A month before the presidential election, the people running FEMA decided to venture outside the field of disaster relief and into the completely unrelated, if very trendy, business of policing “disinformation.” Of course, policing disinformation isn’t what FEMA is paid to do. It’s not why FEMA receives tens of billions of dollars from taxpayers every year. But in this case, the agency determined that it had no other choice. Disinformation, in the eyes of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had become its own kind of emergency. It was a disaster unto itself.
To that end, FEMA’s director — a woman named Deanne Criswell, who incidentally “broke the glass ceiling” to become the first woman to head the agency — announced that FEMA would be conducting a thorough investigation to, “uncover the source of conspiracy theories hampering Hurricane Helene relief efforts.” Among those conspiracy theories were that FEMA was directing funding to illegal immigrants and that FEMA was withholding assistance to certain demographic groups. As Criswell put it, “It’s really unfortunate that we try to create this level of fear that is impeding our ability to do our job at the level we need to do it.”
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