Ingraham Returns To Airwaves With No Apology, And Few Advertisers

“Did you miss me?”

Laura Ingraham returned to Fox News on Monday evening defiant and defensive, a week after advertisers fled her program over her ridicule of Parkland, Florida, school shooting survivor David Hogg.

Ingraham opened her program, “The Ingraham Angle,” with a 10-minute monologue about the “squelching of free speech” by the left and deemed such efforts “Stalinist, pure and simple.”

“The left’s propaganda shaped a new generation of young adults, who then parroted all that malarkey about the ‘patriarchy,’ and then they came up with their own new phrases like ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘safe spaces’ and ‘white privilege,’” Ingraham said. “Today, left-wing activists use these terms as bludgeons to intimidate those who disagree with them from entering the dialogue at all.” 

She offered no on-air apology to Hogg, whom she mocked last month on Twitter after he didn’t get into some of the colleges he’d applied to. Hogg, 17, took to his own social media account later that day and called for a boycott of those who advertised on Ingraham’s program. Nearly 20 advertisers  left the show.

Ingraham did post a brief apology to Twitter a day after her initial tweet, saying that she was sorry for “any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland,” but the move was largely ineffective.

On Monday evening, it appeared that few companies planned to air their ads on her program in the near future. The only big-ticket advertisements came from the meal delivery service Blue Apron, the Beaches hotel in Turks and Caicos, and the genetic testing company 23andMe.

HuffPost has reached out to all three companies for comment.

The company My Pillow advertised twice during the program after its founder, Mike Lindell , said earlier this month he did not intend to take his ads down .

At the end of her program, Ingraham said she would launch a new segment called “Defending the First” meant to promote free speech and counter a “dangerous epidemic” she said was being sponsored by liberals.

“The left will brook no dissent, and they will militarily police the borders of their stale orthodoxy,” Ingraham said. “We will expose the enemies of the First Amendment while showcasing those brave voices for making a difference.”