Laura Ingraham Scoffs at Political Worldview of Reparations: As Trump Says ‘No Do-Overs’
On her podcast show, conservative pundit Laura Ingraham scoffed at the notion of paying reparations to African-Americans who are descendants of slaves or who suffered under the racist oppression of Jim Crow laws.
“People would argue, and I would, that the whole world has been reshaped by people taking other people’s land. It’s called conquest,” she said in a discussion with Kentucky State University political science professor Wilfred Reilly.
“They want to live in a fake world,” she continued. “As [President Donald] Trump always says, ‘You don’t get do-overs. No do-overs. That’s it. There was an argument, a quote from the ’80s: ‘We won, you lost, that’s that.’ Describing world politics: ‘We won, you lost, that’s that. That’s just the way it is.'”
Ingraham’s worldview is belied by reality, however. Reparations between peoples have long been a part of world history, as evidence by the war restitution payments made by Germany to the Allies after World War I. And on a more granular scale, the United States has long followed a policy of remunerating families in Iraq and Afghanistan who have suffered accidental injuries or death as a result of its military operations in those countries.
“You can change Indian reservations and make them better or change the whole way those operate,” Ingraham said later, conceding that governments can, in fact, enact policies that attempt to redress past mistakes and atone for policy inequities. “That’s not my area of expertise,” she then openly acknowledged.
Notably, Ingraham didn’t see fit to reckon with how her fundamental opposition to relitigating the past — “no do-overs” — contradicts the driving ethos of one of her podcast’s recent sponsors, the president’s 2020 re-election campaign, which officially goes by the name “Make American Great Again Committee.”
