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Lee Zeldin, the Trump-appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, on Thursday attempted to walk a fine line between placating conspiracy theorists and dispelling misinformation. Unfortunately, he seems to have left many people confused as to the agency’s actual policies and actions.
“Americans have questions about geoengineering and contrails,” Zeldin wrote in a post on X. “They expect honesty and transparency from their government when seeking answers. For years, people who asked questions in good faith were dismissed, even vilified by the media and their own government. This ends today.”
To some, this sounded as if Zeldin was giving credence to unsubstantiated claims about “chemtrails,” a misnomer for contrails, the white streaks of vapor condensation that sometimes trail behind planes in the sky. The “questions” he referenced almost certainly pertain to a widespread suspicion that these cloud lines indicate some form of climate manipulation (“geoengineering”) or the mass spraying of the population with biological agents or chemicals (hence “chemtrails”).
This has never been the reality, yet for decades many Americans have persisted in the belief that contrails are proof of a nefarious plot to blanket them with unknown toxins. In fact, it’s such a popular and enduring conspiracy theory that eight states have produced legislation aimed at outlawing chemtrails — if not exactly by name. The law that Florida passed last month, for example, bans “geoengineering and weather modification activities.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, known to be partial to various conspiracy theories, is attempting to advance a similar bill in Congress.
What Zeldin was announcing, however, was the EPA’s launch of online resources meant to debunk misconceptions about contrails. The new government web page on contrails explains, in part, that “chemtrails” is “a term some people use to inaccurately claim that contrails resulting from routine air traffic are actually an intentional release of dangerous chemicals or biological agents at high altitudes for a variety of nefarious purposes, including population control, mind control, or attempts to geoengineer Earth or modify the weather.” It also states: “The federal government is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering or weather modification.”
A separate page about geoengineering notes, “The U.S. government is not engaged in any form of outdoor solar geoengineering testing,” nor “large-scale deployment” of such technology.
The replies to Zeldin’s comments and the link to the accurate EPA reports he shared were swarmed by blue check conspiracists who simply continued to peddle the usual falsehoods about what they think contrails are. One Florida resident responded with a picture of contrails, complaining that he was still seeing them even after the state passed its legislation on weather modification. Others spread misinformation that has circulated in right-wing circles about the supposedly artificial causes of the deadly flooding in Texas this month.
Greene — who was among the MAGA crowd incorrectly blaming those floods on weather-altering substances released into the atmosphere — did not seem to realize that Zeldin’s materials ran contrary to her own narrative. “Thank you Secretary Zeldin!” she wrote on X (Zeldin is an administrator and does not hold a formal cabinet secretary position). The congresswoman then segued into another pitch for her bill, which she said would prohibit “the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump‘s health secretary and an avowed chemtrails conspiracy theorist, also responded to Zeldin as if the EPA chief had affirmed his views on the subject instead of discrediting them. “I’m so proud of my friend Lee Zeldin and President Donald Trump for their commitment to finally shatter the Deep State Omerta regarding the diabolical mass poisoning of our people, our communities, our waterways and farms, and our purple mountains, majesty,” Kennedy wrote on X. This was despite the EPA reports making it clear that contrails are not “poisoning” anybody.
At least one Democrat, Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, was critical of Zeldin for having the EPA bother to engage with conspiracy theorists at all. “Some people have ‘questions’ about whether birds are real — will that be your next project?” he wrote on X. “How much taxpayer money will you be spending on this?”
Zeldin is not the only Trump appointee trying to tamp down misinformation from the MAGA base. Many right-wing influencers were furious when the FBI and Justice Department issued a memo this week to say that investigators had found no evidence that the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was murdered, nor that he had kept a “client list” he used for blackmail purposes. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had previously teased bombshell revelations in the case, bore the brunt of their wrath as they insisted the government was hiding the truth. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, also responsible for overpromising on new Epstein information, are likewise in an awkward spot with Trump supporters demanding prosecutions of his associates.
But this is just politics as usual when you come to power on a wave of lies and suddenly find out they won’t play when you’re in charge. If Trump officials acknowledged that chemtrails were real, or that certain elites can be directly implicated in Epstein’s crimes, they would have to do something about it. And that’s a little tricky when the “it” is entirely made up.
