Laura Ingraham
Laura Anne Ingraham is an American conservative television presenter. She has been the host of The Ingraham Angle on Fox News Channel since October 2017, and is the editor-in-chief of LifeZette. She formerly hosted the nationally syndicated radio show The Laura Ingraham Show.
Ingraham worked as a speechwriter in the Reagan administration in the late 1980s. She earned a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Virginia in 1991 and was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. She then worked for the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in New York City. Ingraham began her media career in the mid-1990s. Ingraham is known for her support for Donald Trump and acted as an informal advisor during his first presidency.
Early life and education
Ingraham grew up in Glastonbury, Connecticut, where she was born to Anne Caroline and James Frederick Ingraham III. Her maternal grandparents were Polish immigrants and her father was of Irish and English ancestry. She has two brothers. She graduated from Glastonbury High School in 1981.Ingraham studied English literature and Russian at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts. After college, Ingraham spent several years as a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan's domestic policy advisor. She then attended the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was a notes editor for the Virginia Law Review. She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1991.
Career
In the late 1980s, Ingraham worked as a speechwriter in the Reagan administration for the domestic policy advisor. She also briefly served as editor of The Prospect, the magazine issued by Concerned Alumni of Princeton.After graduating from law school in 1991, Ingraham was a law clerk for Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1991 to 1992 and for Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas from 1992 to 1993. She then worked as an attorney at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. In 1995, she appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in connection with a story about young conservatives.
In 1996, she and Jay P. Lefkowitz organized the first Dark Ages Weekend in response to Renaissance Weekend.
Television host
Ingraham has had three stints as a cable television host. She first became a host on MSNBC in 1996. In the late 1990s, she became a CBS commentator and hosted the MSNBC program Watch It!. Several years later, on her radio program, Ingraham began campaigning for another cable television show. In 2008, Fox News Channel gave her a three-week trial run for a new show entitled Just In. In October 2017, she became the host of a new Fox News Channel program, The Ingraham Angle.Radio host
Ingraham launched The Laura Ingraham Show in April 2001. The show was heard on 306 stations and on XM Satellite Radio. It was originally syndicated by Westwood One, but moved to Talk Radio Network in 2004. In 2012, Ingraham was rated as the No. 5 radio show in America by Talkers Magazine. In November 2012, she announced her departure from Talk Radio Network, declining to renew her contract with TRN after nearly a decade of being associated with the network. She was the second major host from TRN's lineup to leave the network that year: TRN's other major program, The Savage Nation, left TRN two months earlier. Her new program, syndicated by Courtside Entertainment Group, began airing on January 2, 2013, and went off the air in December 2018. Ingraham continues to produce podcast material for Courtside's PodcastOne division.LifeZette
LifeZette is a conservative American website founded in 2015 by Ingraham and businessman Peter Anthony. In January 2018, Ingraham confirmed that she had sold the majority stake in LifeZette to The Katz Group, owned by Canadian billionaire Daryl Katz.Books
- The Hillary Trap: Looking for Power in All the Wrong Places, first published June 2000 and updated in 2005, accuses Hillary Clinton of being a faux feminist whose "liberal feminism has created a culture that rewards dependency, encourages fragmentation, undermines families, and celebrates victimhood".
- Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America, published October 25, 2003, decries liberal elites in politics, the media, academia, arts and entertainment, business, and international organizations, and praises Middle Americans as "the kind of people who are the lifeblood of healthy democratic societies".
- Power to the People, a New York Times number one best seller, published September 11, 2007, focuses on what Ingraham calls the "pornification" of America and stresses the importance of popular participation in culture, promoting conservative values in family life, education and patriotism.
- The Obama Diaries, a New York Times number one best seller, published July 13, 2010, is a fictional collection of diary entries purportedly made by President Barack Obama, which Ingraham uses satirically to criticize Obama, his family, and his administration.
- Of Thee I Zing, a New York Times best seller, published July 12, 2011, is a collection of humorous anecdotes meant to point out the decline of American culture, from muffin tops to body shots.
