Lazy Caturday Reads: Misinformation, Disinformation, and Lies

Posted: October 5, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: conspiracy theories, disinformation, FEMA, Hurricane Helene, International Longshoremen’s Association, Longshormen’s strike, misinformation, rumors, Trump lies |

Happy Caturday!!

Walter Chandoha’s daughter Marie and kitten.

Today’s illustrations are by Walter Chandoha, a famed cat photographer.

It’s difficult to believe that Trump’s lying could get any worse, but it has. He is now spreading outrageous lies at a level no one has seen before, to use one of his favorite phrases. And when Trump lies, MAGA Republicans follow his example. Lately, Trump has been spreading dangerous lies about the government’s efforts to aid communities devastated by Hurricane Helene.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson published a piece about this today at her Substack “Letters from an American.” 

MAGA Republicans are now lying about the federal response to Hurricane Helene in much the same way they lied about Haitian migrants bringing chaos and disease to Springfield, Ohio. Both disinformation efforts are flat-out lies, and both are designed to demonize immigrants. Immigration was the issue Trump was so eager to run on that he demanded Republican lawmakers reject the strong border bill a bipartisan group of lawmakers had hammered out. 

The federal response to Hurricane Helene has drawn bipartisan praise, with Republican governor Henry McMaster of South Carolina thanking Biden by name for what McMaster called a “superb” response. 

But on Sunday, September 29, two days after the hurricane hit, the right-wing organization started by anti-immigrant Trump loyalist Stephen Miller posted: “Billions for Ukraine. Billions for illegal aliens. And what for the Americans? Reprogram every single dollar that FEMA has dedicated to support illegal aliens to go towards Americans who are facing unprecedented devastation!”

Yesterday, in Saginaw, Michigan, Trump echoed Miller, claiming that the Biden administration is botching the hurricane response because it has spent all the money appropriated for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on “illegal immigrants.” “They spent it all on illegal migrants.… They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them,” he said. Today, he claimed that “a billion dollars was stolen from FEMA to use it for illegal migrants, many of whom are criminals, to come into our country.” 

Early this morning, X owner Elon Musk posted to his more than 200 million followers: “Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you! It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.” On Wednesday, Dana Mattioli, Joe Palazzolo, and Khadeeja Safdar of the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Musk has been financing groups with ties to Miller since 2022. 

But of course, it is NOT happening in front of anyone’s eyes.

Walter Chandoha, The Mob

As always, Trump’s false claims represent projection of his own behavior onto others. Back to the Richardson piece:

Congress also appropriated money for a different fund, the Shelter and Services Program (SSP), which is part of Customs and Border Protection but is administered by FEMA. Established under the Trump administration in 2019, SSP gives grants to states and local governments to provide shelter, food, and transportation to undocumented immigrants. After Trump’s accusation, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement: “These claims are completely false. As Secretary Mayorkas said, FEMA has the necessary resources to meet the immediate needs associated with Hurricane Helene and other disasters. The Shelter and Services Program (SSP) is a completely separate, appropriated grant program that was authorized and funded by Congress and is not associated in any way with FEMA’s disaster-related authorities or funding streams.”

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post did not leave the story there. “Trump has a habit of assuming other politicians act in the same way as he would,” Kessler wrote. So he looked into why Trump would have accused Biden “of raiding the FEMA disaster fund to handle undocumented migrants. It turns out that’s because he did this.”   

In the middle of hurricane season in 2019, Kessler explains, Trump took $155 million from the FEMA disaster fund and redirected it to pay for detention space and temporary hearing locations for immigrants seeking asylum. “No, Biden didn’t take FEMA relief money to use on migrants,” the article title reads, “but Trump did.”

Unfortunately, Trump supporters actually believe his nonsensical lies, and that could lead to people failing to get the help they need from FEMA. Read more examples at the Substack link above.

WYFF4 in Greenville, SC, posted FEMA’s responses to several rumors that have been fed by the MAGAs:

Rumor: FEMA does not have enough money to provide disaster assistance for Helene.

Fact: FEMA has enough money right now for immediate response and recovery needs. If you were affected by Helene, do not hesitate to apply for disaster assistance as there is a variety of help available for different needs.

By Walter Chandoha

Rumor: FEMA is asking for cash donations and turning away volunteers.

Fact: This is false: FEMA does not ask for or generally accept any cash donations or volunteers for disaster response. We do encourage people who want to help to volunteer with or donate cash to reputable voluntary or charitable organizations. After a disaster, cash is often the best way to help as it provides the greatest flexibility for these reputable organizations working on the ground to purchase exactly what is needed. If you encounter someone claiming to represent FEMA and asking for donations, be careful as that is likely a scam. Government employees will never solicit money. Learn more about how to help after a disaster: How to Help After Hurricane Helene

Rumor: Funding for FEMA disaster response was diverted to support international efforts or border related issues.

