What are we outraged about now, folks?
Well, if you are Fox News, it’s deeply upsetting that Vice President Kamala Harris once again posted a photo of her gas stove on social media.
Why is this so outrageous? According to the right-wing outrage-industrial complex, it’s because the Biden administration supposedly wants to take away everyone’s gas appliances, so therefore, Harris is a raging hypocrite.
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Over the holiday weekend, Harris shared an image of her and her husband Doug Emhoff making Christmas dinner. The largely innocuous pic featured the smiling couple in the kitchen, apparently making Beef Wellington. “Merry Christmas to all. May your day be filled with love, family, and good food,” Harris wrote in the Dec. 25 tweet.
The veep had posted a similar tweet around Thanksgiving, showing the pair preparing their holiday meal in the kitchen, where Harris has a gas stove. Right-wing media melted down since conservatives had spent the past year warning that Democrats are coming for your ovens. “Gas Stoves for Kamala, Not for Thee,” blared one Newsmax headline.
At the time, Fox News spent nearly an entire week raging about the photo, with pundits and anchors tripping over themselves mocking the vice president for her alleged hypocrisy. Describing the tweet as “Gasgate,” the network’s personalities claimed Democrats “want all of America to be as miserable and unhappy and unloved as they are” while demanding the Second Couple be named and shamed.
“Remember how we had the COVID hypocrisy slow scroll on this show, we scrolled all the names not wearing their masks,” Trump spokeswoman turned Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany exclaimed at the time. “We need a climate change hypocrisy slow scroll and add these two to the list with the gas stove.”
Skip ahead a month, and it feels more like Groundhog Day than Christmas.
After MAGA lawmakers poked fun at Harris over the pic and accused her of trying to “hide” the stove to avoid a second round of holiday backlash, right-wing tabloids such as The Daily Mail breathed more life into the conservative outrage cycle. At that point, it was only a matter of time before Fox News jumped on the bandwagon.
Early morning show Fox & Friends First kicked off things for the conservative cable giant on Wednesday, comparing the Thanksgiving and Christmas photos before wondering if Harris’ team is “not telling her about the backlash or do they not care.”
“They just don’t care,” Washington Examiner deputy editor Kaylee McGhee White declared. “They want to deny you what they want for themselves. We saw it during COVID, the hypocritical double standard, where the leaders were operating by a completely different quality of life than they forced on everyone else.”
During the network’s morning flagship show Fox & Friends, guest host Griff Jenkins wailed that he was “legitimately worried that they’re going to come for the gas stove” before getting even more conspiratorial.
“See, once is maybe hypocrisy. Twice is intentional,” Jenkins insisted, adding that Harris posting an image of her stove is “not a coincidence.”
The guest hosts of Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria continued the dogpile, claiming Harris “may not be the sharpest tool in the shed” and is “clueless” for posting the picture on social media.
“It’s the fact that they are trying to eliminate something that has been a part of our lives, part of everybody else’s lives so that they can continue—it just shows hypocrisy,” Fox News host Todd Piro grumbled. “It shows a lack of caring for the American people.”
At the top of her own outrage segment with radio host Rich Zeoli, Fox News anchor Molly Line appeared to make a bit of a Freudian slip. “They look adorable in these pictures,” she said. “They look like a happy color—uhh, happy couple.”
Grousing about Harris’ “gas stove for me, not for thee kind of approach,” Zeoli then somehow found a way to lump religion into his grievance-filled tirade.
“It shows you the hypocrisy of the left. They don’t think gas stoves are a problem,” he fumed. “They want to ban them because it’s something they can virtue-signal and be woke about and the extreme climate left really wants them banned.”
Zeoli continued: “But every chef knows it’s the best way to cook. They know it’s the best way to cook, Molly, that’s why they were cooking on the gas stove for Christmas. They did not say Jesus Christ at all when they wished everybody a Merry Christmas, so there’s that.”
Fox & Friends co-host Carley Shimkus, meanwhile, seemed to inadvertently highlight how ultimately silly her network’s outrage was over the vice president’s gas appliance.
“Someone in the campaign needs to start reading the comments section because the comments are brutal every time she posts a gas stove picture,” Shimkus stated. “It wasn’t even her or President Biden who wanted to ban gas stoves, it was somebody else in the administration, and then they vetoed the whole idea.”
Indeed, the yearlong Republican fearmongering about the White House coming for Americans’ stoves began after an official with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission expressed concern over the health risks gas stoves posed, especially to children with asthma. “This is a hidden hazard,” CPSC commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. said in January. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
Trumka’s comments set off an immediate firestorm, prompting GOP lawmakers to echo the NRA and proclaim that “if the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands.” At the same time, conservatives and Fox News directed their bluster at First Lady Jill Biden by digging up years-old images of her cooking on a gas burner.
In the end, the agency and the White House said they were “not looking to ban gas stoves” and were instead “actively engaged in strengthening voluntary safety standards,” adding that the president “does not support banning gas stoves.” However, buoyed by some local and state regulations restricting natural gas stoves in select new buildings, Republicans have continued to peddle that narrative, even going so far as thanking Fox News for giving them “talking points” on the issue.
