One longstanding fight that has divided the political right has been over whether or not humans should be allowed to modify the weather, with religious conservatives saying absolutely not, while the tech visionaries are all for it. These debates were often theoretical, but then the catastrophic floods in Texas took place.
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.
After news of the floods broke, it didn’t take long for internet observers to make a connection and point to Rainmaker’s cloud-seeding efforts as the cause of the catastrophe. “This isn’t just ‘climate change,’” posted Georgia Republican congressional candidate Kandiss Taylor to her 65,000 followers on X. “It’s cloud seeding, geoengineering, & manipulation. If fake weather causes real tragedy, that’s murder.” Gabrielle Yoder, a right-wing influencer, posted on Instagram to her 151,000 followers, “I could visibly see them spraying prior to the storm that has now claimed over 40 lives.”
Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser and election denier, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about Russia, told his 2.1 million followers on X that he’d “love to see the response” from the company to the accusations that it was responsible for the inundation.
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 that 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. On July 5, the day after the floods, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced that she planned to introduce a bill that would make it a felony offense for humans to deliberately alter the weather. “We must end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering,” she tweeted.
Lawmakers in both Florida and Tennessee appear to feel similarly; they have recently passed laws that outlaw weather modification. But other states have embraced the technology: Rainmaker currently has contracts in several states that struggle with drought: Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, California, and Texas, as well as with municipalities in Utah and Idaho.
The debate over cloud-seeding is yet another flashpoint in a simmering standoff between two powerful MAGA forces: on one side are the techno-optimists—think Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk (who has fallen from grace, of course), or even Vice President JD Vance—who believe that technological advancement is an expression of patriotism. This is the move-fast-and-break-things crowd that generally supports projects they consider to be cutting edge—for example, building deregulated zones to encourage innovation, extending the human lifespan with experimental medical procedures, and using genetic engineering to enhance crops. And to ensure those crops are sufficiently watered, cloud-seeding.
The opposing side, team “natural,” is broadly opposed to anything they consider artificial, be it tampering with the weather, adding chemicals to food, or administering vaccines, which many of them see as disruptive to a perfectly self-sufficient human immune system. The “Make America Healthy Again” movement started by US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., lies firmly in this camp.
Indeed, Kennedy himself has spoken out against weather modification. “Geoengineering schemes could make floods & heatwaves worse,” he tweeted last June. “We must subject big, untested policy ideas to intense scrutiny.” In March, he tweeted that he considered states’ efforts to ban geoengineering “a movement every MAHA needs to support” and vowed that “HHS will do its part.”
In April, Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s crusading surgeon general who emerged as a critic of Covid vaccines, cheered Florida’s geoengineering ban. “Big thanks to Senator Garcia for leading efforts to reduce geoengineering and weather modification activities in our Florida skies,” he posted, referring to Republican state senator Ileana Garcia, who had introduced the bill. “We have to keep fighting to clean up the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.”
Unsurprisingly, both camps believe that God is on their side. “This is not normal,” Rep. Greene tweeted on July 5, a day after the Texas floods, when the extent of the damage was still not fully known. “I want clean air, clean skies, clean rainwater, clean ground water, and sunshine just like God created it!!”
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.”
“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. Last year, PayPal founder and deep-pocketed right-wing donor Peter Thiel’s foundation granted Doricko a Thiel Fellowship, a grant awarded annually to a select group of entrepreneurs who have foregone a college degree in order to pursue a tech-focused business venture. Rainmaker has received seed funding from other right-leaning investors, including entrepreneurs and venture capitalists Garry Tan and Balaji Srinivasan. (This world isn’t as distant from Doricko’s religious community as it might seem; the cross-pollination between the Silicon Valley elite and TheoBro-style Christian nationalism is well underway.)
Yet for all his right-wing bonafides, Doricko also refers to himself as an “environmentalist”—a label that has historically been associated with the political left. And indeed, Rainmaker also has ties to left-leaning firms and politicians. Last March on X, Doricko posted a photo of himself with Lauren Sanchez, wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and head of the environmentally-focused philanthropy Bezos Earth Fund. “Grateful that Lauren and the @BezosEarthFund realize we don’t have to choose between a healthier environment and greater human prosperity,” Doricko wrote. A month later, he posted a photo of himself with former president Bill Clinton, adding, “It was a pleasure discussing how cloud seeding can enhance water supplies with #42 @BillClinton!”
Predictably, Doricko drew backlash from the right for those tweets, but he didn’t seem to mind, likely because he’s been too busy fighting weather modification bans IRL. Earlier this year, he testified before both the Florida House Appropriations Committee and the Tennessee Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee, imploring the skeptics to quit worrying and embrace technology. “If you’re in favor of depriving farmers in Tennessee from having the best technology available in other states, I would ask you to vote for the bill as it is,” he said in his testimony in the Tennessee statehouse. “In all things, I aspire to be a faithful Christian, and part of that means stewarding creation.
On Monday, Doricko appeared on a live X space, where he attempted to address the allegations that Rainmaker had caused the floods. “The flooding, unequivocally, had nothing to do with Rainmaker’s activities or any weather modification activities that I know of,” he said. Yet Doricko’s appearance seemed only to intensify the rift in the MAGA-verse.
“We have a right to KNOW if cloud seeding had a role in #TexasFlooding,” Fox &Friends host Rachel Campos Duffy tweeted to her 279,000 followers on July 9. “Also need to know why companies are allowed to manipulate weather without public consent??!!” The following day, Mike Solana, the CEO of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, posted to his 373,000 followers, “The hurricane laser people are threatening Augustus’s life for making it rain. They are idiots. But he *can* make it rain—and he should (we thank you for your service).”
