Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham’s Wednesday night monologue about immigrants destroying America was so racist it got the endorsement of David Duke, the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
During the opening to her primetime show The Ingraham Angle, Ingraham complained that “the America we know and love doesn't exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people,” she said, in the form of documented and undocumented immigrants.
Minutes later, Duke tweeted praise for Ingraham.
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“One of the most important (truthful) monologues in the history of MSM,” he wrote above a clip of Ingraham’s rant. He later deleted the tweet.
It should be no surprise that Ingraham’s rhetoric got the endorsement of an open white supremacist. Ingraham’s fellow Fox News host Tucker Carlson also echoed white nationalist rhetoric when he said immigrants were leading to “the collapse of the American family” in June.
Ingraham and Carlson’s monologues borrowed the rhetoric of what white nationalists falsely call “white genocide,” an innuendo that refers to racist fears about people of color coming to outnumber white people in the United States. A large segment of white nationalists also hitch their fears to the claim that the left and/or Jewish people are encouraging immigration to dilute the white race.
“White supremacists talk a lot about the inherent threat posed by immigrants and refugees, particularly those of color,” she previously told The Daily Beast. “This is obviously a shout-out to the sense that white supremacists have of being under siege. It’s a shout-out to the concept of white genocide, which is a popular trope among white supremacists and it’s something they use as a recruiting tool: a sense of fear of the other.”
Duke has accused “Zionists” of planning to ethnically cleanse “Europeans and Americans” and even said Anthony Bourdain wanted to “exterminate the white race.”
Ingraham blamed the left for pushing out whites.
“From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically, in some ways, the country has changed,” Ingraham said. “Now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases legal immigration that, of course, progressives love.”
Ingraham’s remarks came during a riff on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist who recently won a Democratic primary in New York for a seat in Congress. Ocasio-Cortez, a young Latina progressive, had appeared on a podcast where she discussed the collapse of America’s middle class. Ingraham claimed the nation’s real troubles came from “the left’s effort to remake America” by allowing more immigrants into the country.
Later in the program, Ingraham dismissed structural racism in the criminal justice system (an objective fact measurable in disproportionate policing and prosecution of black Americans) by asking about “black-on-black crime” (a conservative cliche used to demonize the black community).
“But is black-on-black crime, for instance, right now, in Chicago a bigger problem for the community than just the racism that you claim is in the criminal justice system?” she asked when a guest mentioned recognizing racial bias in the country’s courts.
In four days, white supremacists are scheduled to rally in Washington, D.C. to mark the one-year anniversary of Unite the Right, last year’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Permit applications show Duke is expected to be a featured speaker.
