A hurricane of threats on meteorologists:the new frontier of conspiracy theories made in Trump

The new monsters of disinformation on social media:Fema scientists accused of creating hurricanes to hit Republican states."They should be hanged"

ROME – Two real, frightening, destructive hurricanes.And a fake one, the result of now pathological misinformation.Helene and Milton weren't enough, in the United States there is a perfect storm of insults and threats against meteorologists. The new American conspiracy front is targeting climate scientists, accused of creating and using tornadoes and various storms at will. They have supplanted virologists, in the sights of conspiracists.It is a constantly updated emergency.

A disturbing series of falsehoods and threats began to circulate in the two weeks following Hurricane Helene's passage through six states.And it hasn't stopped now, with Milton's advance. Second the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), “The scale of misinformation fueled by Donald Trump and his supporters has been such that it has hampered the ability to help communities affected by the hurricane.”

Katie Nickolaou, a meteorologist from Michigan, said she and her colleagues had to endure all sorts of lies and attacks:people who claim the existence of Category 6 hurricanes (no, there aren't), that meteorologists or the government create and pilot hurricanes, and that scientists should be killed and radar equipment scrapped.“There are people who take it for granted that we control the weather. I had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we cannot hope to control it. But the speech took a more violent rhetorical turn.I can't believe I had to write that "murdering meteorologists won't stop hurricanes."

Since Trump took it out directly on Fema, saying that the agency had run out of funds for hurricane survivors "because they had been given to illegal immigrants", a flurry of incredible reactions has been unleashed on social media.Someone went so far as to write that FEMA workers “they should be beaten or arrested and shot, or hanged on sight“.

Nothing surprising, given that Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor, shared a video a few days ago in which he literally says that “Hurricane Helene was an attack caused by weather manipulation”.

“Yes, they can control the weather,” wrote Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right congresswoman, on X last week.“It's ridiculous for someone to lie and say it's not possible.”

Chris Gloninger, a former television meteorologist and climate scientist who has faced threats for speaking out about the climate crisis, says that “the Republican party has an army of people on social media with huge followings who simply spread this misinformation.I see my former colleagues receiving threats, they accuse me that we are directing hurricanes towards red states.It's amazing, I've never seen anything like this in any disaster“.