Nikki Haley targeted by false weather manipulation claims before Iowa caucuses

"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," Loomer says in a January 11, 2024 post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Loomer, a far-right Florida activist and former congressional candidate, continues: "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 dominate the Iowa Caucus ... Looks like weather manipulation to me."

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Screenshot of an X post taken January 12, 2024

The Republican caucuses in the state of Iowa kick off the presidential election process January 15, offering the first real test of Trump's runaway poll lead.

But a powerful cyclone is predicted to hit the midwest state, threatening to derail campaigning. Hopefuls such as Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have already postponed multiple events.

Loomer has previously attacked Haley as her poll numbers rise, amplifying false claims that the former South Carolina governor is not qualified for the office because her parents were not American citizens at the time of her birth.

Loomer's latest allegation of weather manipulation is similarly baseless.

HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is a research initiative that uses the world’s most powerful high-frequency transmitter to study the ionosphere and the physical processes at work in the very highest regions of the atmosphere.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has operated the program since 2015, when it was transferred from the US Air Force (archived here).

HAARP has long been the subject of conspiracy theories -- including that it is designed to manipulate the weather. AFP has previously debunked several such claims.

"Radio waves in the frequency ranges that HAARP transmits are not absorbed in either the troposphere or the stratosphere -- the two levels of the atmosphere that produce Earth’s weather," HAARP says on its FAQ page (archived here).

"Since there is no interaction, there is no way to control the weather."

Philippe Marbaix, a researcher at the Earth and Life Institute at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, confirmed to AFP in August 2022 that weather "is essentially phenomena that occur in the troposphere, that is below about 10 kilometers' altitude."

That is far lower than the ionosphere, which starts 37 miles (60 km) above the Earth's surface, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (archived here).

So what is behind extreme weather?

"Heatwaves, droughts, storms and floods are all caused by a variety of different conditions in the atmosphere and are often the result of the random combination of weather events," Ella Gilbert, a meteorologist at the British Antarctic Survey, previously told AFP.

"The idea that technology can somehow bring about these extreme events makes no sense."

US weather authorities and media outlets report the Iowa storm is due primarily to an Arctic mass pushing south after a blizzard in the region (archived here, here and here).

AFP contacted HAARP for comment, but no response was forthcoming.

AFP has fact-checked other misinformation about the 2024 US elections here.