RFK Jr. on Chemtrails: ‘I Am Persuaded’

The confirmation fights just keep getting weirder and more serious.

So this should be big, per Politico:

The Department of Justice asked a federal judge Wednesday to force Google to sell off its popular Chrome browser and impose restrictions on how it uses artificial intelligence and its Android mobile operating system in a bid to break up the company’s illegal monopoly over the search engine market.

Happy Thursday.

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(Composite by Hannah Yoest. Photos via Getty Images.)

The Truth Is Up There

by Andrew Egger

Vaccines cause autism. COVID may have been a “plandemic”—one designed to spare Jews and Chinese people. The government is using 5G networks to “control our behavior.” WiFi is making us unhealthy. The FDA is waging a “war on public health.” HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. 

At this point, it might be easier to list the conspiracy theories Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t embraced.

But here’s another one for you: The man Donald Trump has selected to run our nation’s health agencies has expressed a strong belief in the existence of “chemtrails.”

In February 2023, Kennedy hosted a chemtrails true believer on his RFK Jr. Podcast, also known as the Defender Show. Some of these comments, surfaced in a review of his shows by The Bulwark, have not been previously reported. A spokesperson for Kennedy declined to comment.

The guest, Dane Wigington of the website GeoEngineering Watch, offered a lengthy presentation on the existence of “chemtrails”—massive amounts of chemicals that nefarious actors are supposedly using commercial airlines to spray into the atmosphere. By the end, RFK Jr. seemed convinced: “I am persuaded by what you’re saying.”

“I think one of the other parts of your story that’s important to understand is the military programs to weaponize climate, because of course they’re doing that,” Kennedy went on. “Of course we know they’re doing that, because they do it with everything else. They do it with chemicals, they do it with biology. Anything that they can weaponize, they’re going to.”

The “chemtrails” theory purports to explain the long-lasting water vapor trails that planes sometimes leave in the sky. In the world of conspiracies and nefarious plots, they’re not believed to be condensation from the aircraft exhaust, but, as Wigington told Kennedy, “in almost all cases, they’re sprayed particulate trails.”

Conspiracy theories for what these supposed chemicals might be vary widely: They’re deliberately making us sick, or they’re trying to control our minds, or they’re trying to control the weather. In Wigington’s telling, they’re a secret effort to battle global warming: “putting tens of millions of tons of aluminum nanoparticles into the atmosphere annually as part of solar radiation management, to block some of the sun’s incoming thermal energy with no consideration of the consequences whatsoever,” he told Kennedy.

“If you’re seeing an aircraft emitting a trail at altitude, even a commercial aircraft, the chances are almost certain that that is a spray dispersion or a fuel additive happening in that aircraft, which is also part of climate engineering operations,” Wigington said. All this, he argued, was being covered up through a complicated plot involving pilots being convinced they were “doing something benevolent” and “an illegal gag order on all the nation’s weathermen.”

Kennedy acknowledged at the show’s onset that the public largely regards chemtrails as tinfoil-hat territory. And in a few brief moments, he pushed back on Wigington. He bristled at the suggestion that “all the environmental groups,” including “WWF, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Earth Justice, all of them,” were aware of the chemtrail plot but too afraid of government retribution to speak up.

“You know, I gotta push back on that, because I know these environmental leaders and I know their environmental groups,” Kennedy said. “Nobody’s worried about losing their 501(c)(3) by taking a tough stand on an issue. . . . I think that probably the reason they don’t want to do it is that it’s regarded as a crazy person’s issue.”

But Kennedy hastened to assure Wigington that he didn’t think about it that way. “You take a lot of strength to do what you’re doing. You’re obviously very well informed. You’ve researched this stuff very well.” At this point, he acknowledged he was persuaded.

Indeed, by the end of the episode, Kennedy was offering his own theories for why chemtrails whistleblowers hadn’t come forward:

If you are involved with the civilian application of these geoengineering projects, and if they’re being run by the Department of Defense or the intelligence agencies, and they come to you and say, ‘We want you to be part of this, but you need to sign a state secrecy agreement,’ then you’re never gonna talk about it. Because then you go to jail for 20 years and you lose every possession that you have and you don’t get a lawyer either. So anyway, I think that’s an aspect that makes the secrecy explainable. The fact that they are probably militarizing this and weaponizing it to attack other countries, to hurt other countries’ crop production, et cetera.

Kennedy’s taste for conspiracy theories had, for years, left him exiled to the fringes of politics. But his decision to latch on to the Trump campaign over the summer has now opened the door to actual political power. Should he be confirmed as head of HHS, he would oversee a massive bureaucracy, through which he could act on his own conspiratorial instincts.

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A Bit of Spine?

by William Kristol

A friend who served in a previous Republican administration, and who doesn’t have a high opinion of today’s GOP, texted last night: “Republicans showing a tiny bit of spine? Or am I deluded?”

Good questions!

On the one hand, there is a bit of spine to be glimpsed.

For example, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported earlier this week that Mitch McConnell said, “There will be no recess appointments.” She later took down the post, apparently in response to uncertainty about whether the gathering at which McConnell was speaking was off the record. But neither McConnell nor any of his aides has denied he said it.

