As a journalism student during the Vietnam War era, I was assigned to read a history called The First Casualty by Phillip Knightly. The title is drawn from the maxim that when war breaks out, truth is immediately killed by propaganda. Truth is the “first casualty.”
The subject turned out to be relevant in my half-century-long journalism career covering election campaigns where I learned that Mao Zedong was correct in stating that “Politics is war without bloodshed.” In politics, as in war, truth is often the first casualty.
This is the case in the campaign between Democrat Roy Cooper and Republican Michael Whatley for North Carolina’s U.S. Senate seat. But in this campaign, some of the biggest claims about Cooper’s record don’t withstand scrutiny.
The outcome of that race on Nov. 3 – and possibly whether majority control of the U.S. Senate remains in Republican hands – may depend on whether voters accept those attacks.
I don’t write this conclusion to be melodramatic. John S. Knight, the owner of the Miami Herald where I spent most of my career, had a single instruction to his journalists: Find the truth and print it. The reverse was equally important: Find lies and deceptions and expose them, perhaps in larger fonts.
Some Whatley campaign claims fall into the latter category. This much we know: his campaign is attacking Cooper, the former Democratic governor, with claims that are contradicted by the record.
Those false claims were repeated this month by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance during separate campaign visits to the state to support Whatley.
In a campaign rally in Gastonia on Sept. 16, Trump portrayed North Carolina as “blood-soaked killing fields,” and Cooper as having “bloodied your communities with migrant criminals, destroyed your schools with gangs and drugs and filled your streets with lawlessness, filth and squalor.”
The centerpiece of his attack directly echoed Whatley’s in focusing on the horrible murder of a young refugee named Iryna Zarutska who was living in Charlotte in 2025. The man charged with the crime was an ex-felon named Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., later found mentally incompetent to stand trial.
Trump commented that the closed-circuit video of the murder was “too hard to watch” though he didn’t hesitate to describe it in gruesome detail to the audience. “She was petrified to be on that train” because “there was so much crime here … it was national news.”
Brown wouldn’t have been “on your streets,” Trump continued, segueing into the lie that the killer should have been in prison. “But Roy Cooper said, ‘No, let’s release him.’”
Vance campaigned for Whatley in Greensboro Sept. 21 and dutifully repeated Trump’s false anti-Cooper attack.
“You all remember the story and you remember the video; it’s so hard to watch,” he said. “She was a young woman who’d fled the war in Ukraine, seeking to build a promising new life in this country, thinking that the United States would be safer than Ukraine, only to have her life snuffed out by a violent psychopath who should have never been on our streets.”
Have no doubt the crime was horrible. But the central premise of the Whatley campaign’s attack – that the killer was out of prison because of what Trump called Cooper’s “murderer protector” policies – is false.
More than that, it is a lie. Brown was “on the streets” and not in prison that day because he had completed his sentence. Cooper played no part in his release.
Brown was not released from prison under Cooper’s COVID-19 settlement. He had left prison five months before the settlement was reached.
Whatley, Trump and Vance conjured the lie that Brown was part of a court-ordered early-release program to reduce prison populations when the pandemic hit in 2020. The ACLU and other groups successfully sued Cooper on the inmates’ behalf, forcing him to implement the program for some 3,500 prisoners nearing the end of their terms.
But you won’t hear that in Whatley’s TV ads, nor would you have heard it from Trump or Vance. That truth would counter their deliberate lie and deny the Republican ticket the opportunity to use Iryna Zarutska’s murder for campaign purposes.
A pair of recent anti-Cooper ads – funded by the Republican Senate Leadership Fund – were equally false in linking two murders to the COVID-19 release. The first involved a killer and victim in South Carolina, a fact not included in the ad.
The second involved the killing of 23-year-old Shemar Hayes in Charlotte, victim of a car-jacking by 18-year-old Tyzavian Smith. The ad features an on-camera interview with Hayes’s father, Ronald Hayes, who grows emotional in describing the crime. It concludes with the words of an announcer saying: “As the governor, Mr. Cooper was allowing these criminals back on the streets.”
Both ads are lies. Neither case was related to the early releases.
In fact, Ronald Hayes told reporters after the ad aired that he was deceived by its producer into thinking the ad was part of an anti-gun violence campaign. He said he is a supporter of Cooper.
I’ve seen politicians of both parties distort the truth and dismiss it as political hyperbole.
Hype is woven into the very fabric of American elections dating to the tales of Washington tossing a coin across the Potomac and Trump winning dozens of golf championships, most of them unwitnessed. We roll our eyes and let such claims slide.
But outright lies go beyond political hype and they aren’t the practice of one party. Consider the lies of Gary Hart who lost the opportunity to become president for lying about an affair during his 1987 campaign. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about his predatory sexual relations with a White House intern. And earlier this year Eric Swalwell resigned in shame from Congress facing numerous allegations of sexual assault. He denied the most serious allegations.
We’ll know on Nov. 3 what weight voters give Whatley’s attacks.
If irony can be found in this sordid situation it may be that voters don’t share the Republican candidate’s premise that they should be terrified about violent crime and want to punish the former governor for allowing it.
All of us, irrespective of partisan ties, condemn crime and criminals. But voters aren’t likely to cast ballots based on Trump’s false assertion that violent crime is rampant in North Carolina, that “some of the worst criminals in the nation … savage criminals, child predators, killers and murders,” are roaming our streets. Nor do they relate to Vance’s claim that they’re “afraid to walk down your street; you can’t raise a family or build a business…”
Catawba College political-science professor J. Michael Bitzer told me violent crime isn’t the voters’ primary concern this year.
“I haven’t seen a poll yet where crime is at the top of mind” for voters heading to the midterm election, said Bitzer, director of the North Carolina Center for Politics & Public Service and the Catawba College-YouGov Survey of state voters.
“Economic concerns are going to top every other issue,” he said. “The issue will be affordability and the factors around it, like inflation and the cost of gas and groceries.”
The FBI’s own data undercuts Trump’s claim that North Carolina sits atop state rankings of violent crime. The FBI’s survey including 2024 – Cooper’s last year as governor – found that the state ranked 19th among the 50 states in per capita murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, the components of violent crime.
The data also found that incidents of violent crime declined through 2025 — the period encompassing North Carolina’s prisoner-release program.
A national Pew Research Center survey this spring found violent crime well below several economic and political concerns when Americans were asked which issues they considered “very big problems” for the country. Violent crime ranked eighth on the list of 13 issues, behind such concerns as money in politics, health-care affordability, inflation, the federal budget deficit and the ability of Democrats and Republicans to work together in Washington.
“I haven’t seen a poll yet where crime is at the top of mind” for voters heading to the midterm election, said Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College. “Economic concerns are going to top every other issue.”
So why are Whatley and the White House relying on fears of violent crime to pull voters to their side?
“When you have [affordability] as such a dominating factor,” Bitzer said, “the Republican tactic is to pivot to something else. And for Republicans, that ‘something else’ is crime. Crime is always the Republican ‘go-to’ issue and they try to scare the bejesus out of people. Fear works.”
But the challenge in this election, he continued, is whether the tactic can succeed.
“The question is, can that fear [of violent crime] overcome the fear of what most North Carolinians see when they drive to work and see the gas prices,” he said.
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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Tom Fiedler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter and dean emeritus from Boston University who lives in Asheville. His Democracy Watch column appears every other Wednesday. Email him at tfiedler@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.
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