Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has his plate full with two disastrous hurricanes hammering the Southeastern United States in swift succession, and he is also trying to combat another enemy of public safety: misinformation.
If knowledge is power, then it follows that a lack of knowledge is weakness. Buttigieg, along with other sentient observers, is seeing false — often deliberately false information — weakening organized efforts to help people in disaster zones.
Buttigieg says “some of it is driven by politics,” though he doesn’t specifically mention GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump‘s false assertions that the federal government has abandoned storm-stricken Americans and redirected disaster-aimed FEMA aid to illegal migrants.
[NOTE: Multiple Republican governors in Southern states have refuted Trump’s fabrications, but his voice and accusations have a bigger reach.]
“We have a massive misinformation problem,” Buttigieg says, “that actively harms the ability of responders to do their job.”
Pete Buttgieg on CNN talks about picking up the phone and calling Elon Musk about misinformation he was spreading on X and about the broader misinformation problem pic.twitter.com/G5QRttMOrA
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2024
Buttigieg recently had a one-on-one phone conversation with billionaire Elon Musk, a major Trump supporter who had made disparaging and incorrect statements about alleged federal government flight prohibitions in a hurricane zone.
The personal exchange of information with Buttigieg saw Musk publicly declare that Buttigieg is “on the ball” — a rare affirmation by Musk that the U.S. government is something other than a “deep state” plot run by “puppets.”
In the interview above, Buttigieg is asked whether the resolution he reached with Musk would fix the misinformation problem? “Has that made misinformation go away? Has Elon Musk stopped spreading [it]?”
Buttigieg says, “No, unfortunately.”