A North Carolina congressman had to reassure his supporters recently that the government didn’t create Hurricane Helene as part of a nefarious plot to steal lithium…one of many wild rumors in circulation. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says it’s a symptom of a problem that’s long plagued our country.
Chuck Edwards, the Republican congressman who represents the district that includes the North Carolina mountains, felt the need the other day to issue a press release telling his constituents, and many other concerned Americans, that the world is not flat.
Well, he didn’t say exactly that. But damn near.
In his press release, titled “Debunking Helene Response Myths,” Edwards explained that no, the government is not seizing the town of Chimney Rock to steal buried minerals; no, FEMA is not turning away donations or seizing people’s property; no, the FAA is not restricting airspace for rescue and recovery; and no, Lord help us, the government does not control the weather.
No matter what Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene says.
I understand that the devastation of Helene has stressed a lot of people to the breaking point. I understand that sometimes, when people lack information, their brains fill the gaps with the worst things they can imagine.
But the people who are suffering from the actual flood that Helene brought don’t deserve the flood of misinformation and outright lying that has come in behind it.
I can understand being suspicious of the government. Our job at WFAE is to be, among other things, professionally suspicious of the government. But it’s a whole other thing to look at a red light, swear it’s green, and floor it into the intersection, no matter who gets hurt.
I think two things are overlapping here.
One is that the media landscape is so fragmented now that a lot of people aren’t sure what or who to believe.
And the other thing is that a lot of people have settled on what they want to believe, whether it’s true or not, and they have found politicians willing to tell them exactly those things.
Donald Trump was president once, and might be again, because no other politician in our history has been as skillful and shameless at telling the lies his followers want to hear.
But let’s not pretend this is a new thing.
I recently read Wright Thompson’s book “The Barn,” which is about the place in Mississippi where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. You might know that two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, went on trial for Till’s murder. What you might not know is what their defense attorneys said really happened.
Their story was that Emmett Till was not actually dead — that the NAACP and probably the Communist Party, in cahoots with Till’s mother, had taken a body from a morgue and thrown it in the river, hoping somebody would find it so Till’s mother could identify it as her son, thereby making white Mississippi look bad.
This was their actual defense. The all-white jury acquitted them in 67 minutes.
I guess it’s possible that one or two of the jurors actually bought that story. But it’s far more likely that the jury had already decided that the death of a Black boy in Mississippi was not worth troubling themselves over, and the defense was just a necessary show.
We will only make our way forward if, to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence, we hold certain truths to be self-evident. The problem is not just that so many people find power and profit in lying. The problem is that so many others are willing to believe.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
