Your brain on chemtrails
There’s comfort in conspiracy theories as we live through the Anthropocene
Brownish smoke tumbled over Persimmon Ridge. Standing on her farm in the South Carolina Upstate, a concerned citizen took pictures of the smoke, along with something else that had caught her eye in the bright blue sky: Crisscrossing white lines of condensation.
The plume of brownish smoke was from a wildfire burning in nearby Table Rock State Park, caused by careless hikers who had lit a fire during a drought in March 2025. The fire had burned more than 4,000 acres at the time she took the photo, and it would go on to burn another 12,000 before it was contained by firefighters, rainfall, and a shift in the wind.
The white lines had a simple explanation too. They were condensation trails left by the engines of passing aircraft, composed mainly of water that froze into crystals in low temperatures at high altitude. But that explanation didn’t satisfy the concerned citizen.1
“Check out 2 planes dripping chemtrails over the same area! Pure evil,” she wrote on Facebook, via an account she had recently used in a successful run for Greenville County Council. She shared several photos of the skyline, along with screenshots from the Flightradar24 app showing a flight path.
“I tracked the plane back to where they took off near Folly Beach and came the way here to dump the chemicals … Wished someone would meet them at the airport when they return!” She later claimed she could smell the chemicals from her porch, could feel them causing her skin to tingle when she stepped outside, could see them causing her horses’ eyes to water.
The chemtrails conspiracy theory is just old enough to predate widespread consumer adoption of the internet. If you are old enough and were immersed in certain paranormal subcultures, you might have encountered this theory on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM radio talk show in the ‘90s. For reasons I’m going to explore today, it’s reaching fervent new audiences and a national political stage in 2026.
Adherents believe that the contrails left by a wide variety of airplanes are secretly full of chemical agents used for mind control, population control, climate manipulation, or some other wicked plot. For this to be true, government officials or other malign actors would have to be in cahoots with commercial airline pilots, flight crews, and the numerous international scientific organizations that have patiently debunked the theory again and again since the ‘90s without a single leak or whistleblower.
I first heard people talking about chemtrails at one local government meeting or another in the 2010s. Sit through the public comments at enough county council or school board meetings, and you’re liable to learn a lot about what your neighbors believe.
There was a gentleman at a Charleston City Council meeting who believed local zoning laws were part of a scheme to establish One World Government under the United Nations’ Agenda 21. The John Birch Society sent emissaries to school board meetings to explain how the Common Core curriculum was a communist brainwashing plot. A well-dressed bespectacled man has shown up for years at city council meetings to deliver inscrutable word salad about various properties, for which the mayor politely thanks him at the end of the time limit.
It was easy to dismiss the chemtrails conspiracy theory, like so many of the other ones, as a bit of harmless nonsense. These delusions weren’t hurting anything but the social lives of people who held them.
Maybe those were simpler times. Today we are living under the second presidency of a man who entered the national political scene by spreading lies about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Medical misinformation is directly informing national public health policy. And lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced bills to ban chemtrails.
Mainstream political candidates are running on an anti-chemtrail platform. On March 25, Paul Dans, a Republican seeking to unseat U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, shared a video from the “Wall Street Apes” Twitter account of the aforementioned concerned citizen in the Upstate testifying about chemtrails killing monarch butterflies on her property. In a quote tweet he intoned, “Stop polluting our skies. Now.”
He didn’t use the word “chemtrails,” but Nancy Mace did. The sitting Congresswoman, currently polling well as she runs for governor of South Carolina, posted a graphic on March 31 with the slogan “BAN CHEMTRAILS” superimposed on a skyline with contrails.
“As Governor, I would sign legislation into law, like Florida and Tennessee, to ban chemtrails,” she said.
It’s hard to predict what will happen when the government seeks to ban something that does not exist, but we know what conspiratorial rhetoric does to our political institutions.
Part of the allure of conspiracy theories is that they help us assign blame for real suffering. Monarch butterflies really are in danger, but not because of chemtrails — their biggest problems are habitat loss, the proliferation of certain insecticides, and climate change affecting their migration patterns.
In early 2025 there really were wildfires burning all over South Carolina, including in the vicinity of Persimmon Ridge. As climate change worsens within our lifetimes, extreme droughts and wildfires will become more common. So will hurricanes, crop failures, dust storms, and other catastrophes. There is comfort in believing that we can reverse this all by unmasking and punishing the authors of a vast conspiracy.
There are people who bear disproportionate blame for the deteriorating state of our air and ecosystems. They live in the wealthiest countries on earth, including ours. But even if we imprison fossil fuel executives, reverse the official U.S. policy of inaction on climate change, and drastically curb carbon emissions worldwide this decade, we will have already crossed several tipping points. The Atlantic Ocean will reshape or swallow cities on the east coast of the United States. The summer heat will become hostile to human life in densely populated parts of India within the next 100 years.
The existential challenge of our generation will be to prevent as many degrees of warming as possible. We are all going to suffer because of climate change, and the world’s poorest people living in tropical climates will suffer first and most. Our children will suffer more than we did. The decision of how much more they will suffer is squarely in our hands.
Looking over the mountains at a systemic crisis that is too massive for metaphors, facing difficult prospects for human life no matter what, we will face the temptation to shrink and mystify our problems with increasingly baroque conspiracy theories.
David Wallace-Wells mentioned the allure of conspiracy theories near the end of The Uninhabitable Earth, a properly ominous 2019 book summarizing scientific research on the human toll of climate change:
Throughout, the intellectual style is paranoid — the impressive mass of data sometimes standing in for, and sometimes obscuring, the skeleton of causal logic that should give the mass a meaningful analytic shape. This kind of reasoning lives abundantly on the internet, feeding our golden age of conspiracy theory, that insatiable beast, which has only just begun to feast on climate.
How tempting it is to think that we could save species from extinction, stop the bleaching of coral reefs off the coast of Australia, and reverse the melting of the polar ice caps just by stopping some small cabal of people responsible for spraying doomsday chemicals from airplanes. How nauseating it is to realize that the doomsday chemicals are the ones we ourselves burn every day, whether to fuel our cars or to cool our homes in the rising summer heat.
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In other news, I’ve podcasted again. As part of my day job I co-host the While I Breathe podcast, focused on the people struggling for liberation in South Carolina. The latest episode, “Reconstruction Radicals,” is an interview with the historian Robert Greene II about the historical period that occupies my thoughts on a weekly basis. Check it out here or just search for “While I Breathe” wherever you listen to podcasts.
In case you missed it, I also recorded a podcast with my pal the sportswriter Mike Baumann, reviving our tradition of exchanging unusual and evocative Wikipedia articles. The latest episode of the Brutal South podcast is here, and it is very silly.
I am leaving her name out of this. To quote Richard Hofstadter, “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since [she] is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by [her] fantasies as well.”
As a former resident of South Carolina, I feel your pain. SC inflicts their insanities not just on their own legislature, but in national elections as well. Please stop that.
Too small to be a country, too large to be an insane asylum.