“Hunting FEMA”: Trump’s Hurricane Lies Spark Terrifying Threat

Donald Trump’s baseless attacks against federal relief efforts for Hurricane Helene came to life over the weekend, when officials in North Carolina reported encountering truckloads of militia members “out hunting FEMA.”

An official with the U.S. Forest Service, which is assisting in relief efforts in North Carolina, sent several federal agencies an urgent warning Saturday afternoon, according to The Washington Post.

“FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, NC, to stand down and evacuate the county immediately,” the official said.

FEMA’s message warned that National Guard troops “had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying they were out hunting FEMA.”

The Forest Service official told the Post that responders had been relocated to a “safe area” but that the incident had paused efforts to clear roads of debris, deliver supplies, and aid in search and rescue operations.

This incident follows weeks of toxic misinformation about federal assistance amplified by Trump and other MAGA Republicans. The Republican presidential nominee has repeatedly criticized federal relief efforts, and falsely claimed that $1 billion was redirected away from FEMA to help undocumented immigrants.

This incident also comes shortly after MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene boosted an antisemitic conspiracy theory positing that the government controls the weather, which then was echoed in slews of antisemitic attacks against FEMA’s Director Jaclyn Rothenberg.

On Friday, Trump took to Truth Social to claim that North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and other Democratic leaders “were blocking people and money from coming into North Carolina to help people in desperate need.”

Cooper slammed Trump’s claim, calling it a “flat out lie.”

“We’re working with all partners around the clock to get help to people. Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories have hurt the morale of first responders and people who lost everything, helped scam artists and put government and rescue workers in danger,” Cooper wrote in a post on X.

It seems Trump’s words have the potential to hurt more than morale, as residents are now reportedly taking up arms against relief workers. In the end, Trump’s own conspiracies are preventing the swift recovery of the region, which, ironically, is mostly home to his own supporters.

A MAGA influencer is trying to spread a nasty rumor about Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. The issue is it reads more like fan fiction than facts.

“DocNetyoutube,” whom Washington Post media reporter Will Sommer describes as “an up-and-coming new player in the ‘making things up’ corner of online Trumpworld,” claims he has proof that Walz sexually assaulted a student during his time as a high school teacher.

In a series of “drops,” a term popular in the QAnon community, DocNetyoutube on Sunday posted several alleged screenshots of communications between himself and Walz’s anonymous victim. But the posts have several red flags about their authenticity.

The email dates are formatted in an inconsistent way, with misplaced commas and strange text alignment. Another clue is what appears to be a typing cursor that still appears on the screenshots, indicating that the internet personality most likely wrote them himself.

Much of DocNetyoutube’s conspiracy hinges on him breaking the news of a student who went to a concert with Walz and his wife while the couple were teachers at the same Nebraska school. The story isn’t new. The New York Times published this story in August, noting that after the anonymous gay student confided in them, the couple took them to an Indigo Girls concert, a rare queer-friendly event in the area.

But on Sunday, the MAGA conspiratorial account tried to claim that the media was “trying to get out in front of this story,” instead of acknowledging that he was publishing old news. The internet personality claimed to have a “statement from the victim” to prove the legitimacy of the posts. The anonymous statement noted that Walz has a Chinese symbol tattooed on his upper thigh. “I remember he explained to me what it meant, but I do not recall at this time,” the supposed student wrote in the statement. In the comments on X, MAGA users quickly spun out about whether Walz could have gotten that tattoo laser removed or could have done a skin graft procedure. Very normal stuff.

Baselessly calling Walz a groomer is nothing new. Laura Loomer has previously spread similarly vague allegations against Walz. “There’s a reason why he shakes his wife’s hand and panders to the gay community, and it’s not because he’s awkward.… It will all come out,” she wrote on X in August, citing no evidence.

Several X-verified QAnon accounts have also spread the claims far and wide, boosted by Elon Musk’s algorithm. Earlier this month, the pro-QAnon podcast “RedPill78” interviewed an anonymous man who alleged he was a former foreign exchange student at Walz’s high school who was inappropriately touched by the Democrat.

Previously, terminally online Republicans also tried to push the narrative that Walz was grooming children by being the faculty adviser of the newly formed Gay-Straight Alliance at his Minnesota school. In reality, queer students appreciated his support. “It was important to have a person who was so well-liked on campus, a football coach who had served in the military,” one former student at the school told The New York Times. “Having Tim Walz as the adviser of the Gay-Straight Alliance made me feel safe coming to school.”

Since that talking point didn’t stick, it appears they had to escalate. Of course credible assault allegations should always be taken seriously. But if Republicans don’t want to vote for someone who has touched someone inappropriately, perhaps they shouldn’t vote for the convicted rapist.

