Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones accused Vice President Kamala Harris of having the ability to control hurricanes through so-called “weather weapons.”
Jones kicked off his Tuesday broadcast by promising to explain how he knew the government could control the weather.
“I’m going to be covering today, and I’ve sent the crew over 20 clips, and I’ve got over a hundred documents right here,” he explained. “I’m gonna do a big presentation for everybody on what’s really going on with weather weapons.”
Jones claimed to have interviews and government documents that would prove his point.
“Then we have the bold headlines that I put up on X that the Kamala Harris, you know, the Biden-Harris administration is in control of this hurricane,” he said of Hurricane Milton.
“So they have the power certified easily with just five or six big aircraft,” he opined. “And that’s the old technology, not the lasers that are all certified and the Doppler radar. They also have on ships and in large oil drilling platforms that they’ve launched. They could totally just make this thing stop and dump the water in the ocean.”
Jones insisted that the technology to control hurricanes was used before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“And on 9/11, the hurricane was gonna hit,” he asserted. “Remember in 2001, but that meteorologists never saw anything like it. It just turned away from the coast went away because that was gonna get in the way of some of the stuff the deep state was up to.”
Scientists have said it is currently impossible to control weather events like Hurricane Milton.
This Alex Jones mf. Imagine running your mouth so bad you have to pay a billion and a half dollars to families of murdered children. I’d probably be terrified to ever open my mouth ever again.
Ah, but your entire brand image probably isn’t agressively lying.
Ah yes, because if a politician could control the weather, of course the thing they’d do with it is attack several swing states right before the election /s
It’s mindblowing to us non-Americans that such a large percentage of a purportedly first-world country can be so utterly stupid. I can’t imagine that things were this bad even just 20 years ago. Why are y’all so dumb?
I’ve usually pointed towards our education system but I’m not so sure anymore. I think there’s more at play.
I think it’s more about the inherit individualism in America, “the American dream”, capitalism, and the definition of The United States. There’s a strong rejection of community support and social services. There’s a desire to have more than we need. There’s a fear of “others” who threaten your domicile and prosperity. The country was founded on a distrust of government with the formation of semi-sovereign states and multiple forms of checks and balances.
I think there’s an argument that to “be American” means to be in opposition to and skeptical of government. At first, in wake of the revolutionary war, this seemed reasonable. With slow moving news and a journalistic industry maintaining the fourth pillar of democracy, without the temptation of ad revenue or competition with social media, Americans were, frankly, sheep to a small group of organizations. As a 21st century first first world country, we really need to get together and reassess what the role of government should be and how to draft a constitution that meets the needs of a nation in an increasingly connected (and shrinking) planet.
We are not afforded the tools to be competitive with the future of humanity.
I actually believe our lack of faith in religion has had a negative impact. We used to be more connected with our community. We largely trusted one another. It was not that long ago that hitch hiking across the country was a normal practice for teens. I don’t believe in gods but I have respect for some aspects of some religious organizations. What seems to have replaced this is social media bubbles or tribes. Or internet forums like this.
We’re an increasingly fractured nation that holds distrust of all things in high regard.
Also, we’re a nation that defines wealth as the ability to acquire rather than the ability to give.
Thanks for this interesting and deeper take. I hadn’t made that link between individualism and this phenomenon, but it seems very plausible because we see less of this in countries that aren’t as antisocial.
One point I disagree on is that the country was founded on distrust of government. I’d say rather it was founded on distrust of dictatorships and autocracy. From the outset it was designed in a way that attempted to distribute power in such a way that no single individual or group had absolute power. It was one of the reasons why several of the founders were highly skeptical of political parties and considered banning them outright but instead settled for voicing warnings about them. They feared that a single political party could eventually become dominant and become the de facto ruler of the country.
In recent years there has been an effort to re-frame distrust of autocracy into a general distrust of government. I believe this has been primarily driven by powerful business interests in an attempt to remove regulations that get in the way of their maximizing profits at the expense of the public. They have rather successfully hijacked the anti-communism propaganda of the 50s and 60s and twisted it into an anti-government propaganda.
The really weird move is how right-wing attitudes in the USA have gone from distrust of government and its “interference” in their lives, through distrust of autocracy, to strong support for fascist autocracy that would be highly oppressive and invasive into people’s lives. The last step is astonishing.
Absolutely, but it’s also easy to see how the change happened. The original goal was to prevent autocracy, so power was distributed and checks and balances were created to prevent any one person or branch from being able to have too much authority. The message was corrupted into distrust of all government and combined with the debunked trickle down capitalism theory (thanks Reagan) that wealthy companies would lead to a wealthy public. The GOP then ran on a platform of eliminating “corrupt government” and removing “government interference” that was supposedly preventing that sweet free market capitalism they had been promising from working and trickling down to everyone. This then allowed them to re-frame stripping regulations and power from various government bodies and centralizing it within the executive branch as removing “wasteful and corrupt government”, and removing checks and balances as removing laws and regulations that “protected corrupt government officials”.
