Last spring, when Fox News host Laura Ingraham decided to use her platform to personally attack a survivor of the Parkland school shooting, over a dozen companies, including the likes of Hulu and Office Depot, announced that they would no longer be running ads on the program. Ingraham took an unplanned leave of absence from the show, and, with time, some advertisers, like Ace Hardware, eventually came crawling back. [Advertisers love uninformed viewers, and Fox News has cultivated the largest audience of uninformed viewers known to mankind.] One would imagine the folks at Ace were assured, before announcing their return as a sponsor, that Ingraham, who has a long history of such things, would do her best in the future to tone down the hate speech to a barely audible, and plausibly deniable, dog whistle. Well, as we saw last night, that’s certainly not the case. In an unhinged rant about immigration, Ingraham, speaking to other clean white thoroughbreds like herself, brought her racial animus roaring to the surface, noting that “demographic changes” have stolen our country from us, the white European Americans who truly deserve to be here. “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” the racist Fox News host said.
Laura Ingraham: "The America we know and love doesn't exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don't like … this is related to both illegal and legal immigration" pic.twitter.com/s5G2qIY4W0
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) August 9, 2018
As you might imagine, the rant got quite a bit of attention. Among those who approved wholeheartedly was “white nationalist politician, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Holocaust denier, convicted felon, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan” David Duke, who called the monologue one of the most “important” and “truthful” in the history of American media.
While I don’t have an up-to-date list of all of Ingraham’s advertisers, I do know, through the magic of Twitter, how to reach @AceHardware, and you can be sure that I’ll be writing to them… They made a conscious decision to go back to Ingraham, after acknowledging that they understood just how dangerously toxic she was, and people should know that. Sadly, the only effective tool we have at our disposal right now, in this corporatocracy that we now live under, seems to be our choice as to where we spend our dollars, and I don’t see any reason why I’d support a company that knowingly promotes a viewpoint echoed by the likes of David Duke.
If Ace went back to Ingraham, and stayed with her over these past several months, as she told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble” when he came out against Donald Trump, and defended Alex Jones after Infowars was banned from several social media platforms, saying, “This is about freedom, and our access to information from sources we as individuals trust and like,” then, in my opinion, they deserve whatever might be coming their way.
I’ll just conclude by saying that this weekend marks the one-year anniversary of the deadly white supremacist “Unite the Right” march through the streets Charlottesville, and it will be marked by a gathering of white nationalists in D.C., right next to Donald Trump’s White House, in Lafayette Park. David Duke, you might be interested to know, is scheduled to address the crowd.
This needs to stop, and stop right now. Just because some individuals “trust and like” her, does not mean we should allow such vile hate speech on our publicly-owned airwaves. And, if the federal government won’t step in, we have to compel those companies who depend on us to keep paying their shareholder dividends, to do the right thing.
