BF:

President Trump recycled a grab bag of debunked claims on Tuesday about wind turbines killing birds, causing cancer, and knocking out your TV.

“The thing makes so much noise, and of course it's like a graveyard for birds,” Trump said at a campaign fundraising dinner. “And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”

Trump had offered a different attack on wind power at a speech in Michigan last week, saying, “Windmills. Weeeee. And if it doesn't blow, you can forget about television for that night.”

The president has criticized wind turbines — which he sometimes calls “windmills” — since 2012 on Twitter and during his rallies. He has primarily focused on turbine projects in Ireland and Scotland, where he would later open golf courses.

Between 2012 and 2014, Trump aggressively tweeted at the first prime minister of Scotland denouncing wind turbines and calling him “an embarrassment to Scotland.” In 2015, the British Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not stop an offshore wind farm near two of his Scotland golf courses, prompting a new series of attacks from the now-president.

His remarks on Tuesday seem to have come out of nowhere. To support his debunked claims in the past, Trump has tweeted links to a handful of fringe websites. But searches of 4chan and the social media monitoring tool BuzzSumo show that there have been no recent claims online connecting wind farms and cancer. On 4chan, an anonymous forum that’s often the first to start and promote conspiracies, nobody’s mentioned wind farms and cancer for more than a year.

Trump’s statement on turbines and cancer parrots claims popularized years ago, known as the (debunked) wind turbine syndrome. It was pushed by online conspiracy theorists, who blamed wind turbines for all kinds of illnesses, from headaches to cancer. In at least one case the spread of the myth was connected to an oil company in Australia. Multiple studies have since concluded there are no health risks to living around turbines.

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