MORNING SENTINEL • October 10, 2024
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. 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. Both hurricanes were made more intense by human-caused climate change, scientists say, not secret government technology.