In 1934, Adolf Hitler promised a “thousand-year Reich”— a millennium of fascist rule. But where he failed, Donald Trump could quite possibly succeed on a global scale — plunging the planet into a thousand-year eco-fascist climate disaster. If he wins — or steals — the election this year, the chance of avoiding severe climate disaster could vanish, driving mass migrations and resource wars on a scale never seen in human history — a new world order in which fascist dictatorships will flourish while peace-oriented democracies flounder and disappear. The climate we now know could vanish for a thousand years … or more.
Hurricane Helene — just a taste of what’s to come—should have been a wake-up call. But thanks to decades of corporate and rightwing gaslighting, turned up to 11 by Donald Trump, the media missed it. Climate chaos is already driving mass migration — the Central American influx eclipsing Mexican migration at the U.S. southern border since 2016 is just one facet of a worldwide pattern. But what’s happening is obscured by a trio of gaslighting big lies: climate denial, Great Replacement theory (migration as “an invasion” facilitated by “globalist elites”), and mass voter fraud (“they’re bringing in ‘illegals’ to vote”). None of these has any factual foundation, but media coverage isn’t grounded in facts. It lets itself be shaped by the repetition of simplistic big lies so that the real-world situation is entirely obscured — and with it any chance of solving the real problem.
Trump calls climate change “a hoax,” but the families of 270-plus victims of Hurricane Helene have good reason to bitterly disagree. Without the impacts of climate change, the vast majority of them would probably still be alive today. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that climate change caused 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. And made that high amount of rainfall up to 20 times more likely.
On top of the lives lost, damage estimates range as high as $250 billion, close to 1% of annual U.S. gross domestic product —and far more than the government spends annually to fight climate change, the vast majority due to the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump has promised to reverse.
Yet, even with the one-two punch of Helene followed by Milton — and both storms experiencing rapid intensification due to global warming’s impact on Gulf of Mexico water temperatures — the issue of climate change did not break through into the election campaign.
Instead, there was a flood of baseless conspiracy theories, which even resulted in threats to Federal Emergency Management Agency workers and others, which caused FEMA to temporarily suspend some rescue work.
Wake-up Call or Harbinger of Things to Come
By all rights, Helene should have been a wake-up call. Asheville, North Carolina, the largest population center in the hardest-hit area.Citizen Times had recently placed Asheville on a list of cities more likely to experience “climate migration.” But, in the words of a substack post by Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler, “You will not escape the climate crisis: We are literally all in this together.”
A basic problem, Dessler told Random Lengths News between hurricanes Helene and Milton, is a mismatch between how people think and how the climate works. “Humans are really good at linear thinking,” he said. They see the shortest distance between two points as a straight line, but climate impacts aren’t linear.
“They’ll think about climate change as small damages accumulating over a long time. Eventually, it will get really bad, but that’s decades in the future. And if I’m okay now, I’m going to be okay tomorrow, because it’s only accumulating these small damages,” he said. But, he warned, “That’s not the shape of the curve. The curve is much like a hockey stick, where it’s zero, and then, when we pass the threshold, the blade goes up very rapidly.”
Helene reflects the larger problem in miniature.
“A month ago or two weeks ago people in Asheville thought, ‘We’re fine. Yeah, this is a place we can avoid climate change,’ and yet they didn’t realize that in a week they were going to be wiped out. A lot of them are wiped out. And that’s the reality of climate impacts. You’re fine today, it’s gone tomorrow.”
It’s the job of the government and the media to take a longer view, in light of what’s scientifically known. But knowledge itself — and trust in those who know — have always been among fascism’s prime targets.
Stephan Lewandowsky, a British-Australian cognitive scientist, was targeted more than a decade ago. In 2013, an online journal retracted a study of online climate denialism he led, not because there was anything wrong with it, but due to harassment and threats of costly litigation, extensions of the very same denialism he was studying. It was a chilling foretaste of things to come.
“Unlike the attacks on me and other scientists at the time, the entire machinery of the Republican Party is behind the attacks, including in a committee in Congress run by Jim Jordan,” Lewandowsky told Random Lengths. Previously, politicians were involved, “but it was never the official Republican policy to go after climate scientists,” he said “whereas now going after misinformation research, going after fact checkers, trying to abolish fact checks altogether is a core mission of Trump and his team. And that is what makes the current situation very different.”
While some have argued that “the laws of physics will ultimately overcome conservatism” regarding climate change, and denialism would crumble, “I always thought that that was really optimistic,” Lewandowsky said. “I think we have entered a possible world in which reality is going to be cast aside almost entirely by people who, you know, want to keep things as they are and continue to make money, and they couldn’t care less what happens in the future and to other people. … I think that is what’s happening right now.”
Disaster of Conspiracy Theories
The flood of conspiracy theories in the wake of Hurricane Helene was symptomatic of that, along with a whole online conspiracy influencer industry that coalesced during the COVID-19 lockdowns, as described by author Naomi Klein on Democracy Now! “Climate change itself is presented as a hoax by the Davos elites in order to lock you in your homes to eat bugs,” Klein began. “But then they have to deal with the fact that people are encountering weather events that are very unnatural. So what’s the story for that? It’s the government manipulating the weather. Why is the government manipulating the weather? Because they want to drown the red states. Why aren’t they responding? Because they don’t want people to vote. And also, they’ve given money to migrants. So, it’s sort of a singularity of all the conspiracies. Who else is really behind it? It’s the Jews. It’s a whole mess of contradictory conspiracies.”
