Newly-minted Trump replacement RFK Jr. promises to end chemtrail “crime”

Just days after (mostly) abandoning his independent presidential bid and joining Donald Trump's Republican campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is already spreading a conspiracy theory that is completely crazy even for him: chemtrails.

“We will stop this crime,” Kennedy posted on social media on Monday in response to an X-Account (formerly Twitter) that shared a conspiracy video claiming pilots were using their planes to secretly spray chemicals on unsuspecting people. These pilots, the video said, were “hardened to humanity” and “couldn't care one bit about killing undesirable or exploitative aspects of America and the world.”

Chemtrails – the alleged chemicals that certain pilots emit from their planes to poison or contaminate innocent people – have long been part of the world of conspiracy theories.

The white streaks that follow airplanes are actually called contrails, and are just condensation products that form when airplanes fly through a high-humidity environment. (There is also a technique called “cloud seeding,” which is intended to create precipitation in dry areas like Utah. However, it is still relatively rare and its effectiveness is disputed.)

This is not to say that the boom in commercial aviation over the past few decades is not harmful to the planet – global warming is real and air travel produces a lot of emissions – but there is simply no evidence that thousands of pilots have been poisoning innocent people for decades with secret chemicals in aircraft exhaust.

But scientific truth did not stop Kennedy from spreading the lie – just as it did not stop him from lying about vaccines for years.

The same social media account that Kennedy responded to on Monday has, as expected, also spread anti-vaccine content, hysteria about 5G cell towers and the rumor that singer Adele secretly makes satanic gang signs.

Kennedy is not just another Trump-supporting nutcase. In an interview published Monday, he told right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson that he had been asked to join Trump's transition team “to help pick the people who are going to run the administration, and I'm excited about it.” According to a report in the New York Times on Tuesday, a Trump campaign adviser confirmed that both Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, the former House Democrat who has made a radical shift to the right in recent years, would be added to the transition team.

Kennedy has promoted chemtrail conspiracy theories before. In February 2023, he hosted a podcast with old-school chemtrail conspiracy theorist Dane Wigington. In that conversation, Kennedy said that Woody Harrelson brought the issue to his attention when the actor talked to him about contrails from airplanes and they saw contrails turning into clouds. (Contrails can actually contribute to increased cloud cover, but that has nothing to do with the chemtrail theory.)

“Woody Harrelson was at my house one time and he was talking about this – this was probably 10 years ago – and I said, 'Come on, this is just ridiculous, this is impossible.' And he said, 'Come outside with me,'” Kennedy Wigington said. “We went outside and sat on a hill. And we watched these planes fly in a grid pattern and leave this, you know, grid of contrails. And then they turned into clouds and we had a cloudy day.”

Harrelson, who supported Kennedy's presidential bid, does not appear to have spoken publicly about chemtrails in recent years, so his views on the subject are unclear. But he has promoted conspiracy theories about 5G cell towers and once mocked COVID-19 vaccines during a “Saturday Night Live” monologue.

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