Similarly, it’s been reported without denial that enough House Republicans are unwilling to adjourn the House to give House Speaker Mike Johnson a pretext for claiming the House and Senate are in disagreement, which might give the president the power to adjourn Congress.

In other words, there seems to be sufficient congressional resistance to block Trump’s plan to avoid the constitutional confirmation process by means of recess appointments.

Meanwhile, new revelations about Trump’s nominees can’t be making senators’ hearts grow fonder.

As Andrew reports above, more news keeps coming out about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crackpot views. I myself have been hearing informally from alarmed physicians and health professionals about the very real and substantial damage to American’s well-being Kennedy could do in that job. I’m sure senators are hearing the same.

Meanwhile, newly released Monterey Police Department records further confirm that Pete Hegseth is unfit to serve in any position of high trust and responsibility. Here’s the AP:

A woman told police that she was sexually assaulted in 2017 by Pete Hegseth after he took her phone, blocked the door to a California hotel room and refused to let her leave, according to a detailed investigative report made public late Wednesday.

Recall also that Hegseth paid for a settlement in 2020 because, his attorney said, if the facts about the incident came out, it would endanger his job at Fox News. Should the qualifications to serve as secretary of defense be more lax than those for being a host on Fox & Friends? 

Republicans on the House Ethics Committee are trying to suppress the committee’s report on Matt Gaetz. But there will be a floor vote in the House to release the report after Thanksgiving, thanks to the filing of a privileged motion. And in any case, enough Senate Republicans have said they want to see the report. It’s hard to believe it won’t ultimately be provided to them. There’s widespread reporting that Republican senators put Gaetz’s chances of being confirmed at less than 50-50.

And respected veterans of the intelligence and national security community are ready to explain in a senate hearing that Tulsi Gabbard, with her record of pro-Putin and pro-Assad activities, could do real and lasting harm to our national security as director of national intelligence.

In none of these cases has there been any visible rallying, except outside of the hardcore Trump base, to any of these nominees.

Yes, yes, I know. How many times in the last eight years have Republicans—including or especially Senate Republicans—seemed open to taking on Donald Trump on some matter, and then flinched?

Too many to count.

So it is possible we could see in January another sad spectacle of Republican capitulation.

But the Republican senators will have to vote. This is not a case where they can just slink off into the distance and cower and hide. And if they vote “yes,” they would be positively asserting that these individuals are qualified for the positions for which they’ve been nominated. Will all of them be comfortable doing that?

Maybe I’m too hopeful. Maybe we’ll instead find ourselves once again in a situation like the one Churchill described in January 1931, as he looked over at Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald on the front bench in the House of Commons:

I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities. But the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as “The Boneless Wonder.” My parents judged that that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes, and I have waited 50 years to see the boneless wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

I hope that in January we’ll look at the Republican Senate and not be presented with a revolting and demoralizing scene of 53, or 52, or 51, or 50 boneless wonders. I hope we’ll see, at long last, a bit of spine.

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Quick Hits

ETHICS SCHMETHICS: Sure looks like the GOP-led House Ethics Committee is going to sit on the Matt Gaetz report. Per Politico:

“There was not an agreement by the committee to release the report,” Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) told reporters after the meeting ended. Soon after, Ranking Member Susan Wild (D-Pa.) confirmed that the panel did not agree on releasing the report, but said “we did agree that we would reconvene as a committee on Dec. 5 to further consider this matter.” . . .

Wild was clearly incensed with how Guest had characterized the private panel meeting. She told reporters that he “betrayed the process by disclosing our deliberations within moments after walking out of the committee.”

The committee plans to meet again next month, at which point we guess we’ll learn if there have been any new breakthroughs in the field of ethics. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that federal investigators looking into Gaetz’s conduct several years ago “established a trail of payments” from the then-congressman “to women, including some who testified that Mr. Gaetz hired them for sex.” Investigators even put together a chart, partially redacted by the Times, that is equally handy and chilling: 

(A diagram that, according to the Times, “shows how federal investigators mapped out payments between Mr. Gaetz, his associates and women.” Photo courtesy of the New York Times.)

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HERE THEY GO-GE: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the boy wonders of DOGE, are laying out their plans, per WaPo:

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy vowed “mass headcount reductions” to the federal government in an opinion piece Wednesday that sketched out their vision for President-elect Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” in the greatest detail so far.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy laid out their plans to slash federal regulations, cut government spending and significantly reduce the number of federal employees. . . .

The DOGE commission, they wrote, will first “work with legal experts embedded in government agencies” to identify regulations that Trump can repeal. That effort will rely on “advanced technology,” they said, a potential reference to artificial intelligence.

Musk and Ramaswamy argued that recent cases decided by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will enable major reductions in federal regulations. After Trump “nullifies thousands of such regulations,” DOGE will then work with “embedded appointees” across federal agencies to “identify the minimum number of employees” required for an agency to perform its essential functions. This line appeared to echo Musk’s broader business philosophy and past practices; Musk oversaw the reduction of roughly 80 percent of the staff of Twitter, the social media platform he later renamed X, after he bought it.

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