Fact: This is false. No money is being diverted from disaster response needs. FEMA’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.

Rumor: FEMA is confiscating donations for survivors.

Fact: Rumors about FEMA turning away donations, stopping trucks or vehicles with donations, confiscating and seizing supplies often spread after a disaster. These are all false. FEMA does not take donations and/or food from survivors or voluntary organizations. Donations of food, water, or other goods are handled by voluntary agencies who specialize in storing, sorting, cleaning, and distributing donated items. FEMA does not conduct vehicle stops or handle road closures with armed guards — those are done by local law enforcement.

And this one in particular could badly hurt desperate survivors:

Rumor: FEMA will only provide $750 to disaster survivors to support their recovery.

Fact: This is false. One type of assistance that is often approved quickly after you apply is Serious Needs Assistance, which is $750 to help pay for essential items like food, water, baby formula, breastfeeding supplies, medication and other emergency supplies. There are other forms of assistance that you may qualify to receive once you apply for disaster assistance. As your application continues to be reviewed, you may still receive additional forms of assistance for other needs such as support for temporary housing and home repair costs. Learn more about the types of assistance available. If you have questions about your disaster assistance application and what you qualify for, contact us at 1-800-621-3362 to speak with a FEMA representative.

It’s sickening that Trump and his followers are pushing this nonsense, and they will continue to do so.

From Reuters, another article on Helene misinformation: US officials struggle to quash Hurricane Helene conspiracy theories. 

In the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Helene in the United States this week, a new storm emerged on social media – false rumors about how disaster funds have been used, and even claims that officials control the weather.

Local and national government officials say they are trying to combat the rumors, including one spread by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

By Walter Chandoha

One of the more far-fetched rumors is that Helene was an engineered storm to allow corporations to mine regional lithium deposits. Others accuse the administration of President Joe Biden of using federal disaster funds to help migrants in the country illegally, or suggest officials are deliberately abandoning bodies in the cleanup.

Republican Congress member Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X Thursday night: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

The conspiracy theories come at a pivotal time for rescue and recovery efforts following the storm, one of the deadliest U.S. hurricanes this century. And the presidential election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is just over a month away.

Republicans and Democrats alike say the rumors are causing problems.

“I just talked to one Senator that has had 15 calls TODAY about why we don’t stop …….. ‘fill in the blank,’” said Kevin Corbin, a Republican in the North Carolina Senate – a state that is one of the hardest hit by Helene. “98% chance it’s not true and if it is a problem, somebody is aware and on it,” he wrote on Facebook.

“I’m growing a bit weary of intentional distractions,” he added.

White House officials on Friday accused some Republican leaders and conservative media of intentionally peddling rumors to divide Americans in a way that could harm disaster relief efforts.

“Disinformation of this kind can discourage people from seeking critical assistance when they need it most,” a White House memo said. “It is paramount that every leader, whatever their political beliefs, stops spreading this poison.”

This piece on disinformation is from Jordan Green at Raw Story: ‘Scares the hell out of me’: J6 expert warns of disinformation ramp-up in mid-October. 

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Denver Riggleman, who served as senior technical advisor to the January 6^th Committee, said he believes there is a significant risk of violence during the vote count of the Nov. 5, 2024 election because supporters of Republican nominee Donald Trump are so deeply immersed in conspiracy theories.

“They still have a plan to probably use lawfare to go after some of these certain states, but violence is certainly possible,” Riggleman told Raw Story. “I would say it’s actually probable. And I think it’s because you have people that are so riled up with these conspiracy theories and this good-against-evilvendetta that Donald Trump and I think a lot of the far right and the Christian nationalist type of individuals have been pushing into sort of the MAGA communications ecosystem.

Walter Chandoha’s daughter Marie feeding cats.

“It scares the hell out of me, as someone who’s dealt in counterterrorism for so long, to know that some of the same people who are around him — or a lot of the same people around him — for January 6th, 2021,” Riggleman added, “are the same people in his campaign today and the same people who were authors of Project 2025.”

A former Republican congressman and former military intelligence officer, Riggleman spoke to Raw Story after taping a message to North Carolina Republicans and independent voters on behalf of the Harris campaign at a recreation center in Greensboro on Thursday.

“Violence is bubbling right beneath the surface,” Riggleman said, citing the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the two assassination attempts on Trump this past summer. Riggleman identified variations on the QAnon conspiracy theory as a driving force of political violence.

