The Right Meets Hurricane Helene With a Storm of Lies

As communities in the Southeast continue to dig out from the devastation of Hurricane Helene—and as western Florida prepares for Category 5 Hurricane Milton to make landfall later this week—hurricane victims and first responders are contending with a demented storm surge of misinformation surrounding federal rescue efforts. The false claims began in earnest with an incendiary Trump talking point that the Federal Emergency Management Administration had run out of funds after diverting $1 billion to shelter migrants, the Trump movement’s all-purpose demons of civic destruction. That piece of political folklore launched first in the fever swamps of social media, but soon was emblazoned on the cover of the New York Post, and furnished the occasion for solemn editorials in other right-wing newspapers. In reality, only one US president has ever channeled FEMA money to migrant support—and it was Donald Trump in 2019, per a Washington Post report.

Of course, Republican-authored actions are routinely attributed to enemies in the unfiltered, overheated right-wing messaging complex—but this fallacious claim was just the opening volley in a steady torrent of paranoid conspiratorial claims about insufficient, corrupt, and expropriation-minded federal disaster relief after Helene leveled communities in the southeast. When Kamala Harris said in an interview that storm victims would receive an instant $750 FEMA grant to cover expenses for essential needs such as housing, food, and infant formula, that got shortened in MAGA discourse to the bogus claim that the federal government was giving each person affected by the storm just $750 and no more. Trump also took to his Truth Social account to claim, again falsely, that the Biden administration was withholding desperately needed assistance to Republican-leaning constituencies in North Carolina.

When one side of the MAGAverse was charging the feds with cruelly shortchanging storm victims, another group was alleging that they were displacing them entirely with eminent domain land grabs. An account on Elon Musk’s cesspool of innuendo, X, declared that the government was seizing the storm-devastated town of Chimney Rock, North Carolina, and letting corpses pile up in the open as they executed their sinister scheme. This was all complete bullshit, but yielded 3 million views on Twitter, and another million-plus when it spilled over to TikTok.

And where his excitable users are circulating destructive lies, Musk himself is sure to be close behind. The oafish MAGA cheerleader declared that FEMA officials were guilty of “treason” and elevated yet another post claiming that scarce FEMA funds were being redirected to undeserving migrants. He also endorsed the bogus assertion that the Federal Aviation Administration was blocking the airspace above storm-battered communities, throttling the operations of Musk’s Starlink connectivity company and preventing aid from helicopters from arriving. Musk also lent credence to still more demented claims that federal officials were blockading aid and seizing goods on the ground in Helene’s path. The FAA and Starlink whoppers came a cropper when Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg broke into Musk’s feed to debunk them, and scheduled a follow-up call with the filter-free man-boy.

All of this digital lie-promotion has created real hazards amid a crippling disaster. FEMA isn’t dedicating scarce resources and time to migrant demands in the storm’s wake—but the agency has had to post a web site to discredit the false stories about the nature and reach of its relief efforts, so that affected citizens can actually obtain the aid they need. The North Carolina Department of Public Safety has been forced to take the same precaution, to ensure that victims know that aid is indeed available to them. Political leaders in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida have all issued pleas to Trump and his followers to stop spreading falsehoods about aid responses—all to little avail, since MAGA propagandists are hoping to reap political benefits from all the slander. (Yes, all the Trumpian assertions that the Biden administration has politicized the FEMA response beyond any point of effectiveness are still another instance of flagrant projection on the right, and yes, I’m tired of continually pointing this out.)

Indeed, federal lawmakers are now refusing to ensure the most basic safeguards against the pending calamity of Milton’s landfall. This week, an effort endorsed by many GOP lawmakers in the Southeast to reconvene the recessed House of Representatives to vote on an emergency supplemental funding bill for hurricane relief was scotched by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who—I hope you’re sitting down—has also echoed the MAGA myths around the federal government’s Helene response. In addition, the wave of post-Helene storm lies on the right are a likely prototype for the similar torrent of bullshit the MAGAverse is bound to unleash should Trump lose the 2024 election, as Jay Kuo and Brian Beutler have each argued. On this disinformation front, Johnson, a steadfast 2020 election denier, is already proving a loyal apparatchik. (Meanwhile, the ever-right pandering governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who mounted his failed presidential run in large part on his record of dismissing federal Covid relief, has refused to take calls from either Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris about post-Helene cleanup plans, in another feckless act of political theater sure to harm the lives of his constituents.)

Such crass ideological grandstanding during a grievous emergency is plenty sickening on its own terms. But there’s a far broader sort of historical projection fueling this bad-faith failure to govern. The conservative governing project sustained one of its worst moments of comeuppance in 2005, during the George W. Bush administration’s failure to respond effectively to the landfall of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans—just 73 miles from Johnson’s home district in Baton Rouge. No one knows better than the House speaker what a botched federal response can do to a storm-ravaged community—and yet in speech and action, he’s doing everything in his power to obstruct effective aid support in Helene’s wake and on the eve of Milton’s landfall. Johnson, Musk, and Trump have all done precisely what they revel in accusing federal emergency officials of doing—obstructing, diverting, and otherwise monkey-wrenching the flow of critically needed resources for their own venal and short-term political gain. You might cite it as a textbook example of the cunning of history, if it weren’t all so unbearably stupid, cruel, and sad.