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.