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

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

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.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:

Is the Deep State activating HAARP to disrupt the Iowa Caucus?
We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military industrial complex. She’s losing in Iowa, and now Iowa is set to get hit with a ONCE IN A DECADE blizzard as Donald Trump is set to… pic.twitter.com/K9YKbwZ2Oh
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) January 12, 2024

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.”