Michael Whatley Can't Name a Hurricane, But He Sure Can Fake One

Some politicians get caught not knowing the home team. Whatley got caught inventing one.

Ahead of the Carolina Hurricanes' Game 1 Stanley Cup Final loss to Vegas, Whatley's X account posted a "Let's go, Canes!" graphic, except the player in it wasn't real. Fans accused him of using AI to fabricate the image, pointing to garbled letters where the NHL logo belongs and helmet stickers inconsistent with the team's branding⁸. One wag dubbed the Frankenstein forward "Jacksandrei Blakenekov," a mashup of two actual Canes. The post had been viewed nearly 300,000 times by late Wednesday.⁸

The tell came when a reporter asked the obvious question. Asked to name his three favorite players, Whatley said he liked them all; pressed for a single favorite, he managed only that the team is "loaded" and playing offense really well.³ Whatley acknowledged the visuals were AI-generated and brushed it off as not a big deal, and only after a state GOP spokesman intercepted the reporter did Whatley produce a name: Jaccob Slavin.^1,3 Cooper's camp twisted the knife: "Guess they might not carry our games up in DC…"³

Here's why a hockey graphic matters. The whole pitch of the Whatley campaign is authenticity: a Watauga County boy, a man of faith, a North Carolinian to his boots. But the AI slop is of a piece with a career built on manufacturing things that aren't there. After 2020, the then-NCGOP chair pushed Trump's false fraud claims, asserting "massive fraud" in cities like Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia, claims for which there is no evidence and which lost in court more than 60 times.⁷ He's a stop-the-steal guy, as one Trump confidant put it to the New York Times.⁷

The irony writes itself. The self-styled election-integrity crusader won his own 2023 reelection as state party chair under a cloud. Three Republican activists sued, alleging the NCGOP deployed a phone app letting votes be cast from off the convention floor in violation of its own rules, with delegates' votes for Whatley's opponent mysteriously coming back for Whatley, and some counties registering more votes than people.⁹ The party got the suit tossed on procedural standing grounds, not on the merits.⁹

And the cowboy-boots populist who rails against insiders? From 2007 to 2022 he was a partner at the oil-and-gas lobbying shop HBW Resources, carrying water for clients like the American Petroleum Institute.¹⁰ Fifteen years as Big Oil's hired gun, now running as the workingman's friend. The boots are real. The populism is the costume.

The numbers are the unkindest cut. The latest Carolina Journal/Harper poll has Cooper up 49.8% to 38.7% (an 11-point hole), and a majority of voters either have no opinion of Whatley or have never heard of him.⁶ Money is supposed to fix that: the Senate Leadership Fund pledged at least $71 million to prop him up, less than a week after a poll showed him down 14.⁵ Cooper still outraised him roughly $13.8 million to $5 million in the first quarter alone.⁴

Seventy-one million dollars to introduce a man to his own state, a state whose hockey team he can't roster without a chaperone. Whatley wants you to believe the polls, like that jersey, are AI slop. The receipts say otherwise. MUCK YOU, Jacksandrei.