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Tucker Carlson is currently in the middle of a political firestorm. The once titanic Fox News personality, now a massively popular podcaster, managed to destabilize the entire MAGA movement in late October by hosting a warm conversation with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, the leader of a nihilistic and hateful right-wing youth movement. The Republican Party’s commentariat class is still furiously debating the Fuentes interview, but Carlson has blithely moved on to conducting interviews about A.I. girlfriends and George Santos’ prison exploits.

But Carlson’s dedication to proving his “open-mindedness,” at least when it comes to certain kinds of ideas, has persisted. On Monday, he reiterated this by releasing an episode of his podcast dedicated to an exciting new topic: chemtrails.

The episode was titled “US Government Admits Chemtrails Are Real (It’s Worse Than You Think).” It was a conversation with Dane Wigington, a conspiracy theorist who appears to have dedicated his professional career to exposing the government’s secret use of chemtrails—toxic chemicals being deposited into the skies, in long wispy trails, by aircraft. The details of the chemtrails conspiracy theory vary, but Carlson’s guest focused on a version of the theory in which the chemicals are used to seize control of the weather for both practical aims and more sinister purposes. “Destabilize the food supply by destabilizing the rain, and you destabilize the population,” the show’s expert guest says at one point.

“Chemtrails” aren’t real, and the “contrails” you see coming out of airplanes are largely water vapor. Nevertheless, the belief in chemtrails has been around since at least the 1990s, but it appears to have experienced a........

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