Chemtrails and vaccine lettuce: Florida is about to have its stupidest session ever

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Feb 16, 2025

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

The Tallahassee Democrat had an interesting piece recently about an apparent behind-the-scenes bottleneck in the Florida Legislature, where lawmakers have been unusually slow to file and begin hearing bills ahead of their 2025 legislative session.

Which made it especially striking that one of the very first bills the Florida Senate decided to start moving forward this year deals with…chemtrails.

Chemtrails are a long-running conspiracy theory alleging that the government is secretly flying airplanes that release chemical or biological agents into the atmosphere and fooling people into thinking that the cloudy tails you sometimes see lingering in the sky are just ordinary condensation trails left behind by commercial airliners.

Now, you won’t find the term “chemtrail” anywhere in Senate Bill 56, which is formally titled, “An act relating to geoengineering and weather modification activities.” But the bill’s sponsor — Sen. Ileana Garcia (R-Miami) — made crystal clear that she filed it in response to chemtrail claims during a meeting last week of the Senate’s Environment and Natural Resources Committee.

It was one of the more unhinged legislative hearings you’ll ever see. Garcia, who once tried to have Florida taxpayers pay Donald Trump’s legal bills, kept insisting she’d done her own exhaustive research on the issue — all the while sounding less like a serious policymaker than a confused relative who claims to be an independent thinker because they get all their news “from YouTube.”

This was a hearing in which the absence of evidence was evidence itself.

Florida, for instance, has an old law on the books that stops farmers from trying to artificially stimulate rain without a permit. The law dates back to at least 1957. And it’s not clear if or when Florida has ever issued such a permit — although it certainly hasn’t happened in the past 10 years, at least.

But that lack of activity just suggests someone may be hiding something, Garcia told her colleagues.

“Officially, there were no requests for permits for cloud seeding,” she said. “But, ironically, the concerns are there. The complaints are there. I think that all of us senators, at any given moment, have received complaints with regards to kinds of cloud seeding. Usually it comes coined with the term of, ‘I think these are chemtrails. I’m very concerned.’”

It might have been funny — if it weren’t so ugly.

Because there are plenty of people who seem genuinely concerned about chemtrails, people who are convinced that the sky isn’t as blue as it was when they were a kid. Several of them showed up at the Senate hearing, earnestly urging senators to take them seriously

But Ileana Garcia — and every other senator who voted for her bill last week, all of them Republicans — are making a public mockery of these people.

You know what Senate Bill 56 would do? It would make the state’s Department of Environmental Protection set up an email address for people to submit chemtrail complaints.

But you know what Senate Bill 56 would not do? Make DEP act on those complaints. The agency wouldn’t be required to investigate them or refer them to someone else for follow up. Nor would it, or any other department, have to do any kind of testing or research.

The bill doesn’t devote any resources — not one dollar or a single state employee — to trying to figure out whether chemtrails are real. It leaves DEP free to delete every email it gets without any response at all.

This is nothing more than cynical pandering. It’s a bunch of condescending politicians pretending to take people seriously in order to trick them into thinking that it’s the other guys who are the out-of-touch elites.

It’s also, I fear, just the beginning. Because while Florida lawmakers may be off to a slow start ahead of the 2025 session, they are already loaded up on legislation meant to stoke more conspiracy theories and provoke more fringy fights.

GOP legislators have, for instance, already filed bills about edible vaccines, shopping with gold coins, and investing retiree pensions in Bitcoin, just to name a few. Many appear to be copied whole cloth from other Republican-controlled states — like Tennessee, where lawmakers last year passed an edible vaccines bill that was apparently inspired by fears of “vaccine lettuce.” (Tennessee has already passed a chemtrails bill, too.)

These are likely to become some of the loudest and most headline-grabbing debates of the Florida Legislature’s 60-day session, which formally gavels open on March 4.

But, of course, that distraction is part of the point here, too.

Just note: While the Senate was holding its chemtrail hearing, Republican lawmakers in Tallahassee were also filing new bills to weaken Florida’s minimum wage.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis backs down on immigration (CBS News Miami)

Anti-immigrant fervor shatters a Florida dream (South Florida Sun-Sentinel) ($)

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Protect Floridians from deadly utility shutoffs (The Invading Sea)

nelson

No colors are as vibrant as they were when you were a kid. The lens opacifies. People notice the difference when they get cataract surgery and the lens is replaced.

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PJ Whelan

Chemtrails......Moisture in the air chemtrails are puffier. Dry air ahead, chemtrails are thinner and disappear quicker. Republicans filing bills like this.....asinine. Meanwhile not one GODDAMN Republican can take a "HANDS FREE CELL PHONE LAW" OVER THE FINISH LINE IN FLORIDA. MEANWHILE auto insurance rates climb every year, thousands of people died last year (3,208) over 250,000 injuries and we can't get one stupid Republican in the house to bring it up. They are suffering from abject failure syndrome.

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