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RIGHT ON POINT
Thoughts From Fox News Commentator Laura Ingraham
interview by Bruce Percelay
Laura Ingraham developed her appetite for conservative political commentary as a student journalist at Dartmouth College. Upon graduation, Ingraham joined the law firm of Skadden Arps and proceeded to get a position as a speech writer at the Reagan White House. Having worked for CBS and MSNBC, Ingraham has emerged as a leading conservative voice on Fox News where she has been a commentator for 12 years and host of The Ingraham Angle since 2017.
Where do you draw the line between reporting on particular politicians and becoming involved with them?
I can only speak from my perspective, and if you watch my show for any length of time, you will see that I give very detailed advice to Republicans, and right down to this is how Ron DeSantis can break through, and this is what Trump needs to do. I don’t go through every candidate, obviously, but on the main candidates, I actually try to give them on-air advice, which really is what I would say to them privately as well.
Let’s talk about the great partisan divide that we’re now seeing. Politicians who tend to be extreme have their voices amplified by the media because they are much more interesting. How do you see the effect of the media on perhaps even inadvertently fueling the divisions in the country?
I really reject that characterization for a number of reasons. Number one, the establishment complaining that it doesn’t get enough attention is a reflection on the establishment, both on the Republican and Democratic parties. It’s much easier to book a guest on my show who actually wants to fight for their position and who isn’t afraid of a debate than it is to book any random establishment Republican. And no personal offense, but if you want to be a leader in your party and be respected by the core electorate, the grassroots, then you actually have to be somebody they think will fight for them. If you’re just hidden in your office and meeting with big donors all day long, then no, the people aren’t going to really want to hear from you or they’re not going to take you very seriously on issues that they care about, from China to the border to protecting free speech to big tech.
In one way or another, all of us or our ancestors were immigrants. We have an enormous labor problem in the United States and don’t have enough bodies; our population growth is essentially zero. Is your position on immigration one where you are opposed to illegal and criminal immigration or the dilution of the population by immigration period?
What we were seeing now, which Democrats are now coming to grips with, is abhorrent. When you have liberal New York City leaders saying enough, when you’re saying don’t send people here, they are now seeing what an open border does to a population. They’re understanding just how cruel it is, and in a city that’s broken in many ways with crime and homelessness and despair and a shrinking middle class, adding thousands of individuals to that mix is untenable. So it’s not a question of the great migration of the early 1900s. It’s a question of what kind of a country do we want to be now, if our economic concerns with our divisions seem to be getting deeper. I think our public schools are in many ways shattered. I don’t think adding 10 million migrants to the mix when Black Americans in Chicago feel like they can’t get a fair shake in schools is the way to go. Black Americans are infuriated in the inner city that migrants are, they believe, getting services that should be reserved for American citizens, and New York City liberals are throwing up their hands.
That tells you where this debate has gone. Teddy Roosevelt warned against America becoming a polyglot boarding house where people are widgets, essentially just existing for the benefit of business. They just come to America for money, basically a paycheck. That’s not America.
No president in U.S. history has been the target of more criminal cases than Donald Trump, yet the more he appears to be on the receiving end of criminal prosecution, the stronger some of his support becomes. What does that say about the base that just does not seem to be able to be swayed even if a president’s behavior was so reckless? What does that say to you?
I don’t think it says anything more than the Democrats coalescing behind Joe Biden, who has left our border open and who can barely find his way off the stage. Trump is leading across every demographic, not just leading to the core, but Trump is winning in every significant demographic group among Republican voters, and I think what that tells you is people don’t trust the other options are really fighting for them. If you want to beat Trump, I mean, I guess they can try to send him to jail or hope he dies in prison and they can have a big celebration afterward. But that’s not going to solve the problems in the country. And that’s just going to make the country far more divided. They’re whistling past their own graveyard if they think that that's a way to bring the country together to take out Trump. Long after Trump, we’re still going to have a very dissatisfied public, if disagreeing with the elite, media and political class means that you’re a horrible, awful, rotten racist. I think the divide is really as much about the demonization of the American people, as it is about the persecution of Trump.
What do you think is the answer on how we pull the country together? And how concerned are you as to the trajectory that we are on?
