[EDIT: Apparently these are two different Levi Russells, and the UK professor was not AfP spokesperson. We apologize for the error!]
Buried in last August's bipartisan infrastructure bill is a clause stipulating that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration needs to start figuring out the best way for cars to use technology capable of preventing drunk driving, and make it standard equipment in new cars. This technology is already around, cars are already collecting all sorts of data as you drive, the intent here is to standardize the system to try to do something about the ten thousand people killed by drunk drivers every year.
It went unnoticed, until Georgia Republican Bob Barr wrote an op-ed in the Daily disinfo Caller at the end of November that the bipartisan legislation "will mandate that automobile manufacturers build into every car what amounts to a 'vehicle kill switch.'" Barr goes on a paranoid rant raising all sorts of questions about how things could go wrong, concluding that it is "a violation of our constitutional rights" and if not removed somehow after being signed into law, "the freedom of the open road that individual car ownership brought to the American Dream, will be but another vague memory of an era no longer to be enjoyed by future generations."
And indeed, who doesn't long for the days of leisurely drunk drives in cars with no seat belts?
From there, some car blogs picked up the narrative from Barr, and in the months that followed, the "kill switch" claim bounced around social media and went viral enough in early March that both the AP and LeadStories fact checked the claim, and found it "false" and "misinterpreted."
Johns Hopkins researcher Jeffrey Michael, who actually works on the technology, told the AP the law has “nothing to do with giving law enforcement access to a kill switch," while Jake McCook of the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety program told LeadStories that the actual agreement between government and industry directly stipulates that they "establish operating procedures and physical security measures designed to protect these Data from inadvertent release or disclosure to unauthorized third parties," meaning they are charged quite explicitly with keeping the data privately protected.
Two months after those fact checkers thoroughly debunked Barr's apparent fears that his car will snitch on him for driving drunk, the Daily Caller's fact checker hasn't touched it (shocker!) but the claim is back in the Koch network's new beau, RealClearEnergy.
"Joe Biden is threatening our freedom of movement" cries the headline of an op-ed by Levi Russell, bylined as "an assistant teaching professor at the University of Kansas's Brandmeyer Center for Applied Economics," which sounds like a real academic gig. But why would an assistant teaching professor put his name to claims that have already been soundly debunked?
Because Levi Russell is more accurately described as a Koch spokesperson given a job at one of dozens of Koch-sponsored university centers in order to continue promoting Koch propaganda (like this "freedom of movement" piece attacking electric cars) with the sheen of academic credibility.
[EDIT: Apparently these are two different Levi Russells, and the UK professor was not AfP spokesperson. We apologize for the error! Please consider the strikethrough a deletion with acknowledgement of our error.] When we googled his name+Koch, for example, what jumped up was a story from 2014, when Russell was a spokesperson form Koch's Americans for Prosperity tea party front group, and had to apologize for their attack ad's use of an image of President Obama visiting parents of people killed in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado mass shooting.
"Apologized for inadvertently exploiting mass murder to smear Obamacare on behalf of my billionaire-funded politically lobby shop" is definitely not a normal part of any real professor's CV, but is perfect for a Koch university front group like the Brandmeyer Center, which is helmed by another former Koch crony, Art Hall. According to documents brought into the public domain by UnKochMyCampus, Hall's funding from the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation was for creating "intellectual products" for use "as a tool in economic policy debates."
Russell's misuse of the UN-recognized phrase Freedom of Movement, meaning countries allowing citizens to come and go as they please, more or less, as a rallying cry for pro-drunk-driving, anti-EV propaganda isn't just ridiculous clickbait bombast.
It's apparently the best "intellectual product" they can come up with to use "as a tool" to fight for what Koch profits demand: less EVs, more fossil fuels.
