The further assertion was that RFK visiting the lavatory this way somehow compounded the "problem" even more, like it was some monstrous transgression against all of humanity.  The reality is that healthy bare feet are completely unaffected by that environment as well, in the absence of open wounds.  The skin of our soles, even on tender feet that rarely see the light of day, has evolved to be really good at keeping bad things out of our bodies.  And whatever RFK's fellow passengers may have walked on with their shoes in the same loo, they likely brought more of whatever might have been on the floor back to their seats in the shoe treads which have far greater "collection" and holding area.  A bare sole retains far less material picked up from its environment than the never-cleaned shoes of all the self-righteous shod people who don't pause to examine the physical reality of this situation.  Instead, they'd rather judge from their internet armchairs and hold forth a simple pair of feet as borderline obscene.  Never mind that it's none of their business in the first place.

Furthermore, urine is mostly sterile, and once it's on a restroom floor it's little different from any other water that lands there, such as splash from the sink.  In other words, not any notable source of dangerous pathogens, and arguably, urea is beneficial for skin!  People obsessing about a little pee as such a major ick-factor need to get a goddamn grip.  Walking barefoot on that "soup" is no more hazardous than walking on a wet pool deck.

Let's look at some of the prominent examples that emerged from this, starting with the late-night comedians on Youtube.  It's dismaying that even they can exhibit such ignorant bias, really, and all this does is encourage their channel commenters to fly into some kind of self-fabricated rage.

• https://youtu.be/1IMoGo5fs1Y?t=412 :   Stephen Colbert
  
  His comment is, "that is completely unhygenic".  Newsflash, Steve: it's no more "unhygenic" than walking around an airplane cabin in shoes.  The truly "unhygenic" place is *inside* the shoes that other people kept on, as the bacteria thrive and multiply in that dark, moist place.  This is why it's in generally poor taste to *remove* shoes in a confined space around other people, but if someone was barefoot all day before boarding the plane there is no possible harm or annoyance to others.
• https://youtu.be/yvBS2bFP4GQ?t=484 :   Jimmy Kimmel
  
  He may have gotten one minor aspect of his rant right, saying "is this how you build natural immunity?".  That may contain a grain of truth, in that barefooting is healthy and promotes developing stronger feet and by extension one's body, but it would still have very little to do with actual pathogens.  It has no possible relationship to Covid or other virus transmission, of course, even though there were some misguided efforts in the height of the pandemic to claim such existed.

• https://youtu.be/RZjb7Zj6tMM?t=212 :   Jimmy Fallon
  
  Given RFK's stance on many other things including denial of vaccine science, being "back to a two-party system" might be a good thing but in this case, for the entirely wrong reasons.  And it seems pretty unlikely that trying to poke the entertainment screens with one's toes would be very productive.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BycfrpOSATI :   Fox 26 Houston
  
  "No judgement here"?!  Then why are you even bring it up and trying to hold RFK to as much ridicule as everyone else?  Again, one's harmless choices while in transit are nobody else's business.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VslhuQEmDfs :   OK! Magazine
  
  Here, the commentator hides behind a robot speech generator, likely afraid to exhibit their own bias in person.  From this, however, we get more hints about the origin of the story.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxlH0a1BzyM :   The View
  
  You would think Whoopi Goldberg would have a more balanced view on this, but there she is ginning up more knee-jerk mob-think among her panelists.  And how would socks help?  They'd just soak up more of the supposed urine soup on the floor.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2txBdG7Z9A :   Young Turks
  
  Even Ana Kasparian gets caught up in the faux outrage, revealing a possibly darker side to her usually *sensibly* judgemental nature on current events.  And who's misinformed enough to think that people of color never go barefoot??  They used to quite a bit more, back in the day, which in fact gave rise to the tacit discrimination in the Sixties that we're still living with today.  It really has to STOP.

• https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news... :   Independent
  
  Here we learn a little more about the story's origin.  That "conservative podcaster" who started it, Justin Haskins, needs to mind his own goddamn business. 

• https://news.yahoo.com/robert-kennedy-jr-seen-barefoot... :   Yahoo News
  
  Meta-links out to many other outlets.

• https://www.thedailybeast.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-goes-barefoot... :   Daily Beast
  
  More fluff, riding on the coattails of the original reference

• https://www.tmz.com/2023/11/12/robert-f-kennedy-jr... :   TMZ
  
  This seems to be closest to the original source of the story.  There are some videos embedded there, including a followup wrapped around a lame "response" from RFK, in which it's not entirely clear if he's meekly bending the knee to the mob instead of actually standing up for himself, or just trolling them even more.  He does "lean into" the incident a little more near the end of this other interview, stating that no, he generally doesn't like shoes, so really, he should have stuck with that and tried to debunk some of the asinine mythology instead of just trying to put the whole thing behind him.  The only disgusting thing here is the attitudes of Haskins and everyone else in that TMZ newsroom, and the fact-free judgemental mob-think he whips up among them.  But what do we expect from a forum like that -- TMZ seems to basically be a tabloid pustule riding on the ass of Fox News.

• https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/robert-f-kennedy-jr-goes-... :   Yahoo "entertainment"
  
  Here, Haskins offers a weak "explanation" of how things played out.  He was trying to sneak shots of RFK in the first place, and then deliberately blew the one he did get into a steaming pile of sensationalist clickbait.  What a creep.  This does not even begin to qualify as journalism -- Haskins needs to get a real job and do something useful with his life.  Honestly, RFK Jr should sue him into a smoking ruin, for wrapping a picture taken completely without permission in all the attempted-defamatory bullshit that got piled on afterward.

• https://jalopnik.com/rfk-jr-is-one-of-those-monsters... :  
  
  Why is Jalopnik even weighing in on this, as it has nothing to do with cars?  One of the comments about "human butter" is pretty funny, and guess what, that is a real thing, but it generally doesn't come from our feet.  It comes from all over our bodies, in great enough quantities to actually make popular mountain trails more slippery than they would naturally be.  *That* could be viewed as kind of disgusting, but it doesn't hurt us and it should be pointed out that said human effluent generally comes from shod climbers anyway.