- Billionaire at the Barricades, published 2017, explains the 2016 election victory of Donald Trump as the continuation of a populist revolution, initiated by Ronald Reagan, with working class support.
Political views
Homosexuality
In her senior year at Dartmouth College, during her tenure as editor-in-chief of independent campus newspaper The Dartmouth Review, Ingraham wrote several controversial articles. She sent a reporter undercover in 1984 to a campus Gay Students Association meeting, and later received criticism when, despite an oath of confidentiality being read to participants, Ingraham published a transcript of the meeting and included the names of the attendees, describing them as "cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites". Ingraham argued that confidentiality did not apply because the meeting had been advertised, and defended the outing of the gay students as a "freedom of the press issue". Jeffrey Hart, the faculty adviser for The Dartmouth Review, described Ingraham as having "the most extreme anti-homosexual views imaginable", and said "she went so far as to avoid a local eatery where she feared the waiters were homosexual".In 1997, Ingraham wrote an essay in The Washington Post in which she stated that she had changed her views on homosexuality after witnessing "the dignity, fidelity, and courage" with which her gay brother, Curtis, and his partner coped with the latter being diagnosed with AIDS; Curtis's partner ultimately died of the disease. Ingraham has stated that she supports civil unions between same-sex partners, but believes marriage "is between a man and a woman".
Immigration and race
Ingraham is a frequent critic of immigration and has expressed anti-immigration views. She opposed the proposed bipartisan 2013 US Senate comprehensive immigration reform plan. In 2014, Ingraham said that allowing more immigrant workers to come to the United States would be "obscene to the American experience". In 2014, she denounced House majority leader Eric Cantor after he expressed support for the DREAM Act and a GOP bill to grant a pathway to citizenship for young immigrants. At the time, Cantor faced a primary challenge from Dave Brat, which he would go on to lose. According to The New York Times, "Few people did more than Ms. Ingraham to propel Mr. Brat... from obscurity to national conservative hero." Ingraham said the race would go "down as one of the most significant repudiations of establishment immigration reform that I've seen in my 20 years of doing politics", and that due to the outcome of the race, "immigration reform is DOA". That same year, Ingraham harshly criticized Republican congresswoman Renee Ellmers for expressing support for a comprehensive immigration bill which included a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants who were in the country at the time. In an interview with Ellmers, Ingraham accused her of supporting amnesty and using liberal talking points, and said her arguments were "infuriating to my listeners".In September 2014, Ingraham claimed that then-president Barack Obama sent assistance to Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and exposed Americans to the virus because of his guilt over "colonialism".
In September 2017, amid reports that Trump was considering an agreement with Democrats on amnesty for approximately 800,000 DREAMers, Ingraham criticized him, tweeting "When does American working class w/out real wage increase in 15yrs & who send their kids to overcrowded public schools get amnesty?" In July 2018, Ingraham harshly criticized Republican congressman Kevin Yoder after he expressed support for a Democratic bill that rolled back Attorney General Jeff Sessions' order that immigration judges not be allowed to grant asylum to asylum seekers fleeing domestic abuse or gang violence in their home country. She called on the congressman "to stop selling out the Trump agenda".
In February 2018, Ingraham said NBA players LeBron James and Kevin Durant should "shut up and dribble" after James called comments by Trump "laughable and scary". When her statement was criticized, Ingraham said there was no racial intent in her remarks and cited her 2003 book Shut Up & Sing and other instances when she had said performers should "shut up" about politics. In 2020, when Drew Brees, a white athlete, criticized protesters who kneeled during the U.S. national anthem, Ingraham was criticized for supporting his statements, which she had not done in the earlier case with the African-American athletes.
Ingraham defended the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" family separation policy for children of illegal immigrants, and in a June 18, 2018, broadcast compared the children's facilities to "summer camps" that "resemble boarding schools". She further described criticism of the policy as "faux liberal outrage". Ingraham had referred to the border crossings as "slow-rolling invasion of the United States". School shooting survivor and activist David Hogg, who had led a previous campaign to pressure advertisers to leave The Ingraham Angle, called for a second boycott, but advertisers interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter on June 19 did not plan to leave the show.