Each piece of information seemed too much to bear and wholly insufficient to make sense of the tragedy that struck the Hill Country. At each update, officials announced a fatality toll that continues to tick higher.
National attention was especially seized by the news that more than two dozen girls, campers and counselors at the sleepaway camp, Camp Mystic, were unaccounted for. But as officials made calls for prayers and support, and as families began the slow process of confirming the deaths of their young daughters, a different kind of narrative began to emerge online.
Social media posts voicing skepticism about every detail of the tragedy have swirled and gained significant traction in some cases. In a tweet that at over 2.4 million people have viewed, Kandiss Taylor, a congressional candidate from Georgia, warned, “Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake.” (A fact-checking note added to Taylor’s post said the claim “lacks evidence.”)
General Michael Flynn, who briefly served as national security advisor during President Donald Trump’s first term, repeatedly shared posts on X that claimed private weather manipulation was to blame for the unprecedented flooding. The posts have been viewed more than three million times.
According to Keith Livers, an associate professor at the University of Texas and author of Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination, conspiratorial thinking has existed throughout history, with some evidence suggesting that conspiracy theories proliferated even during the founding of the United States.
Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake.
— Kandiss Taylor (@KandissTaylor) July 5, 2025
Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, conspiracy-style thinking exploded in frequency across the U.S., Livers said, and since the assassination, conspiracy theories have tended to “coalesce around traumatic events, particularly those" that affect the entire nation. However, to some extent, genuinely believing in a conspiracy theory was still somewhat fringe throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
Then came the advent of social media, which has accelerated the reach of conspiracy theories and misinformation into the mainstream. Events like the flooding in Kerrville are a breeding ground for conspiracists, Livers said, because the information comes as communities grapple to make sense of a tragedy. Social media algorithms are trained to show a person more of the type of content they engage with, which can lead to a person being fed the same narrative over and over again, even if it’s untrue.
“[The majority of people sharing conspiracy theories online] are people who are genuinely distressed and looking for an explanation. What conspiracy theories offer, among other things, is what I call ‘streamlined causalities.’ There is a neat explanation as to why bad things happen in the world,” Livers said. “Conspiracy theories tell us, almost always, who is to blame, in a very streamlined, digestible way. And that makes them attractive.”
Lived Experiences and Planted Storylines
Livers said that investigating the root belief at the center of any conspiracy theory can help reveal deeper beliefs about a community.After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, a number of New Orleanians, and particularly Black New Orleanians, expressed the belief that the government had intentionally breached the levee system to help divert water away from whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. The conspiracy theory functioned as a metaphor for the “neglect” of local and federal authorities that had long disenfranchised New Orleanians. That kernel of lived truth made the myth especially difficult for officials to combat.
“It's very intractable in terms of how do you address it? How do you claw people back from this story, which basically explains or articulates their trauma?” Livers said. “People tend to gravitate towards those explanations that reflect their lived experience rather than … scientific or factual narratives.”
In some cases, the groundwork for a conspiracy theory has been laid for decades within the culture.
Take, for instance, the “satanic panic” that gripped parents in the 1980s and 1990s. Across North America, the belief that underground Satanic cults were responsible for kidnapping, abusing and sacrificing children cropped up even though virtually no evidence existed to support the fear. A New York Times article published in 1994 states that of 12,000 reports made across the U.S. of “group cult sexual abuse based on satanic ritual,” not one claim was ever substantiated.
Still, though, that line of thinking has wound its way into the modern day, most substantially in 2020 when the far-right conspiracy movement QAnon popularized the idea that a cabal of Deep State leaders is running a pedophilic child sex trafficking ring. The group grew out of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory — a child sex ring claim so effective that, in 2016, a man went to a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant with an AR-15 to save the children he believed were being harbored there.“If this were all just a fringe phenomenon of people believing strange things, then we wouldn't really have to worry about it.” -Keith Livers
tweet this
During the pandemic, QAnon popularized a theory that the furniture store Wayfair was trafficking children, and the company was forced to hire armed security after receiving multiple threats of violence.
