False stories in the aftermath of tragedy


Whenever there is a natural disaster that takes many lives, there is a tendency for people to seize upon conspiratorial thinking as to the cause or on stories of miraculous survival or rescue.

In the case of the recent flash floods in Texas that has resulted in over 100 deaths and over a 150 people still missing, we see the conspiratorial minded come out in full force. I am not talking about the more serious discussions as to whether the cuts by Trump in funding the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) resulted in less efficient weather forecasting and early warnings (and he is proposing further $2.2 billion in cuts to NOAA), but about stories that the floods were the result of the government efforts to manipulate the weather.

Some people, emerging from the same vectors associated with the longstanding QAnon conspiracy theory, which essentially holds that a shadowy “deep state” is acting against President Donald Trump, spread on X that the devastating weather was being controlled by the government.

“I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS,” posted Pete Chambers, a former special forces commander and frequent fixture on the far right who once organized an armed convoy to the Texas border, along with documents he claimed to show government weather operations. “WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?”

The same chain of posts on the social media platform X singled out a California-based “precipitation enhancement” company as a potential culprit.

It didn’t take long for one of the most integral figures in the QAnon movement to repost Chambers, which received millions of views on the Elon Musk-owned app.

“Anyone able to answer this?” wrote retired general Mike Flynn, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration and who helped legitimize QAnon after pledging allegiance to the movement in 2020, reposting Chambers.

Conspiracists and grifters on other platforms joined in. One YouTuber with hundreds of thousands of subscribers posted breathless coverage of what he called “The TRUTH of WEATHER MANIPULATION” in a segment which earned him close to 200,000 views alone.

The halls of Congress echoed the sentiment, as Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – a vaccine skeptic and GOP hardliner who has espoused Jeffrey Epstein conspiracies – didn’t waste the moment to say she was introducing a bill of her own after the floods.

“I am introducing a bill that prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity,” she wrote on X as the aftermath of the floods continued. “It will be a felony offense.”

At the other end are the false stories of miraculous survival or rescues that spread like wildfire despite having no factual basis, such as the one about two girls who were found six miles downstream clinging to a tree. Even journalists spread the story, persuaded by so many accounts from people who claimed to have first-hand knowledge of the rescue. The story was then picked up by other news outlets.

Louis Amestoy, editor of The Kerr County Lead, was sceptical, but the messages he was getting about the miraculous rescue would not stop, he said. A ground report on social media from a volunteer seemed to corroborate the story. After sending a reporter out to investigate and hearing from what he said were multiple self-described witnesses, the Lead ran the story on July 6, which was subsequently shared both locally and nationally.

But the story was not true; “100% inaccurate”, as a local sheriff put it.

When a reporter for the Lead, Jennifer Dean, went to the scene of the supposed rescue, “volunteer firefighters” and other community members recounted the story about the two girls as proof of their efforts, Amestoy said.

“You had so much enthusiasm in that community for that story. So many people were telling us that they saw the situation,” Amestoy said. “We literally had eyewitnesses.”

Dean spoke to some 20 to 30 people in Comfort, all of whom told similar versions of the story, Amestoy said. Dean could not be reached for comment. A few even took her to the site of the made-up rescue, Amestoy said.

Amestoy said he finds it surreal how many people continue to believe the rescue took place even after the retraction.

“We wanted this to be a good story. We wanted something positive to report, and that didn’t happen. And we are apologising and holding ourselves accountable for this mistake.”

One can understand the need of people to find slivers of good news in that face of tragedy and spread it when they hear it. But what is disturbing are those people who claim to have been eyewitnesses to an event that did not happen. People do often inadvertently insert themselves into an interesting story because it makes them seem more significant and increases its verisimilitude. But that kind of error usually happens long after the event itself, when they are reconstructing an old memory. It is less common in the immediate aftermath when the events are still fresh. Was it some form of delusion? Or were they deliberately lying? And if lying, why?

Comments

  1. says

    my favorite is con artists using every little piece of news to run scams. that *really* fucks up attempts to run legitimate charity to disaster victims in need.

  2. Katydid says

    The religious nutters are forever trying to turn tragedies into opportunities to proselytize. I expect shows like The 700 Club to start running commercial promos with earnest people asserting, “God told me to get out and I’m saved!” or “I was neck-deep in water and prayed, “God help me!” and then I was miraculously pulled from the water!”

