For years, I would catch Mike Thompson on WDAF-TV, now Fox 4, with his weather reports. He was always cheery and engaging — one of the easiest-to-watch anchors and weather forecasters on the air.
Three years ago he left Channel 4 and in January 2020 was selected to fill a vacant Kansas Senate seat. In November 2020, Thompson, a conservative Republican from Shawnee, defeated his Democratic opponent, Lindsey Constance, by less than 2,500 votes.
Ever since he entered the Senate, Thompson has been making news for all the wrong reasons.
Let me give you some examples:
:: He won’t call Covid Covid, instead calling it “the Wuhan virus.”
Fact: It may have started in China but it’s a worldwide pandemic.
:: He has said face masks don’t help guard against the virus. Quote from a Shawnee Mission School Board meeting: “Think of it this way. I’m about six feet tall. Saying this mask is going to block the virus is like saying I can’t walk through a doorway 6,000 feet tall and 2,000 feet wide — that I’m going to bump into walls and it’s going to prevent me from getting through that doorway. That’s how tiny the virus is.”
Fact: Masks can and do prevent the vast majority of airborne particles and droplets from penetrating your nose and mouth.
:: He’s opposed to wind energy. Quote he gave to The Star’s Katie Bernard: “Would you buy a car that would only run when the wind is blowing a certain speed, or the sun is shining? If your answer is no, then explain the logic of using taxpayer dollars to replace reliable sources of generation with unreliable ones.”
Fact: The wind doesn’t have to blow 50 miles and hour 24 hours a day to generate a lot of electricity. Already, 40 percent of the state’s electricity is generated by wind, and it has quickly become one of the biggest industries in the state.
:: He doesn’t believe in evolution. Quote from the Kansas Reflector: “I’m not a Darwinist. I don’t believe in the apes evolving into man.”
Fact (from the Kinks): “I am an apeman.“
:: He doesn’t believe humans are responsible for climate change: Quote to Katie Bernard: “The climate has changed on its own, sometimes quite violently and dramatically, for as long as the earth has been in existence. If you want to actually talk about the climate, you have to be willing to engage in an honest discussion about what truly drives the climate on this planet.
Fact (from an Oct. 27 New York Times story): “In 2014, before the Paris climate agreement, the world was on track to heat up nearly 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, an outcome widely seen as catastrophic.”
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Thompson, 64, is also a “professional speaker.” You pay him a fee, and he’ll talk to your group. On his website, he lists two topics that he speaks about:
- Renewable Wind Energy Blows Smoke
- The Climate Change Canard
Now, like the guy who, I’m sure, is his favorite politician, Thompson almost certainly is a very stable genius. Oh, yes, there are highly placed people who will testify to that.
People like Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson, a Wichita area Republican who picked Thompson to chair the Senate Utilities Committee.
Masterson told Katie Bernard: “Thompson spent decades as a meteorologist studying weather patterns for a living. He knows and understands the science behind the climate debate like few others.”
I’ll say this: He’s got opinions like few other meteorologists.
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Godfrey Daniel! Let’s hope Lindsey Constance runs for the 10th District Kansas Senate seat again in 2024 and that 1,250 of the people who voted for Thompson last year have read some of the balderdash coming out of this man’s mouth and change their votes.Until then, he would do well to follow the lead of U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and keep his mouth shut.
Note: Credit to The Star’s Katie Bernard, who craftily dissected Thompson in this this feature story posted today on The Star’s website. Unfortunately, Katie doesn’t have the liberty that I do to say straight out that Thompson is full of crap.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
And in your Missouri: Mark Alford – “The newsroom was a hostile location for a Christian conservative with respect for law enforcement and for small businesses.”
So, he could only stay twenty-three years — 23! Fat and happy for 23 years, then all of a sudden… such hogwash!
Funny, Bill…And that’s all I can say. I’ve got an indirect conflict of interest when it comes to Alford.
Meteorology is the highest known form of wizardry. It is a Satanic ritual that relies on science (not God’s will) to predict weather patterns, which as we all know is absolute blasphemy. Using alchemist tools such as a thermometer or wind gauge have a known connection to the Quija Board and have led many to a life of sin-filled immoral debauchery…My God, Mike, come to your senses, it is not too late to renounce this evil practice.
Hilarious, Richard. Thank you.
I’m glad you know him ’cause I thought he was serious.
I flipped the station when Thompson delivered the weather because his creep factor was pretty high.
Seems as if all our government representatives are outrageous, some are more outrageous than others. My late father said the only honest professions are politics and professional wrestling, because they both know they are fake.
Unfortunately, the best chance to keep this moron out office came and went last year when the seat was vacated. Trying to defeat him as an incumbent in a red state will be close to impossible.
As a retired meteorologist, nothing burns me more than when The Star labels Mike Thompson a meteorologist.
He got his weather training as an enlistee in the Navy and had a few college courses when he was breaking into TV in Oklahoma City. You do not need a degree to get the American Meteorology Society seal of approval anymore. It’s all based on tapes of your on air performance. If you read/watch closely, you’ll see Thompson never claims to be a meteorologist because he isn’t.
That being said, I worked with people (mainly of the strong religious persuasion) that were total climate deniers despite what they evidenced everyday.
A side note:
When I first started working for the National Weather Service here, Dan Henry was doing the weather on channel 4. The station would send a courier down to the federal building in the early afternoon during the week to pick up a hard copy satellite image and a half page description written by a junior meteorologist like myself for him to use on the air that night.
Bill Hirt, that is not surprising but good to know!
Mike didn’t bother to correct The Star’s Katie Bernard whose first line was…
“In December 2018, a longtime Kansas City meteorologist announced he was leaving the field but not retiring.”
This is a common error in the media for the past 20 years or so. Media assumes anyone doing weather in broadcast is a meteorologist. That is true in most cases today, there are still some long time holdovers who are just media personalities who are “weather forecasters”. If you see the term weather forecaster used with a media personality, you can pretty well assume they are not a meteorologist.
This distinction was much more rigorously enforced throught the 1970s and 1980s when having a meteorologist on your broadcast staff was considered a prestige plus for the broadcast station. Meteorologists in broadcast media really did not proliferate until after the debut of the Weather Channel in 1982. The irony behind that was John Coleman of ABC was a main force behind the Weather Channel, but he was not a meteorologist. He had meteorologists behind the camera to help and make the forecasts.