MTG’s Dumb Hurricane Conspiracy Takes on Sinister New Twist

It looks like antisemites are really latching onto Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiracy theory about Hurricane Helene.

In the aftermath of the Category 4 storm, Jewish government officials have been targeted by antisemitic conspiracy theories, according to The Forward, a national Jewish media outlet.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, and FEMA spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg have become targets of antisemitic abuse online, only days after Greene boosted an antisemitic smear of her own.

Last week, Greene amplified a right-wing conspiracy theory that the government may have manufactured the deadly hurricane.

“Yes they can control the weather,” Greene wrote on X Thursday. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” She also seemed to imply that the government had been targeting Republican areas, which Donald Trump has also suggested.

Not only is this theory outrageously anti-science, but it is also built on an explicitly antisemitic trope. Notably, Greene’s outlandish suggestion also lacks any semblance of reason. While telling her credulous public that Democrats could rule the heavens and summon a deluge upon them, Greene failed to address why Democrats didn’t use that omnipotence to, let’s say, win in Georgia by more than 12,000 votes in 2020—a markedly more pedestrian task, surely.

Greene has not taken down the post, nor apologized for spreading misinformation.

Now, criticism over the federal response to Hurricane Helene has been infused with the very same invective, as trolls place the blame for human suffering on the religious and ethnic identities of Jewish leaders.

In a Facebook post on Thursday, Republican North Carolina State Senator Kevin Corbin pleaded with his constituents to stop spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, including one that the “government is controlling the weather from Antarctica.”