Unfortunately, this is the sort of world we’re becoming. If we are looking for scapegoats, former United States president and presidential hopeful Donald Trump is fundamentally to blame for this new and undesirable order, as are many of his toadies, family members and the milquetoast members of the Republican Party.
Their agenda to subvert truth and generate "alternative facts" has found room to flourish in the Covid-19 era, with many disaffected and angry people ready to blame the messengers, be they scientists, journalists or politicians, for bearing bad news they do not want to hear.
Such cynicism, nihilism or anarchism even, is quite different from being sceptical. Healthy scepticism is an excellent personal quality to have. Journalism thrives on it. Human knowledge has been accumulated by questioning of ideas and authority over many centuries.
However, we all have to believe and trust in something. Even people who don’t want to believe in things are effectively subscribing as a group to a belief, one in which they choose not to trust anything.
It’s like life as it really is has become just too hard for some in society to cope with. In some ways it is understandable - there are plenty of people who have been left behind by the education system, the economy and the workforce, who feel cut out of the loop when it comes to politics and knowing who to look up to, and whose lives have been significantly affected by mandates and the pandemic.
But there’s a line between uncertainty and the kind of barminess which causes people to lose the plot completely. The gullibility of some is manipulated cruelly by callous, self-serving leaders for whom the end justifies the means.
Mr Trump and his ilk quickly saw this as an opportunity from which they could sow the seeds of distrust.
They worked to turn the fear and grief of affected communities into anger by suggesting that President Joe Biden and his administration were deliberately slow in their response because the states were Republican strongholds and they wanted to use the aid money instead to support illegal immigrants.
Not only that, but also some of the far-right fanned the flames of fury with the preposterous proposal that somehow Mr Biden was controlling the development and movement of the hurricanes.
We know, of course, this is utter tosh. However, there is already a bunch of conspiracy theories circulating in the US that cloud-seeding methods are now advanced enough to control the weather. And don’t get these people started on plane contrails.
As a consequence of the claptrap hawked by Mr Trump and supporters, aid workers and meteorologists have been receiving death threats. Unfortunately, such intimidation is not limited to the US, with forecasters and climate scientists in many countries now routinely being threatened because of deliberately spread disinformation by malign influences.
Weather forecasters, who strive to save lives with the best advice they can provide during extreme weather conditions, have been weaponised by Mr Trump and the insanity he peddles.
To the logical minded, such a situation beggars belief. Barely a decade ago it would have been close to unheard of to put forward such nonsense.
In the end, the kind of world we want is entirely our choice. Do we want one built on the truth, on long-established science and proven facts, in which we have the best chance of knowing what is actually happening around us, what the state of our health really is, and one in which our homes remain standing due to the proper appreciation and application of physics and engineering?
Or do we want to go with the lies, the misinformation and disinformation, the utter lunacy? Tread that path and you’ll very soon reach the end of things, the collapse of society and everything most of us hold dear.