This also explains the “he’s not hurting the right people” crowd, as they were sold on the idea that the autocrats would be using their power to attack government institutions and politicians, not the public. They never bothered to follow things to their logical conclusion and ask “once you’ve established an autocrat, and removed all government regulations, what happens next?”, with the obvious answer “you have a dictatorship”.
One of our political parties discovered they can reliably achieve short term goals by politicizing facts and science. The success of this strategy points out that it’s available to anyone who wants to use it, which over time has meant that group of voters just got continually flooded with nonsense, until we got here.
There’s (almost) no one pushing back from that side - the strategy is too successful, the margins of victory for the party are too small, and most politicians in general want what’s best for them and would put the long term health of the group they’re representing as a distant priority, if at all.
Doesn’t even really require coordination/cooperation. With enough people willing to employ this strategy for enough time, by now the distrust of science and official communications is extremely entrenched.
If you’re looking for the “why” we’re susceptible to it, it’s the same old story - people angry at how things are going can often be manipulated into blaming people and things other than the true causes, with obvious advantages / incentives for those doing the manipulation.
Rupert Murdoch.
Decades undermining and underfunding education. They want dumb consumers just informed enough to work a shit job and earn enough to survive but not thrive.
Why are y’all so dumb?
There were truthful realities that some people didn’t like. Those realities were communicated by experts. Instead of people accepting those realities, there was an attack on experts. This happened in two ways:
- credentialed experts were discredited
- non-credentialed people claim the mantle of “expert” for themselves where they pushed whatever narrative they wanted.
Because there are now two groups calling themselves experts, and they are giving contradictory information, further loss of trust occurs. So the masses are picking and choosing which experts to listen to with whatever criteria they determine, and I’m not seeing a lot of informed decision making or critical thinking questioning sources.
Couple that with Clarke’s proclamation: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
So our technology has evolved to do so many amazing things, those without understanding of the technology assume it can do so much more, and don’t question things like “Dems control the weather”.
So a whole bunch of us are dumb now.
Decades of propaganda painting opposition to the GOP as literal Satan worshipping baby killing pedophiles, and when that’s who you’re running against, how could not vote for the GOP no matter how uneducated they are?
i agree this is the main thing, plus social media. that’s a recipe for conspiracies to spread like wildfire. any asshat can make a spooky video and appear to know what they’re talking about, and people are not nearly skeptical enough. Not to mention algorithms designed to keep people clicking, tapping, and watching.
sure education is facing challenges but i don’t think it’s THAT much worse than a few decades ago. it just hasn’t been able to catch up with the propaganda and social media.
The attack on education is part of the long term strategy. The early indoctrination and propaganda gets people into the conspiracies and a lack of education makes sure they stay there and don’t stop to consider how utterly batshit insane they sound. I also think lead exposure due to usage of leaded gas prior to 1996 can’t be overlooked. There’s a very obvious correlation in violent crime rates that corresponds with the increased usage of leaded gas in the 60s and the sharp decline in the 90s following its phasing out starting in the 80s and outright ban in the mid 90s.
yeah I’m not denying education is under attack. I just don’t think it’s anywhere close to the same level of responsibility for conspiracy thinking as propaganda and social media.
It’s essentially a force multiplier. The propaganda wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective as it is without the attacks on education. The propaganda was the thin end of the wedge, and now that they’re established they’re attacking education to make sure they stay entrenched, as it’s the only thing that could really threaten them.
The propaganda wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective as it is without the attacks on education.
yeah I disagree, but I doubt either of us are going to find conclusive evidence one way or the other.
Because the Republicans have spent the last 40 years slowly demolishing public education. That combined with a steady feed of propaganda on AM radio and Fox News, plus mild lead poisoning from leaded gas usage prior to the 90s has resulted in multiple generations that lack even the most rudimentary critical thinking skills or scientific knowledge and are primed to believe whatever absurd conspiracy reinforces whatever their pastors and favorite talking heads are saying.
They’re absolutely convinced that the US government has been infiltrated by “communists” that are engaged in grand sweeping conspiracies to destroy the US, and the only solution is to remove all power from the US government. They’ve been steeped in propaganda for decades that tells them all governments are corrupt and only corporations can be trusted, that the “free market” is the solution to all problems.
Decades of FUD. It’s the same strategy totalitarian regimes follow around the world. You don’t expect people to believe this shit. You just need them to question reality enough so that they don’t believe the truth.
As an American southerner I don’t appreciate your cultural appropriation
Blame English for lacking a proper 2nd person plural pronoun.
Tons of Russian ops too
US citizens have always been this dumb. But the Internet has made it cheap and easy for the idiots to gain a platform. The media was expensive 20 years ago and complicated so the idiots didn’t have the skills to use it.
