Newly Minted Trump Surrogate RFK Jr. Promises To Stop Chemtrail 'Crime'
Just a few days after dropping his independent presidential bid (mostly) and joining Donald Trump’s Republican campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is already amplifying a conspiracy theory that is completely bonkers, even for him: chemtrails.
“We are going to stop this crime,” Kennedy posted on social media Monday in response to an X (formerly Twitter) account sharing a conspiracy theory video, which claimed that pilots use their planes to secretly spray chemicals on unsuspecting populations. These pilots, according to the video, are “hardened to humanity” and “could care less about killing off unwanted or leeching aspects of America and the world.”
Chemtrails — the supposed chemicals that certain pilots dispense from jets in an effort to poison or contaminate innocent people — have long been part of the conspiracy theory world.
The streaks of white following planes are actually called contrails, and they’re justcondensation resulting from jets cutting through high-humidity environments. (There’s also “cloud seeding,” a technique used to encourage precipitation in dry places like Utah. But it’s still relatively uncommon, and its efficacy is debated.)
This isn’t to say that the boom in commercial aviation in recent decades isn’t bad for the planet — globalwarming is real, and air travel contributes lots of emissions — but there’s simply no evidence that thousands of pilots have for decades poisoned innocent people with secret chemicals in plane exhaust.
But scientific truth hasn’t stopped Kennedy from spreading the lie — just like it hasn’t stopped him from lying about vaccines foryears.
The same social media account that Kennedy responded to Monday has also predictably shared anti-vaccine content, anti-5G cell tower hysteria, and the rumor that singer Adele is secretly throwing up satanic gang signs.
Kennedy isn’t just another crank supporting Trump. In an interview released Monday, he told right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson that he’d been asked to join the Trump transition team “to help pick the people who will be running the government, and I’m looking forward to that.” According to a Tuesday report in The New York Times, a Trump campaign adviser acknowledged that both Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, the former House Democrat who has taken a hard-right turn in recent years, were being added to the transition team.
Kennedy has spread chemtrail conspiracy theories before. In February 2023, he hosted the old-school chemtrail conspiracy theorist Dane Wigington on a podcast. In that conversation, Kennedy said that Woody Harrelson had turned him onto the issue when the actor spoke to him about plane contrails, and that they saw contrails turn into clouds. (Contrails may indeed contribute to increased cloud cover, but this is separate from the theory of chemtrails.)
“Woody Harrelson, one time, was at my house, and he was talking about this — this is probably 10 years ago — and I was saying, ‘Come on, that’s just, that’s ridiculous, that’s impossible.’ And he said, ‘Come outside with me,’” Kennedy told Wigington. “We went outside, and we sat on a hillside. And we watched these planes fly in a grid pattern, laying out this, you know, grid of contrails. And then it turned into clouds, and we had a cloudy day.”
Harrelson — who supported Kennedy’s presidential run — does not appear to have publicly spoken about chemtrails in recent years, so his views on the topic aren’t clear. But he has shared conspiracy theories about 5G cell towers, and he once mocked COVID-19 vaccines during a “Saturday Night Live” monologue.
