Laura Ingraham — the Fox News host and fringe radio personality whom no one should take seriously on the topic of what’s racist because she herself is demonstrably racist — decided Ron DeSantis should receive an apology.

He’s earned that apology, Ingraham believes, because he got in trouble for using racist terms to talk about his opponent, Andrew Gillum, and it is in fact Gillum who should apologize.

DeSantis, the Republican candidate for Florida governor, used a number of racist terms during a Fox News interview to talk about his Democratic opponent Gillum, who is Black. The one that got headlines was his use of the term “monkey.”

Ingraham tries to explain her thinking: “‘You want me to apologize? You apologize for falsely accusing someone of racism to avoid a debate on the issues.’ I’d turn it right around on them.”


But Ingraham doesn’t even have her facts straight: Gillum didn’t accuse DeSantis of anything. In fact, he refused to take the bait and declined to comment on the incident. “I’m not going to get down in the gutter with DeSantis and Trump,” he said after. “There’s enough of that going on.”

He’s right: the race is getting really ugly. A neo-Nazi group based in Idaho has reportedly been making extremely racist robo-calls to Florida voters.

On the subject of DeSantis’ racist comments, Ingraham felt a case of Reverse Racism (which is not real) coming on. “Apparently, if you’re white, you just can’t criticize an opponent at all,” she lamented on her radio show.

Even Fox News, the network that serves up propaganda on behalf of the racist president, distanced itself from the statements. Host Sandra Smith said on air after the segment that Fox News does “not condone this language and wanted to make our viewers aware that he has since clarified his statement.”

DeSantis didn’t clarify the statement as much as deny that the term was offensive at all. His campaign even tried to claim this is a term he uses all the time — an odd strategy, considering this could be pretty easily debunked.


Media Matters fact-checked this claim, looking through his public comments to find any example of him using this phrase at all. They found none.

We checked. In fact, there is no record of DeSantis having used the phrase publicly. https://t.co/BNjQUjGd1V — Media Matters (@mmfa) August 29, 2018

Ingraham’s wacky PR advice, DeSantis’ execrable views, Fox News trying its hardest to act surprised a Republican would say such a thing on one of its programs: these could soon be in Democrats’ rear-view mirror: Polling now shows Gillum in the lead over DeSantis by about 5 points.