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“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” — Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity — a Sherlock Holmes Short Story”
Two assassination attempts.
White powder sent to state election officials around the country.
Election workers and other local government officials consistently harassed nationwide.
All since this summer.
And now federal workers trying to help North Carolinians affected by Hurricane Helene have been chased away from their work by reports of an armed militia on the hunt for Federal Emergency Management Agency employees.
The “militia” turned out to be a lone man, William Jacob Parsons, 44, armed with a handgun and a rifle when police arrested him, but Parsons’ threats against FEMA workers forced recovery teams on Monday to briefly evacuate an area where they were clearing roads to allow access to hurricane-ravaged communities.
Crews were back in place Monday afternoon, according to the Washington Post.
However, as a precaution against violence, many FEMA crews now work in static locations, asking victims to come to them, instead of going door to door as they typically do.
While Parsons was the only armed perpetrator and rumors of truckloads of militiamen on the prowl turned out to be unfounded, Parsons wasn’t the only person bothering FEMA workers and others as they tried to reach hurricane victims. Numerous other North Carolinians shouted at hurricane relief crews (“We don’t want the government here!”), kicked crews off their property, and told them to leave town.
FEMA and other emergency management leaders blamed the tensions on a rash of misinformation about FEMA and its response to Helene.
Too many people believe FEMA’s giving only $750 to each hurricane survivor (that’s an initial payment to help with immediate needs while claims are processed) and that FEMA gave hurricane relief money to migrants (the money for migrants sits in a separate account established by Congress and FEMA can’t legally tap that fund for hurricane victims). Other untrue rumors include tales that FEMA is supposedly bulldozing hurricane wreckage with bodies beneath it and that FEMA is only aiding areas where residents vote for Democrats.
“It’s terrible because a lot of these folks who need assistance are refusing it because they believe the stuff people are saying about FEMA and the government,” Riva Duncan, a former U.S. Forest Service official who lives in Asheville, told the Washington Post. “And it’s sad because they are probably the ones who need the help the most.”
Never in my life would I have imagined hurricane victims not only turning away federal aid but actively working to chase federal workers out of devastated communities.
How weird can it get?
How dangerous?
Old-fashioned misinformation — conspiracy theories, exaggerations, and outright lies from politicians, political groups, and even foreign adversaries — is bad enough. We’ve seen innumerable times in recent years how normally rational people can be driven to do irrational things when they believe a lie.
But this election cycle, we also must contend with artificial intelligence.
AI technology — improving and adapting by the day — can easily manufacture photos and videos and mimic people’s voices. At first, AI generated slightly off-looking images, with extra fingers and arms and enough oddities to make the deepfakes easy to spot. But AI is learning, and those oddities become rarer all the time.
Even if it’s not used to manufacture deepfakes to try to paint a politician in an unflattering light (which it has been), the very existence of AI erodes trust. It makes people doubt whether whatever they’re seeing or hearing is real.
If any photo, video, or audio clip could be manufactured, people will dismiss real photographic, videographic, or audio evidence, and they won’t believe anything.
Except what they want to hear.
That’ll harden people’s beliefs, worsen polarization, and make the chance for compromise slip further and further away.
The chance for violence will grow.
A heavily polarized populace — and we are a heavily polarized populace — is like dry kindling sitting in an arid summer sun.
And, right now, lit matches are falling everywhere, coming from the mouths of politicians and from foreign governments working to disrupt our democracy and from our friends and family trying hard to get us to believe as they believe. With social media, the matches fall faster and multiply more quickly.
It’s raining fire.
What will catch?
What will happen then?
As you’re reading this, we have 18 days until Election Day, 80 days until Congress certifies the Electoral College count, and 94 days until the next president is sworn in on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
Will we make it to all those dates without further violence?
Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.