Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) pushed an unhinged conspiracy theory about Hurricane Helene on Thursday as a large swath of the southeastern U.S. still struggles to recover from the storm’s devastating floods, with residents desperately searching for missing loved ones and mourning the 215 people killed.
“Yes, they can control the weather,” Greene wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, Thursday evening. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Yes they can control the weather.
It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) October 4, 2024
Greene didn’t specify in her tweet who “they” were (although such insinuations are typically antisemitic, and wouldn’t be out of place coming from a congresswoman who once blamed wildfires on Jewish space lasers). But another post, from earlier in the day, seemed to suggest Greene was blaming Democrats.
“This is a map of hurricane affected areas with an overlay of electoral map by political party shows how hurricane devastation could affect the election,” Greene wrote Thursday morning, seeming to accuse Democrats of manufacturing a storm to kill hundreds of their fellow Americans, and render thousands more homeless, as part of a scheme to make Republican voters unable to participate in next month’s elections.
The map Greene posted appears to have been created by Matt Wallace, a dodgy crypto influencer and conspiracy theorist with over 2 million followers on X. “This took me a long time to make!” Wallace wrote on Sept. 30, posting an image of the map. “I created map showing the path of destruction of Hurricane Helene with an overlay of the 2020 election results… The storm seemed to almost methodically miss the bluest parts of those crucial swing states, while simultaneously ravaging the red parts. What a crazy coincidence!”
“If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might assume that this is a big part of the reason why Biden and Kamala are still prioritizing aid to illegals over aid to citizens impacted by the storm,” Wallace wrote. “I would also wonder if it was all be design.”
Wallace, of course, is indeed a conspiracy theorist. And so is Greene. Their conspiracy theory about Hurricane Helene is completely baseless, having emerged from a far-right media ecosystem long obsessed with the government’s supposed ability to control the weather for nefarious purposes. Particularly on Elon Musk’s current iteration of X, those theories have flourished.
Disinformation peddlers have frequently focused on the practice of cloud-seeding, which involves manipulating clouds to help produce more rain. The technique, however, does not cause storms — especially ones that some secret cabal of Democrats could direct to hit a prescribed set of counties where people are likely to vote for former President Donald Trump.
Trump himself has made multiple false claims about the storm, including that Democrats were purposefully withholding aid from red, Republican counties, and that the Biden administration has not talked to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp about the storm response. (President Joe Biden and Kemp have both independently confirmed that they spoke. Kemp, a Republican, has praised the federal government’s response to the storm.)
Meanwhile, state officials in the Republican Party have made posts begging their constituents not to share the type of conspiracy theories peddled by Greene.
“Friends, can I ask a small favor?” North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin (R) wrote on Facebook. “Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet about the floods in [western North Carolina]. Example: FEMA is stealing money from donations, body bags ordered by government has denied, bodies not being buried, government is controlling the weather from Antarctica, government is trying to get lithium from WNC, stacks of bodies left at hospitals, and on and on and on. PLEASE help stop this junk. It is just a distraction from people trying to do their jobs.”
The junk Greene shared in her post to X on Thursday is the latest in a long series of lies and conspiracy theories posted by the congresswoman, who was elected to office in 2020 in spite of her promotion of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory.
In 2022, Greene also spoke at a white supremacist conference where her fellow speakers praised Adolf Hitler and called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be hanged. Nevertheless, she has risen to prominence in the Republican Party since taking office. She currently sits on the House committee on homeland security, and spoke at the Republican National Convention in August.
