Conspiracy theorists spent Thursday trying to claim President Joe Biden had accidentally “admitted” that directed-energy weapons were being used to start devastating wildfires like the one in Texas this week that’s become the largest in state history. But you won’t be surprised to learn that the video clip these folks are using takes Biden’s words out of context.
“Because a lot… if you fly over these areas that are burned to the ground, you’ll see in the midst of 20 homes that are just totally destroyed one home is sitting there because it had the right roof on it,” Biden says in a viral clip that’s been viewed over 6 million times on X.
That 14-second clip ends with Biden saying, “and anyway, since I took office, FEMA has supplied Texas alone…” which conspiracy theorists have pounced on as evidence President Biden said something he wasn’t supposed to admit.
“Did he just admit DEWs don’t affect your home if the roof is painted blue?” the viral tweet reads.
DEW is shorthand for directed-energy weapons, which include everything from lasers to sound devices like LRADs. It should be noted, of course, that Biden didn’t say anything about roofs that are painted blue. But that didn’t stop others on X who jumped in to express shock that Biden had “messed up” by admitting something he wasn’t supposed to talk about.
“Why would he bring up a roof when talking about everything being burnt down?? It’s cause the DEW is real and they’re using it against us. The blue roof conspiracy theory is being proven true!!! They hate us,” one typical tweet reads.
What’s the blue roof conspiracy theory? It’s the idea that directed-energy weapons are being used by governments to start massive wildfires for one reason or another. The idea jumped from conspiracy circles to mainstream America and was immortalized with the term “Jewish space lasers” after Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene helped spread the conspiracy theory in a Facebook post in 2018 that resurfaced in 2021.
The conspiracy theory that blue roofs are spared by lasers being shot down from the sky became incredibly popular during the deadly fires that swept the island of Maui in Hawaii during the summer of 2023. Some people online insisted that particular fire was started by the Chinese government and “evidence” of space laser activity started to spread on X. Others insisted these supposed lasers we being deployed by the U.S. government as a “false flag” against Americans.
Needless to say, Biden’s words from his speech on Thursday are being taken out of context. All anyone needs to do is actually watch Biden’s address, which is available on YouTube from a number of different media outlets, and it becomes clear that the clip going viral is edited without giving the full context of what the president actually said.
Biden started by talking about the brutal effects of climate change, which are making natural disasters like floods and fires more extreme.
“Well, my administration is going to keep building on the progress we’ve made, fighting climate crisis, and we’re going to keep, help folks rebuild themselves in the wake of these disasters. And we rebuild to the standards that are up… the up-to-date standards and building codes and the rest,” Biden said on Thursday in a portion of the speech that isn’t in the viral clip.
Biden continued by talking about the images coming out of Texas, where you can see from an aerial view how some homes were spared.
“Because a lot of, if you fly over these areas, it’ll burn to the ground. You’ll see in the midst of 20 homes that are just totally destroyed, one home sitting there because they had the right roof on it,” Biden continued.
Biden was almost certainly referring to fire-resistant roofs, an area that insurance companies have become very interested in as climate change creates more volatile conditions for fires. Almost half of insurers in California, for example, started to offer discounts in 2022 to homeowners who installed fire-resistant materials on their roofs. But wildfires have gotten so bad in the state that some insurers simply stopped covering homes in California in 2023 and 2024.
Directed-energy weapons have been around since the 1970s when Darpa conducted the first test to shoot down a drone by using a laser in 1973. And it makes sense that conspiracy theorists would become focused on laser weapons, as they start to be deployed by the U.S. Navy.
Click through the slideshow to see the latest photos out of Texas, where over 1 million acres have burned this week, killing at least two people. There are a lot of things you can say about the wildfires, but there’s absolutely no evidence they were started by directed-energy weapons.
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