Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia-based conspiracy theorist who moonlights as a congresswoman, was at it again on Thursday, posting this semi-cryptic message on X: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
The “Jewish space laser” aficionado’s claim about a nebulous “they” controlling the weather came only a few hours after she posted a map purporting to show the damage that Hurricane Helene wrought on predominantly conservative voting areas.
Not that it needs saying, but Democratic-leaning areas were ravaged too. As the Associated Press noted on Sept. 30 regarding just one area, “Asheville, [North Carolina,] which was devastated by the storm, is solidly Democratic, as is much of Buncombe County, which surrounds it.”
As of Friday afternoon, Helene has claimed over 200 lives.
Greene’s conspiracy theorizing is nothing new. And Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas wrote all about how Elon Musk’s X—where Greene posted her latest cuckoo idea—is now a wasteland of right-wingers theorizing that Democrats (and other “elites”) controlled, if not created, Hurricane Helene.
Greene is just one soldier in an army of misinformation created to bolster Trump’s policy-anemic campaign. Following Trump’s own guilty projection of disaster-relief partisanship, right-wing media has promoted false attacks that range from the federal government purposely dragging its heels in response to Hurricane Helene because it has affected Republican voters, to the Federal Emergency Management Agency spending all of its money housing migrants and asylum-seekers.
None of these claims are true, of course. Trump’s lies that President Joe Biden was unwilling or unable to take state officials’ calls for aide have been contradicted by the Republican officials themselves.
FEMA has a page dedicated to debunking many of the lies being peddled by conservatives these days. The Daily Beast reports that “the $640 million earmarked for migrant humanitarian services during the 2024 fiscal year was approved by Congress for FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, a wholly separate and unrelated initiative to the agency’s Disaster Relief Program.”
And it’s especially shameless that Greene was one of 82 House Republicans who voted against extending funding of FEMA the week before she began asking for federal disaster relief.
On top of this, Trump and the GOP do not have solutions for changing weather. Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump administration, would gut FEMA while also dismantling the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s NOAA whose scientific data collection is key to weather warning systems.
Conspiracy theories about the weather are likely to become more plentiful in the years ahead. The reality is that climate change is being felt all over the world. Historically catastrophic events—and the need for anti-science conservatives to rationalize these devastating events—mean broader conspiracy theories that include the weather itself.
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