Two failed GOP congressional candidates—DeAnna Lorraine and Lauren Witzke—claimed to have figured out where Hurricane Ian came from. According to them it's not just the result of high and low pressure weather fronts colliding or any other force of nature.
Lorraine and Witzke claim Ian was created by the "deep state" using "weather manipulation technology" to exact revenge on Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis because he didn't enact a vaccine mandate in his state.
No, this isn't an Onion article or an SNL sketch, this a real conspiracy theory being espoused as fact by real Republican politicians.
Lorraine and Witzke are the type of crackpots that are too crackpotty even for a country deeply enamored of crackpots.
At the height of the pandemic in 2020, when suspicions were running high, both failed spectacularly in their respective congressional races in which they both ran on explicitly conspiracy-driven platforms.
Lorraine won just 1.8% of the vote in her attempt to unseat Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, while Witzke lost her Senate race in Delaware by almost 22%.
But those losses haven't slowed them down a bit. In their conversation about Ian during Lorraine's online talk show, she claimed:
“We understand that the ‘Deep State,’ they have weather manipulation technology. They have DARPA. They know how to manipulate and create big storms — hurricanes, tornados, climate change, etc."
"And these huge hurricanes always seem to target red states, red districts, and always at a convenient time, typically right before elections or, in this case, possibly because Ron DeSantis has been stepping out of line a lot and challenging, fighting the Deep State.”
Okay, then. Witzke then chimed in to compound the nonsense.
“[T]hey are literally trying to change people’s DNA through vaccination...of course they would be willing to do something like this to target red states.”
“I’m not putting it past the elites to target something like this towards Florida as punishment for getting rid of vaccine mandates or getting rid of child grooming. They are angry with us.”
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Lorraine and Witzke are right about one thing: Governments around the world have had the ability to manipulate rain for decades, via cloud seeding--infusing clouds with chemicals that make them drop moisture as rain.
But how did the government control the winds to make sure Hurricane Ian devastated Florida specifically? Perhaps a series of giant invisible space fans?
And if manipulating the weather is so easy, why hasn't the government done it in, say, California and Arizona, states rapidly running out of water and embroiled in a catastrophic drought that also happen to be where most of our vegetables are grown?
Lorraine and Witzke don't seem to have thought this far, and naturally, the internet has had a field day with their nonsense.
Though not everyone found it funny--many found it downright ominous.
If Hurrican Ian was merely just a creation of the big bad Democrat-led government, Lorraine and Witzke's beloved Governor DeSantis certainly doesn't seem to mind.
He's petitioned for, and received, aid from the Biden Administration to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, despite having voted against such aid in the wake of Hurricane Sandy back in 2013 during his tenure in Congress.
@joehas/X