With Iowans facing intense cold in the days leading up to the GOP caucus in the Hawkeye state, Fox News host Dana Perino suggested Monday that climate protesters who have interrupted candidates’ stump speeches there are having their message tarnished by the chilly temperatures.
On The Five, the panel reacted to clips of protesters making themselves seen and heard at recent events for President Donald Trump, Vivek Ramawamy, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Last Tuesday, DeSantis also had his Fox News town hall event disrupted by several apparent climate activists who chanted “no oil money.”
Each co-host—except for Jessica Tarlov, who introduced the topic and did not weigh in—seemed to be in agreement about the protesters.
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“They should die…of embarrassment,” Greg Gutfeld said, while Jesse Watters approvingly cited a Washington Examiner column claiming that they’re aiming for “intimidation” rather than “persuasion.” Jeanine Pirro, meanwhile, groused that “everybody’s fed up with it,” and doubted the protesters’ motivations.
When it was Perino’s turn to weigh in, she seemed to allude to the weather in Iowa as one reason why climate activists looked “ridiculous”—a comment that echoed global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe bringing a snowball into the Capitol in February 2015 to try to bolster his argument.
"I would just say that it reminds me of the day that…Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth in 2002 or 2003; it was the coldest day of the year,” she said. “That’s what these climate protesters remind me of. It’s ridiculous and they’re persuading no one."
For what it’s worth, the documentary film that Gore wrote premiered on May 24, 2006, and his book by the same name was published two days later. It wasn’t immediately clear what criteria Perino used to claim that either day was “the coldest” of that year.
Regardless, global warming doesn’t just mean an increase in the Earth’s average temperature, but more extreme weather patterns—cold and snow included.
