First, they tried to claim that FEMA was a deep-state ideological op, and that didn’t work. So then, the hard-core MAGA-ratchiks moved on to the real center of action for the omnipotent cabal pushing American history leftward: control of the weather. Taking the lead of that reliable arbiter of rational discourse, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, they began, as Florida prepared for the landfall of Hurricane Milton, to sound the alarm that the fierce succession of destructive hurricanes battering the Southeast was all orchestrated from on high—and from the sinister, power-grabbing left. As reeling communities in the path of Hurricane Helene started to dig out from the damage last week, Greene repaired to her X account to alert her million-plus followers: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Greene’s demented, undocumented assertion at first seemed a sideshow to the crisis, calling to mind her infamous declaration that the 2018 wildfires in California were actually the handiwork of Jewish space lasers. (It’s worth noting that the legions of weather conspiracists on the right have also taken up this ugly side of Greene’s misinformation career, inundating Jewish officials involved in the Helene rescue effort with a steady barrage of online hate, to the point where they now fear for their safety.)

Yet as Hurricane Milton makes landfall in west Florida, causing a new round of devastating destruction, the weather-control thesis has moved into the white-hot center of MAGA conspiracy-mongering—so much so that President Joe Biden was forced to refute it in a TV interview.

The basic MAGA argument—if you can even call it that—is that the forces of liberal world domination have “geoengineered” the suspiciously timed storms as yet another weapon in their vast, shape-shifting arsenal of election interference. The far-right conspiracy site Gateway Pundit boosted Greene’s claims with a grab-bag set of testimonials from other merchants of paranoia. The piece highlights the findings of no less an authority than Robert Kennedy Jr., who declared that nefarious deep-state actors have seized control of the weather via the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. “They aggravate the problem, and sell us the solution,” Kennedy breathlessly announced. “The solution they want is more social controls.”

Other MAGA-aligned hucksters supplied the obvious connection: “They” are using hurricanes to obliterate Trump supporters! Never mind that it’s positively quaint to imagine that a power-mad, weather-modifying elite cadre of ideological scientists would harness the awesome power of hurricanes to manipulate voter turnout as opposed to, I don’t know, raining terror on the country at large and anointing themselves as weather-shaping demigods. And never mind that the speculations over the great liberal storm cabal contradict last week’s MAGA plaint that FEMA was doing the small-bore scut work of liberal social engineers by diverting scarce funds and resources to undeserving migrants: Are the lords of the deep state all-powerful Simon Bar Sinisters, or hapless, DEI-indoctrinated social workers?

But of course, consistent reasoning is hardly the point here. The point is, always and forever, to secure the standing of MAGA followers as the main characters in the byzantine conspiracies victimizing them. And in the context of the real forces creating this unprecedented wave of devastating hurricanes, the other chief objective here is to make these storms seem anything other than what they plainly are: a disastrous product of climate change.

Boxed out by the empirical conditions they’ve proudly dismissed as a hoax, adherents of the paranoid right alight on the soothing persecution narratives endorsed by their great leader. Indeed, compared to Donald Trump’s own lurid record as a weather conspiracist, Marjorie Taylor Greene is strictly a piker. As Rolling Stone reporters Asawin Subsaeng and Adam Rawnsley wrote in 2022, one of Trump’s first acts in office was to convene national security hands and other White House aides to ask whether China was using a “hurricane gun” to precipitate adverse weather in the United States. He also wanted to know whether America should consider bombing China in retaliation for this supposed treachery. “It was almost too stupid for words,” one former Trump official recalled. Trump’s interest in this potential act of Chinese comic-book villainy came up so often that White House aides began referring to it as “the hurricane gun thing.” Trump also liked to tout his own meteorological prowess, despite possessing zero understanding of how climate and weather actually work: That was how, in 2019, he infamously wound up brandishing a Sharpie-doctored weather map on TV in 2019, to support his prediction that Hurricane Dorian was barreling toward the Alabama coast. (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t) During that same daft hurricane season, Trump floated the idea of attacking hurricanes with nuclear bombs to disperse them—a proposal that manages the rare feat of being equally demented from the standpoints of meteorology and fissile weaponry.

It’s little wonder that Trump’s supporters are mimicking his high-improv weather paranoia. “Biden and Harris are messing with the weather!” went one typical outburst on X. “Hurricane Milton was sent to Florida just like the other hurricane to wipe Florida out!!” (The “other hurricane” did its worst damage in Tennessee and North Carolina, for the record—though, then again, maybe the cabal ordered up Milton pronto after Helene missed its intended target.) From the more notionally respectable perch of his million-follower X account, MAGA hedge fund manager Grant Cardone noted the rare eastbound trajectory of Milton to ask whether they believe “Gov’t is using technology to manipulate weather patterns and storms,” in the same just-asking-questions rhetorical pose that JD Vance uses to promote blood libels against immigrants.

Other commentators have already flagged the ways in which the present battery of MAGA- branded weather delusion parallels election denialism on the right, and indeed serves as a likely trial run for the torrent of lies, fraud accusations and threats of violence sure to come if Trump once more loses the election in November. That’s all true enough—yet, in another sense, this unhinged response to climate catastrophe isn’t what you get when you deny Donald Trump the presidency; it’s what you get when you successfully elect him.