White Anxiety Finds a Home at Fox News

It wasn’t so much a dog whistle as it was an airhorn. Or perhaps a primal scream. But whatever it was, Laura Ingraham’s forceful denunciation of “massive demographic changes” served as another raw example of a Fox News host echoing white nationalist language.

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The Fox News audience is almost 100% white, according to Nielsen. And on the channel’s highest-rated shows, the politics of white anxiety play out practically every day, as hosts and guests warn about the impacts of immigration and minimize or mock the perspectives of people of color. The talk show segments are clearly intended to appeal to people who perceive they are losing their grip on power.

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“The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” Ingraham said Wednesday night. “Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.”

Ingraham said “this is related to both illegal and legal immigration.”

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Nearly 24 hours later, Ingraham’s name was still a top trending topic on Twitter. Media Matters made a video asserting that Ingraham’s “anti-immigrant rant” was “ripped from white supremacists.” Some Democratic lawmakers also spoke out. Senator Tammy Duckworth tweeted that the “racist” comments “shouldn’t have been aired by @FoxNews.”

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In a part of the commentary that didn’t circulate widely on social media, Ingraham said, “There is something slipping away in this country and it’s not about race or ethnicity. It’s what was once a common understanding by both parties that American citizenship is a privilege, and one that at a minimum requires respect for the rule of law and loyalty to our constitution.”

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Fox’s opinion hosts tap into — and sympathize with — a deep vein of concern about cultural displacement. Whiteness under threat is a common theme, especially on Carlson’s show, during which he often laments the mistreatment of white people and the influx of foreigners.

Media Matters and other outspoken Trump critics have accused him of promoting white nationalist ideas, a charge he has repeatedly rejected.

Although some advertisers avoid some of Fox’s talk shows, citing various controversies, the shows are highly profitable for Fox and its parent company 21st Century Fox. Among the beneficiaries are Rupert Murdoch and his sons James and Lachlan, who jointly run the company.

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But Fox absolutely knows what its audience wants. It’s not exclusive to the network: Researchers say the anxieties of white Christian America have also fueled conservative talk radio and digital media. And Trump expertly tapped into the same thing with his speeches about restricting immigration and saying “Merry Christmas” again. Infamously, Trump decried immigrants from places in Africa and Latin America, which he described as ‘shithole countries.’

All of it relates to a supposed loss of cultural dominance among white people.

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Fox’s particular appeal to white Christian voters has been well documented for years. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her 2016 book “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” found that “Fox is family” for some Tea Party supporters in Louisiana.

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Right now, the biggest fear among Fox viewers might be the changing face of America, or as Ingraham put it, “changing demographics.”

White supremacist websites express anger over the changes in far more hateful and hostile ways than anyone on television does.

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But white nationalists are certainly familiar with Carlson. As Vox’s Carlos Maza detailed in a video that went viral last year, Carlson’s show has won praise from white nationalist Richard Spencer, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, which called the host its “greatest ally.”

Carlson has impressed those types with his repeated on-air complaints about immigrants and Muslims. In fact, Ingraham’s comments on Wednesday essentially echoed what Carlson has said on his own show. In March, Carlson commented on Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where the Hispanic population has grown exponentially since 2000, saying such demographic changes were “bewildering for people.” Behind Carlson was a graphic that read: “Changes in America.”

“That’s happening all over the country. No nation, no society has ever changed this much, this fast,” Carlson said. “Now before you start calling anyone bigoted, consider and be honest: how would you feel if that happened in your neighborhood?” Last month, Carlson went even further, saying that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country, at a rate that American voters consistently say they don’t want.”

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One of Carlson’s most frequent critiques is that liberals are too obsessed with race, and too quick to make claims of “racism.” But that critique ends when it comes to purported racism against whites, as evidenced by his coverage last week of Sarah Jeong, an Asian-American journalist who will join the New York Times editorial board next month.

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Carlson also made the accusation against a person of color last month, when he had University of Louisville professor Ricky Jones on his program. Carlson’s ire was drawn by a column that Jones had written, in which the professor considered whether it was right for the black 20th century writer James Baldwin to call white Americans “moral monsters.”

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The anxieties aren’t likely to fade away soon. Trump, Ingraham and Carlson all have found an audience for their calls to return America to a mythical long, lost era. {snip}

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