Originally published at: Why the Chemtrail Conspiracy Theory Lingers and Grows — and Why Tucker Carlson Is Talking About It - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license Everyone has looked up at the clouds and seen faces, animals, objects. Human brains are hardwired for this kind of whimsy. But some people – perhaps a surprising number…
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Why the Chemtrail Conspiracy Theory Lingers and Grows — and Why Tucker Carlson Is Talking About It
The answer is simple - the public are idiots.
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Former republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor and crazy man, Doug Mastriano, is also a big chemtrail conspiracist.
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Nice, concise article on how we can be deluded into conspiracy theories, and you are correct, the right may be more susceptible, but the left is not inoculated. There is something appealing about having “the information that others are just too blind to see.” The 9/11 conspiracy theories for example - lots of explosive “experts” talking about the melting point of steel and jet fuel can’t get hot enough to melt the steel and collapse the building - there had to be explosives. The insanity of the way the Bush administration pursued the war (torture, invading Iraq on false pretenses, the mind-numbing waste of blood and treasure, the futility of the global protests), the ruthless attacks on the left (we were called fifth columnists) paired with the almost comical super-villain nature of Dick Cheney, had many on the left thinking it must be an inside job to consolidate power. What’s a few thousand American lives to these men? So tempting.
The next big left conspiracy theory mill is going to be about the billionaire class. They are straight-up killing what we believe America to be and strangling the poor and middle-class, but some of the reasons on why they do what they do are right out of sci-fi (rather than simple avarice and power).
Chemtrails are just wild to me. They’ve been in the air for as long as there have been planes flying at high altitude. You can see them in photos of B-17s in WWII (It goes so deep. Started with FDR!). We are four generations deep into this one and it just got fresh legs. Humans are so hackable.
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The major flaw in this idiocy is that if some secret organization had a nefarious plan to control weather/people thru chemicals in the atmosphere why would they do so in large trails in the atmosphere for everyone to see ? Why not simply emit the gasses from tall buildings or mountaintops ? For higher level mischief use balloons or aircraft at lower altitudes ? Everyone sees contrails, not much of a secret program…
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Also… I’ve been living in southern Belize now for a couple of years, don’t recall a single contrail the entire time. Does this mean that Belize is being spared from the evil plot ?
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This, much like the chemtrail idea, exploits misunderstandings that many people have of how the physical world works. Condensation, melting, combustion, structural stability, and the aerodynamic properties of jet engines and wingtips are complicated ideas that require a decent knowledge of math and physics to understand. The conspiracy initially sounds plausible because most people simply don’t know enough about the topic to immediately realize it can be explained without the conspiracy.
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Not necessarily. I grew up on Air Force bases. I quit “seeing” condensation trails at about age ten.
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Warm air rising tends to dissipate contrails but you’ll still sometimes see them, however my best guess is that whatever you’re cooking is the ultimate cause of our chemtrails up here
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Oh you silly thing. The evil ones use ordinary aircraft in the course of those ordinary aircraft doing ordinary things like commercial transportation in order to disguise the chemical dispersion within ordinary everyday phenomena. The secret is hidden in plain sight, as any fool can see.
A perfect disguise.
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B-17’s generating contrails over Germany during WWII.
It wasn’t the “chemicals” in the contrails that defeated the Nazis.
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Doug Mastriano is the reason I am boycotting Martins Breads. They are a big supporter of him and MAGA.
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Never knew that one. I always thought they we caused by jet engines and at the higher altitudes modern planes fly.
There is a tendency to make things all about yourself. Thinking the chemtrails are directed at me and I have no agency against them. This is classic paranoia, a form of schizoid thinking and dysfunctional pattern recognition, like connecting star patterns into anthropomorphic figures. This is not limited to the Left or Right. I have heard chemtrail and voting machine conspiracies on Pacifica Radio stations. Anyone who grew up with Nazi or Cold War spy movies is predisposed to believe conspiracy theories. Remember the Red Scares?
The most dangerous thing is that the phony conspiracies distract from the fact the climate is really being changed by global warming. God’s will or vapor trails are not the cause.
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It is Thanksgiving - and I am still harvesting tomatoes and peppers in the DC area. 20 years ago, those were finished by early September.
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Incredibly enough some of the chemtrail morons believe that very thing. The allies were dumping poison chemicals on Germany (via chemtrails) which caused the nazi defeat. Idiots all.
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Stewart Swerdlow, whose great uncle Yakov Sverdlov, was an early head of the Russian Soviet Republic (1917-1919), was touring around the USA in the early 2000’s spreading conspiracy theories like chemtrails. At the time it seemed just an odd synchronicity, but in 2025 it’s certainly tempting to consider the role and power of conspiracy theories in damaging a population’s grip on reality, and whether Swerdlow may have had a stake in that.
Or is that just layering more conspiracy?
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This conspiracy theory is so silly because it is so easily falsifiable. There is no hardware on commercial aircraft to introduce chemicals into engine exhaust. Commercial airliners, while very complex mechanically, are probably the best-documented machines on earth, given the rigor of their certification process. Operators aren’t allowed to make the slightest modification without certifying it as well. And these people want to tell us that there’s an entire undocumented system on these planes, appearing nowhere in certification documentation, but somehow maintained and replenished by thousands of mechanics and airport ramp personnel? It’s even more ridiculous than other conspiracy theories.
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I think a lot about the case of Kelly Dae Wilson who went missing in Texas in 1992. At some point the town council became convinced she was abducted by Satanists. When they couldn’t find actual verifiable evidence of Satanism, rather than admitting error they claimed “that’s how powerful the Satanism was”– the Satanists had used magic to cover up the evidence.
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It’s comforting to believe the people who burned “witches” in the Middle Ages died off.
But the ignorant, angry mob lives on in every generation, including ours.
Alive and well, seizing their occasional chance to light torches and gather kindling.
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