As the death toll climbs amid the carnage and destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is floating another conspiracy theory.
"Yes they can control the weather. It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done." Greene posted on X to her 1.2 million followers.
Greene didn't describe who "they" are in her post, but she has a record of using conspiracy theories to explain deadly catastrophes.
In 2018, a poorly maintained electrical grid sparked a California wildfire that killed 84 people. In a Facebook post in November of that year, Greene falsely speculated that darker forces were at work.
Connecting a series of scattershot points, Greene suggested a bank controlled by the Rothschild family, who are Jewish, a utility company responsible for the fire and then-Gov. Jerry Brown had a compelling motive to spark the blaze: clearing the path for a high speed rail project Brown wanted. She also floated the possibility that the fires could have been started by "lasers or blue beams of light" shot down from space by allies of Brown who were said to be in the solar energy industry.
The post coined the phrase "Jewish space lasers."
More recently, she said in April after a 4.8 magnitude earthquake hit New Jersey and reverberated through the northeast, around the same time of a solar eclipse, that they were signs "God is sending America signs to tell us to repent."
Helene is the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. since Katrina in 2005. Roughly half the victims were in North Carolina, while dozens more were killed in South Carolina and Georgia.
How many people are missing or unaccounted for isn't clear. The death toll soared to 215 people on Thursday as more victims were found.
Electricity is being slowly restored, as the number of homes and businesses without power dipped below 1 million for the first time since last weekend, according to poweroutage.us. Most of the outages are in the Carolinas and Georgia, where Helene struck after coming into Florida on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane.
As of Thursday, the search continued for people who have yet to be heard from in places where phone service and electricity were knocked out. Pleas for help came from people running low on medicine or in need of fuel for their generators.