AUGUSTA — A Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives says the government is creating hurricanes to seize land and punish voters in conservative states.
Wendy Lee MacDowell of Augusta amplified conspiracy theories and made a number of false claims about recent hurricanes in a series of posts this week to both her personal and campaign social media pages.
MacDowell is running against incumbent Democrat Bill Bridgeo in House District 60, which represents Augusta east of the Kennebec River.
Her posts alleged that the government is manufacturing “weaponized weather” to target conservative states with intense storms and seize their land for lithium mining, mirroring false claims from national politicians and social media ideologues about Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.
Reached for comment, MacDowell refused to provide information backing up her claims and threatened to sue a reporter for requesting an interview.
MacDowell’s conspiracy theories were posted days after Hurricane Helene killed more than 200 people and days before Hurricane Milton struck Florida in what experts warned could be the state’s most destructive hurricane on record.
In one post, MacDowell shared an image of a hand mixer labeled “HAARP” stirring up a hurricane, referencing the false conspiracy theory that major weather events are controlled by the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, known as HAARP.
A Facebook post shared Oct. 2 by Republican House candidate Wendy Lee MacDowell of Augusta references the false conspiracy theory that major weather events are controlled by the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, known as HAARP.
Both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton were made more intense by human-caused climate change, scientists say, not secret government technology. The HAARP system researches the Earth’s ionosphere and has no effect on the planet’s weather patterns.
On another occasion, MacDowell shared a post falsely claiming that all aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is a loan that hurricane victims must pay back. Federal and state officials have flatly denied this rumor.
These rumors and others, FEMA said, cause unnecessary concern among people in the path of hurricanes, and make them less likely to accept help.
“The high volume of rumors and misinformation in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene has caused confusion and threatens important response and recovery efforts,” FEMA said in a post this week.
One image shared to MacDowell’s official campaign account claimed without proof that private equity companies were buying land washed out by flooding in Chimney Rock, North Carolina, to be used for lithium mining.
“Land grab, NC (North Carolina),” MacDowell wrote. “Weaponized weather.”
Another post linked to a post on X, formerly Twitter, claiming without evidence that Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, stands to benefit financially from those supposed mines.
A Facebook post on Wendy Lee MacDowell’s official campaign account claims without proof that private equity companies are buying land washed out by flooding in Chimney Rock, N.C., to be used for lithium mining, and suggests that Hurricane Helene was targeted at the state.
Those claims are entirely false, according to local and federal officials.
U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, a Republican who represents western North Carolina, issued a press release Tuesday to dispel “an uptick in untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos by sharing hoaxes.”
“Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock. Nobody can control the weather,” Edwards wrote.
After being confronted by a reporter with evidence that her claims were not true, MacDowell began posting “proof” of her beliefs to her personal Facebook, citing a 1947 experiment in which the U.S. Air Force attempted to weaken a hurricane through a process known as “cloud seeding,” in which dry ice is airdropped into a cyclone’s cloud layers to cool the cyclone’s temperature, with the goal of weakening the storm’s intensity.
The federal government researched cloud seeding until the early 1980s, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, determined it is impossible for humans to modify hurricanes’ intensity or behavior.
“There is no sound physical hypothesis for the modification of hurricanes, tornadoes, or damaging winds in general, and no related scientific experimentation has been conducted in the past 20 years,” NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division notes on its website. “No Federal agencies are presently doing, or planning, research on hurricane modification.”
‘RIDICULOUS’ THEORIES FLOURISH
Conspiracy theories like MacDowell’s are playing an increasing role in political discourse in Maine and around the country, according to Nicholas Jacobs, an associate professor at Colby College in Waterville, who studies contemporary American politics and media discourse.
“There’s been a significant increase in the visibility of conspiracy theories, not just on the fringes, but being espoused by political candidates and elected officials themselves,” Jacobs said. “We’re no longer at the point where they can be written off or laughed off, no matter how ridiculous they are.”
