Fox News Pushes Dangerous (and Stupid) Hurricane Helene Conspiracy

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham has started pushing a wild conspiracy theory about the federal response to Hurricane Helene that seems copy-pasted from another natural disaster.

Ingraham hosted a segment speculating Monday night about what a strong leader Donald Trump would have been during the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, and criticizing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for their disaster response in North Carolina.

Ingraham also reignited an old conspiracy theory when criticizing Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttegieg, who, she remarked, “loves to go on TV campaigning for Kamala every five minutes.”

“But when will he go on TV to tell us when I-40 is gonna open? Or how many bridges are going to have to be totally rebuilt?” Ingraham sneered.

“Will they drop all their DEI regulations—any that still exist—to ensure that people get the help they need as fast as possibly, as possible?” Ingraham said.

Here, Ingraham’s claim seems to come out of nowhere, and it’s unclear what “DEI regulations” she imagines would prevent the distribution of aid or the rebuilding of vital infrastructure. Of course, DEI is something of a right-wing catch-all for any perceived institutional failure.

Seconds later, Ingraham ironically noted that a “delayed show of concern by our president and vice president has bred its own conspiracy theories.”

If blaming a natural disaster response on wokeness sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

In August 2023, voices on the far-right, including then-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, tried to spread a conspiracy theory that the local response to the wildfires in Maui had been weakened by the “DEI agenda.”

This comparison seems to have been exactly what Ingraham was going for, because during the same program Monday, Ingraham was joined by former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who has taken a sharp rightward turn since her Democratic run for president in 2020 to become a member of Trump’s campaign team.

Ingraham and Gabbard both likened the severe flooding in North Carolina to the devastating wildfires in Maui in August of 2023, and criticized the federal response based on… what exactly?

Gabbard claimed that some of her friends in Asheville and the surrounding areas said they had been experiencing the “same thing that happened to our communities in West Maui.” She said her friends “did not see a single federal official on the ground, not even a FEMA orange-vest wearing person.” Gabbard also insisted that the federal government was “focusing on bureaucracy.”

But shaky, sourceless reporting like Gabbard’s secondhand accounts is par for the course for Fox News. In August, host Maria Bartiromo repeatedly claimed that Democrats have been pushing to register “massive lines of illegals” to vote in Texas, but she never did any actual reporting to confirm that topic.

FEMA reported Monday that it had delivered about one million liters of water and more than 600,000 meals across North Carolina, according to NBC News. Residents and local officials have criticized the government for not being adequately prepared to deal with the severity of the destruction in Asheville, which was recently dubbed a “climate haven.”

The first—and probably only—vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and J.D. Vance is taking place Tuesday evening.

It’s sure to be entertaining, given both candidates’ unique tendency to be turned into memes, whether willing or not.

This may also be the last debate at all before the November election, as Donald Trump is thus far chickening out of a second debate with Kamala Harris. That makes it an important one, especially as early voting is already underway in much of the country.

If you are watching the debate, join The New Republic in a game of Bingo. (You can also throw our key terms into a Bingo card generator if you’d like to play with friends.)

The vice presidential debate will begin at 9 p.m. EST.  The debate will air in full on CBS News and its YouTube channel. Other outlets including C-Span and PBS News will also broadcast the event.

Despite President Biden’s public comments stating the opposite, the U.S. government actually backed Israel’s attacks and bombing of Lebanon.

Citing Israeli and U.S. officials, Politico reported Monday that White House officials told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to bomb Hezbollah targets, despite the fact that publicly, Biden was urging a cease-fire.

Specifically, presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told Israeli officials that the U.S. supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy to launch military attacks on Lebanon in order to convince Hezbollah to engage in diplomatic talks.

The U.S. government wasn’t united in this stance, however. Some officials in the State Department, the Department of Defense, and in the intelligence establishment warned Israel’s move could pull the U.S. further into another war in the Middle East. 

Israeli officials told their U.S. counterparts in mid-September of the change in military strategy, but didn’t mention any specifics. McGurk and Hochstein, while reportedly urging caution, replied that it was a good time to attack Lebanon as Hezbollah had suffered losses in previous months.

