Donald Trump, among other highly visible Republicans, has spent the last week talking about the aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Helene, which left swaths of North Carolina and other states in ruin and killed hundreds of people. Rather than offer anything helpful these voices have joined a chorus of misinformation about the storm and the government’s response, making common cause with elements of the far left who are on the same page for different reasons. The thing about these narratives is that they’re not a different reading of the facts, separate perspective or a different take; they’re blatantly, completely false, stoked intentionally by people who have access to better information. A billion dollars has not gone missing from FEMA or been redirected to migrants, or Israel. There has been a massive federal response on the ground, and its aim is to assist people in acute need and take steps to begin rebuilding, not to confiscate land or anything nefarious. The $750 initial payment slated for people who’ve lost their homes is just that, a first and immediate bit of aid so they can eat and get some supplies before the rest of the aid is disbursed — funding that, by the way, several elected officials leading the disinformation charge themselves voted against. Some of those spreading these ideas might wave off concerns by claiming to be simply asking questions or engaging in normal political rhetoric, but the fact is that this is impacting actual emergency response on the ground. FEMA personnel report feeling fearful not just of the natural dangers of their jobs but the potential for threats and violence from people who believe they are ill-intended. People are less likely to follow instructions from a government they mistrust, which is a danger not just for the disasters that have already happened but those to come. Right now, Hurricane Milton is bearing down on Florida, the first major hurricane to directly threaten areas like Tampa Bay in more than a century. It could hit very hard, but you’ve got residents bombarded with messages from prominent commentators and elected officials saying that emergency management authorities are lying to them or even, as spouted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that they control the weather. A level of fracturing of a shared information space is a simple byproduct of our contemporary environment of social media and polarization; the sources to which people go for information have multiplied and siloed themselves off. But it wasn’t inevitable and it wasn’t just incidental. Influential people and powerful forces have spent decades actively and meticulously trying to destroy trust in institutions and the news media, believing this would serve their political and financial goals in the long run. The problem with unleashing that monster is it will just keep going. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, calls misinformation “a grave threat in the aftermath.” And there are GOP officials in several states all but begging people to ignore the party’s standard-bearer and several of its most prominent members. Maybe there’s no way to neatly put the genie back in the bottle, but the least they can do is stop fanning the flames. People are dying, and will continue to die, because of it.