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As Louisiana state Rep. Kimberly Landry Coates, R-Ponchatoula, stood before her colleagues in the Legislature, she warned that the bill she was presenting might “seem strange” or even crazy.
Some lawmakers laughed with disbelief and others listened intently, as Coates described situations that are often noted in discussions of “chemtrails”—a decades-old conspiracy theory that posits the white lines left behind by aircraft in the sky are releasing chemicals for any number of reasons, some of them nefarious. As she urged lawmakers to ban the unsubstantiated practice, she told skeptics to “start looking up” at the sky.
“I’m really worried about what is going on above us and what is happening, and we as Louisiana citizens did not give anyone the right to do this above us,” the Republican said.
Louisiana is the latest state taking inspiration from a wide-ranging conspiratorial narrative, mixing it with facts, to create legislation. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a similar measure into law last year and one in Florida has passed both the House and the Senate. More than a dozen other states, from New York to Arizona, have introduced their own legislation.
The bills are indicative of how misinformation is moving beyond the online world and into public policy. Elevating unsubstantiated theories or outright falsehoods into the legislative arena not only erodes democratic processes, according to experts, it provides credibility where there is none and takes away resources from actual issues that need to be addressed.
“Every bill like this is kind of symbolic, or is introduced to appease a very vocal group, but it can still cause real harm by signaling that these conspiracies deserve this level of legal attention,” says Donnell Probst, interim executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education.
Louisiana’s bill, which is awaiting Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s signature, prohibits anyone from “intentionally” injecting, releasing, applying or dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere with the purpose of affecting the “temperature, weather, climate, or intensity of sunlight.” It also requires the Department of Environmental Quality to collect reports from anyone who believes they have observed such activities.
