Are conservatives or Republicans now taking issue with "manufactured" rainbows that appear when there is water spray from a fountain? No, that's not true: This viral 2007 video of unscientific musings about rainbows was mashed up and posted to mock conservative Republicans in 2023. In the original video, the person's political party affiliation is not readily apparent.
Remixed in 2023, the mash-up features audio of a woman speaking that was recorded on July 6, 2007. The YouTube channel where that was posted features a range of fringe conspiracy themes about HAARP (the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program), radiation, energy fields, nanobots, chemtrails and optical effects such as rainbows and halos. Although these conspiracies live on in 2023, they are not widely embraced as a whole, nor is a rainbow conspiracy representative of a political party's current agenda.
The original video dated July 6, 2007 was posted on YouTube by @dbootsthediva. It's no longer publicly available on the channel, but was republished (here) by Daniel Pratt on March 16, 2021. A remixed version of the @dbootsthediva's video was posted on May 29, 2023, on TikTok (archived here) by @majorhustler, who posts videos of Seattle street scenes. He added her audio to footage of a rainbow in the spray of the International Fountain in Seattle. His video is titled "The Rainbow Conspiracy" and was posted with several hashtags:
#rainbowconspiracy #seattle #coverup #georgebush #illuminaticonfirmed #ancientaliens #mythbusters
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:
majorhustler on TikTok
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Jun 1 17:48:22 2023 UTC)
The screenshot below shows the 2021 repost of the video, titled, "DBoots the Diva shows how rainbows are a government hoax!!!" It begins with the captions:
NOW THE NEW PHENOMENA IS RAINBOWS NEAR THE GROUND
20 YEARS AGO WE NEVER NOTICED THESE RAINBOW EFFECTS SO PRODOMINATLY [sic]
(Image source: YouTube screenshot taken on Thu Jun 01 18:55:00 2023 UTC)
The narration of the video is:
Hot day. July 6, 2007. About 4:30 pm. I'm just wondering what the heck is in our water supply? What the heck is in our oxygen supply? Of the metallic oxide salts, that create a rainbow effect in a sprinkler? What is oozing out of our ground that allows this type of effect to happen? Not just around our sun and our moon anymore -- everywhere we look the visible spectrum is rainbows! This cannot be natural. We all know, it wasn't something that happened 20 years ago, but now it's happening now. We as a nation have got to ask ourselves what the hell is going on? What is oozing out of our ground?
The optical effect appearing in both these videos is a rainbow created by sunlight refracting through water drops. In both these videos, that water is from a man-made spray, rather than a rain shower or the mist of a waterfall. Rainbows are not caused by chemicals or metallic salts in water although it certainly is possible for contaminated water to produce a rainbow. The spectrum colors of a rainbow are the result of wavelengths of visible light in sunlight bending when passing through water drops. Rainbows are observed when water drops are in the air in front of the viewer and the sun is behind them. The height of a rainbow is caused by the relative height of the sun behind the viewer -- the higher the sun the lower the rainbow.
There are additional optical effects with spectrum colors that a viewer may observe when looking toward the sun or moon. These effects include halos caused by refraction or reflection, or a corona caused by diffraction. All these natural optical phenomena produced by water drops or ice crystals and light have existed since before recorded history. They did not just suddenly appear in the past 20 years.
The TikTok video remix features the 10-foot-tall International Fountain with the 605-foot-tall Space Needle in the background, both originally built for the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. The hashtags chosen seem to be poking fun at conspiracies, but other reposts of the remixed video on Twitter (pictured below) have created a strawman. That is to say, they have misrepresented conservative beliefs in order to mock conservatives. They represent the 2007 musings of @dbootsthediva in the audiotrack as if she speaks for a conservative or Republican "culture war against the woke" when her original video does not suggest that was her mindset.
(Image source: Lead Stories composite image of Twitter screenshots (here and here) taken on Thu Jun 01 20:47:03 2023 UTC)
Lead Stories has debunked several claims revolving around rainbow flags and wokism (here, here and here). While some conspiracists believe that halos are caused by chemtrails, Lead Stories has not encountered a large-scale conservative objection online to actual rainbows.