Lewandowsky wrote a whole paper on the incoherence of climate denial theories. “Climate deniers don’t care,” he said, “because what’s coherent about climate denial is the opposition to any mitigation policies and that’s a coherent political position,” and the position itself is never questioned. “The same thing is true I think with Trump,” he added. “He has a cult following, to whom all that matters is that Trump is Trump. And so if he’s being incoherent, what do they care about? ‘Oh, yeah,’ you know, ‘He’s just Trump being Trump.’”
What all this obscures is a relatively straightforward story: more energy trapped by greenhouse gasses makes the climate grow hotter and more unstable, causing increased weather catastrophes, disrupting lives on a mass scale, and driving increasing desperate migrations worldwide, all of which drives conflicts and strains government resources to the breaking point.
The non-linearities Dessler spoke of are most threatening in the form of “tipping points,” beyond which a new set of cyclic causation sets in.
“I’m actually far more worried about tipping points in the social system than tipping points in the physical climate system,” Dessler noted. “There are tipping points in the physical system — shutdown of the ocean circulation system, die-off of the Amazon — we don’t really have a good feel for how close we are to any of those,” he explained. “But I think that you can look at a tipping point to the social system and we are much closer to tipping points in that system,” he said. “Insurance is something I talk about a lot,” and Milton was just the latest threat leading to where “nobody is going there to insure property in Florida.”
The consequences are dire. “If people are not willing to insure property, then nobody’s going to be able to get a mortgage, because you can’t get a mortgage without property insurance. And if you can’t get a mortgage, that means property values are going to plummet, and people are much poorer than they think they are,” he warned. “A lot of people whose mortgages are underwater, financially as well as literally, are going to just walk away, you get this contagion that’s going to move through the entire economy.” What happened with mortgages in the financial crisis in 2008 was “a hiccup in the system, we can recover,” he said. “But climate risk is not going away. The insurance is not going to come back.”
Cali Consequences
Here in California, it’s wildfires rather than hurricanes, but a similar process can already be seen. In late September, State Farm projected a million-policy decline in five years in filings submitted to the California Department of Insurance. Its property insurance policies could decline from 3.1 million at the end of 2023 to just over 2 million by 2028. It’s seeking a massive rate increase, which could actually accelerate the process.
This is just one facet of the multiple problems unfolding from the growing climate crisis, which is challenging enough for the government to deal with. But if the root cause is denied, and how things from it are obscured, the possibility of effective action is virtually paralyzed. And that’s the danger of the disinformation we now face.
Lewandowsky and his colleagues have discovered that fact-checking conspiracy theories — trying to debunk them — isn’t effective. But inoculating against them — prebunking — can be. But the problem shown with Helene was the rapid explosion of new conspiracy theories, bolstered by false reports, which are impossible to anticipate beforehand, and thus prebut.
“What really is required is a deep structural change of the information environment,” Lewandowsky said. “The reason this can all happen is because the social platforms allow it, and they have algorithms that are, cooperating, collaborating with conspiracy theorists,” he said. “We know this with this great certainty because in the lead up to the 2020 election Facebook was able to change its algorithm repeatedly, so that the amount of misinformation people saw was dramatically reduced, and the same was true during the pandemic.”
Things were hardly perfect. Pandemic disinformation feeds protests that in turn feed into the Jan. 6 insurrection, as happened with Orange County activists Random Lengths covered at the time. But there were relatively few such activists—half a dozen from Orange County—things clearly could have been far worse. Facebook and other platforms prevented that from happening. “They’re perfectly able to protect the public against misinformation if they want it. And if they’re given the political incentive or mandate to do this,” Lewandowsky said.
“So why is all the stuff not happening?” he asked. “It’s because the platforms have given up on doing that by caving into Republican pressure. So if you want to fix these issues, then you’ve got to start with the algorithms and the platforms, and that’ll do 80% of the work for you. You don’t have to do any pre-bunking.”
Instead, what we’re getting is the exact opposite. Elon Musk has turned Twitter (now “X”) into an online Nazi bar, flooded with racist lies and disinformation, with Musk himself as one of the primary spreaders.
In early August, the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate reported that Musk’s misleading election claims had gotten 1.2 billion views on X, with no corrections. They identified 50 instances when Musk posted election claims debunked by independent fact-checkers, none of which displayed a “community note” to correct his claims or add context.
Like Henry Ford spreading the antisemitic Tsarist-forged “Protocols of the Elders” via his newspaper The Dearborn Independent a century ago, Musk today is America’s wealthiest automaker, spreading poisonous lies and conspiracies to the widest possible audience. In the wake of Helene, Politico ran a story in which they reported:
Musk has helped spread accusations that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “actively blocked” donations to victims of Helene and is “seizing goods … and locking them away to state they are their own” — allegations that FEMA officials call false and which run afoul of state and local Republican leaders’ praise for the assistance from Washington.
Ford was later praised by Hitler. But Musk’s relationship with Trump is much closer. A decade ago, he was seen as a champion in fighting climate change. Now he’s switched sides. Whatever happens to the planet, he thinks he’ll be fine. That’s Nazi thinking, pure and simple. The ubermensch has nothing to worry about. That’s what’s on the ballot this November. Nothing less than the future of the planet and the human race.
