Accusing Jews of controlling the weather is not new for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the conspiratorial congresswoman from Georgia. She once accused the Rothschilds of starting forest fires with space lasers. Now she’s accused a shadowy “they” of causing both Hurricane Helene’s damage as well as the incoming destruction of Hurricane Milton, expected to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday.
“Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
While Greene’s space lasers comment was widely roasted as the ramblings of a crazy conspiracy theorist, the more recent weather comments have caught on.
On nearly every viral video I’ve seen about cleaning up from Helene’s devastation, preparing for Milton or evacuating from the storm’s path, there are comments accusing “them” of causing the storms.
Often, this is framed as a kind of election interference; commenters note that the areas hit hardest by the storms are largely red states — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina — and accuse Democrats of orchestrating the hurricanes.
The conspiracy has also penetrated the left side of the political spectrum, with some people blaming Israel for causing the global warming that has contributed to the growing intensity of hurricane season.
But much of the time, the conspiracy theorists don’t identify the mysterious “they” supposedly causing the storms. That sort of vague gesturing is a hallmark of conspiratorial thinking, allowing readers to blame whichever groups they like least — the banks, the government, a mysterious cabal of evil powers.
While few people outright blame Jews for the hurricanes, the inference is easy to make, even without Greene’s famous Rothschild space laser comment. After all, going all the way back to the Black Plague, Jews have been accused of somehow orchestrating acts of terrifying destruction. And the idea that a rich cabal would seek to control the elections — well, that’s got antisemitic history behind it as well.
Greene, for her part, is egging on the conspiracies. She has tweeted out a meme showing patents filed for weather control devices, though none of them have been proven to work. She also tweeted a clip of a 9-year-old CBS report on the potential for lasers to impact weather events — though the theory has also not worked outside a lab. And none of the processes by which humans might theoretically control the weather are able to cause or steer a giant hurricane.
That’s not to say that humans didn’t help to create the storms; most scientists agree that the increasingly destructive hurricane seasons ripping through the U.S. are caused by global warming.
But to defend against the accusation, most Jews are turning to jokes, not science. After all, if we controlled the weather, why would we hit our aging parents in Florida?
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