Monday night marked the return of Laura Ingraham, a rejected Sailor Moon villain, to her nightly Fox News show after a weeklong “scheduled” vacation. Ingraham took a break just as several of her own advertisers dropped their support of her because she insulted teenage Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg on Twitter. You might think that Ingraham used her break to reflect on the nature of her political rhetoric—she did apologize for it, after all!
But Ingraham returned, fresh as a daisy, only to double down on whatever it is that she does. It seems her only takeaway from this whole situation is not to refrain from getting into a petty Twitter scuffle with a 17-year-old, but to proclaimthat “the left” is trying to “silence” conservatives. In fact, she announced a new segment called “Defend the First” which consists of “exposing” the enemies of Free Speech.
A week after Fox News defended Ingraham and decried “agenda-driven intimidation tactics,” she assumed the role of the victim—conveniently omitting the very thing that lost her her advertisers or her own pathetic apology over it. Some things she said, via CNN:
“There is a contraction of free speech all around us, and few seem to even notice!” she said.
“Expressing views that just five or ten years ago were considered mainstream can now get you fired,” she said. “It can cause you to lose a promotion. Or you can be branded a ‘hater,’ or yes, you can get boycotted.”
A Fox News host making fun of a teenage shooting survivor for not getting into college was considered mainstream ten years ago? Maybe.
“We” — meaning conservatives — are “winning the war of ideas on immigration, the economy, life, trade and, yes, political correctness,” Ingraham said, “which is why we’re seeing the left wing retaliatory hit squads popping up everywhere! Today in academia, in Hollywood, and in the media, the left will brook no dissent and they will militantly police the borders of their stale orthodoxy.”
To be fair, Ingraham probably had to fill the air and talk for longer because her commercial breaks appeared to be shorter, indicating her sponsors have yet to return. And so once again, a very conservative figure is held accountable for her own very stupid actions and seizes the opportunity to play the victim while also insisting that she’s winning. The circle of life has been restored.