Meet The Tornado Truthers
Yes, there are people out there claiming that the Moore, OK tornado was some kind of diversion plotted by the Obama Administration:
On Sunday, six days after a furious and deadly tornado, President Obama will reportedly head to Moore, Oklahoma. It took less than 48 hours for the truthers to furiously accuse the White House — perhaps by way of George Soros — of creating the tornado itself. If you thought 9/11 conspiracy theorists were bad, or the Sandy Hook and Boston bombing truthers were reckless, Obama’s meteorological manipulation — all to distract a country from three Washington scandals — well, that might be a new level of ridiculous.
“Of course there’s weather weapon stuff going on — we had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force,” Alex Jones said on his radio show Tuesday afternoon, adding he wasn’t sure if a government “weather weapon” was used against Moore. And being “unsure” of something is exactly the way conspiracy theories work: It allows people like Jones to sow doubt, float an untrue story — in this case, about the government creating a massive tornado — while at the same time giving truthers a loophole to squeeze through, without being held accountable or stating on the record anything they actually do believe.
The conspiracy theory of the moment goes something like this: The Obama administration is being asked how much they knew about three apparent scandals — Benghazi, the IRS, the Justice Department’sdouble leak investigations — and in order to make Americans think about something else, the administration manipulated the weather and created the mile-wide Moore tornado.
Part of the theory involves a supposedly secret weather manipulation system called HAARP, which has been the subject of nutjob conspiracy theories since the 1990s:
As Gawker’s Ken Layne writes, the “stated goal of HAARP is to study the ionosphere and how the spectrum of radio waves works within these upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.” Essentially, HAARP researches communications. But there are budding conspiracy theories that HAARP could be ultimately used to disrupt the ionosphere, and manipulate weather patterns. As one Redditor pointed out, one of the permutations of the conspiracy theory in Moore is that the left-wing financier George “the Sorcerer” Soros is behind all of this.
Jones’s theory is a little bit different. The left-leaning Media Matters has the segment of his show where Jones claims that if people in Oklahoma saw helicopters and aircrafts “in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things” that “if you saw that you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did. You know, that’s the thing, we don’t know.”
And another contributor on Before Its News says the whole thing is a farce — that no one is actually dead, even though they very much are.
This isn’t really a surprise, of course. There seem to be similar conspiracy theories like this that pop up within mere hours of any kind of national tragedy.We saw it after the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and we saw it after the bombing in Boston. What’s distressing is that there are people who believe this nonsense.
Distressing? Nah, it’s par for the course.
Hell….these people are why I’m a liberal instead of a Libertarian.
@James Pearce (Formerly Known as Herb):
I’m not a liberal because I don’t believe in a government that thinks it knows better than me how to run my life, but to each his own I suppose
@Doug Mataconis: I have all the confidence in the world that you specifically are capable of running your life better than any government. I have the same confidence in myself and several of the people I know.
These people however…….
@Doug Mataconis: and I’m sure you do. And I’m even willing, against the weight of the evidence, to stipulate that each individual should be deemed best to manage their own life.
But you aren’t the best to manage how you impact everyone else’s life. Think tragedy of the commons. That is why we decide to make many decisions collectively.
To quote myself:
Prove me wrong.
It sounds as if Jones got hold of a DVD of “Storm Trackers,” a tv movie from 1999 in which Martin Sheen plays a crazed Air Force general who’s devised a method of manipulating the weather so as to cause giant storms to devastate enemy territory. Sadly, all Sheen’s machine does is cause Hurricane Andrew and, years later, a hurricane that nearly wipes out Los Angeles. Luke Perry is the Tequila-slugging rogue meteorologist who saves the day.
Reminds me of the 9/11 Truthers.
It was true then and it is true today…
(Apologies to Mel Brooks.)
@Doug Mataconis: I hope that comment was intended to be flippant, and that you have a better reason you might be willing to share at some point.
@PJ:
Are you being intentionally ironic?
Doug may think what he likes about being libertarian. The plain fact is though, that by voting Republican, and refusing to even consider voting Democrat, he puts into office folks who believe this stuff and much other nonsense besides(Remember the Republican congressman-on the Science Committee no less-who believes that the Big Bang was a “lie from the pit of hell?”).
A libertarian these days is pretty much a fellow traveler and enabler of Republicans, whatever they may think in their hearts. That’s real world.
@Ernieyeball: The President’s a ni-CLANG!
@legion: hahaha
What´d he say?
He said the President is near.
also:
Sarah Palin only pawn…. in game of life.
@SKI:
This. Libertarians just can’t seem to comprehend that the world doesn’t revolve around them.
@Nikki:
Nor can they understand that every single governmental rule that they complain about was not put into place because the government desired more control over their lives, but because leaving matters in the hands of the invisible hand made people’s lives far worse off, and that therefore our elected representatives decided that the lesser evil was to “intrude” into their lives.
CHEMTRAILS!!!!
Actually, there is a pretty decent Bruce Sterling novel called Heavy Weather about a situation like this.
I signed up for HAARP thinking I was going to get my mortgage adjusted. I came home to find my house destroyed.