Trump's right-wing disinformation also had a very specific emotional effect — or at least intent - which gave it power as political speech: it tried to turn people's horror over what was happening in LA - indeed, over the big, amorphous climate crisis - into anger. And Trump directed that anger towards Democratic elected officials. In this way, he transmuted feelings of helplessness into an emotion that can increase perceptions of agency and he used that emotion to his political advantage. In the face of terror, anger is a comfort, and scapegoating people as Trump scapegoated LA mayor Karen Bass and Gavin Newsome (who he called Gavin "Newscum") is a time-honored way to redouble that sense of agency and create social cohesion to boot. Meanwhile, voices on "our side" were reduced
to repeating bland facts.
Trump repeatedly turns climate-change disasters into events in which Democrats supposedly hurt the American public. He did it this past summer with Hurricane Helene, and he did it again with the LA blazes. And the right-wing propaganda machine surrounds that false narrative with a barrage of lies. Yet the way to combat and overcome this strategy is not by fact-checking or even just by connecting climate disasters to climate change. It's to clearly and repeatedly — in every venue and across all platforms - to tell a story of our own: climate change is caused mostly by our use of fossil fuels, and Trump's plan to expand fossil fuels and suppress clean energy is the kind of policy responsible for the loss of people's
homes, the destruction of their communities, and even their very deaths. Could you imagine Democratic politicians saying such a thing? Could you imagine mainstream journalists writing it? It seems almost impossible to believe they
ever would. The introduction of this discourse into the public sphere would be
📢 Trump's top-line climate disinformation strategy combines 4 tactics—Sleight-of-Hand, Fossil Fuel as the Main Character, Gaslighting, and Flood the Zone with Shit—to construct the lie that Democrats (not climate disasters) are killing people.
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