The congresswoman is pushing a strange conspiracy theory about the natural event.
Between the 4.8 magnitude earthquake that rocked a swath of the Northeast on Friday and the total solar eclipse expected just a few days later, conspiracy theorists are abounding with fodder. But some of the people leading the mass speculation are a little too close to national politics for comfort.
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—who famously claimed that Jewish space lasers were the cause of the California wildfires–got dangerously religious on Friday, posting on social media that the two geological events should be heeded as an omen from God.
“God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” Greene wrote on X. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”
That claim was quickly amended by the platform’s community notes function, which clarified that “Monday’s eclipse was predicted hundreds of years ago, it will not have been caused by contemporary actions,” and that “earthquakes occur naturally and happen (on average) more than 30 times a day across the world, although many are too subtle to feel.” But flagging the truth didn’t stop Greene’s theory from gaining traction online and circulating through the far-right ecosystem.
Greene did not comment on what it might mean that the earthquake’s epicenter was just a few miles from Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
But Greene isn’t the only major figure of the American right on board with this. Earlier in the week, InfoWars owner Alex Jones argued that Monday’s solar spectacle will be a government “dress rehearsal” for enacting martial law, which he predicts will occur if Donald Trump wins the election in November.
“All this is, is a dress rehearsal,” Jones said on his podcast. “No government in modern times… have ever acted like this for a solar eclipse.”
Eclipses and other seismic phenomena have conjured religious and conspiratorial speculation going back to ancient times, so, in truth, the theories—and the people attempting to profit or materially gain off them—are nothing new.
“There are so many of them,” cult mediation specialist, Patrick Ryan, explained to Salon. “There are the purveyors like Alex Jones, who make money off these, then religious folks, who put together a story that can somehow make sense of the world, and it’s not new.”
Still, it might be time to remind ourselves of the necessity of the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause: the separation of church and state.
