Editorial: After the storm, a flood of lies and antisemitism

As first responders, repair crews and so many other people rushed to the aid of flood-stricken North Carolina, we wrote that “the worst of the weather has brought out the best in America.”

That’s still true. But there’s a depressing postscript. The worst weather brings out the worst in some people. Three examples:

Donald Trump

There’s a direct line from his malicious lies about FEMA to the alarms that interrupted the agency’s door-to-door assistance efforts. There can’t be much that’s more depraved than his attempt to politicize a deadly hurricane with a deluge of falsehoods.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

The Georgia congresswoman claims “they” control the weather. It’s obvious whom she meant. She was already the author of the poisonous fantasy about Jewish space lasers starting Western wildfires. A direct line runs from Greene to the vicious antisemitic attacks targeting Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer and federal disaster relief officials.

Elon Musk

He owns the megaphone for those direct lines of lies, having turned X (formerly Twitter) into an open sewer for the most vile bottom-feeders, here and abroad.

In Helene’s wake, the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found 33 posts on X containing claims debunked by FEMA, the White House and virtually every national, state and local official involved in the massive recovery effort. As of Oct. 7, those lies were viewed more than 160 million times.

Overt antisemitism

Ten posts viewed 17 million times “contained overt antisemitic hate,” some directed specifically at Manheimer, Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas and Jaclyn Rothenberg, FEMA’s director of public affairs, the ISD said.

“In the comments,” ISD said, “users insinuated that Manheimer was part of a larger plot, in which she and others were ‘slowly and methodically taking over territory by territory every year … and finally the federal government.’”

What anyone’s religion or ethnicity has to do with the hurricane may not be apparent to reasonable people. But it’s deeply alarming because Greene evoked the oldest and deadliest of the world’s conspiracy theories, that Jews are to blame for any misfortune.

During the Black Death of the 14th century, rumors spread that Europe’s Jews had caused it by poisoning wells, food, even the air. A holocaust ensued.

“The massacres spread from one end of Europe to the other,” wrote Abram Leon Sachar, the founding president of Brandeis University, in his book “A History of the Jews.” “…Flame and sword devoured Jewish homes and cut down Jewish lives.”

In Strasbourg, he wrote, 1,800 Jews were burned alive on a Sabbath. In Mayence, now known as Mainz, 6,000 were butchered.

A social media sewer

Today’s social media spreads such poison farther and much faster than word of mouth ever could in medieval times.

“The partisanship on this disaster is bizarre and unfortunate,” Manheimer told the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board. “I had not heard the weather-control one before. That was new to me.”

Shame on Congress. If it were a responsible legislative body, it would expel Greene. The House expelled the fabulist George Santos for a fabric of falsehoods, but his lies put no one’s life at risk.

That Americans can be gullible is a recurring fact, memorably diagnosed decades ago in historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

What’s new and more dangerous is the combination of the internet, social media and a passel of politicians eager to exploit what they know not to be true.

Lies have consequences

Trump, for one, kept insisting even after being rebutted that the Biden administration had raided FEMA’s disaster budget for money to help “illegal immigrants.” What is true, according to PolitiFact, is that Congress gave FEMA a separate fund to house and feed immigrants who had been admitted here legally pending decisions on their asylum claims. The only president who ever redirected disaster money to immigration was Trump.

Lies have consequences. The outpouring of antisemitism is one of them. Another is the arrest of a 44-year-old North Carolina man accused of making threats against FEMA employees working to help the devastated Chimney Rock community.

Deputies found him with a handgun and a rifle. Comments he is said to have made at a gas station apparently prompted exaggerated reports of truckloads of armed men hunting for federal workers. Considering what was happening on social media, that rumor could not be ignored.

Meanwhile, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said he was concerned that people sorely needing FEMA’s assistance wouldn’t apply for it because of the toxic rumors, and he directed law enforcement assistance to FEMA and other relief agencies.

It’s almost incomprehensible that anyone would want to harass and threaten the people engaged in the exhausting, heroic work of comforting victims and helping a community recover from a disaster of historic scope. The word “evil” doesn’t begin to do it justice.

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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

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