The report contradicts what the administration has said publicly. Biden was asked Monday if he was comfortable with an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, and replied, “I am comfortable with them stopping. We should have a cease-fire now.”

But, cease-fire talks are seemingly in limbo as Israel continues to bomb Lebanon, killing more than 700 people since September 23, including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday. Israeli officials dropped multiple U.S.-provided 2,000-pound bombs on residential buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs to kill Nasrallah. The U.S. government, led by Biden, appears unwilling to use its military support of Israel as leverage to stop the latest conflict, much as it refused to do in Gaza.

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance already has a major setback in his Tuesday matchup against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: Nobody seems to like him.

Favorability ratings aggregated by CNN political analyst Harry Enten indicate that the country’s opinion of Vance is appallingly low, at -11 percentage points, lower than any other politician currently in the race for the White House.

That makes Vance the least liked vice presidential pick in modern U.S. history at this point in the race—that is, before he’s even had a proper face-off against his opponent. He’s also the second vice presidential pick with a net negative favorability, preceded only by Dan Quale in 1988, who actually had a stronger position than Vance before his first debate with a -3 percent favorability rating.

Walz, meanwhile, is soaring. The “Midwestern Dad” ranked head and shoulders above the favorability ratings of everyone else in the race, including Vice President Kamala Harris, with a +4 percent favorability rating.

Enten’s analysis also suggested that 72 percent of polled Americans believed that Walz has the upper hand in Tuesday night’s debate, making Vance an aggressive underdog with just 28 percent of the country thinking he stands a chance of winning.

Vance’s aggressive rhetoric, baseless conspiracies, and just plain weird comments have rubbed Americans the wrong way in the months since he was selected to be Donald Trump’s right-hand man. The Republican vice presidential pick has ardently defended his position that childless adults should not hold positions of power as they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country, and derided Democratic Party leaders as “childless cat ladies.”

He also invented a lie about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has sparked at least 33 bomb threats to the sleepy city, forcing it to evacuate and temporarily shutter several of its schools, colleges, festivals, and a significant portion of its government facilities, including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School.

And Vance’s more general appearances out in public have done everything but humanize him to the country’s voting class. In August, the MAGA Republican’s quick stop for some glazed donuts in a Georgia shop ended up going viral when it became clear that the visit—and his general abrasiveness—was making a couple of people behind the counter painfully uncomfortable.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is really hoping to get his five-count federal corruption indictment thrown out.

Adams’s lawyer Alex Spiro filed a motion Tuesday seeking sanctions against the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, alleging that it had leaked sensitive grand jury materials to the press.

In the filing, Spiro wrote that the government had been facilitating a slow drip of information to the media, so that by the time Adams’s damning federal corruption indictment was unsealed on Friday, “most of the details of the indictment and evidence underpinning the government’s case (weak as it is) had already been widely reported in the national and local press.”

Spiro cited The New York Times, which reported Thursday evening that Adams had been indicted and announced that additional details would be released the next day. Spiro argued that only the prosecution would have been “privy to the government’s plan to announce additional details the next day,” and so it was “therefore clear that the prosecution team is behind the leak.”

Spiro requested an evidentiary hearing to “develop the record as to the scope of the prosecution team’s misconduct and the appropriate remedy, including dismissal of the indictment.”

At a press conference on Monday, Spiro claimed that the prosecution team had committed a “grave breach of the public’s trust” for leaking information.

Adams is accused of unlawfully receiving $10 million in public funds as part of a slew of public corruption charges, including one count of wire fraud, two counts of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national, and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery, and to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals.

Adams has also been charged with one count of bribery, which his lawyer is also desperate to see tossed from his case. Spiro argued that the types of gratuities the federal government alleged Adams took don’t actually count as bribes at all.

After a contributor to Project 2025 was outed for his gay porn past, he has finally addressed the controversy.

Last week, online sleuths uncovered 2014 adult film videos of Corey DeAngelis, a right-wing school privatization advocate affiliated with the American Federation for Children and the Cato Institute. And after more than a week of silence, DeAngelis has finally said his mistakes make him an expert in protecting childrens from “transgender ideology.”

