On Thursday night, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) sparked a social media firestorm with her post saying, “Yes, they can control the weather.”
“It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done,” she added.
The statement came as the American southeast was reeling from the destructive aftermath of Hurricane Helene, with a federal response to the catastrophe hampered by government distrust being sowed by characters like Greene.
In the wake of the storm, social media feeds filled with exhortations to not donate to FEMA and misleading tales about the Biden administration’s efforts.
And Greene’s post helped amp up the backlash, sparking claims the storm was a 2023 election interference effort.
“The most important election in the history of America is 30 days away. PRAY! GA voting has been compromised and don’t know if we will be able to get all our early voting days in. Now, a hurricane is coming straight for Florida. These two states are necessary for a Trump victory! No coincidence,” wrote Kandiss Taylor.
This weekend, Greene doubled down in the face of criticism, sharing a clip of former CIA Director John Brennan discussing cloud seeding.
“Yes they can control the weather. Here is Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan talking about it,” she wrote.
In the clip, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, Brennan discusses geo-engineering and says that “stratospheric atmospheric injection” has “caught his eye.”
Brennan describes “a method of seeding the stratosphere with particles that could help reflect the sun’s heat,” discussing efforts to thwart climate change, which is currently helping supercharge the Atlantic’s hurricane season and would prevent these kinds of massive storms Greene is certain the government wants.
“Anyone who says they don’t, or makes fun of this, is lying to you,” Greene said.
Greene, in her claims, is likely referring to a different kind of cloud seeding, made famous before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when Chinese officials shot silver iodide into clouds to induce rain and help with the city’s smog problems.
But Greene’s backers bought into her assertions, tying the newest brewing storm, Hurricane Milton, to HAARP, a government program popular among the conspiracy crowd.
“They seed the tropical depressions in the S Atlantic, then use HAARP to heat the ionosphere and supercharge the storms. When it hits land, the NEXRAD radars can pulse and direct it. This is what occurred with Helene, and they have another one coming in Milton,” they wrote.
Greene also winked at her most infamous conspiracy, that Jewish Space Lasers started wildfires in California, sharing an old clip from CBS.
“Lasers.. CBS, 9 years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather,” she wrote.
And while her efforts to bash the government at a time when it was working to aid her own citizens were hit by Helene, her biggest fans enthusiastically cheered.
“Wake up. Stop being ignorant or plain stupid. There’s no such thing as coincidences,” wrote one.
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