.”In North Carolina, the board of elections made changes to increase accessibility for people affected by the hurricane, allowing increased use of absentee ballots and dropoff options. The Trump campaign had requested improvements for access in Hurricane-ravaged areas, many of which disproportionately hold Republican voters. Still, the move immediately drew skepticism from the right.“I don’t know if I love or hate these late changes in the election law,” Fox host Jesse Watters said in a broadcast. “But I know Marc Elias, the Democrat election lawyer who specializes in shenanigans, loves it, so that makes me a little suspicious.”The Gateway Pundit, a far-right website, contributed to the doubt cast on the rule changes, headlining its story: “Here We Go: North Carolina Officials Change Election Rules in Hurricane-Devastated Counties that Mostly Voted for Trump, Fueling Republican Election Integrity Concerns.”The conspiracies about the hurricanes racked up massive views on social media. In one video shared on X of clouds, a woman claims “they’re chemtrailing the fricking crap out of us”. It got nearly 8m impressions. Another post encouraged people in Florida to ignore evacuation orders, claiming a plot was afoot to prevent Floridians from returning to their homes after the storm. “This looks a lot like a J6-style trap to invoke an insurrection and declare martial law to cancel the election,” wrote the account @healthranger, which has 245,000 followers on X.Chuck Edwards, a Republican representative from North Carolina, put out a lengthy release debunking a series of rumors about Fema, search-and-rescue efforts and weather manipulation. Fema’s response has had “shortfalls”, he said, but “nobody can control the weather”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I encourage you to remember that everything you see on Facebook, X, or any other social media platform is not always fact,” he wrote. “Please make sure you are fact-checking what you read online with a reputable source.”DeYoung, who is originally from western North Carolina, is in a lot of local disaster recovery groups on Facebook as part of her research. One of the groups, which has more than 7,000 members, was sharing information about supplies and relief areas. After a few days, it changed its cover page to say Fema was funneling money to illegal immigrants.“That’s just an example of some of the challenges we’re facing, because it’s become hyper-partisan, which actually gets in the way of people receiving accurate information about relief, supplies, response,” she said.Abbie Richards, a video producer at Media Matters for America who studied climate change conspiracies on TikTok for her master’s thesis, found a host of videos on the platform that alleged Fema was confiscating resources, blocking roads or stealing donations – all false claims the agency has confronted in Helene’s aftermath.“They’re seeing this misinformation, they’re believing it, and they feel like Fema is against them,” she said. “I’ve seen people call for civil war, and then I’ve seen explicit calls to unalive Fema personnel, or saying that Fema personnel can be arrested or shot or hanged on the spot.”Election conspiracies are baked into a lot of these videos, such as the idea that Democrats are controlling the weather or the government isn’t responding at the level it should because the areas affected are Republican-led, she said.The spread of misinformation and ties to the election don’t bode well for how lies or rumors will unfold on election day and afterward, she said.“The infrastructure for communication via social media has grown more complicated in the last four years,” Richards said. “More people are online. More people know how to make videos. More have their phones out, recording every moment. But that just adds to the sheer volume of it, and it’s quite clear that the social media platforms are not prepared.”Rightwing figures are using these storms not only to sow doubt, but to rally the troops against the people they allege are trying to prevent them from voting for Trump.Mike Flynn, the short-lived national security adviser under Trump who is now a far-right figure with 1.7 million followers on X, laid out the crises facing the nation: hurricanes, fires, overseas wars, censorship, “fake and real declared pandemics”, “stolen elections”.“The globalists are pulling out all the stops,” he wrote on X. “Don’t worry, we have them right where we want them, and oh yeah, the real storm is coming. @realDonaldTrump and the tens of millions of Americans who will #MAGA.” More
