When Donald Trump Jr. fired at him with a flood-related conspiracy theory — Anderson Cooper took the gloves off and hit back.
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00:00There was plenty of deep water all around.
00:02The idea that I am kneeling in water to make it look deep is, frankly, idiotic.
00:22Over the weekend, however, the son of the president, Donnie Jr., tweeted out this picture
00:27of me in waist-high water, my camera crew a few feet away on higher ground in only a little bit
00:31of water. Donnie Jr. was claiming it showed me in Florence faking the depths of flood waters
00:37in order to somehow harm his father. Now, the pictures popped up in various memes alleging
00:42fake news. Some guy I've never heard of made a joke on Twitter that I was on my knees in the
00:46water to make it look deep and then went on to say that I was used to being on my knees, which
00:50I assume is some sort of anti-gay reference. Very classy. Anyway, I've covered hurricanes for about
00:5614 years, and it really does make me sad to think that anyone would believe that I would try to fake
01:00something or overly dramatize a disaster. Now, I debated whether I should even respond tonight to
01:06the president's son. I know he considers himself an outdoorsman and pays a lot of money to be led
01:11to wildlife in Africa that he then kills, but I'm not sure if he's ever actually been to a hurricane
01:16or a flood. I didn't see him down in North Carolina in the last few days helping out,
01:20lending a hand, but I'm sure he was busy doing something important besides just tweeting lies.
01:27So
01:46number one, this was not Hurricane Florence. This was taken 10 years ago during Hurricane Ike.
01:51As for those who think I was kneeling or faking the water level or making it look worse than it
01:56was or standing in some sort of a hole, this is an area where people had been trapped on the
02:00roofs of their homes by water. I'm going to show you, in fact, a clip of me walking in the water,
02:05and rather than trying to make it sound worse than it was, I just want you to note that I'm
02:08talking about how the water is actually receding, subsiding. The good news here, Rob, water is
02:14subsiding a little bit. I just want to walk over and just show our viewers. Also, meanwhile, we're
02:18still seeing paramedics, fire personnel, fish and wildlife folks in boats. I don't expect the
02:25president's son to ever admit he was wrong or one of the president's former advisors or, frankly,
02:30anyone else who's retweeted these pictures, but I at least thought that they and you should know
02:34the truth.