Jews and Democrats Are Not Sending Hurricanes to Kill Trump Supporters

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.

Likewise, the notion that the government is intentionally abandoning or exploiting survivors uses a tiny kernel of truth to hide much larger realities that are unfolding in plain sight.

While claims that federal agencies under the Biden administration and Democratic-led state governments are engaging in a lethal war against white conservatives better fit the GOP’s central narrative, the reality on the ground is much more mundane.

FEMA often fails to provide relief at any reliable scale not because of an underlying, conspiratorial plot, but because Republican administrations have for decades stripped federal agencies of their budgets, shrinking their ability to help at the same time that natural disasters are becoming more severe. (The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for a second Trump administration proposes defunding emergency storm tracking programs, virtually ensuring that, should Trump win, future natural catastrophes will arrive with less warning.) 

In times of crisis we also see vast inequities take shape, as class, race, geography and other factors play key roles in who gets aid and who does not. What’s more, state infrastructure relies on vastly inequitable institutions, from the police to the military, which can accelerate harm, and those at the top of the economic pyramid often already have plans on how to expand privatization in the wake of collapse.

These are all real issues and disparities. But instead of highlighting them, conspiracy theorists shift the analysis from systems to scapegoats.

Although recent Helene conspiracy theories hurt those in need of aid on the ground — FEMA says the flood of disinformation has impeded its work — the Right continues making them a foundational piece of their ideological framework, and for good reason. Widening inequality, deepening political dysfunction and spiraling climate crises all demand action, but the Right has little to offer the working-class members of its base by way of policy solutions. Instead, by turning to conspiracy theories, they can seemingly answer the questions of those facing economic and social dislocation — How did people so far inland face such destruction? Why aren’t they getting the help they need? How did life become so unstable? — while avoiding any action on the systems causing the crises in the first place. Whenever conspiracy theories replace grounded analysis, we disconnect our feelings of alienation and rage from their causes, thus becoming the target of any charlatan or grifter who wants to redirect our anger toward convenient targets. 

While the Right spread wild tales about weather control and abandonment, it was mutual aid groups like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief that showed up after Helene to connect community members with the resources they needed and to help in areas where government agencies and charities were unable to. While the Right wants to use our pain to spin their own narratives about blame and resentment, the antidote to this is the solidarity and direct care that communities can offer each other. By meeting each other’s needs, and seeing our problems for what they are, we can chart a future not captured by the fantasies of rich media moguls and political swindlers and their cynical attempts to exploit our suffering.