The truth is, it's getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren't taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars' Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were "weather weapons" unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and "truth seeker" accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was "spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton" in order to ensure maximum rainfall, "just like they did over Asheville!"

As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption "WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!" The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images - all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn't be obliterated overnight - offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.

Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, "The primary use of misinformation' is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary." This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information.

"The primary use of misinformation' is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

It doesn't matter how many times the posters known for disinformation, lies and gaslighting are corrected, they'll come right back to another post with the same bogus talking points and discredited lies as though the factual truth means nothing to them because they realize it's not those fact-checking who they're talking to, it's to reinforce the alternate "truth" of believers like themselves living in a separate reality with its own subjective truths based on "knowing" or "feeling" that their version is the correct one.