You know when rightwing disinfo news outlets all cover a climate protest in unison that it must have been something pretty big to get their attention!
That, or it’s incredibly convenient for them to rail against, which is of course the case this week. Because while Fox did cover the blockade on Sen Manchin’s coal power plant, it was something else that captured the hearts and minds and fears of the right this week.
Back on April 6th, Adbusters tweeted the “SUV Flat Tire challenge,” a “gentle escalation of methods to drive the urgency of this climate crisis home and engender a systemic aversion to SUVs” by deflating their tires.
It only got 62 retweets as of a week later, and no one in the climate community seemed to notice or care all that much, but boy did rightwing media act like they did; leading to over 1,000 quote tweets rife with threats of violence, because that’s an appropriate response to a flat tire, apparently.
Fox News kicked it off with plenty of quotes to tweets criticizing the challenge, but no actual evidence that anyone, anywhere had actually accepted the challenge. The Washington Times, Breitbart, and the Daily Wire all followed suit, quoting tweets that were very mad at the idea that someone would dare assault their precious SUV, and all suspiciously bereft of any interviews from deflated survivors of these heinous (imagined) attacks. (And before this clip makes the rounds as “the next Greta”, it's from last September, and not inspired by Adbusters.)
The Guardian did report, back in March, that a group in the UK calling themselves the Tyre Extinguishers claims to have deflated tires on a thousand SUV’s, but reporters on the right have still failed to find a single one!
Instead of reporting, they’re keening and wailing and clutching pearls. The most hyperbolic take came from Fox’s Jesse Watters, who teamed up with fellow racist Alex Epstein to talk about it. Watters ended with the take-away that “if you take it to the logical conclusion” then “we are pretty close to human sacrifice.” (Hat tip to Media Matters)
While the suggestion that human sacrifices are the logical conclusion of deflating tires to protest SUV’s role in the climate crisis may sound far-fetched to you, bear in mind that Fox News has spent two years broadcasting disinformation that’s polarizing its own audience against Covid vaccines and public health protection measures, so perhaps Watters invocation of human sacrifice was actually supposed to be a positive endorsement!