“QAnon and that whole conspiracy theory mindset of ‘the Deep State’ or ‘globalists,’ or ‘false flags,’ that has bubbled into almost a mainstream belief, I would say within 30 to 35 percent of the Republican Party,” he said. “So, now it’s a battle of good against evil, as far as they’re concerned. The Democrats, independents and the RINOs — whoever they are — represent what’s evil. And I think that should scare the hell out of people. Because once you start dehumanizing people, that’s when violence is possible.

Read more at Raw Story.

 

Walter Chandoha, Cat and kitten

The Washington Post declines to use the word “lie”: As Trump makes false claims about hurricane relief, White House calls it ‘poison.’ 

EVANS, Ga. — Former president Donald Trump doubled down on misinformation about Hurricane Helene in an appearance in this storm-ravaged state Friday, repeating the falsehood that the White House used disaster funds for migrants.

Speaking at a news conference after a state disaster briefing, Trump again falsely said the U.S. government is unable to fund the storm response because it used the money on people “who came into the country illegally” — claims that the White House slammed in a memo Friday as “poison.”

Trump’s comments that the White House is “missing $1 billion” that was used for migrants, as he said Friday, have created a swirl of misinformation around the Helene response. The White House warned Friday that the falsehoods could keep hurricane victims from seeking the assistance they critically need, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency launched an anti-rumor tool that counters Trump’s claims.

The Biden administration said in its memo — which did not name Trump but included a headline that did — that Republicans are spreading “bald-faced lies” about the hurricane response and are “using Hurricane Helene to lie and divide us.”

“It is paramount that every leader, whatever their political beliefs, stops spreading this poison,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates wrote in the memo, adding: “This isn’t about politics — it’s about helping people.” (….)

The federal government has mounted a huge response following routine protocol, sending supplies, meals and more than 1,000 personnel; taking aid applications from affected residents; and coordinating with state and local agencies. Search-and-rescue efforts are ongoing in remote areas. The response faces logistical challenges because of the scope of the damage, across six states, and some residents have complained about waiting for on-the-ground aid.

Trump’s claims, however, have focused on undermining confidence in the federal response and tying his political opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, to that negative picture.

He has sought to blame the hurricane devastation on immigration, on Thursday falsely saying that those affected by the hurricane are getting “no help” because the federal government has instead spent its money “on people that should not be in our country.” In response to questions from The Post, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt claimed that Harris “stole” money from FEMA and repeated the claim that the federal government had no funding, without providing evidence.

Good Lord, will be ever be rid of this evil monster Trump?

According to Politico, the devastation from Helene could affect turnout for Trump in November: Helene hit Trump strongholds in Georgia and North Carolina. It could swing the election. 

Hurricane Helene hit especially hard in heavily Republican areas of Georgia and North Carolina — a fact that could work to Donald Trump’s disadvantage in the two swing states.

Research has shown that major disasters can influence both voter turnout and voter preference. And Helene has pushed this contest into novel territory: It’s the first catastrophic event in U.S. history to hit two critical swing states within six weeks of a presidential election, based on a POLITICO’s E&E News analysis of data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The challenge for Trump: The parts of western North Carolina and eastern Georgia that were flooded by the monster storm are largely Republican. In 2020, he won 61 percent of the vote in the North Carolina counties that were declared a disaster after Helene. He won 54 percent of the vote in Georgia’s disaster counties.

Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris this week visited Georgia, a state that President Joe Biden won by just 11,779 votes in 2020. Georgia and North Carolina each have 16 electoral votes, and polls show that Trump is leading Harris by about 1 percentage point in each state, well within the margin of error.

“There’s going to be a lot of (voting) alterations, and it probably is going to affect turnout,” said Andy Jackson, director of the John Locke Foundation’s Civitas Center for Public Integrity, a free-market think tank in North Carolina.

Now, both states face crucial decisions in the next few days about how to help people register and vote after massive flooding ripped away roads, shuttered towns and dispersed residents. Those include whether to extend next week’s voter registration deadlines, grant more time for voters to cast absentee ballots, and set up new polling places in areas where floods destroyed roads.

State records show that nearly 40,000 absentee ballots were mailed to voters in the 25 North Carolina counties that were declared a disaster following Helene. Fewer than 1,000 have been returned.

Read more details at the link.

At the Washington Post, some good news for Harris/Walz and bad news for Trump/Vance: How Biden helped end a port strike that threatened Democrats in November.

It was a stark ultimatum, delivered by President Joe Biden’s most senior aide.

