Fox News host Sean Hannity platformed more Republican lies about the federal government’s response to this year’s hurricane season, despite the fact that the network seemingly had the truth on hand.
“You have DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas saying FEMA is running out of money and going bankrupt,” Hannity said Tuesday night. “Bankrupt? This has not been a busy hurricane season. This happened to FEMA—FEMA directed more than $1 billion to pay for housing and food for Harris-Biden illegal immigrants.”
“Because this story looks really bad for Democrats in charge, they are trying to just outright lie to you and pretend this is misinformation. This is a deepfake statement by conservatives. Well, it’s also on the FEMA website,” Hannity continued, providing no visual evidence of such claims. “It’s completely truthful, it’s completely real.”
But Hannity’s source doesn’t jibe with information that circulated even inside the conservative media behemoth. A fact sheet produced by conservatives on the House Appropriations Committee, obtained by Fox, revealed that FEMA “has enough funding in the short-term to address immediate needs for both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton,” reported Fox News’s senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram. Pergram tweeted about the fact sheet less than 30 minutes before Hannity went on air Tuesday night.
Further, the fact sheet clarified that there is “no funding connection between” the immigration program at the U.S.-Mexico border and the Disaster Relief Fund, noting that there is “no intermingling of funding between these two programs,” and that the only correlation between them is that they are both managed by FEMA.
FEMA has fervently rejected the accusation that it is out of funds, with agency leaders telling ABC News on Sunday that the notion was “frankly ridiculous and just plain false.”
“This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people.”
Republicans, encouraged by lies spewed by Donald Trump, have launched a host of disinformation throughout the 2024 hurricane season. On top of the charge that the Biden administration has diverted funds from FEMA to assist undocumented immigrants enter the country, conservative leaders in heavily affected regions, including Florida and Georgia, have also claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “ seemed political ,” and have conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes are a government manipulation.
By Tuesday, it became clear to federal officials that the lie that FEMA was out of money had stopped people from actually requesting their aid in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which devastated large swaths of North Carolina and Georgia.
The magnitude of the disaster caused by the bold-faced lies will only come to light after the full hurricane season has passed. On the immediate horizon swirls another massive superstorm, Category 5 Hurricane Milton, which is scheduled to slam the west side of Florida by Wednesday evening. Central Floridian leaders have repeatedly warned that Milton’s arrival at the Sunshine State’s shores will be a catastrophic event that will claim lives and demolish the region, with forecasted 10-to-15-foot storm surges that Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has described as “not survivable.”
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