CONSPIRACY THEORIESFact-Checking the Viral Conspiracies in the Wake of Hurricane Helene

By Zoya Teirstein, Grist

The conspiracy theories started swirling even as the flood waters were rising: Hurricane Helene, the deadliest storm to strike the United States since Katrina in 2005, was created specifically to target Trump voters in crucial swing states. “Yes they can control the weather,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, posted on X on Thursday. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” 

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, best known for insisting the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, released a video on X claiming the government aimed Helene at North Carolina. Why? To force people out of the region so it could mine the state’s large reserves of lithium, a key component in the batteries that power electric vehicles and store renewable energy. The video gleaned nearly a million views in three days. 

Hundreds of keyboard conspiracists have taken to TikTok, X, Reddit, and other social media sites to say the Federal Emergency Management Administration is withholding critical supplies from stranded communities across the Southeast. “Just got down from the mountains delivering supplies,” someone with the username “RastaGuerilla” posted on X on September 30. “As crazy as it sounds FEMA is directly confiscating donated items and blocking volunteers from helping, kicking churches out of parking lots, etc.” The post received tens of thousands of likes, and similar messages from people claiming they were in the disaster zone have been racking up hundreds of thousands of views and reposts. 

There’s no saying what percentage of these bogus claims came from people actually in the areas devastated by Helene, let alone whether humans or bots spewed them. Regardless of who or what wrote them, the conspiracies are patently untrue. FEMA is not confiscating supplies. The Biden administration is not trying to kick people off of land it wants to mine for lithium. And the federal government most certainly cannot control the weather. To disaster researchers, the barrage of pointed conspiracies are further proof that conspiratorial thinking is becoming something of an epidemic. 

“We’ve moved into a space where conspiratorial thinking has become mainstream,” said Rachel Goldwasser, who tracks far-right activity and disinformation at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Every tinfoil hat out there that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”