One afternoon when I was still vending at the gorge bridge, in one of those idle moments when there were no customers and vendors chatted with each other, the subject of chemtrails came up and I casually remarked that they didn’t exist. One of the vendors who was my good friend got a look of shock on her face and said: “You don’t believe in chemtrails”? I said why should I, it’s just a dumb conspiracy theory. Another was equally astonished. Both were middle aged women with decidedly left leaning politics and not into conspiracy theories. Another was a kid in his 20s who supported Trump and was deep into conspiracy theories. And like any good conspiracy theorist, he wanted to argue the point. And the thought occurred to me, “I think I’ve found out how to be branded a heretic in Taos”. Later, the inevitable darker thought came to me, “You know what they did to heretics back in the day, that’s not good”. So facing the options of letting myself be burned at the stake or burning down the church that dared brand me a heretic, like Martin Luther, I obviously chose the latter. And so I turned from a passive pragmatist who didn’t believe in chemtrails or any other conspiracy theory into an active skeptic who openly criticizes them in a community where there are not just a lot of people who believe in them but believe fanatically in them like zealots without a god. And “believe” is the key word here, the whole thing hinges on belief in the improbable, irrational and out and out impossible. There’s a place where that kind of faith is appropriate, it’s called religion. But with chemtrails, we aren’t talking about something abstract that has to be accepted on blind faith alone like the nature of god or what happens in the afterlife, we’re talking about something that is supposed to be happening in the real world where things cost money and it takes real work done by real workers to make something happen. All I have to do is imagine myself the feckless bureaucrat, faithful servant of the deep state put in charge of the secret chemtrails program and start drawing up a list of what I’d need to carry it out to see how ridiculous the narrative about chemtrails is and how difficult it would be to keep the vast federal workforce with an endless paper trail it requires secret for any length of time. And I just love how the conspiracy theorists who push it mimic the language of religion when they argue about it on social media. They refer to skeptics as “deniers” and endlessly repeat their mantra/catechism of “contrails dissipate, chemtrails don’t” when confronted with contrail science. And they inevitably refer to the geo engineering watch dot org website and its propaganda as the source of definitive proof of chemtrails. At one point, I had a pamphlet put out by this website and in printed form it bore a strong resemblance to a Jehovah’s witness tract. The tone of the language was the same, speaking in authoritative tones of absolute certainty along with a strong appeal to emotion rather than reason. I’ve already posted enough on debunking this website and its creator so in this post I’ll just point out that its business model is that of any church or cult. It gets revenue from donations from those who are indoctrinated by its propaganda and just like any indoctrinated cultist, they are very defensive of their beliefs, proselytize them to others, and resist anything that contradicts them. It’s also a very negative and depressing belief system. The underlying message is that the government is all powerful, powerful enough to secretly spray the skies since the 1940s completely undetected and therefore, that evil is triumphant. You’re much better off going for a real religion where there’s something positive in the message. Christianity can teach you that god is beautiful and wise, Buddhism can teach you that the mind can be liberated from fear and suffering. All chemtrails can teach you is that the world is evil and evil triumphs over good.