A billion dollar judgement against this guy and he is still spewing lies.
Billion and a half.
It’s truly unbelievable, isn’t it. It illustrates the degree to which people are truly a slave to their impulses and delusions. No external factors will ever reform this guy, and it’s really a sad thing to watch a person trapped in their own kind of hell.
He knows what the truth is. He just wants money and cocaine, so he continues doing these.
Kamala lives rent free in his head. I’ve heard, you know…on TV, that there’s a way to get her out and it involves a power drill with a long drill bit. But, shhh…don’t tell anyone - it’s a liberal secret.
That’s the only thing he knows and sells.
How else should he get money now?the thing is he wasn’t in trouble for his lies generally speaking, he was in trouble for specific lies that made the sandy hook families’ lives hell. As long as he’s talking about general conspiracy bullshit that doesn’t materially damage anyone, he can still say whatever the fuck he wants.
They stopped with the ‘it’s God punishing sinful States’ when it became apparent that all the states that kept getting hit with natural disasters were mostly Republican controlled ones. 😂
In my opinion, the real concern here is that this may be the demise of the need to address climate change. Just as these wackos convinced millions of people that vaccines were a government plot, they’re setting the stage for the climate change hoax. There will be a large swath of people who convert to believe the government is in control of the weather and the change we’ve experienced in our climate. This should be a grave concern for all.
2000’s conservative: “Climate change isn’t real”.
2010’s conservative: “Climate change is real, but it’s not caused by human activity”.
2020’s conservative: “Climate change is caused by human activity, and IT’S THE LIBERALS AND THEIR HURRICANE MAKING SPACE LASERS”.2030’s we need to band together to stop this threat of climate terrorism 2040’s we need to create our own hurricane creation array
And with that the monkeys paw curled it’s last finger, fell limp and dissolved to ashes.
I was a conspiracy nut for a while, (not that I believed everything, I just really wanted UFOs to be aliens lol) and a rather large conspiracy from “back in the day” was HAARP, a series of antenna in Alaska if I remember correctly. They were claiming similar things that long ago, that HAARP was responsible for weather modification and not climate change. While it was Myspace and not Facebook that was the popular thing, this didn’t really spread all that far.
Maybe now that Twitter is fully right wing trash and Facebook is just as bad this might catch on more, but I kinda doubt it. Some things really are just too stupid for a large enough percentage of people to actually believe.
Except there is a bit of truth to this. The government does seed clouds to impact rainfall. It’s not that far of a stretch for a regular person to believe getting as bunch of these planes together could plausibly nudge a hurricane into existence.
i dunno, these people were never gonna be on board anyway. maybe i’m just being cynical.
This should be a grave concern for all.
I think that actions have consequences. I am not ‘concerned’, I am just expectant that a large number of people deciding to act badly will have worse consequences than otherwise.
I don’t feel emotionally attached to being human and I am middle-aged without children.
Oh wow, he’s really putting his reputation on the line with this one /s
She needs to aim it farther south to hit Mar-a-Lago, then.
Idiots like this are not totally to blame
The government, the leadership, the establishment, the country, the people are all complicit for allowing someone like this to have such a prominent place in the national discourse.
Jones isn’t the only idiot … the entire country is for having a large percentage of the population who listen to him.
The fact that MTG can still be in government in any form kinda backs up the founders beliefs that the general population is just too stupid to handle directly electing their representatives lol
I really can’t believe this is what they are rallying around. This is the thing they’ve all decided yep that’s the hill we’re dying on.
Yes, because closely-scrutinized disaster responses that are having to be done in multiple states for multiple storms are such a huge winner for the incumbent party. This is one of those conspiracies that is not only stupid on its face, but it doesn’t make any sense at all even if it was true. It’s a failure of critical thinking on so many levels.
So she is targeting Democratic leaning cities to stop people from voting for her. Idiot.
Can somebody just get this nutjob committed to a psychiatric institution already? He’s very clearly delusional and paranoid. I’m not sure what he needs to be on, but he definitely needs some kind of medication.
I think he needs iron supplements. I recommend a dosage of around 220 lbs, administered from a height of, oh, let’s say 100 feet.
Why not just send our weather machine after him? Maybe a nice targeted tornado strike, or TTS.
Alex Jones is AI generated, don’t trust him.
Pass this message on in other places please.
Alex Jones “interviewed” ChatGPT on his show. Three separate times.
Just going to drop a plug for the extremely excellent Knowledge Fight podcast.
This statement is supported by just as much evidence as his other claims. Fair is fair!
Scientists
have said it is currently impossible to control weather events like Hurricane Milton.first laughed out loud, said “oh you’re serious?” and then let out a deep sigh while patiently explaining that “no - nobody can do that.” They then picked up their scotch that was half-finished at 10AM and took a deep gulp.