At a campaign rally in Arizona Sunday, Donald Trump denied reports that he is showing signs of cognitive decline, attacking critics for singling out his mispronunciations.

“They watch for weeks and weeks. For weeks and weeks, I’m up here ranting and raving. Last night, a hundred thousand people. Flawless. Ranting and raving. I’m ranting and raving. Not a mistake. And then, I’ll be at a little thing and I’ll say something a little bit like ‘The.’ I’ll say ‘duh.’ They’ll say he’s cognitively impaired,” Trump said.

“No, I’ll let you know when I will be. I will be someday, we all will be someday, but I’ll be the first to let you know,” Trump added.

Trump has in fact continued to sound more erratic and bizarre as the presidential race enters its final weeks. At a Wisconsin rally just over a week ago, he compared himself to a fly, struggled to pronounce words like “Midwestern” and “evangelicals,” and spread misinformation about Hurricane Helene. In a New York rally in September, he stumbled over words like “migrants” and “Russia” and had trouble stringing sentences together.

His cognitive decline was evident to everyone watching the first (and almost certainly last) presidential debate with Kamala Harris, where Trump went on long-winded rants unrelated to the questions asked.

Trump’s speech patterns and alertness look very different from eight years ago, and psychology researchers see compelling evidence that Trump is significantly less sharp than he was at the start of his presidency, with increasingly incoherent speech. The media is finally starting to give the issue attention, which probably prompted the media-obsessed former president to bring up his cognitive decline at his rally. But will all of this evidence convince voters that Trump should not return to the White House? Right now, polls are showing the race between Trump and Harris to be nearly deadlocked.

Looks like Donald Trump has echoed JD Vance’s outlandish anti-immigrant smear … again.

During his rally in Coachella, California, Saturday, Trump whined that the number of students from “illegal immigrant-headed households” had increased in Los Angeles, according to the Desert Sun.

Trump’s new grievance directly echoed a seemingly new talking point Vance delivered last week, blaming the school-age children of undocumented immigrants for a decline in the quality of American education. And in doing so, he has put a target on the back of every brown child in Los Angeles, regardless of their citizenship status.

During a rally in Detroit last week, Vance baselessly claimed that there were 85,000 children of undocumented immigrants placing a strain on schools in Michigan. While it’s also unclear where Vance got “85,000” from, the number does appear on the Higher Education Immigration Portal, which states that there are 85,000 second-generation immigrant students attending higher education institutions in Michigan—a figure completely unrelated to Vance’s claim.

“Think about what it does to a poor schoolteacher, who’s just trying to get by with what they have, just trying to educate their kids, and then you drop in a few dozen kids into that school, many of whom don’t even speak English,” Vance said. “Do you think that’s good for the education of American citizens? No, it’s not.”

Last month, the former president was quick to pick up on another of Vance’s baseless nativist talking points: a right-wing rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had begun eating their neighbors’ pets. Even as the racist rumors were debunked, the Republican ticket continued to push the outlandish claims, and made Springfield the epicenter of their arguments about illegal immigration—even though the Haitian immigrants they were smearing are in the country legally.

It seems that Trump has now latched onto another of Vance’s reckless, unsubstantiated claims, which has placed a target on the back of children, of all people. Trump’s remark came amid a virulently anti-immigrant tirade in which he called the United States “occupied America,” and bemoaned a so-called “invasion” by undocumented immigrants.

With less than 30 days on the clock, Donald Trump’s full attention is geared toward Election Day. But the specifics of his vision are veering into dangerous territory.

Speaking with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, the Republican presidential nominee claimed that the real Election Day issue is the “enemy from within.”

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said, deflecting Bartiromo’s baseless suggestion that Chinese immigrants in the country—or rapists—would interfere in the outcome of the election. “Not even the people that have come in and destroying our country, by the way, totally destroying our country.

“We have some very bad people,” Trump continued. “We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the—and it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

It’s not the first time Trump—or his allies—have threatened military action in order to achieve their goals.

Last week, Steve Bannon’s temporary War Room substitute host Natalie Winters vowed that Trump’s postelection retribution tour will involve prosecuting his enemies for treason, including some members of his former administration, such as retired U.S. Army general and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley.

And Trump himself has leveraged the authoritarian rhetoric before, as well. Speaking with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro in September 2020, Trump warned that he would use force against Democrats if they chose to protest in the streets following his potential win on Election Day.

“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that, if we want,” Trump said at the time, according to Politico.

“Look, it’s called insurrection,” he continued. “We just send in, and we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to, we’d do that and put it down within minutes.”

Of course, Trump did not send in the military to rein in the insurrection—carried out by his own followers after he lost.