Marjorie Taylor Greene Says ‘They Can Control The Weather,’ Selling Conspiracy About Hurricane Helene

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) pushed an unhinged conspiracy principle about Hurricane Helene on Thursday as a big swath of the southeastern U.S. nonetheless struggles to get well from the storm’s devastating floods, with residents desperately looking for lacking family members and mourning the 215 folks killed.

“Yes, they can control the weather,” Greene wrote on X, previously generally known as Twitter, Thursday night. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Greene didn’t specify in her tweet who “they” have been (though such insinuations are sometimes antisemitic, and wouldn’t be misplaced coming from a congresswoman who as soon as blamed wildfires on Jewish area lasers). However one other put up, from earlier within the day, appeared to counsel 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 producing a storm to kill tons of of their fellow People, and render 1000’s extra homeless, as a part of a scheme to make Republican voters unable to take part in subsequent month’s elections.

The map Greene posted seems 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 a picture 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, after all, is certainly a conspiracy theorist. And so is Greene. Their conspiracy principle about Hurricane Helene is totally baseless, having emerged from a far-right media ecosystem lengthy obsessive about the federal government’s supposed potential to regulate the climate for nefarious functions. Significantly on Elon Musk’s present iteration of X, these theories have flourished.

Disinformation peddlers have regularly targeted on the apply of cloud-seeding, which includes manipulating clouds to assist produce extra rain. The approach, nevertheless, doesn’t trigger storms — particularly ones that some secret cabal of Democrats may direct to hit a prescribed set of counties the place persons are more likely to vote for former President Donald Trump.

Trump himself has made a number of false claims concerning the storm, together with that Democrats have been purposefully withholding support from purple, Republican counties, and that the Biden administration has not talked to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp concerning the storm response. (President Joe Biden and Kemp have each independently confirmed that they spoke. Kemp, a Republican, has praised the federal authorities’s response to the storm.)

In the meantime, state officers within the Republican Get together have made posts begging their constituents to not share the kind of conspiracy theories peddled by Greene.

“Friends, can I ask a small favor?” North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin (R) wrote on Fb. “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 put up to X on Thursday is the most recent in a protracted collection of lies and conspiracy theories posted by the congresswoman, who was elected to workplace in 2020 regardless of her promotion of the baseless QAnon conspiracy principle.

In 2022, Greene additionally spoke at a white supremacist convention the place her fellow audio system praised Adolf Hitler and referred to as for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be hanged. Nonetheless, she has risen to prominence within the Republican Get together since taking workplace. She at the moment sits on the Home committee on homeland safety, and spoke on the Republican Nationwide Conference in August.