Most conspiracy theories work in the same way as MacDowell’s, Jacobs said: One kernel of truth is presented without context to create a larger false narrative.
Disproving those narratives is often an impossible task, Jacobs said, because of the inherent distrust of authority that comes with most conspiracy theories. Any information contrary to the narrative is disregarded because it must be part of the conspiracy.
“Believing in conspiracy theories is kind of like a giant middle finger to all the groups in society that say they know what truth is,” Jacobs said.
Tim Grose, the executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, called the conspiracies being spread by MacDowell and others “dangerous.” He said they are hindering relief efforts, and show MacDowell is not fit for office.
“Last winter, the people and communities of Maine’s Kennebec River Valley suffered some of the worst flooding from the storms that impacted our state,” Grose said, “and they clearly cannot trust Wendy Lee MacDowell’s judgment or her ability to lead or respond in times of crisis.”
Conspiracy theories and misinformation are nothing new to MacDowell or Maine’s political discourse. In 2021, MacDowell falsely claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, in which 20 children and six staff members were killed in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax.
“Never happened,” she posted to X. “That building had been abandoned for years.”
She would later walk back her claims in an interview with the Maine Morning Star, though she maintained she is “not sure that (the shooting) happened the way they said it did.”
Bridgeo, the incumbent Democrat whom MacDowell is challenging, said MacDowell’s campaign should be less focused on conspiracy theories and more focused on policy issues.
“Maine and its elected leaders have too many pressing serious matters to address to become engaged in fantastic social media conspiracy theories,” Bridgeo wrote in an email Wednesday.
The Maine GOP and Kennebec County Republican Committee did not respond to requests for comment.
SOCIAL MEDIA’S ROLE
The misinformation MacDowell shared mirrored similar claims about recent hurricanes made by national politicians, including U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who has repeatedly claimed that “they” can control hurricanes, but has not specified who “they” are.
“Yes they can control the weather,” Greene wrote Oct. 3 on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Yes they can control the weather.
It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) October 4, 2024
Conspiracy theories like Greene’s and MacDowell’s have flourished on X since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and then rolled back guidelines about misinformation and fact-checking.
Musk has also shared false claims and misinformation in a number of X posts about the storms and the response to them.
In several posts, Musk claimed that FEMA’s disaster response funds had been diverted to house migrants, a claim that former President Donald Trump parroted last week during a rally in Michigan.
That claim is a flat-out lie, according to FEMA, the White House and members of Congress from both parties. So far, more than $45 million in direct assistance has been given to hurricane survivors, with hundreds of millions more on the way.
In fact, while Trump was president, he diverted nearly $10 million in funding in 2018 from FEMA to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use for detention programs.
While social media has buoyed conspiracy theories across all platforms, the problem has been exacerbated since X’s open embrace of misinformation.
Elected officials and candidates for office across Maine are increasingly buying into and sharing false narratives propagated on X and Facebook, often for political gain, according to Maine extremism and misinformation researcher Andy O’Brien.
Many people only engage with social media content that conforms to their preconceived beliefs, O’Brien said, resulting in content that is increasingly vitriolic, violent and conspiratorial toward those on the other side of the issue or aisle.
“It’s not like people are saying, ‘We disagree with these policies’ anymore,” O’Brien said. “It’s that these people are evil and they want to do evil things. People have been conditioned by social media to always assume the worst in people’s intentions.”
Candidates and officials who spread conspiracy theories seldom do it to attract new voters, O’Brien said.
Instead, posts like MacDowell’s are generally meant to provide subtle nods to the fringes of her voter base and draw them into voting for the candidate – regardless of how wild the claims are.
By taking advantage of the fear and distrust cultivated by sensationalized social media posts, O’Brien said candidates such as MacDowell can often use conspiracy theories to create political action.
“People have been conditioned not to believe the media or any institutions that are reporting things they disagree with, because they believe that they’re all corrupt,” O’Brien said. “So they’re more susceptible to online conspiracies, and it’s often to the advantage of bad political actors.”
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