Laura Ingraham

BA, Dartmouth College

As the book of Ecclesiastes and Pete Seeger and the Byrds have told us, “To every Coke / Turn, turn, turn / There is a Pepsi /Turn, turn, turn / And a Burger King to ev’ry McDonald’s / Under Heaven.” (That’s why capitalism is so great, in case you didn’t know.) Thus, for every Ann Coulter, there is a Laura Ingraham. Which is to say—and meaning absolutely no disrespect to Pepsi or Burger King—that Laura Ingraham is a lesser Coulter: an Ivy-educated, blond conservative “commentator” (read: propagandist) who, although not quite as successful, famous, or appalling as Coulter, is certainly in her hideous league.

In college Ingraham wrote for the Dartmouth Review, the first of the really elegant, repellent conservative Ivy League journals. The Review became the template for similar publications at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Cornell, each providing a political home and journalistic platform by which eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-old pishers could, by aping their elders and betters,^* audition for a wingnut-welfare sinecure.

In her senior year at Dartmouth Ingraham became the Review’s first female editor in chief. She was virulently homophobic. The magazine’s faculty advisor ascribed to her “the most extreme anti-homosexual views imaginable.” One time, for instance, she dispatched an undercover reporter to attend a meeting of the Gay Students Association, then published a transcript of the meeting. Years later, in a Washington Post op-ed, she defended herself:

Part of what we did was journalistically justifiable: The group received college funding but, unlike every other student group receiving a college grant, refused to make public its membership or budget. We wanted to find out how student funds were being spent and to demonstrate the double standard Dartmouth had created by funding the group. But in doing so, we adopted a purposefully outrageous tone—occasionally using, for example, the word “sodomites” to describe campus gays.

Got that? We were concerned about student funds, so we called people “sodomites,” just as, had we been concerned about the use of student funds by Hillel House, we would have referred to its Jewish members as “Christ-killers.” That purposefully outrageous tone, we find, accomplishes so much.

Ingraham minimizes this as being one of her “Dartmouth Review antics,” as though similar to other college-age hijinks like be-ins, binge-drinking pukefests, or panty raids. Besides, the point of the piece was to talk about the change of heart she experienced during the previous ten years.

First, you see, her gay brother, Curtis, had come out to her. Over time, both he and his AIDS-afflicted partner displayed “dignity, fidelity and courage” as they coped with the disease. So moved was Ingraham that her “views and rhetoric” regarding homosexuality were “tempered.”

Damn decent of her, innit? Then again: If you condemn a behavior because you think it immoral (“sodomite” isn’t a political term; it’s a moralizer’s term), why should the dignity of its practitioners make any difference? Or do you relent only because the practitioner is your brother? And if gay men’s dignity tempers your disapproval, then how valid and dependable was—and is—the source of your moral judgments in the first place?

Ingraham doesn’t get that far in the article. Still, she does write, “I now regret that at Dartmouth we didn’t consider how callous rhetoric can wound.” Yes, it sounds like a note of apology your mother made you give a neighbor for smashing into his mailbox, but still: isn’t that nice?

Well… That op-ed is twenty years old. We’ve had two decades to wonder, What has sadder, wiser, more tolerant Laura Ingraham been up to since? Has she used her change of mind regarding sexuality—to the extent that it’s sincere, and not limited to members of her immediate family—as a lens through which to study her other reactionary opinions? If she was wrong about gays, is she perhaps wrong about other things, too?

As the French say, fat chance. Why jeopardize a cushy gig? Like other right-wing radio hosts who make a good buck spreading hate and stoking rage under the guise of defending conservative values, Ingraham makes her living trashing liberals, deploring America’s cultural decline, feigning working-class solidarity by mocking Hollywood and that old demagogue’s standby, “elites,” and doing her bit to assure that the decent, God-fearing people on the right remain as indignant, outraged, and oblivious as ever.

Here, from 2016, is an Ingraham contribution to the transgender-restroom conversation:

We have a new transgender update… for all of you who are bathroom-goers and public—you use public restrooms? I think a lot of people are going to be walking around with just Depends on from now on. They’re just not going to use the bathroom. Adult diapers, diapers for everybody.… Then you’ll be in your own bathroom. Everyone’s bathroom is just their own clothes, OK?

And here’s a nice piece of good, honest, old-time demagoguery she dispensed in March 2016, when she agreed with someone on a radio call-in program who endorsed Donald Trump’s view of Mexicans.

Well, they have come here.… Yeah, they have come here to murder and rape our people. We know that. That doesn’t mean everybody has, doesn’t mean everyone who comes across the border is a nasty, horrible person, but they have violated our laws.

It’s one thing to be a provocateur. It’s another to provoke resentment all the livelong day by broadcasting callous rhetoric—which, as someone once said, can wound. But it sure beats working—and, to the extent that Ingraham is rich and famous, she does Dartmouth proud.