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 just condensation 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 — global warming 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 for years.

The same social media account that Kennedy responded to Monday has also predictably shared anti-vaccine content, anti-5G cell tower