Disinformation is the fifth horseman

On the eve of Halloween 1938 CBS Radio Network broadcast an Orson Welles dramatisation of H G Wells’s The War of the Worlds. The brash young American took a bit of a liberty with the work of his British namesake by starting the show off with a breaking-news style telling of the story, meant to convince listeners that the Martians were actually invading the good ol’ USA.

It has almost become folklore that mass panic resulted with more than a few million Americans getting into their jalopies and heading for the hills. Historical research, however, revealed the story was greatly exaggerated. Many citizens wanting to find out if the little green men were really crossing the George Washington Bridge phoned up their local newspaper, regarded at the time as a generally reliable and therefore trusted source of information.

Scaring people about mythical invaders is of course stock in trade for Donald Trump as he talks about migrants bringing in “drugs”, “crime” and “languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of.” Maybe some of the migrant hordes speak Martian?

Yet there were some Americans who definitely needed to escape their homes recently not to head for the hills but to get away from the coast as two major hurricanes battered the South Eastern Seaboard. Largely gone now are the days when they could rely on local news sources for information. In the past two decades around 2,500 newspapers have folded in America with a loss on average of about two a week. These closures have lead to a decline in civic involvement and increased political polarisation.

Disinformation has become the fifth horseman of the apocalypse with a deluge of it being spread by Trump supporters in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton via so-called social media. The occurrence of the hurricane itself was a plot by the Democrats to prevent votes for Trump, according to Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Yes they can control the weather,” she remarked, without this time saying it was done by “Jewish space lasers”.

Claims were also made that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) weren’t supplying financial relief to people in disaster areas because their funds had been “diverted to migrants”. It’s not in FEMA’s remit to even do this and at least $137 million of relief money has been distributed in relief so far. Additionally FEMA workers’ relief work has been hampered by death threats from far-right militias.

A lot of the disinformation has been spread by Russian state media outlets, including AI-generated pictures of flooding at Disney World which never happened. Right-wing “influencers” on social media have been paid millions of dollars to spread disinformation so that Vlad’s pal (Trump has been in contact with Putin on several occasions since leaving office) gets re-elected.

Can Trump pull it off a second time? Are American voters oblivious to the fact that his own former Chief of Staff John Kelly calls him a Hitler-admiring fascist?

There are causes for hope. Women are more like to vote than men, and the abortion issue is a big motivation for them to turn out. The polls don’t take into account new voters, many of whom are enthusiastic for Harris. And many of the polls and betting sites artificially skew towards Trump.

Trump has set things up to be able to cry “fraud” if he actually goes down when the ballots are counted. We are going to have a repeat of the shenanigans of 2020 if the outcome is a narrow Democrat victory, and with the prospect of his minions in the Supreme Court helping him out.

An interesting observation was made by Rick Wilson of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project recently as to why Trump’s wife, daughter, and son-in-law are invisible in his campaign. “You know Trump is losing because Jared, Ivanka and Melania are nowhere to be seen. If he was really ahead, they’d be all over the campaign like jackals on a two-day-old gazelle corpse.”

Fingers crossed that assessment proves correct!