Tennessee Senate Votes To Ban Chemtrails Because What Even The Fuck

Look, I’m nearing 50. I’ve been around. I have seen some absolute clown shit from politicians. I have witnessed years of things like “bridges to nowhere” and self-aggrandizement taking the form of renamed airports or whatever. I have seen any number of candidates step into the arena with a headful of moronic ideas.

But things changed for the definite worse once Donald Trump took office. Once this happened, politicians who normally would have been marginalized into nonexistence for their trumpeting of conspiracy theories suddenly became the sort of people the public chose to elevate into public offices.

And this is just another example of how America is turning democracy into a farce.

To be fair, Tennessee’s politicians haven’t exactly been great. At least they finally passed an anti-SLAPP law with enough teeth to prevent people from suing people over things they didn’t actually say. But since Trump’s arrival on the political scene, they’ve gotten considerably worse.

Here’s what’s happened in recent years. In 2020, state rep Jay Reedy asked Congress (the federal version) to get back to the important government business of banning flag burning — something that went out of fashion decades ago when it was ruled protected speech (multiple times!) by the US Supreme Court. In 2021, state legislators decided the man who tried to sue Apple because he couldn’t stop looking at porn had good ideas about compelled morality. They pushed an anti-Section 230 law that would have made it impossible for the state government to invest in anything tech-related. In 2023, legislators joined other idiotic legislators around the nation by passing an anti-drag show law that clearly and comprehensively violated the First Amendment.

Just incredibly stupid shit from legislators who are expected to know better… or at least were expected to know better until the nation was overseen by a president who firmly believed the rule of law should only apply to people he didn’t like.

Now, there’s this: a simple bill originally meant to ensure a minor oversight position would be filled in a timely manner got hijacked by 25 state senators to support a hideous blend of conspiracy theories and climate change denial.

I’m going to turn this over to Kevin Underhill, the man behind the wonderful and devastatingly funny legal blog, Lowering The Bar. Underhill explains how a bill that was only supposed to ensure empty seats on the state’s Air Pollution Control Board could only remain vacant for 30 days turned into one of the stupidest bills to ever receive majority support from the Tennessee state senate.

[A]t some point between January 31 and last week, it appears that the sponsors of SB 2691 and a companion measure, HB 2063, became aware of a far greater threat to the public welfare than the 180-day vacancy-reporting period. Which seems not to have been an emergency after all, since the committee completely gutted SB 2691 with an amendment that did this instead:

That links to the bill, which assumes one thing and mandates more things, none of which have any basis in reality:

WHEREAS, it is documented that the federal government or other entities acting on the federal government’s behalf or at the federal government’s request may conduct geoengineering experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere, and
those activities may occur within the State of Tennessee…

Um.

SECTION 1. Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 68, Chapter 201, Part 1, is amended by adding the following as a new section:

The intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight is prohibited.

And there it is. The legalese grants this proposal a gossamer-thin sheen of respectability, but it doesn’t take too much examination to understand what this amendment targets. I’ll hand it back to Underhill to explain the batshit proposal masquerading as serious government work state legislators are expected to do:

As the Nashville Tennessean (not the most creative name, but they do good work) explains here, what’s going on is chemtrails. Or, rather, a belief in “the chemtrail theory,” which the Tennessean explains is “the belief that the [federal] government is secretly adding toxic chemicals to the atmosphere from aircraft, similar to contrails [the condensation trails that jets leave behind].” Why would it do that? As this Harvard University group puts it, “[v]arious different motivations for this alleged spraying are speculated, including sterilization, reduction of life expectancy, mind control, or weather control.” So in other words, on March 18 there were at least 25 Tennessee senators in a room wearing tinfoil hats.

Yeah, that’s the level of service Tennesseans can expect from at least 25 members of the state senate. While they did have enough restraint to avoid speculating about things like mass sterilization, mind control, or other extremes of chemtrail conspiracies, they still felt it was worth including, if only for the reason of preventing any federal or local efforts to (very speculatively) improve environmental conditions.

[T]he bill refers only to chemtrailing “with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.” In other words, this seems to be something about climate change. So they’re proposing to ban something that isn’t real to make a statement about something that is.

Which is somehow even worse than just embracing the crazy. This is virtue signalling via conspiracy theory — something these senators clearly believe will signal to their voting base that they’re willing to do anything to ignore the reality of climate change, up to and including writing bills that are completely divorced from all reality.

The good news, so to speak, is that this amendment will cost taxpayers nothing more than the money they’re blowing on these senators’ salaries. The Fiscal Review Committee has noted this amendment won’t cost any money because this is something that has never happened, isn’t currently happening, and will probably never happen in the future.

It is assumed the action prohibited by this legislation is not currently occurring in this state, nor will it in the future; therefore, this legislation will result in no significant fiscal impact on the state government.

Chemtrails just aren’t real. If there are any efforts to “change” the climate, it’s mostly efforts like cloud seeding, which doesn’t involve contrails, which are nothing more than clouds of water vapor left behind as planes pass through the sky and heat the air. No one has been able to show the climate can be altered in any noticeable or provable fashion by sending planes into the air to disperse… stuff.

Somehow, I think this will have no effect on the electability of these senators during the next state senate race. This stupidity will likely be replaced by something stupider in the near future. Those who think these representatives are idiots likely already did. Those who don’t won’t care and will vote them back in. Voters still on the fence may decide this is the sort of thing they like: a performative push-back against climate change concern via a bill that bans something that isn’t happening and likely is never going to happen. And everything will just keep getting worse so long as the electorate is willing to embrace conspiracy theorists, rather than hustle them towards the exit.