In Maine, a Republican candidate for the legislature is promoting weather conspiracies

Conspiracy theories about the weather have come to Maine. Wendy Lee MacDowell of Augusta, a Republican candidate for the state legislature, has claimed on social media that the government is responsible for “weaponized weather” aimed at whipping up storms in conservative states, reports Dylan Tusinski of the Morning Sentinel, which covers Central Maine.

“Reached for comment,” Tusinski writes, “MacDowell refused to provide information backing up her claims and threatened to sue a reporter for requesting an interview.”

MacDowell, who is running against state Rep. Bill Bridgeo, an incumbent Democrat, is echoing claims made by extreme-right Republicans such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who posted to Twitter recently: “Yes, they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

“They,” presumably, is a reference to Democrats, although there is more than a whiff of antisemitism to these lies, too. For instance, MacDowell linked on Facebook without comment to a video on Twitter, which in turn had been reposted from TikTok, claiming that Hurricane Helene was directed by the government to Asheville, North Carolina, as part of an elaborate conspiracy to take control of lithium mines tied to Doug Emhoff, who’s married to Vice President Kamala Harris.

In the comments, another conspiracy theorist claimed that Emhoff’s family owns a pharmaceutical company “that makes/sells…. the puberty blockers they are pushing on children to change genders.”

And, of course, we all know that Emhoff is Jewish.

The extreme right’s conspiracy theories about hurricanes have resulted in meteorologists coming under attack and have impeded relief efforts, reports Ivana Saric of Axios, writing:

Meteorologist James Spann told Axios on Friday he began seeing an influx of threatening messages and conspiracy theories around the onset of Hurricane Helene. The threats include messages like “‘stop lying about the government controlling the weather — or else,'” he said. Spann also noted that the harassment faced by young women in the field is even greater.

The last word goes to Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College, who tells the Morning Sentinel: “Believing in conspiracy theories is kind of like a giant middle finger to all the groups in society that say they know what truth is.”