It’s time now for a fact-check of North Carolina politics. Residents of western North Carolina continue to recover from the devastation brought by Hurricane Helene. As relief efforts are pouring into the region so, too, are claims about those efforts that may not be true. Paul Specht, of WRAL, joins me now for a closer look at five false claims made on social media that, in some cases, have been viewed by millions of people.
Marshall Terry: Ok. So one is this — that Chimney Rock residents were told their land was being seized by the federal government. This appeared in a post on X. What can you tell me about it?
Paul Specht: This was posted by a man named Chris Martenson — and he has about 200,000 followers on X — but there's no evidence to support it. The local county government — Rutherford County — they put a statement out on Facebook saying these claims are entirely false. I called House Speaker Tim Moore. He's a Republican. He represents part of Rutherford County — although not Chimney Rock. And we asked him, have you heard anything like this about the federal government seizing people's land around that area? Speaker Moore said that he absolutely had not.
Terry: All right. The next post you looked at said: "Joe Biden told the people of North Carolina they had no more supplies for us." Who said that? And is it true?
Specht: That was a quote from Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who's the Republican nominee for [N.C.] governor. He's running against Attorney General Josh Stein, who's the Democrat in that race. We reached out to [Robinson], and they never got back to us. We looked into what it could be, and we found a brief interaction Biden had with reporters when a reporter asked Biden: Are there any more resources the federal government could be giving? And Biden responded, no, we've given them, we've preplanned a significant amount of it. In that response, when he said no, he was speaking about resources that had already been given, but he didn't rule out additional resources.
And, then, by the time Robinson posted this claim on X, Biden had already signaled his intent to provide even more resources in a Sept. 30 press briefing, which was a couple days before Robinson put this claim on X.
Terry: You also took a closer look at another claim made by Robinson on X. He wrote on Oct. 2 — when Hurricane Helene was on its way to North Carolina — [that] Gov. Cooper was too busy hobnobbing with rich folks in New York to care about preparing for the storm.
Specht: The phrasing of this claim might give people the impression that Cooper was at a fundraiser or something like that. When I reached out to Robinson's campaign, they said they were referring to a conference that Cooper attended on Sept. 25. Now that would've been the Wednesday before the storm hit North Carolina on that Friday, and Cooper was up in New York City. He attended a conference on climate change. The more important detail here is that Cooper was back in North Carolina that same Wednesday, so then he was here and in the area as the storm did hit.
Another important piece of context that Robinson leaves out here while he's criticizing Cooper for being in New York ahead of the storm, Robinson was attending campaign events as the storm was hitting that Friday, on Sept. 27. He had events in Moore County, Laurinburg, Rockingham and in Mount Airy.
Terry: Now, you also looked at an Instagram post claiming Republican state House Speaker Tim Moore was preventing an out-of-state helicopter "from even going in and trying to kick us out." What's the context there?
Specht: This was from a video that a man named Jonathan Howard — that's how he identified himself — put on Instagram. And he said he was part of the Florida State Guard Special Missions Unit. He talked about flying in a civilian helicopter to western North Carolina the weekend after the storm hit. And he said, when I flew here on Sunday, they actually stopped us from going in — the sheriff's department — and it was because of a bunch of politics, and they were claiming it was the Speaker of the House of North Carolina that was preventing us from going in, and trying to kick us out. That's the end of that quote.
Now almost immediately after, Howard said "I later learned that Moore wasn't involved. Republican lawmakers called me to say, that's BS [and] Speaker Moore doesn't have anything against you. He wants you guys here." But then he sort of finished his thought by saying, "This is the kind of political nonsense" — I'm inserting a more appropriate word there — "that's happening here right now." And so people who heard that last quote might've thought like, oh, well, is more involved? They might've had some doubts there.
Tim Moore, the speaker of the North Carolina House, has not been involved in trying to block anyone from western North Carolina, whether it's civilians or military or whatever. Speaker Moore told us, in fact, he's been a huge proponent of integrating more civilian and nonprofit rescue efforts into the broader plan.
Terry: Now, here's another X post, and this one was seen more than half a million times. It says the 1,000 troops initially authorized to respond to North Carolina are "sitting around twiddling their thumbs" because Cooper hasn't "written up the mission orders that the troops need in order to be deployed." Who wrote that?
Specht: That was a post by the CEO and co-founder of the Federalist. And, now, that's a conservative media website. And it mischaracterizes the order of things and Cooper's involvement. Cooper actually asked President Biden on Sept. 30 to make all necessary resources available to North Carolina, and that same day he wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin granting consent for the North Carolina Army National Guard brigadier general to lead efforts as what they call a dual status commander for the emergency response. Austin, the defense secretary, authorized that on Oct. 1.
It looks like here the strokes of the pen that people are concerned about did happen between those two dates between Cooper and Defense Secretary Austin. Now, we reached out to FEMA and the National Guard and people like that. They told us that on Oct. 2, the 18th Airborne Corps that's based at Fort Liberty did provide the National Guard with seven Chinook helicopters that were delivering resources and joining rescue efforts the next day. Not everyone was deployed at once.
One thing that the National Guard, and others involved in rescue efforts have emphasized is, that you can't just throw all of your resources at these cities all at once. That's too chaotic. There's an order to things. It's inaccurate to say people were just sitting around with nothing to do and the appropriate papers were signed despite claims on social media.
Terry: Why is there so much false information circulating about this storm response?
Specht: My guess would be that it's because we're in an election season. North Carolina is a swing state — it's one that Trump will need if he wants to win. On the other side, if Vice President Kamala Harris wins this state, a lot of people believe that [N.C.] will secure the win for her. People online have incentive to spread misinformation.
