America is self immolating. Reality is the kindling. Trumpism and Fox News provide the spark. Social media is the gasoline. It may seem like 2020 is beset by an endless wildfire of disparate bad news stories, but beneath all of them is a familiar bed of lies. And somehow we sleep while our beds are burning. In Oregon, fake news trumps real flames. From NPR: Oregon Officials Warn False Antifa Rumors Waste Precious Resources For Fires. The firehose of misinformation about the burn zones is similar to the one being used to keep Covid-19 burning brightly in America, but in the case of West coast fires, the lies are not beating an invisible threat, they are beating back an inferno that people can see, smell, and feel. Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic: In Trump’s Virtual World, Real Catastrophes Do Not Compute. “Mythical looters and mythical anarchists are now more frightening to some people than an actual forest fire.”

+ Everywhere you look, reality is on the ropes. Here’s how it’s affecting health. A new poll “finds that the public’s trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S.’s top doctors, like Anthony Fauci, is rapidly dropping, particularly among Republicans. It also finds that a sizable percentage of Americans still hold a number of incorrect beliefs about the pandemic, and that less than half of Americans surveyed would want to get vaccinated against Covid-19 if a vaccine was available before November.”

+ Here’s how it’s affecting the perception of weather. “Likely Trump-voting Florida residents were 10 to 11 percentage points less likely to evacuate Hurricane Irma than Clinton voters (34% versus 45%), a gap not present in prior hurricanes.”

+ Here’s how it’s affecting the voting. ‘This is f—ing crazy’: Florida Latinos swamped by wild conspiracy theories. “George Soros directs a “deep state” global conspiracy network. A Joe Biden win would put America in control of “Jews and Blacks.” The Democratic nominee has a pedophilia problem. Wild disinformation like this is inundating Spanish-speaking residents of South Florida ahead of Election Day, clogging their WhatsApp chats, Facebook feeds and even radio airwaves at a saturation level that threatens to shape the outcome in the nation’s biggest and most closely contested swing state.”

+ NYT: In Visiting a Charred California, Trump Confronts a Scientific Reality He Denies. “A president who has mocked climate change and pushed policies that accelerate it is set to be briefed on the scorched earth and ash-filled skies that experts say are the predictable result.”

+ “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently hired David Legates, a climate change denier who’s previously maintained that the sun is to blame for global warming and that the ocean’s rising CO2 levels are fine because it means we get bigger crabs.” While the West Coast Burns, NOAA Welcomes a Climate Change Denier Onboard.

+ And the problem is widespead: Australia Burned Under a Haze of Misinformation Earlier This Year. The U.S. Is Next.