Firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is pushing a new conspiracy: that the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene were secretly orchestrated.
“Yes they can control the weather,” she wrote on X Thursday night. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
The Category 4 hurricane has wrought destruction across Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina with a death toll of at least 215 people as hundreds are still missing.
The hurricane and other storms last week dumped a total of 40 trillion gallons of rain across the southeast—figures that one National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official called “an astronomical amount of precipitation.”
As rescue and recovery efforts remain underway, Greene was not the first person to push conspiratorial beliefs.
On popular QAnon forums, conspiracy theorists suggested the storm had a secret agenda, baselessly speculating that the hurricane was steered toward the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. The manor, owned by the Vanderbilt family, they posited, was host to the high-profile secret sex trafficking cabal Democrats and celebrities run.
Others blamed Satanic practices in the area, saying the storm was sent to wash out evil.
But while those claims considered it an attack of God, Greene clearly insinuates a nefarious force was behind it. In recent months, especially after the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, Republicans have used the ambiguous “they” to both accuse Democrats of serious crimes while winking and nodding at antisemitic canards.
Greene’s conspiracy was echoed by a number of right-wing influencers online, including one person who compared it to Hurricane Katrina while asking, “Does that look natural to you?”
“This event was entirely MANIPULATED by man, & guided into a certain direction, for a certain reason,” wrote someone else, adding: “Weather modification is being used as a WEAPON against the American people, NO different than all of the attacks on our infrastructure and food supply.”
False claims of weather manipulation have become a popular and frequent conspiracy to circulate online in the wake of a major storm.
While certain weather modification techniques, such as cloud seeding, do exist and have been used in the Western U.S., it would not be able to produce anywhere close to the amount of rainfall seen from the storm.
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