When you work at Fox News, it takes some effort to hit the absolute bottom of the barrel. But on Monday night, Laura Ingraham might very well have done something more outrageous than we’ve ever seen from the likes of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Greg Gutfeld, Jesse Watters, and other luminaries on the fair and balanced network.
On Sunday afternoon, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one of Trumpworld’s pet hates, caught a breakthrough case of COVID-19. When Ingraham told her audience of this development, she applauded. That’s right, applauded.
Lately, a regular segment on The Ingraham Angle is something called “Positively Boosted,” in which Ingraham lampoons public figures who catch COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated. On Monday night, Ingraham saw fit to highlight Milley’s breakthrough case. But it was the manner in which she did it that proved she deserves to be called deplorable:
Alongside frequent guest and EWTN news director Raymond Arroyo, Ingraham announced that the “triple-vaxxed” Milley had caught COVID-19. She gleefully clapped her hands while describing Milley as “our favorite”—with Arroyo smiling and laughing along.
My first thought after learning about this was, “This has to be snark.” Surely something like this would be too much even for a woman who mocked David Hogg for getting rejected from colleges and claimed Jan. 6 was an antifa plot after trying to urge Trump to call off his own wolves. But unfortunately, it wasn’t.
This is a new low, even for Ingraham. To give you an idea how outrageous this is, there is no evidence—at least that I’m aware of—that any prominent liberal or never-Trumper talk show host laughed or applauded at Trump catching COVID-19. No matter how much I despise Trump, there is no way I would have been okay with anyone rejoicing at him catching this deadly virus. Nor would it be acceptable to rejoice at anyone, no matter how sleazy they are, catching COVID-19.
Not surprisingly, Ingraham has been slammed up and down for her depravity. Leading the charge was her own brother, Curtis.
Frequent Trump critic Seth Abramson rolled his eyes when he remembered that Ingraham went to Dartmouth, just like him.
Other critics mused that Ingraham wasn’t showing much of her devout Christian faith in that moment. Take John Pavlovitz for instance.
James Martin, editor-at-large at Jesuit magazine and a consultant to the Vatican Secretariat for Communications, was slightly more restrained.
The ladies on The View also went in on her. Joy Behar reminded the audience that a lot of people don’t realize that “if you don’t have a vaccine, you will probably end up in the hospital, maybe even dead!” After joining Sunny Hostin in calling Ingraham’s comments “vindictive behavior,” Whoopi Goldberg recalled that a lot of unvaccinated people end up using their last breath to wish they got vaccinated.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is another reminder that there really is a difference between liberals and conservatives. We need not imagine what would have happened had Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Lawrence O’Donnell, or Joy Reid laughed at Trump’s diagnosis. They would have been forced to apologize—and would have likely been fired before the next commercial break. The fact that Ingraham still has a job, and that Fox News actually has a link to this disgusting clip on its video archive, proves once again that Fox News is nothing more than a right-wing agitprop shop masquerading as a news network.
It cannot be repeated enough—by seeing fit to mock someone for catching COVID-19, even if he’s on Trumpworld’s shit list, Laura Ingraham has proven that she is a ghoul. A 100% ghoul.