paranoia strikes deep

Ars Technica:

In an April 28, 2025, appearance on Dr. Phil Primetime, an audience member asked Kennedy what he would do about “stratospheric aerosol injections,” which she claimed are “continuously peppered on us every day.” Kennedy responded: “It’s done, we think by DARPA [a research agency in the Department of Defense] and a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. … I am going to do everything in my power to stop it. We’re bringing on somebody who is going to think only about that — find out who is doing it and holding them accountable.”

In 2023, Kennedy spoke with chemtrail activist Dane Wigington on a podcast and credited actor Woody Harrelson for making him believe in chemtrails after watching contrails from a plane transform into clouds.

“I’ve looked up many times since then and seen that happening, and I don’t have a good explanation for it,” Kennedy said.

Me on a Thomas Pynchon novel, 2013:

Pynchon seems from early in his career to have intuited what Michel Foucault writes about in books like Discipline and Punish: a “power-knowledge regime” which cannot be located in a person or institution, but whose control of our world is imperceptibly dispersed — an evil inversion of the ancient mystical definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. A secret cabal of Freemasons or Communists or Republicans would be comforting by comparison, as a character in Bleeding Edge, an aging Sixties-style radical, notes: “Some conspiracies, they’re warm and comforting, we know the names of the bad guys, we want to see them get their comeuppance. Others you’re not sure you want any of it to be true because it’s so evil, so deep and comprehensive.” Or, as Doc [Sportello, in Inherent Vice] reflects further on the existence of those “rigid, unsmiling” men at the periphery of every festivity,

“If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who’d make it happen. Was it possible, that at every gathering — concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever — those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?”

From within this paranoid (or observantly realist) logic, there is an obvious answer to the question, “Was 9/11 an inside job?” — Of course it was. The invisible power-knowledge regime brought about the destruction of the Twin Towers when that suited its interests — just as it had earlier erected them for equally inscrutable reasons — and those who think that President Bush and his henchmen engineered 9/11 are not looking far enough inside: in this vision the Bushies were at most servants or emissaries of larger, ever-nameless forces.

I keep telling you people that Pynchon explains everything, but you don’t listen.