claim: Flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey exposed a weapons cache hidden by former President Barack Obama.
origin: On 4 September 2017, OurLandOfTheFree.com published a story purporting to reveal evidence of a â€œplanned coupâ€ by former U.S. President Barack Obama that had been conveniently exposed by Hurricane Harvey: < A cache of weapons long suspected to be hidden in Texas during Operation Jade Helm 15 was uncovered by the flood waters of Hurricane Harvey. The stockpile, hidden in a small town outside of Lexmar, matches numbers in the inventory reported missing during Obamaâ€™s tenure. Obama and his administration flat out refused to answer where more than 200 million rounds of ammunition went while he was commander-in-chief. The traitor always maintained that there had to be a clerical error. Now that nearly 10 percent of that ammo has been found, little question remains what happened to it. > The story is a fabrication. The site says as much in a disclaimer: < Ourlandofthefree.com makes no guarantee that anything you find here will be based at all in reality. All posts should be considered satirical and all images photoshopped to look like something theyâ€™re not. Itâ€™s not you, itâ€™s me. > There are other indications as to the storyâ€™s nature. For one, there is no record of a town in Texas called â€œLexmarâ€, let alone any â€œsmall townsâ€ near it. The story also includes a picture allegedly taken on 4 September 2017 in â€œKirkmere, Texasâ€: Again, there is no record of a community by that name in the state. Also, a search for the image reveals that it was taken in May 2010, just outside what has been described as a â€œRussian ammunition warehouseâ€: The story also invoked the name of Operation Jade Helm 15, a 2015 United States military exercise that was the focus of several conspiracy theories before it began â€” but which eventually proceeded without incident. While Our Land of the Free is a â€œsatiricalâ€ news site, other sites ran their own versions of the same story, mostly verbatim, but without a disclaimer labeling themselves as fictitious.