Speaking truth to power when power is with the mob

The disinformation about Helene recovery is not a both sides issue.

The recovery effort in Western North Carolina is difficult enough without the disinformation being spread on social media. Mayors, legislators, governors, and local officials of both parties have been pushing back hard, but they are getting overwhelmed. Bad actors, including Donald Trump, have been flooding the zone with a combination of outright lies and a serious lack of understanding of the situation.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis went on an offensive yesterday against information, condemning it in statements on social media and on Sunday morning talk shows. In a Facebook post state Senator Kevin Corbin, a Republican who represents the far western counties of the state, begged people to “STOP this conspiracy theory junk” and praised the response from FEMA, Duke Power, and others providing assistance.

A keyboard warrior wearing his/her ignorance on their sleeve emailed every member of the North Carolina legislature last week.

IT'S AN ELECTION YEAR!!!!!!!  I live in WNC and we haven't seen our government do ANYHTING!  including Gov Cooper!!!  Rescues and supplies organizing drops and assisting with search and rescue in the mountains...etc all this has been done by the PEOPLE in the communities - GREAT People!  But our elected officials have been silent.  WHERE ARE YOU, where is our assistance and help?  Quite honestly, we don't need you and that WILL BE EVIDENT when we hit the voting booths in a few weeks.    Spruce up your resume, Y'all really could learn a lot from Gov Ron DeSantis!  He knows how to handle a crisis.

Stacey Davis

Hickory, NC

Representative Mark Pless (R-Haywood) responded:

I don’t know who you think you’re talking to but for your uninformed stance I have news. As a water rescue tech I was in the water at 6 am rescuing people from their homes. I spent all day Friday pulling people from cars that drove into flood barricades and getting people from houses that were surrounded by water. Then the remainder of the time until this moment coordinating supplies to help my two communities access what they needed.

During all this time you watched TV in the safety of your home while  the governor of another state talked about his situation. Did you ever stop long enough to consider we aren’t saying anything because we are in the trenches fighting to help our residents live through this time?

The true western part of the state is still 1.5 to 3.5 hours from Hickory. The other true mountain representatives, Republican and Democrat, have been doing the same things I have been doing. I have not had a single email complaint or phone call from the people in my area because they have seen me face to face in the community working. Further more there is no internet and cell service is barely available in spots in the true mountains, so how do you propose we perform interviews so you can like or dislike what we are doing?

If a showman is what you like, Florida has open boarders and would gladly welcome you.

Thank you, Representative Pless, both for your response to the moron who wrote you and for what you are doing for the recovery.

The disinformation is disrupting the recovery effort by clogging help lines with false complaints. Bad information is sending first responders to areas where nobody is in distress. It’s keeping people from reaching out for help and applying for the assistance they need.

We should be thankful that Republicans like Rep. Pless and Sen. Corbin are debunking the junk coming from the bad actors, but we also need to be aware that, in an ironic twist, they are speaking truth to power because, in the modern GOP, the power is with the mob, not the elected officials. The rumors and lies about the recovery are all coming from the right and being spread by right-wing media outlets, foreign agents, and Republican politicians like the Speaker of the House and the former President of the United States. I’m not seeing any of the malicious rumors in my social media feeds unless I go look for them because they aren’t being shared by people or organizations on the left.

Different provocateurs have different goals for spreading the disinformation. Republican political operatives and candidates want to make the response to Helene a political issue. They know that in a disaster the scope of this one, people are going to quickly get frustrated and they want to fuel anger at a response run by Democratic administrations in both the state and federal governments. The foreign actors, mainly Russian, Iranian, and Chinese, just want to sow division. They want Americans to hate each other.

The common target of the domestic and foreign operations is a populace of uneducated or unsophisticated Americans who have been trained to believe propaganda while disbelieving legitimate sources of information. They also believe the worst about their government and their fellow citizens. They’ve been manipulated for political gain by the conservative media ecosystem for decades. Now, they are also being influenced by hostile nations.

Unfortunately, we are not in unprecedented times. Historically, the mob has been used to gain or maintain power in the United States, most prominently in the South. For a hundred years following the Civil War, small town newspapers spread the disinformation propagated by demagogues like Pitchfork Ben Tillman of South Carolina and Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo, who riled up the mob with exaggerated tales and outright lies to keep white Southerners in control while denying African Americans their rights.

The difference between now and then is that, with the World Wide Web, foreign actors, not just local populists, are disrupting domestic politics. Today’s Republican Party has built an informal and unspoken alliance with countries that want to harm the United States in order to secure electoral gain. The disinformation hindering the Helene recovery effort brings to light the damage this unholy alliance has unleashed.

While we should be glad that politicians like Tillis, Pless, and Corbin are denouncing the disinformation, we should also demand that they denounce the sources of the damaging accusations, like Donald Trump, Speaker Johnson, Elon Musk, and conservative outlets like the New York Post. Unfortunately, we probably won’t hear those denunciations. More likely, we will watch people like Tillis turn on the disaster relief effort once it moves past the urgency of a rescue and recovery operation. Cynical politicians may be the greatest single threat to our domestic tranquility.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green doubled down on her claim that the weather is being controlled humans and that the hurricanes are being directed at areas with Republican voters. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara, a North Carolina native, took to the airwaves to claim that money going to immigrants was taking money from the relief effort. Apparently, a lot of Republicans believe that nonsense and few GOP elected officials will refute it.

The shear volume of disinformation about Helene flooding social media channels should be a warning of how bad actors can threaten our country. Republicans should be taking stock of what they’ve built, because the damage is only coming from their side. They’ve ceded their power to the mob and it’s not going to end well for somebody, either for the country as a whole or the Republican Party. I can only hope it’s the latter

If there’s a bright side to any of this, it’s that the people on the ground in western North Carolina know better. They see their neighbors, regardless of political persuasion, doing the hard work of digging out and delivering supplies. They are ignoring the disinformation, at least for now, to reach people and families in need. They need our support and encouragement, not lies and deceit.