At 5:30 a.m. Thursday, before the sun had risen above his Washington home, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients was on a Zoom call with two Cabinet secretaries and the executives of the shipping companies negotiating with workers who had gone on strike at critical docks along the East and Gulf coasts, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

With the nation’s economy — and much of the president’s legacy — hanging in the balance just weeks before the election, White House chief economist Lael Brainard told management that it needed to come up with a new offer to the striking longshoremen. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stressed that Hurricane Helene magnified the importance of a deal. Labor Secretary Julie Su expressed optimism that the union would agree to a temporary extension if raises were included.

Then in a surprising move, as the call was wrapping up, Zients told the board members of the U.S. Maritime Alliance that he was going to tell Biden in about an hour that they had agreed to propose a new offer to the union. By that point, the shipping executives had agreed to do no such thing. Zients was saying they would.

“I need the offer today — not tomorrow. Today,” Zients said on the call. “I’m going to brief the president in an hour that you believe you can get this done today.”

Walter Chandoha in his studio.

Less than 12 hours later, White House officials were celebrating a deal to reopen the ports until January — postponing the issue until after this November’s election. The agreement provides collective if temporary relief to skittish Democrats from the White House to Capitol Hill, while buoying Vice President Kamala Harris, along with Friday’s strong jobs report.

But the resolution of the strike also highlights Biden’s distinctive approach to labor unrest, one that has defied even his Democratic predecessors and sparked unease in some parts of the party. Even as White House officials claim vindication about their strategy, questions persist about whether Biden’s pro-union advocacy will be codified as the new Democratic approach — or represents a rare aberration in a long bipartisan tradition of siding more closely with management.

The agreement reached Thursday provides a 62 percent increase in wages for dockworkers and extends other terms of the current contract until Jan. 15. The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) initially demanded 77 percent wage hikes but has moderated its request. Numerous difficult sticking points could scuttle a deal before the new January deadline, but if the deal holds, the pay gains amount to a $24-an-hour bump in the top pay rate over six years.

Trump really wanted the strike to last till election day. Just more evidence that Biden is a great president. I hope he will be an important resource for President Kamala Harris. See also this piece at CNN: Here are all the winners in the port strike deal. 

Trump is running on lies and absolutely no substance. Reporters are demanding details on policy from Harris, but not from Trump–because he has no clue about policy and couldn’t care less about communicating anything except lies, lies, and more lies.

Check out this piece by John Stoehr at Raw Story: Trump’s 2024 strategy: A campaign about literally nothing. 

It’s probably right to call Kamala Harris the change candidate. Though she’s the vice president, she’s running against forces that struck down Roe and stripped the basic freedoms from half the country. So, for many, voting for her is voting for the restoration of individual liberty.

But I believe she’s a change candidate for another reason.

To understand, you have to reimagine Donald Trump. Think of him less as the Republican challenger to a Democratic administration and more as a kind of over-incumbent. He’s more or less an omnipresence, as if he were now sitting in the White House. His face is everywhere. His words are everywhere. The man takes up all the oxygen in every room.

Joe Biden is the president. Harris is his second in command. But since 2015, they and the rest of us have been living in the era of Trump.

And the dominant trait of our era has been negation.

As president, Trump was against fairness and balanced budgets when he cut taxes for the rich. He was against free trade and free labor when his administration tried to complete a border wall. He was against peace and diplomacy when he sabotaged relations with US allies. He was against competence when his negligence killed over a million people in the pandemic. And he was against democracy and the rule of law when he tried and failed to overturn a free and fair election.

What Donald Trump started as president, he has continued as the GOP nominee, the main difference being that the scale of negation is so massive that his own campaign is now about nothing, literally nothing.

There are no serious policies. There are no serious plans to solve problems. He isn’t giving anyone a reason to vote for him. Trump is only “s— talking America,” as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro put it, for the purpose of negating Kamala Harris and his enemies.

And to hide the blindingly obvious fact that Trump’s campaign is about nothing, he has made up fantastical lies about the economy being the worst on the planet, America being a “failing nation,” foreign leaders “laughing at us,” big cities being overrun by criminals, thugs slitting throats, gangs raping women and, of course, Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs. Trump’s latest whopper is about the United States government refusing to help hurricane victims if they’re Republicans.

As Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote: “At this point, the Trump campaign rests entirely on denouncing things that aren’t happening — an imaginary bad economy, imaginary runaway crime and now an imaginary failure of Biden and Harris to respond to a natural disaster.”

Of course, his campaign is about nothing, because he believes in nothing.

Read the rest at Raw Story.

Trump is everywhere, dominating the news, spreading his lies much more quickly than they can be fact-checked. It makes no sense that this criminal, this monster, is actually permitted to run for president of the United States. Yet it is happening. I hope and pray he can be defeated.

Take care yourselves and your loved ones, everyone!