Copyright Slate
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Tucker Carlson is currently in the middle of a political firestorm. The once titanic Fox News personality, now a massively popular podcaster, managed to destabilize the entire MAGA movement in late October by hosting a warm conversation with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, the leader of a nihilistic and hateful right-wing youth movement. The Republican Party’s commentariat class is still furiously debating the Fuentes interview, but Carlson has blithely moved on to conducting interviews about A.I. girlfriends and George Santos’ prison exploits. But Carlson’s dedication to proving his “open-mindedness,” at least when it comes to certain kinds of ideas, has persisted. On Monday, he reiterated this by releasing an episode of his podcast dedicated to an exciting new topic: chemtrails. The episode was titled “US Government Admits Chemtrails Are Real (It’s Worse Than You Think).” It was a conversation with Dane Wigington, a conspiracy theorist who appears to have dedicated his professional career to exposing the government’s secret use of chemtrails—toxic chemicals being deposited into the skies, in long wispy trails, by aircraft. The details of the chemtrails conspiracy theory vary, but Carlson’s guest focused on a version of the theory in which the chemicals are used to seize control of the weather for both practical aims and more sinister purposes. “Destabilize the food supply by destabilizing the rain, and you destabilize the population,” the show’s expert guest says at one point. “Chemtrails” aren’t real, and the “contrails” you see coming out of airplanes are largely water vapor. Nevertheless, the belief in chemtrails has been around since at least the 1990s, but it appears to have experienced a resurgence in popularity over the past year, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement. This episode seems to be Carlson’s first foray into the world of chemtrail conspiracy theories, but his arrival at the topic unfolded not by accident: At the start of the episode, he says that his team had spent six months trying to find a “serious, sane person with an engineering background” for the subject. And in some ways, Carlson’s amplification of chemtrail beliefs makes sense. If you believe that the government is manipulating the weather, you don’t have to grapple with the real causes of climate change—and ways to address it that don’t fit into your ideological box. It’s a new form of climate denial for an era in which climate change is undeniable. There may be superstorms and megafires, the thinking goes, but the solution isn’t a carbon tax or a push for green energy. As is often the case, the solution is to overthrow the deep-state cabal. Carlson has long preached climate denial, even back in his neocon–bow tie incarnation. And in explaining erratic climate patterns by pointing to a nefarious weather program—rather than the human-caused crisis scientists have for decades been begging the globe to address—Carlson doesn’t have to admit to being wrong. It seems inevitable that many on the right would embrace it, particularly as the movement has devolved deeper into conspiracy theories since Donald Trump’s ascendancy and the COVID pandemic. Of course, none of that is how Carlson and Co. are framing their embrace of chemtrails. In the episode, the conspiracy theory is presented as a nonpartisan exploration of science. Wigington, the guest, has some old-fashioned West Coast–granola qualities. He speaks of being a steward of the planet and of the collapse of the bee population. At one point, he remarks wistfully that forests don’t smell the way they used to. Coming from Wigington, chemtrails seem like another environmental cause, with villains in the defense corporations and the U.S. military. But the real core of Wigington’s theory is that chemtrails, deposited by the U.S. government for slightly amorphous aims, serve to diffuse radiation from the sun—this may be well intentioned but shortsighted, he argues—and play a role in weather modification. These latter projects, which he describes as “the crown jewel weapon with which they can, have been, and are bringing populations to their knees,” can help redirect storms, trigger droughts, and shape weather patterns at the continental level. More importantly, the chemtrails themselves, by poisoning the atmosphere, are ultimately a kind of existential threat to all life on Earth. As Wigington notes at one point during the episode, “It’s virtually dismantling the planet’s primary life-support systems and ubiquitously contaminating everything everywhere.” This is all very ominous, and Carlson accepts Wigington’s assertions as truth. The host was primed, based on his own observations, to deduce that something highly suspicious was going on. As he says of contrails in the episode, “I don’t remember them as a child.” He describes the basic query—what are those lines in the sky?—as “one of the questions that’s been the most discouraged over the past 30 years.” The official answer can’t be right, he says, because it just doesn’t make sense. There is one factor Carlson mentions that helps explain this new milestone in his journey away from typical political discourse: the pandemic. “It would be hard for my middle-aged brain to accept a lie at this scale. How could you do that? How could you hide something this big, this profound, from an entire population?” Carlson says in the episode. “Except I just saw it five years ago with the COVID vax, which was, like, a total lie. … So I know for a fact what you’re describing is possible.” Carlson may represent a substantial number of people here, in bringing a post-COVID conspiracy mindset to the real problem of a changing climate. After the fires in Hawaii and California in recent years, some tossed around ideas about space lasers. Chemtrails allow for a more unified theory of the global climate crisis, explaining wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, flooding, and erratic weather. In the episode, Wigington credits secret geoengineering for the Palisades fire, flash flooding in Texas, freezes along the Gulf Coast, and Hurricane Helene. But Carlson is not a powerless consumer of content: He is a highly influential figure for conservative America, and he spent years undermining the public’s trust in climate science. In an ironic twist, Carlson appears to come around to the idea of human-caused climate change in this discussion, but only if the humans are not on his side. In the end, it’s the military, but also the media, covering it up, as well as, crucially, the scientists and environmental activists who are playing God by trying to tamper with the climate in the name of fighting global warming. Carlson is not the only political figure to have picked up this issue. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has discussed her concerns about chemtrails. Kennedy has accused the Defense Department of being behind them. Florida and Tennessee have passed laws banning geoengineering and weather modification, based on chemtrail conspiracy theories. Other state legislatures have proposed similar laws. When these conversations first popped up in the news, many laughed it off as ridiculous. But Carlson’s show, beyond platforming a facile scientific theory, demonstrates the staying power of the conspiracy mindset in the post-COVID world, beyond the realm of medicine. As Carlson notes, once you’re radicalized to believe that the entire world is lying to you, it’s not much of a leap to think the government controls the weather.
