Fox News host Jesse Watters has we guess been on some kind of Reverse Infrastructure Week on his “I Wanna Be Tucker Carlson Please” show lately, insisting last week that Joe Biden’s climate plan is “falling apart” and nobody will ever buy EVs. Then Wednesday night, Watters let his viewers know about a very serious concern he has about the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, explaining that Democrats secretly mandated the auto industry equip every vehicle built with a “kill switch” as soon as 2026, so Big Government can shut down your car or truck!!!
Spoiler: There’s no such requirement. Watters was lying, passing on misinformation that was already debunked back in January. The Infrastructure Law does require the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to develop rules that would require new cars with technology that “passively monitors the performance of a driver,” recognizes squirrelly performance that suggests the driver is impaired, and temporarily shuts the vehicle down. NHTSA hasn’t yet developed the rules, so the details have yet to be worked out. The legislation pretty clearly intends for an automatic onboard system, and nothing in the law says anything about letting a third party like cops or the government shut down cars.
Ted Nugent lied on Facebook on January 2 that “Beginning 2026, a kill switch will be a mandatory feature on vehicles. The device allows the government, the police, and car makers to disable your car from the comfort of their offices.” That’s simply not the case, as fact checks by the AP and by USA Today explained back in January.
Watters was apparently inspired to resurrect the lie because House Republicans want to strip the impaired driving detection mandate out of the law in one of their budget drafts. A brief Washington Times story didn’t mention the bullshit about the BIL mandating a remote “kill switch,” so that’s nice.
Watters skated around the fact checking by cleverly announcing he simply doesn’t believe the government would ever limit such systems to passive operation, because Democrats are tyrants, duh:
Well, now thanks to Joe Biden, you're going to have a car that tracks your every move, but it's not here to help. Democrats want every car in America armed with a kill switch that'll turn your car off if it doesn't like how you drive. Lobbyists slipped language into the Infrastructure Bill that says all new cars sold in the US must have the ability to disable your car based on your driving performance as early as 2026.
They claim it's to stop drunk drivers, but we don't believe them because here's the language: "In order to prevent advance drunk and impaired driving, the cars will need to 'passively monitor their performance of a driver in order to identify if their driving is impaired or not' and then limit the car's ability to be used."
So, when is the federal government ever passively monitored anything?
It’s sort of beautifully paranoid: Sure the language of the bill directs NHTSA to require a passive system. But you can’t believe that, because just look at these other conspiracy theories! Honestly, we have no idea what he’s talking about here:
After big government partnered with big tech and big pharma to monitor free speech last election, do you trust the big three automakers to partner with big tech and big government to monitor your freedom of movement?
Did big government, tech, and pharma do that? We think we missed it.
Oh, right: He’s still griping about the vaccines and attempts to debunk online misinformation. So obviously, based on that real thing that actually ended free speech forever, Joe Biden is now going to turn our cars against us like in any number of bad movies:
I can't wait for the federal government to stop me from driving, steal my biometrics, and monitor my car conversations. That's funny, you know, they hit the kill switch on every pickup truck in Pennsylvania on Election Day. Oops, sorry about that. Human error.
And here we were, worried about data brokers scraping our cars’ computers for profit, when the real threat is that the NSA will be listening in on you as you scream back at the AM talk radio every day, and then the government will say Baby I Can Drive Your Car and make your lifted dually pickup drive directly to the nearest drag show, disabling your ability to roll coal in the process.
Heck, we’d even watch that movie if Jordan Peele were directing.
OPEN THREAD!
[Media Matters / Photo: Anthony Crider, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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Open Thread Chat Nov. 9. Cats in bowls.
https://substack.com/chat/1783367/post/652f379b-38e9-4a28-a0e6-c635bb0deb73
Dunno if the results are gonna last... but the last 4ish hours I have been without depression, and it is so nice.
Thanks mushrooms.