There are a lot of ways that Republicans and Democrats can actually work together, and I’ve urged the progressives to work with the populace conservatives on issues where I thought we agreed … like the First Amendment, tech surveillance and tech collaboration with the government to infringe on law-abiding citizens’ rights. All these wars, China, human rights in China, outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries, like all of that used to be in the progressive wheelhouse. Now it seems like they would rather coalesce behind Joe Biden and the donor class, Wall Street and big tech, than they would be interested in living up to the traditionally progressive ideals. I would say that someone like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi, in the old days Christopher Hitchens, maybe someone like Tulsi Gabbard; I mean, they haven’t changed their views on any of these issues.
Is there a Democrat in the Senate or the House that you hold in high esteem?
I think a lot of them have been out of the party. I mean, I think the pro-life Democrats, I don’t think any of us know if any of them exist anymore. They’re few and far between. I don’t think today a devout Catholic Democrat of the JFK variety could be named to any significant position in a Democratic administration. I do believe that there are people in the country who already are working together. You see that in Iowa and Arizona on the opportunity scholarships and school choice issues. You see that because Democrat parents want their kids to have good schools, good education, so they’re working with people of a different political perspective on that issue. So that’s actually working quite well. And I think you’re seeing Muslim Americans work with conservatives, Republicans, on issues of parental rights and curricula. And education. I think you’re seeing a shift among Hispanic and even some Asian voters on some of these economic issues, because their small businesses are getting hammered with regulations and inflation. So I think you are seeing now a realignment. But it’s not toward the establishment; it’s really more about a working-class populace, commonsense sensibility on a lot of these issues.
A lot of people feel that the best and brightest are not participating or running for office. Do you feel that is the case?
I’m not sure about whether that’s the case. Politics has always been a rough and tumble enterprise in the United States, going back to our founding. There is no disputing that it is not for the faint of heart. Obviously, as technology changes, as the media changes, everything’s instantly accessible. The debate necessarily changes as well. We’re not going to have the Lincoln-Douglas debates again. That’s not going to happen, but the culture produces the politicians, right? So we can say all the best and the brightest aren’t running, but what’s the culture itself producing? We’ve attacked the universities. We’ve allowed universities to become cesspools of leftist thought. The business community is dominated by pro-China globalists who don’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether America is living up to its founding ideals and who are more interested in the bottom line, which I get. We’re producing people from the culture that we’ve allowed to grow up around us. I have enormous respect for people who decide that, as tough as it is, that America’s worth fighting for. It’s a lot easier to be the head of a hedge fund and not being vilified on a daily basis in the media than it is to stick your neck out and run for office and have half of the electorate really not like you very much.
In relation to Donald Trump, at what point should an individual say that the unity of the country is more important than the individual and that maybe it’s time to put the interests of America beyond the interests of one person?
Are you saying politicians can be self-absorbed and selfish? They’ve all been around for decades, and they all are still clinging to power. OK, so my view on this is if Donald Trump went away tomorrow, the left would dance on his grave for a few days, and then they’d be on to their next target. And likely that target would be Ron DeSantis. And Ron DeSantis would be the next individual who was dividing the country. He was anti-LGBTQ, who was perhaps investigated by the federal government or California for kidnapping migrants and shipping them off to California and parts unknown. In the end, this has very little to do with Donald Trump, and everything to do with the leftist belief that the American people, since 2016, can’t be trusted to elect their own officials. It’s wishful thinking for Republicans to believe that if only Trump went away, the country would magically be united and the Democrats would go back to the Bill Clinton days or the era of big government is over.
What are you most optimistic about given all the challenges that we are facing over the coming decade?
I think I’m most optimistic about this multi-ethnic coalition of new Americans, young Americans, working-class Americans, who are not afraid to speak their mind and love what they think the country really is, which is religiously minded people or civically minded people who just want the government off their backs and want to be able to make a decent living and live in safety and don’t believe the country is systemically racist.
I think most Americans don’t believe the country is a systemically rotten racist country. I think most Americans just want a peaceful, prosperous, patriotic nation regardless of our political differences on this or that issue. … I’m very optimistic. And I think young people are a lot smarter than people of my age think they are. I think they have good BS detectors and I think they know that it’s not right that they’re afraid to speak out on a college campus or they’re afraid to be true to their faith, publicly true to their faith on a college campus. I think they instinctively knew it wasn’t right to keep people out of churches, when they could go to liquor stores during the pandemic. It’s right not to force people to get multiple booster shots to go to school. And I think the chickens are coming home to roost in a really good way. So I’m actually cautiously optimistic.
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