Hope Walz, the daughter of former Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), recently shut down Fox News host Laura Ingraham for calling her out in a segment of “The Ingraham Angle.”
In a TikTok video posted over the weekend, Hope addressed the attacks from Ingraham, who criticized the 24-year-old over another TikTok video she made last week in the wake of the success of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani. Hope had said in that video that Mamdani’s stunning upset was “exciting,” and it proved that progressive economic policies are popular “everywhere.”
While discussing Mamdani’s primary win in a segment of “The Ingraham Angle” on Thursday, Ingraham pivoted to Hope, as a clip of her TikTok video played on air. The network clipped Hope listing off examples of “popular” progressive policies, such as “feeding kids lunch, providing child care, having accessible and functional public transportation.”
This evidently did not sit well with Ingraham.
“You just lost about 100,000 brain cells watching that soundbite,” she said, speaking directly to the camera in response to the clip. She then appeared to boast that President Donald Trump’s election victory in 2024 is proof that his voters don’t widely care about those issues (like “feeding kids lunch”).
“Sweetie, if they were popular everywhere, Trump would not be president,” she said.
Hope has since clapped back and made a damning point about Ingraham’s on-air rant.
“There are people that are willing to come on national TV, [and] with their whole chest admit that they don’t care about feeding kids, or helping people get to work, or providing child care for people that are reproducing and creating our country and [world’s] future.”
“Genuinely, I feel sad,” she said. “I don’t know how you go through your day just not caring about other people.”
Robert Gauthier via Getty Images
Hope then said that the point she was making in her previous TikTok video about embracing progressive policies “went right over Ms. Laura’s head,” and that Ingraham’s “comeback” was “so boring.”
“Get well soon, Laura,” she said. “It must be a miserable life, truly.”
Speaking about Ingraham’s on-air dig about Hope, Kari J. Winter, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo whose expertise includes gender, feminism, race and class, told HuffPost that it’s “sad and pathetic when women spew the contempt for women that patriarchal culture has taught them.”
“I wonder if she practiced in the mirror to deliver the word ‘sweetie’ with so much venom,” she said.
Hope’s response to Ingraham is a ‘refreshing’ reminder that caring for others is ‘the foundation of living well,’ Winter said.
Winter emphasized that people who supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election were promised reduced prices on food and other necessities, as well as “an end to imperialistic American wars.”
“They did not vote for a platform of taking food out of the mouths of children, denying care to children and making public transportation inaccessible,” she said. “Ingraham appears ignorant of the fact that every major world religion places a version of the golden rule at the center of ethics, and commands its adherents to feed the hungry and care for the sick.”
But Winter thinks Hope’s response was important.
The 24-year-old not only revealed her “moral groundedness,” she effectively shed light on “the moral and psychological wretchedness of bullies who spew hatred and contempt on vulnerable people, from children to the elderly, handicapped, poor and persecuted.”
“If we want to create a life and legacy of joy and meaning, we will create and sustain caring communities,” Winter added.