    That type made a feast out of Columbine with the false story that one student was asked if she was a Christian, and when she said yes, she was martyred for her faith. Never happened, but they got a couple of books and lots of talk-show time out of it.

    And after 9/11, someone claimed a crosspiece of common rebar was a Christian cross--which never made sense from the perspective of all the people who died, but I think was supposed to convey a secret message for the faithful to use their decoder ring on.

  3. birgerjohansson says

    My favv case of disinformation was the troll account that prompted the new Grok to go full nazi.

    We know it was a troll account because the portrait wss just an image from an onlyfans account. An offensive message about the flood disaster was signed with with a Jewish name.

    Enter Grok, with the new “improved” programming provided by thr totally not at all nazi guy from South Africa.

  4. says

    @2 Katydid
    promos with earnest people asserting, “God told me to get out and I’m saved!” or “I was neck-deep in water and prayed, “God help me!” and then I was miraculously pulled from the water!”

    This reminds me of a joke. Apologies if you’ve already heard it.

    An old man’s house is being threatened by rising flood waters. His neighbors knock on his door and tell him they will drive him to safety. “No”, replies the man, “God will provide for me”. Hours past and now the waters have overtaken his property and are several feet above his lawn. The local police come by in a boat and shout to the man that they will bring him to safety. “No”, replies the man, “God will provide for me!”. By that evening the waters have risen so far that the man is forced out onto his roof. He hears a loud noise and discovers a National Guard helicopter hovering nearby. They tell the man that they will evacuate him. “No”, shouts the man, “God will provide for me!!”.

    Eventually, the waters rise above the house and the old man drowns. He goes to heaven where he meets Jesus. The old man says “I had great faith that you would save me. Why didn’t you save me?” Jesus looks at him half in disgust and says “What are you talking about? I sent a car, a boat, and a helicopter! What more do you want?”

  5. Snowberry says

    @jimf #4
    The usual version is “two boats and a helicopter”, and it’s either God or St. Peter rather than Jesus. Regardless, by now it’s so commonly known in some circles that people usually just refer to it as “the parable of the drowning man” as shorthand.

  6. Owlmirror says

    Speaking of cloud seeding, it turns out there was actually cloud seeding going on in Texas, not too long before the flood:

    https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/the-texas-floods-cloud-seeding-maha-tech-thiel/

    On July 2, two days before floods devastated communities in West Texas, a California-based company called Rainmaker was conducting operations in the area. Rainmaker was working on behalf of the South Texas Weather Modification Association, a coalition of water conservation districts and county commissions; the project is overseen by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Through a geoengineering technology called cloud seeding, the company uses drones to disperse silver iodide into clouds to encourage rainfall. The company is relatively new—it was launched in 2023—but the technology has been around since 1947, when the first cloud-seeding experiment took place.

    [ . . . ]

    Augustus Doricko, Rainmaker’s 25-year-old CEO, took Flynn up on his request. “Rainmaker did not operate in the affected area on the 3rd or 4th,” he posted on X, “or contribute to the floods that occurred over the region.”

    Meteorologists resoundingly agree with Doricko, saying the technology simply isn’t capable of causing that volume of precipitation, in which parts of Kerr County experienced an estimated 100 billion gallons of rain in just a few hours. But the scientific evidence didn’t dissuade those who had already made up their minds that geoengineering was to blame.

    You might think that Doricko would be secular, if not an atheist, but that would be very wrong:

    The following day, Rainmaker’s Doricko tweeted, “I’m trying to help preserve the world God made for us by bringing water to the farms and ecosystems that are dying without it.” Last year, he told Business Insider, “I view in no small part what we’re doing at Rainmaker as, cautiously and with scrutiny from others and advice from others, helping to establish the kingdom of God.”

    Indeed, for Doricko, the reference to the divine was not merely rhetorical. He reportedly attends Christ Church Santa Clarita, a church affiliated with the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial and Gen Z ultraconservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of this branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.

    His political formation was also ultraconservative. As an undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, he launched the school’s chapter of America First Students, the university arm of the political organization founded by white nationalist “Groyper” and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. (Doricko didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.)

    More recently, he has aligned himself with a different corner of the right: the ascendant Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are increasingly influencing Republican politics.

    Ugh.

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