We made it through the Bluenami without a national catastrophe, thank God. But had there been one, there would have been dozens of social media-savvy preppers ready for it. For weeks, and especially in recent days, media apps showed off bare shelves where toilet paper and bottles of water used to be. What caused the urgent preparation for a sustained power outage? As best as I can tell, it was the revelation of real, evidence-based, ongoing vulnerabilities colliding with insane, hysterical fearmongering from online personalities. And then the panic spread through social media.
On November 1, Tucker Carlson claimed that “under pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran.” That preposterous claim was the closest trigger for a flurry of scrambling to hunker down for Armageddon. But Carlson’s claims are a fiction. U.S. Central Command has largely held a defensive posture around the Strait of Hormuz, working to keep oil flowing and occasionally responding to IRGC attacks against shipping. If President Trump gave Admiral Brad Cooper the green light to conduct a more comprehensive attack against...