Conspiracy Theories Are Attacking Our Ability to Support Hurricane Ravaged Communities
I wrote the below piece for In These Times as the devastation of the Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina was still a fresh wound, one that people were grasping at straws to explain. Not unlike whenHurricane Sandy that hit New York City with a hideously toxic aplomb in 2012, we did not expect the winds to strike inland so hard and in areas already facing a different type of destruction from economic and social dislocation. This is also why conspiracy theories filled the gap in information so well, and they built on the well oiled machine that Trumpism, the alt-right, and the new Republican Party had worked together to manufacture.
Since I published it the situation escalated even while Milton turned out to, thankfully, be a little less lethal than its earlier twin. But people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk continued their violent tirades against government workers, suggesting that FEMA was intentionally ignoring, or even harming, rural Red County residents. This led Willian Jacob Parsons, a forty-four year resident of Bostic, North Carolina to make patently illegal threats against FEMA employees, raising the stakes of danger for the public sector workers trying to help and limiting their ability to share services.
This incident reminded me of the rumors that "antifa" were lighting the forest fires that were blanketing Oregon in 2020, as well as looting, which then led militias to interfere when left-wing mutual aid organizers headed into the disaster areas to offer support and help get people out. Conspiracy theories attack our only ability to survive the crisis that the right-wing sabotage of our life systems ignited. There is no habitable future possible while basic facts are undermined by some of the loudest, most deranged, and frankly richest voices in the U.S.
As Florida braces for the arrival of Hurricane Milton, a Category 4 storm that could devastate the state’s Gulf Coast, the sort of conspiracy theories that followed September’s Hurricane Helene are already taking root. On X (formerly Twitter), one post viewed 4 million times suggested that Milton is a government-orchestrated event, similar to the COVID-19 “plandemic.” Another (viewed a mere 150,000 times) claims the storm is the result of “weather manipulation” using a government research project that “Boils the Upper Atmosphere using ionospheric heaters.” Yet another claims the hurricane is a deliberate effort “to kill Trump supporters and interfere with the election.”
“The one positive thing coming out of these massive hurricanes this past month,” concluded a fourth, “is that the public has started to awaken to the reality their government has weaponized the weather.”
Part of the unbelievable crisis of Hurricane Helene — which has already taken more than 230 lives, destroyed electrical and travel infrastructure and decimated entire communities — as well as the destruction sure to come from Milton, is a crisis of information. When our communications pathways break down, when good information is hard to come by, people often turn to rumor to find out what is happening, both in terms of what resources are available and what caused the crisis in the first place.
But as conspiracy theories and misinformation become an increasingly entrenched part of how our online political world digests major events, they are profoundly skewing our understanding of tragedies like Helene. And as these theories proliferate — taken up both by some people in affected areas as well as opportunistic outsiders — they represent a particularly dangerous trend, reframing climate disasters through a conspiracy lens and thereby obscuring their underlying causes as well as shielding those actually responsible from accountability.
From the early hours of Hurricane Helene’s collision with North Carolina, the conspiracy theories flowed. On October 3, Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” She left the “they” to readers’ imagination, but given that in 2018 she infamously suggested California’s horrific wildfires might have been caused by space lasers controlled by the Rothschilds — a rich Jewish family who have been at the center of antisemitic conspiracy theories for nearly 200 years — her intended meaning was clear.
The same day, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones used his popular Infowars show to further the narrative, reading aloud a list of patents he claimed show evidence that the government has the means to manipulate weather, suggesting that the hurricane might be a “deep state” effort to meddle with the election. This followed other recent Infowars claims that “storms are being manipulated by radar arrays and cloud seeding that has reached its technological zenith.” One popular theory, which circulated well beyond Jones’ Infowars audience, claimed that “Cloud Ionization, Electric Rainmaking and Laser-guided Weather Modification” were used to “weaponize” and direct the storm, while other commentators suggested that radio waves had directed the clouds. Many of these claims headed in openly antisemitic directions, from reviving long-standing claims that the Rothschilds can control the weather to singling out Jewish officials — from Asheville’s mayor to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) public affairs director to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — as targets.
Claims that a globalist cabal is geoengineering the weather aren’t entirely new. For years, a loose collection of related conspiracy theories — such as the “chemtrails” theory that airplanes’ condensation trails are actually a chemical cocktail intended to either poison the public or reshape the atmosphere — have percolated in the backchannels of the internet, over time converging into one, hazy mess.
While these absurd claims may seem beneath acknowledgment, they are no longer that far from mainstream right-wing climate discourse. The notion that climate change is a hoax cooked up by liberal politicians and green NGOs has become standard GOP fare, as in Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill that strips references to climate change from state laws. Climate denialism — itself dependent on baroque conspiracy theories — requires similar leaps of logic.
While the idea that Helene was intentionally seeded by the “deep state” to thwart Donald Trump’s election chances may be the strangest, another kind of conspiracy theory has proliferated more widely: that the government is intentionally withholding disaster aid from Republican-majority areas. Last week, Trump claimed not only that the government was refusing to help affected Republicans but also that FEMA lacked the funds to do its job because Joe Biden’s administration had used the money to help migrants. Not to be outdone, X owner Elon Musk spread the false claim that the Federal Aviation Administration was blocking rescue and recovery flights from entering North Carolina. Musk also retweeted a post reading, “It’s not Republicans (sic) fault that FEMA is run by a bunch of Marxists who used all their money for illegals.”
What all of these theories do is protect the status quo while diverting blame for the world that status quo has created. When a narrative proliferates that a cabal of nefarious actors is intentionally altering weather patterns, it undermines our sense of a common problem and what to do about it. Instead of considering the role of global capitalism, with its accelerating tilt towards growth, we instead treat the problem as exceptional: if it wasn’t for these actors, our systems would work fine. This forces us to look away from the politicians who cut greenhouse gas regulations, the corporations that lobbied them to do so and the wealthy who profit, all while ignoring how catastrophic climate change has become.