Should I Stay or Should I Go
The hurricane—or the pandemic—doesn't care where your information came from.
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In September of 2017, as Hurricane Irma snapped a right turn at Cuba and bore down on the Florida Keys, sentient pile of harrumphing compost Rush Limbaugh said the following on his immensely popular radio show:
There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it…. these storms, once they actually hit, are never as strong as they’re reported.
Ann Coulter followed with more “hurricane trutherism,” and this sort of right-wing weather denial found its way into mainstream news reporting. A few days later, the storm struck the Keys, and then the Florida mainland, causing tens of billions of dollars in damage and killing more than 80 people. In spite of his conspiracy-addled rhetoric, Limbaugh evacuated his Florida home in advance of the storm; a decent chunk of his fans, though, did not.
A new paper published in the journal Science Advances used a combination of precinct-level voting records and anonymized cell phone location data to analyze evacuation patterns in advance of Irma, as well as two prior storms, Matthew and Harvey. They found that in the days leading up to Irma, probable Trump-voting residents of Florida were more than ten percent less likely to evacuate than were probable Clinton voters—34 percent compared with 45 percent left their homes in response to hurricane warnings and evacuation recommendations. This was even more stark in the most polarized precincts, with fewer evacuees in strong Trump areas and more in strong Clinton areas.
The important point here is that this stark difference did not show up in similar analyses of Matthew and Harvey. As those hurricanes drew close, there were no right-wing fever dream segments claiming that NOAA and whatever gatherings of experts had somehow been co-opted into a demonic conspiracy to, I dunno, help people not drown as their house floated away. Evacuation rates were essentially identical between Trump and Clinton voters, until conservative media decided that dying to own the libs was worth it. Who knows if any of the 84 dead people in Florida would be alive if Limbaugh and his cronies hadn’t convinced them to stay home?
In other words, right-wing media might actually be killing you. And of course, we’ve been watching this play out in the slow-motion cyclone that is the COVID-19 pandemic for more than six months now. Limbaugh himself was among the many conservative media types to downplay the severity of the virus from the very beginning, and it only took a short course of his brand of expert-bashing, mirroring that of the president himself, for simple ideas like wearing a mask and not spending five hours licking the faces of all your fellow rally-goers to become political statements. It’s been asked every day for months, but just as with Hurricane Irma, how many of the 200,000 dead people would be alive if conservative media didn’t insist on disavowing every bit of scientific expertise the country has to offer?
And looking ahead, there is another looming metaphorical hurricane just waiting for such trutherism to submarine another year of American life. If we skip past the absurd Trumpian promise to have a magical coronavirus vaccine ready just in time for election day, whenever the actual, well-tested and proven vaccine(s) really do become available you can be sure the Limbaughs of the world will be primed and ready to shit all over its efficacy and safety, just because that’s contrary to what the actual scientists (and Democrats) are going to be saying.
It isn’t particularly difficult to imagine a scenario where vaccination rates among Republican voters falter far behind those of Democrats, just as the evacuation curves separated. In fact, there’s already evidence this is on its way: a Gallup poll asking if people will be willing to take a free, FDA-approved vaccine found that 81 percent of Democrats said yes, compared to an astonishing 47 percent of Republicans.
What happens then? You have millions of people, a group already largely disdainful of masks and social distancing, insisting that they have a right to continue to spread a virus that science and reasonable countries have under control. And it’s easy to sneer and say they’re only hurting themselves, but that’s obviously not true. Just as with the never-ending anti-vax arguments around measles, there are plenty of immunocompromised people who can’t get vaccinated, not to mention plenty of small children who have no choice in the matter and probably would rather not get sick and either die or potentially suffer long-term consequences so their parents can broadcast how opposed they are to the entire concepts of reason and logic and empathy.
The authors of the new evacuations paper said that right-wing media messaging caused “an immediate and high-stakes divide” in behavior. This small cadre of influential buffoons has incredible power, but they long ago decided to use it only to negate rather than confirm. There will be another hurricane on which, for some reason, Limbaugh and co. decide it is worth casting doubt; they continue to do so with a pandemic, providing it with all the warm ocean water it needs to keep raging across the country. All rational people—and rational media—can do is to try to drown them out, or so thoroughly explain and report incontrovertible truths that it, more or less, inoculates the confused against their next bout of deception.
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As you might have heard, the West Coast is on fire. Happily, a number of major outlets have made the connection between those apocalyptic orange skies and climate change explicit; here’s one, and here’s another.
[clears throat]: Cosmic Dust Bunny.
The Japanese operator of a tanker that spilled a bunch of oil onto some protected marine areas just off the island nation of Mauritius will pay $9 million to help with the restoration. Which seems a tad light, given the destruction of essentially priceless ecosystems.
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