“If this were all just a fringe phenomenon of people believing strange things, then we wouldn't really have to worry about it,” Livers said. “But the problem is now that conspiracy theories are so mainstreamed, you have large demographics who actually do believe, and they act on those beliefs. Sometimes in potentially very destructive ways.”
So, when Texas officials announced that several cabins of 8-year-old girls had been lost to the floodwaters, it wasn’t surprising to see a conspiracy that the girls had been trafficked crop up online.
A number of social media profiles, many of which do not include identifying names or images, circulated a photo of a Camp Mystic bunk that a reporter took after the floodwaters receded. The accounts point to a bed made with panda bear-printed sheets as evidence that human traffickers took the missing girls. (Some of the most hardcore QAnoners have spread the unfounded notion that panda bear imagery is a secret signal between pedophiles engaged in trafficking.)
“People who are interested in this sort of thing will immediately say, ‘Aha, children have disappeared. Children have disappeared, and that doesn't just happen,’” Livers said. “So there has to be some force that's responsible for it.”
Camp Mystic severely damaged following catastrophic flash flooding, where more than 20 children went missing.
— Crime With Bobby (@CrimeWithBobby) July 5, 2025
Image shows a destroyed cabin with scattered suitcases and furniture in Hunt, Texas.
Credit: NBC News / Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP - Getty Images pic.twitter.com/iMkqYTzS5g
The Explosion of Weather Conspiracy
In a post to X that has been viewed 6.5 million times, a Twitter influencer named Liz Churchill, who has “conspiracy theorist” listed in her biography, warned that the weekend radar over Hill Country didn’t look “normal.”“It’s almost like the weather has been weaponized,” Churchill wrote.
The rhetoric aligns with a conspiracy theory that claims government officials are manipulating weather patterns through a technology called “cloud seeding,” a process where substances like silver iodide are introduced into existing clouds to help encourage rainfall, especially in agriculture-heavy or drought-stricken areas. Several cloud seeding operations occur across Texas, according to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, and the technology has been used since the 1940s.
Experts argue that cloud seeding is a safe practice and is not capable of causing mass downpours.
“You don’t spontaneously make 4 trillion gallons of water appear in Texas,” Matthew Cappucci, a meteorologist with the MyRadar weather app, posted to X over the weekend. “Cloud seeding does NOT make moisture appear, and — put bluntly — the sky in Texas VERY CLEARLY did not need any help producing rainfall.”
But appeals like Cappucci’s haven’t stopped some communities from latching onto the science as evidence of a conspiracy.
As extreme weather events have become more common, conspiracy theories surrounding weather manipulation have become a common way for climate change skeptics to grapple with the “very abstract” subject matter, Livers said. The popularization of the “chemtrail” theory — the belief that planes are spraying the U.S. population with nefarious substances — has helped pave the way for other weather manipulation theories, he added.
Conspiracy theories can also help reinforce existing narratives amongst demographics. Conservatives, for instance, may be inclined to believe that extreme weather events are being manufactured to make way for government overreach and intervention, Livers said. Other online personalities have expressed the belief that flooding in Texas, Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the 2024 wildfires in Hawaii were coordinated land-grab attempts by mega-corporations.
After Hurricane Helene last year, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene came under fire for promoting the idea that Democrats “can control the weather.” Following the Kerrville flooding on Saturday, Greene announced that she plans to introduce a bill that will make weather modification a felony offense.
During a Monday afternoon press conference, as officials pleaded with the public to fact-check the information they share online, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz refuted the idea that weather manipulation played a role in the weekend’s flooding.
"To the best of my knowledge, there is zero evidence of anything related to anything like weather modification," Cruz said. "And look, the internet can be a strange place. People can come up with all sorts of crazy theories."
