Fox Nation is continuing to promote a wild misquotation claiming that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson called Republicans “jack-booted thugs” in a speech at UC-Berkeley. In fact, as Politico noted on Friday when video of the speech was posted, Jackson used the term “to refer to her own employees, jokingly borrowing language that the EPA's critics have used to describe the agency's workers.”
Here is what Jackson actually said:
JACKSON: You may have heard that EPA intends to triple its budget and add 230,000 new regulators to cut greenhouse gas emissions from sources like -- be prepared -- backyard grills and cows. In truth, we put forward a tailoring rule months ago, a common sense plan to tailor greenhouse gas standards so that we could exempt small sources, like small businesses from regulations, and focus the country's regulatory attention on the largest sources of greenhouse gasses. A massive expansion was never a possibility, and the people who cited the 230,000 new EPA jack-booted thugs knew that.
The misquote originated from a story by E&E News, which has since issued a correction. As of posting time, Fox Nation has yet to retract its post and correct the misquote. Still, Fox Nation has found time to put up posts this weekend on various other topics.