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Monday, July 7, 2025

Fact Check: Assessing some widely-viewed false claims made about Helene relief in NC - WFAE

These fact checks of North Carolina politics are a collaboration between PolitiFact and WRAL. You can hear them Wednesdays on WFAE's Morning Edition.

It’s time now for a fact-check of North Carolina politics. Residents of western North Carolina continue to recover from the devastation brought by Hurricane Helene. As relief efforts are pouring into the region so, too, are claims about those efforts that may not be true. Paul Specht, of WRAL, joins me now for a closer look at five false claims made on social media that, in some cases, have been viewed by millions of people.

Marshall Terry: Ok. So one is this — that Chimney Rock residents were told their land was being seized by the federal government. This appeared in a post on X. What can you tell me about it?

Paul Specht: This was posted by a man named Chris Martenson — and he has about 200,000 followers on X — but there's no evidence to support it. The local county government — Rutherford County — they put a statement out on Facebook saying these claims are entirely false. I called House Speaker Tim Moore. He's a Republican. He represents part of Rutherford County — although not Chimney Rock. And we asked him, have you heard anything like this about the federal government seizing people's land around that area? Speaker Moore said that he absolutely had not.

Terry: All right. The next post you looked at said: "Joe Biden told the people of North Carolina they had no more supplies for...



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