The popularity of these conspiracies may also be on the rise in right-wing spaces. Some MAHA figureheads, including Nicole Shanahan, have shared geoengineering content promoting conspiracy theories, while Marla Maples, Donald Trump’s ex-wife, told Fox News in July that she helped Florida’s anti-weather modification bill pass. (Bill Gates’ track record of funding solar geoengineering research has undoubtedly helped fan some of these flames.)

Doricko, the Rainmaker CEO, has spent much of the past year testifying in state legislatures that were considering vague anti-geoengineering bills that would have also banned cloud seeding. In May, he told WIRED that he and his team had spoken in front of 31 state legislatures. Education, he says, is key to getting people on board with the technology.

“I think there’s some cohort of people that believe that, you know, Joe Biden is actually a lizard person,” he says. “I think that a lot of people aren’t quite that far along, but are very concerned about chemtrails, probably. Showing them farms that are greener than they otherwise would have been with testimonies from those farmers—that’s probably the way that we’re gonna win hearts and minds.” (Doricko told WIRED last week that in recent months, his company has had “interest, curiosity, and excitement” from various state governments, both Democratic and Republican, in using cloud seeding to enhance water supply. “The education that we had the opportunity to do ultimately I think assuaged a lot of reasonable people’s concerns.”)

There is one additional type of human-caused shift in the world’s weather that played an outsize role in the hearing: climate change. Greene and other Republican lawmakers repeated many climate denial talking points and bad framing around climate science, including the idea that carbon dioxide is good for the planet because it is plant food. There were multiple mentions of beach houses owned by Barack Obama and Al Gore as a way of illustrating supposed hypocrisy about sea level rise. One of the witnesses called by the House majority works at an organization with a long history of questioning established climate science; he claimed in his testimony that there is “uncertainty as to exactly how much influence humans have exerted” over the global rise in temperature—a take that is out of line with mainstream science.

“My view is that this is mainly a way of saying there are secret forces at work that are making your life miserable, and everything bad is due to these secret forces,” says Dessler. “When in reality, it’s not secret forces, it’s climate change and it’s these other things that are hurting people.”

But even a whole hearing dedicated to a conspiracy theory grab bag may not be enough for some. On X, a popular anti-geoengineering community was alight with posts about the hearing—including many critical of the experts and their findings. “This was a scripted show to protect the government’s weather control agenda,” one moderator’s post reads. “Why no independent voices?”

If you’re in the market for a new television, some of our favorite QLED screens from TCL are almost half off for the start of football season. They’re already budget-friendly, so these discounts make them even more appealing as an upgrade, and they feature mini LED technology for impressive brightness.

While a variety of models are on sale, I want to focus on the two that have found their way into a few of our favorite television roundups. First up is the TCL QM6K (8/10, WIRED Recommends), a screen that impressed us with its excellent balance, screen uniformity, and color reproduction across the entire panel. It has great off-angle viewing too, if you’ve got a big or oddly shaped TV room, and has great quality-of-life features, like a dedicated eARC HDMI port for your soundbar.

If you have a particularly bright home, or a bigger budget, you might also consider the TCL QM8K (9/10, WIRED Recommends). This upgraded TV is one of the most premium mini LED screens we’ve had the pleasure of testing, with top-tier colors for the category. It’s also exceptionally bright, which is perfect if you’re stuck somewhere you can’t pull the shades and turn out the lights every time you want to watch a movie.

Both screens have Google TV for their interface, which is one of our preferred platforms for built-in streaming. It’s super fast and responsive, and has a massive catalog of apps and streaming options, even if you aren’t an Android user. Both the QM6K and QM8K also have impressively thin bezels, which doesn’t help performance, but will make these feel a bit more modern hanging on your wall or sitting on your entertainment stand.

The 65-inch QM6K is marked down from $1,000 to just $650, a healthy 35 percent discount for an impressive mid-tier television. Meanwhile, the 65-inch QM8K is discounted from $2,500 to $1,500. The discounts should run across official TCL retailers, so I was able to find both the QM6K and QM8K at Best Buy as well, if you’d prefer to try and find one locally, and there are markdowns on both larger and smaller examples as well, with some variation between them.