“As an activist for parental rights and school choice, my passion is personal,” DeAngelis wrote on X on Monday. “I was a victim of poor decisions and poor influences. I have turned that experience into the fuel that fires me to save young people from being put in the same position I was put in and to help parents protect their children.”

DeAngelis didn’t specifically mention what “poor decisions” he was referring to, but he was allegedly featured in gay adult films under the name “Seth Rose” a decade ago. His past was discovered by a gay porn blog, according to HuffPost, and his apology Monday was praised by fellow conservatives.

He is listed as a contributor to Project 2025 on behalf of the Betsy DeVos–backed American Federation for Children. The federation has since stripped references to him from their website and placed DeAngelis on leave.

The Human Rights Campaign warned that Project 2025 would “take a wrecking ball” to LGBTQ rights. The plan calls for Donald Trump to imprison teachers or librarians who allow students to read LGBTQ materials  and register them as sex offenders. Further, it defines pornography as intertwined with the queer and trans community.

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed.

As Melissa Gire Grant wrote for The New Republic, the intended enemies of Project 2025’s war on pornography are not abusers or the patriarchy but teachers and LGBTQ Americans. And as a school-choice culture warrior, DeAngelis made a living portraying public schools as sites of left-wing indoctrination.

“DeAngelis’ connections to the longtime anti-LGBTQ group Heritage Foundation and his co-authorship of Heritage’s fascist, dangerous blueprint Project 2025, are further proof that he is willing to sell out student safety to anti-LGBTQ extremists,” GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis told The Advocate. “Targeting any student makes every student and school less safe.”

President Biden isn’t happy with Donald Trump’s lies about him ignoring the plight of hurricane victims.

Speaking to reporters Monday night along with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, who was present via teleconference, Biden sharply responded to a question from one reporter who noted that Trump accused the pair of ignoring the state.

“He’s lying, and the governor told him he was lying,” Biden said. “I don’t know why he does this, and the reason I get so angry about it, I don’t care what he says about me, but I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are. We are.”

Another question concerned whether Biden wished he had spent the weekend in Washington instead of Delaware, and if he wished in retrospect that there were more resources available for the hurricane response.

“Come on, stop with the game will you? [Delaware is] 90 miles from here, I was on the phone the whole time,” Biden responded, noting that the question was not of more resources but how to get the resources there amid the devastation.

“It’s hard to get it from point A to point B. It’s hard to get it [there] if some of these roads are wiped out. Communities are wiped out. There’s no ability to land, there’s no ability to get trucks through. There’s no ability to get a whole range of things through,” Biden said. “If I sound frustrated, I am.”

Biden is rightfully angry over the conspiracy theories egged on by Trump about Hurricane Helene that the president and Cooper are neglecting people in Republican areas. These theories have been debunked by Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, but of course the former president has doubled down.

Meanwhile, it appears that four years in the White House dealing with natural disasters didn’t teach Trump anything about how hurricanes are forecast and how preparations are made. Perhaps Trump should leave relief efforts to the adults who are actually trying to help the victims instead of pushing his self-serving agenda.

The Democratic National Convention is apparently trying to goad Donald Trump, resurrecting old pranks against the Republican presidential nominee just hours before his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, is scheduled to go toe-to-toe against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

On Monday night, the liberal party projected a series of biting taglines onto a panel outside Trump’s New York City residence on Fifth Avenue.

“Trump is a chicken,” the projection read.

The projection reportedly appeared just hours after Vance arrived at Trump Tower for the debate, which will take place Tuesday night, without an audience, at CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan.

Some of the other jabs flashed through the projection included references to Vance’s old tweets, including one in which he referred to Trump as an “idiot,” and stabs at Trump’s ongoing affinity for Project 2025, a 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto intended to help him to install far-right policies in the executive branch as seamlessly as possible should he win in November.

“Vance on Trump: ‘What an idiot’,” the signage said.

Democrats did something similar in August, branding Trump Tower in Chicago with giant messages during the Democratic National Convention. Those phrases included: “Trump-Vance: Out for Themselves,” as well as “Trump-Vance: ‘Weird as Hell,’” “Harris-Walz: Fighting for You,” and “Project 2025 HQ.”

