What’s next from the Wyoming Freedom Caucus? Tinfoil Stetsons?

Just when you thought Wyoming politics couldn’t get any weirder, the Freedom Caucus proclaims, “Hold our beer!” The Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Agriculture Committee, under the heavy thumb of the Freedom Caucus conspiracy theorists, tightened their tinfoil Stetsons and advanced an interim bill that outlaws — wait for it — chemtrails!

I’ll digress for a moment to offer my personal and professional gratitude to the Wyoming Freedom Caucus. Whenever I am at a loss for column fodder or for something in Big Empty politics to satirize or ridicule, the WFC always comes up with a new boneheaded move that perfectly satisfies.

Now, back to “chemtrails.” Contrails have been around for quite some time. You can probably recall old photographs of Allied bombers over Nazi Germany, and the feathery, linear clouds that stream out behind the bomber formations. They’re the same things you see today, when you see an airliner at cruising altitude on its way to who knows where. They’re what happens when water vapor from a jet’s hot exhaust condenses into ice crystals or clouds.

Online flat-earthers claim, without a shred of credible evidence, that contrails are really “chemtrails” resulting from deepstate hooligans trying to poison us with nano-particles of nonsense.

For some reason, this phenomenon has the Freedom Caucus’ skivvies in a bunch, and they felt they needed to plant their feet and put a stop to this conspiracy. Or at least make it illegal in Wyoming. So they arm-twisted the Joint Ag Committee into pushing the “Clean Air and Geoengineering Prohibition Act” to keep all us cowgirls and cowboys safe from Communism sprayed on us from above.

A recent Joint Ag Committee interim hearing on this goofball legislation was further evidence that the Freedom Caucus is bucking for an Oscar nomination in the theater of the absurd.

The committee ignored testimony from the head of the University of Wyoming Atmospheric Science Department when he tried to debunk the “chemtrail” myth with real, actual science. But their ears picked up when a disgraced YouTube podcaster validated their paranoia and told them exactly what they wanted to hear.

To combat the threat they believe “chemtrails” pose to the Cowboy State, the committee played fast and loose with the Tenth Amendment and claimed, contrary to federal law, that the state of Wyoming enjoys sovereignty over the airspace above it. I guess they want to establish some sort of Golden Dome over the 307, so we can shoot down invading aircraft that try to spray us with strange and mysterious vapors.

This would not bode at all well for the Air Force Thunderbirds at the Frontier Days Airshow when they wow the crowd with their loops and barrel rolls and, for the finale, pop smoke and release “chemtrails” over the unsuspecting throng.

And it might dampen enthusiasm for Freedom Caucus cupbearer Rep. John Bear’s notion that Wyoming can replace revenue lost to Freedom Caucus tax cuts by selling more jet fuel to zillionaires who patrol the Wyoming skies in their Gulfstreams and Learjets. It would only take one overzealous “chemtrail” patriot shooting down an executive’s jet that he thought was poisoning his family to give a black eye to that whole program.

The Freedom Caucus’ tilted flat earth is a slippery slope, indeed. What’s next? Maybe legislation naming Bigfoot as our official state biped? Or a posthumous pardon for Lee Harvey Oswald, because everyone knows the CIA killed JFK? How about a law against Jewish Space Lasers and the threat they pose to our kids? The possibilities boggle the mind.

Let’s face facts. The only political card the Freedom Caucus has in its hand to play is fear. If they can fear-monger us into believing that only they can protect us from boogeymen like “chemtrails,” their election certificates are secure.

But once we realize that Freedom Caucus fears are mere paranoia, and their manufactured boogeymen simply aren’t real, then they skate on very thin political ice.

This upcoming campaign season will be pretty interesting and entertaining. I can’t wait for the Freedom Caucus to take its theater of the absurd on the road to town halls at the end of our long, dusty roads. I can foresee them creating new boogeymen to scare us into voting for them, and hearing enlightened chuckles from citizens with working bullshit detectors.

Confronted with ridicule for their goofiness, Freedom Caucus flat-earthers will stomp and bluster and tell us we’re all doomed. And they won’t even remove their tinfoil Stetsons for the Pledge of Allegiance.