January 13, 2024

Far-Right Trump Activist Thinks the Deep State Created the Blizzard in Iowa

Now it’s the weather that is rigging votes.

Snow plow in front of sign that says "Des Moines"

A snow plow drives past a mural during a blizzard in Des Moines, Iowa on January 12, 2024. Photo by Julia Nikhinson/Abaca/Sipa USA(Sipa via AP Images)Abaca Press/Associated Press

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In Iowa this weekend, subzero temperatures and blizzard conditions are wreaking havoc on the caucuses, forcing candidates to cancel events and threatening to keep voters home.

Uncomfortable and inconvenient conditions are not especially unusual for January in Iowa—but that fact isn’t stopping far-right activist and Trump supporter Laura Loomer from insisting that they are actually part of a sinister government agenda. Here’s Loomer on X, explaining how the “Deep State” is harnessing its Queen Elsa-like powers to orchestrate the storm for nefarious political purposes:

Loomer is alluding to a conspiracy theory about the University of Alaska’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, which studies the ionosphere. It alleges that the project is actually a front for a top-secret government initiative to control the weather. Proponents of this wild speculation have included former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and Sandy Hook denialist Alex Jones.   

Paranoia about HAARP persists, despite frequent and decisive debunking by scientists. As Bob McCoy, director of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told the AP in 2018, “No, it’s not a weapon, and it couldn’t be…the way high-frequency radios work is that the atmosphere is transparent to those signals. If we made this 10 times bigger and tried, we still couldn’t affect the weather.”

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