But Monday night’s prank has a more direct objective than simply trolling the Republican ticket. Instead, it’s transparent bait for Trump, who has flat-out rejected the idea of debating Vice President Kamala Harris again after his first performance against her turned unbelievably sour, frustrating his team, allies, and donors.

“As Vance takes the debate stage to attempt to make up for Trump’s own lackluster debate performance, these projections on Trump Tower NYC are a reminder that Trump and Vance are out for themselves while Trump remains afraid to go back on that debate stage and be held accountable by Vice President Harris for his failed record and his dangerous agenda,” DNC spokesperson Abhi Rahman said in a statement.

Donald Trump is already explaining away J.D. Vance’s performance during the vice presidential debate, and it hasn’t even happened yet. 

During an interview on Fox Business Monday, Kellyanne Conway asked Trump whether he would consider doing another debate. 

The former president tried to downplay his outright refusal to go head-to-head with Kamala Harris again, and implied that Vance would face the same treatment Tuesday night. 

“I would love to have two or three more debates, I like it, I enjoy it. But they’re so rigged and so stacked,” Trump said. “You’ll see it tomorrow with J.D., it’ll be stacked.”

Trump has used a similar playbook to undermine the outcomes of his own debates, both before and after they happened. Before the first presidential debate in June, the Republican nominee attacked CNN’s hosts, and then walked back his claims after they didn’t fact-check him on air. 

Before his debate with Harris, he claimed that ABC News would be biased against him. He and his MAGA acolytes continued to insist this was the case after the debate moderators fact-checked him on air for his outlandish lies about babies being aborted after they’re already born and Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Now Trump is claiming the debate will be rigged as a safety net for Vance, who has his own problems with the truth to contend with. CBS News, which is hosting the debate, said that it will be up to the candidates to fact-check each other. 

Conway went on to say that when asked about doing a second debate, Trump “said no, but he didn’t totally say no,” according to The Hill. Crucially, in Trump speak, that was a definite no.

Harris previously accepted CNN’s invitation to  appear in another presidential debate on October 23, but Trump claimed last week that it was “too late” for another debate because early voting had already begun in some states. Before that, Trump had a different excuse, declaring that he wouldn’t seek a rematch because only someone “beaten” would ask for one. Instead, the former president has run scared from a second matchup. 

The vice presidential debate will take place at 9 p.m. at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York.

On Saturday, a 43-foot-tall nude statue of Donald Trump was installed near Interstate 15 just outside of Las Vegas, immediately drawing a backlash from the former president’s supporters.

The foam-and-rebar art installation, weighing about 6,000 pounds, is titled Crooked and Obscene and is expected to travel to other cities, although dates and cities for the tour have not been announced, according to The Wrap.

The artists behind the “anatomically correct” statue, who want to stay anonymous, said in a statement that the former president’s nudity was “intentional, serving as a bold statement on transparency, vulnerability, and the public personas of political figures.” But Republicans, as one might expect, are livid.

“While families drive through Las Vegas, they are forced to view this offensive marionette, designed intentionally for shock value rather than meaningful dialogue,” the Nevada Republican Party said in a statement, according to The Telegraph.

Right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong posted on X that Trump, if elected president, “should jail everyone who was a part of this effigy’s creation.”

Fellow right-wing conspiracy theorist Catturd (real name Phillip Buchanan) called the people behind the statue “demons,” piggybacking on yet another right-wing influencer’s post calling the art piece “POLITICAL VIOLENCE.”

While these right-wing figures are freaking out, this isn’t even the first instance where a nude Trump statue has been erected. In 2016, just before the election, five small naked Trump statues went up on street corners in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Seattle, and New York City, only to be taken down by local authorities because the artist didn’t secure a permit.

The artists behind this latest art project are pretty tight-lipped, so there’s no word on whether they secured a permit themselves. On a related note, Trump on Sunday told supporters in Wisconsin that if he wasn’t campaigning, “I could’ve been sunbathing on the beach. You have never seen a body so beautiful. Much better than Sleepy Joe.” He probably won’t like this statue, though, and definitely won’t add it to his NFT trading card collection.