On Donald Trump's favorite television program Fox & Friends, co-host Pete Hegseth passed a little morning-banter time by, apparently, attempting to gross out his fellow television personalities.
“My 2019 resolution is to say things on air that I say off air... I don’t think I’ve washed my hands for 10 years. Really, I don’t really wash my hands ever,” [...]
“I inoculate myself. Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real,”
Both Hegseth and Fox News proper were quick to clarify that he was joking. Just a bit of morning fun, trolling the co-hosts ... and Twitter.
Mind you, we here at Hunter Industrial Enterprises are always up for a good joke, but I'll confess to being a wee bit nervous about this one. The morning show Fox & Friends is, hands-down, the dumbest pseudo-news program on television; more pressingly, its audience consists of people who can only tolerate the dumbest pseudo-news programs on television. They count among their most avid viewers a certain Donald J. Trump, which should serve to demonstrate the sort of couch potatoes we're dealing with here.
And I am not sure the audience of the dumbest news show on television is going to get the joke. I'm not sure Donald will get the joke. (The Twitter replies, for what it's worth, do not seem to be treating it as a joke.)
We are one high-profile idiot away, in other words, from a national movement among conservatives to give up hand washing after pooping in order to own the libs.
Don't say you can't imagine it happening: of course you can. These are people who throw their coffeemakers out the window when Sean Hannity tells them to, people who earnestly believe that wide parts of Europe and our own midwestern states both have "no-go zones" controlled by Islamic law. These are people who buy gold based on television ads. Joking with them is not a good move.
As a special bonus to this story, we should note that as recently as March 2018, the very same Fox banterer Pete Hegseth was being considered a leading candidate to become the new secretary of Veterans Affairs. This was because Donald Trump sees him on television. Fresh new ideas on hand-washing presumably had nothing to do with it.