You’re WorldNetDaily. You have a massive credibility problem after years of obsessively promoting bogus conspiracy theories about President Obama. Your attempts to inject journalism into your operation by hiring actual journalists have failed, and you have to beg for money to keep going.
So what do you do? You start promoting the chemtrails conspiracy theory. You know, the idea that contrails left by jets are really the government spreading chemicals on an unsuspecting populations.
Oddly, the current chemtrail interest from WND comes from Chuck Norris. His Aug. 7 column insists that a recent speech by CIA director John Brennan in which he discussed geoengineering (which Norris concedes Brennan never admits the government has done) was an admission the feds use chemtrails: “Let’s be clear about at least one thing: Despite that those on the right and the left (including our president) have denied the government’s use of stratospheric aerosol spraying in the past, chemtrailing just collapsed as conspiracy. The climate cat is now out of the bag!”
WND followed up with an Aug. 16 article noting a study in which 76 of 77 scientists interviewed debunked the idea of chemtrails, adding sarcasatically, “In other words, nothing to see up here. Move along.”
Two days later, WND published another article — like the earlier one, minus a byline; presumably, no WND employee wanted their names associated with promoting chemtrail conspiracies — noting that the study “is not convincing those who believe something more nefarious is at work in the skies overhead” and that “the blowback has been swift across social media, with opponents accusing the scientists of offering up a whitewashed report.”
The article even highlighted how “One critic took the time to email a full letter to lead scientist Steven Davis of University of California at Irvine, and he copied WND on the letter,” and it included Davis’ response, in which he points out that the scientists “were able to provide simple explanations based on chemistry and physics that do not involve a large-scale government conspiracy.”
This isn’t really helping to fix WND’s credibility issues, is it?