If our planet's increasingly extreme weather isn't caused by man-made climate change, then it stands to reason that it's actually caused by man-made supervillains using government technology to take American Freedoms with superstorms like Monday's mile-wide monster tornadoes.

If that makes no sense at all, it's because the Powers That Be don't want you know the real truth about Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy and this week's devastating twisters that mowed down entire towns in Oklahoma.

The Tornado Truthers know these shocking weather events have nothing to do with the weather extremes climate scientists have long predicted for a planet rapidly heating from our civilization's burning of fossil fuels and global industrial production of farting meat animals. Monster storms are caused by Barack Obama and his predecessors in the White House/New World Order, using powerful storm-making technology like the massive HAARP antenna farm in Alaska.

HAARP stands for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, which is an unclassified "ionospheric research program" based at a research station on Air Force property in the remote Alaskan wilderness. The stated goal of HAARP is to study the ionosphere and how the spectrum of radio waves works within these upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere. Because the Air Force and the Navy have particular interest in global communications from the bottom of the sea to suborbital space and beyond, HAARP is funded by the Pentagon and its mad-scientist division, DARPA. The remoteness of the massive collection of transmission antennas and the involvement of secretive/weird defense researchers has led to the obvious conclusion that HAARP is actually a Doctor Doom/Loki machine for torturing humanity into further submission.

Conspiracy theories adapt to the prevailing political and cultural moods. When George W. Bush was president, you could find endless theories on liberal-left blogs and message boards linking Hurricane Katrina to Dick Cheney running the HAARP beams over the Gulf of Mexico to drown all the black people. Now that Obama is in charge, right-wing theorists accuse the black president for running the HAARP machines against white people in the Midwest to distract Fox News from the IRS/Tea Party scandal, or making Superstorm Sandy turn Chris Christie into an Obama-loving liberal, just in time to steal the election from Mitt Romney (who was only the nominee because he's an Illuminati insider Mormon-Mason).

Tornado Truthers fully believe horrifying disasters like the Oklahoma City twisters are not simply extreme weather events. Many are also vehement climate change deniers, with the same combination of anti-science ignorance and Tea Party hostility to government programs of all kinds—the military's long exclusion from these right-wing conspiracies due to patriotism is no longer followed. There is no longer a need to be a patriot, because America and its Military Heroes have been forever tainted by the moderate Democrat twice elected president in landslide elections.

Conspiracies are real. A conspiracy is just a plan to screw somebody over, one way or another. People conspired on the 9/11 attacks, lots of people using lots of planning and many passenger jets. People conspired to kill Sharon Tate and John F. Kennedy and Julius Caesar and Osama bin Laden and those school kids in Newtown and Batmanin Colorado. People conspired to keep those teenaged girls locked up in a basement for 10 years. The banks conspired to pass on garbage mortgages to other lenders, with the full knowledge that a financial collapse would eventually result from the collapse of the housing bubble. Conspiracies are real, and common, and both the famous and the regular people can be the victims.

Conspiracy theory, in the modern sense, is something far more elaborate. HAARP is not just a remote science experiment dealing with baffling atmospheric physics. It's a ridiculously more complicated and villainous explanation for global warming and terrifying tornadoes. That cars and cows and coal plants are spewing enough greenhouse gases to melt the ice caps and unleash constant monster storms is just too banal for The Avengers or whatever. "Fixing climate change" is a long, difficult and very expensive process that may or may not even work. Better to blame that evil socialist Muslim with his black hands on the horror machines.

Those tornadoes that killed two dozen and injured hundreds were monstrous. Sandy and Katrina and the endless drought and the L.A. wildfires and the empty aquifers and the B.P. oil spill and a hundred other current and recent environmental disasters are the new normal. It is going to get a lot worse for a long time before it's going to get better. And the very people pushing insane bullshit like "Obama did OK tornadoes #HAARP" are the very people least willing to back the policies and penalties necessary to eventually slow down climate change enough for us to continue living on this generally very good planet.

[Images via Twitter and HAARP.]