Conspiracy Theories About the Texas Floods Lead to Death Threats

WIRED

a day ago

Jul 8, 2025 6:01 PM Disinformation around a 'weather weapon' and cloud seeding is being widely promoted by everyone from anti-government extremists to GOP influencers—and leading to real-world consequences. KERRVILLE, TEXAS - Heavy rainfall caused flooding along the Guadalupe River in central Texas, leading to over 100 reported deaths. Photograph:On Sunday afternoon, Michael Meyer, the founder of anti-government extremist group Veterans on Patrol, posted a warning on his Telegram channel.
'Due to the recent weather weapon deployed against Texas, which resulted in a high number of child murders, efforts to eliminate this military treason are being escalated,' Meyer, who is commonly known as Lewis Arthur, wrote.
Hours later, a man broke into an enclosure containing the NextGen Live Radar system operated by News 9 in Oklahoma City, damaging its power supply and briefly knocking it offline. The man also damaged CCTV cameras monitoring the site, but footage shared by News 9 shows the cameras captured a clear image of his face before they were destroyed.
Captain Valerie Littlejohn of the Oklahoma City Police Department tells WIRED that no arrests have been made but that the department is 'aware of the Veterans on Patrol group.'
Meyer, who declined to tell WIRED if he knew the identity of the perpetrator, says the attack was part of what he calls Operation Lone Wolf, adding that he's in discussion online with over a dozen people who are willing to carry out similar attacks.
'Anyone that's going out to eliminate a Nexrad, if they haven't harmed life, and they're doing it according to the videos that we're providing, they are part of our group,' Meyer tells WIRED. 'We're going to have to take out every single media's capabilities of lying to the American people. Mainstream media is the biggest threat right now.'
Nexrads refer to Next Generation Weather Radar systems used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to detect precipitation, wind, tornadoes, and thunderstorms. Meyer says that his group wants to disable these as well as satellite systems used by media outlets to broadcast weather updates.
The attack on the News 9 weather radar system comes amid a sustained disinformation campaign on social media platforms including everyone from extremist figures like Meyer to elected GOP lawmakers. What united these disparate figures is that they were all promoting the debunked conspiracy theory that the devastating flooding in Texas last weekend was caused not by a month's worth of rain falling in the space of just a few hours—the intensity of which, meteorologists say, was difficult to predict ahead of time—but by a targeted attack on American citizens using directed energy weapons or cloud seeding technology to manipulate the weather. The result has not only been possible damage to a radar system, but death threats against those who are being wrongly blamed for causing the floods.
'I think that we've probably received in excess of 100 explicit death threats on either email or X, [with] probably about one order of magnitude more calls for my incarceration,' Augustus Doricko, the founder of cloud seeding company Rainmaker, tells WIRED.
'NOAA is aware of recent threats against NEXRAD weather radar sites and is working with local and other authorities in monitoring the situation closely,' NOAA spokesperson Erica Grow Cei tells WIRED.
Over 100 people have now been confirmed to have lost their lives in the flash flooding that hit homes and camps along the edge of the Guadalupe River in the early hours of Friday morning. Meteorologists who spoke to WIRED dismissed claims that the National Weather Service failed to accurately predict the risk of flooding in Texas.But within hours of the tragedy happening, conspiracy theorists, right-wing influencers and lawmakers were pushing wild claims on social media that the floods were somehow geo-engineered.
'Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake,' Kandiss Taylor, who intends to run as a GOP candidate to represent Georgia's 1st congressional district in the House of Representatives, wrote in a post viewed 2.4 million times. 'That doesn't even seem natural,' Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of Women for America First, wrote on X, in a post that has been viewed nine million times.
As the emergency response to the floods was still taking place on Saturday, US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, tweeted that she would be introducing a bill to 'end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering.' Greene, who once blamed California wildfires on laser beams or light beams connected to an electric company with purported ties to an organization affiliated with a powerful Jewish family, said that the bill will be similar to Florida's Senate Bill 56, which governor Ron DeSantis signed into law in June. That bill makes weather modification a third-degree felony, punishable by up to $100,000. (Greene's office did not respond to a request for comment on whether or not her announcement was specifically tied to the floods in Texas.)
On Instagram, right-wing influencer Gabrielle Yoder jumped on one of the biggest conspiracy theories, claiming that cloud seeding was responsible for causing the floods and calling out Doricko specifically.
Docicko's company was also named by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn on X. He wrote that 'anyone who calls this out as a conspiracy theory can go F themselves.'
Doricko told WIRED that Rainmaker was working on a brief cloud seeding operation just days before the storms near the town of Runge, Texas, about 120 miles away from Kerr County, where the worst of the flooding was concentrated. But Doricko says his staff meteorologists noted some high moisture content in the region. The company, he says, called off its operations, per state regulations.
Cloud seeding—the practice of increasing precipitation in a cloud by introducing materials like silver iodide or dry ice—has been in use for decades. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation maintains a page on current weather modification efforts from irrigation districts, counties and other groups in the state. Doricko's company, Rainmaker, is a buzzy startup that aims to '[synthesize] advanced technology with environmental stewardship.'
Multiple meteorologists told WIRED that there is no way that cloud seeding was responsible for the devastating storms that racked Texas last week.
'It is not physically possible or possible within the laws of atmospheric chemistry to cloud seed at a scale that would cause an event like [the Texas flooding] to occur,' says Matt Lanza, a digital meteorologist based in Houston. Lanza compares cloud seeding to adding 'icing to a cake': It's able to juice up precipitation from clouds in drier areas, not create storms wholesale out of thin air.
The National Weather Service was already warning as early as last Tuesday about potential nighttime downpours in parts of Texas, thanks to moisture coming northward from Tropical Storm Barry, which made landfall last weekend in Mexico.
'The meteorological ingredients [for the storm] were already there, and cloud seeding could not have played a role,' Lanza says.
Doricko is no stranger to anti-weather modification factions. He spent much of the early half of this year testifying against a swathe of state-level anti-geoengineering bills, including the one that eventually passed in Florida.
Doricko's personal profile—he was once photographed with Bill Clinton, and was chosen as a Thiel fellow—seems to have made the attacks on his company easier for those looking for a conspiracy on which to pin the devastating storms in Texas.
'I am trying to be as transparent as possible, because this is an incredibly controversial subject but isn't actually as regulated and discussed transparently as it ought to be by the federal government,' Doricko says. 'Just for the record, I'm not a deep state plant from either Bill Gates or Palantir, Peter Thiel or Bill Clinton.'