Do you all see what you’ve done to poor, sweet, innocent Sean Hannity? Once America’s foremost chronicler of secret sperm in presidential paintings, the Fox News host has now found himself reduced to the outer dregs of TV content generation: Commenting on Olive Garden memes in which he, himself, appears.
Specifically, Hannity apparently—because we’re still having legitimate trouble convincing ourselves this isn’t an incredibly elaborate deepfake—spent more than a minute on his show tonight addressing a joke post made earlier today by Twitter user Louie Mantia, Jr., cruelly alleging that Hannity had had his “Lifetime Pasta Pass” revoked by the semi-casual dining chain. Mantia’s joke was inspired, among other things, by Hannity’s recent focus on the nation-wide breadstick dispensary, after Anderson Cooper spoke with some negativity about the beloved Italian Kitchen franchise over on CNN.
Mantia eventually deleted his post after it went viral, because, frankly, too many people were too willing to believe that Olive Garden would casually dish up this sort of vigilante pasta justice. (Does “When you’re here, you’re family” mean nothing to these people?) But Hannity apparently got wind of the whole thing, which is how we ended up with this particular surreal moment in what was already a pretty fucking surreal day:
So, just to be clear: Sean Hannity has never had a Lifetime Pasta Pass—as Mantia noted, they haven’t even been available for more than a year, more’s the pity—but he does think it’s “fake news” when someone on the internet makes a joke. Anyway, we can’t wait to see how the next phase of this noodle Ouroborous plays out: Will Olive Garden be inspired by the whole debacle to offer Hannity one of those sacred passes? And will he then do something deplorable enough to have it revoked? That’s the fun thing about the ultimate death of truth and the blurring of reality into a sort of grimy content sludge: You never know how it’s going to manifest in some hot Zuppa Toscana-based news.