Donald Trump has always practiced a certain brand of dog-whistle politics, as embodied in his various “both-sides”-isms, as well as his not-so-subtly coded references to immigrants. But shortly before touching down in the U.K. last month, the president dialed up his nationalist leanings in an interview with The Sun. “Allowing the immigration to take place in Europe is a shame,” he told the tabloid. “I think you are losing your culture . . . I think it changed the fabric of Europe and, unless you act very quickly, it’s never going to be what it was, and I don’t mean that in a positive way.” Upon the release of this interview, the far-right was in raptures. “Is Donald Trump an Identitarian?” asked a member of extremist group Generation Identity, hopefully. In short order, Trump walked the interview back, calling The Sun “fake news.” But as with most of his denials, the pall of his words lingered long after he had retracted them, a subliminal message to those of his supporters whom the White House has long claimed to find repugnant.

These days, it’s difficult to discern where Trump’s ideology ends and Fox News’s begins. But there’s no mistaking that the president’s favorite talking heads have lately seemed to mirror his sentiments as expressed to The Sun. On Wednesday night, Fox host Laura Ingraham told the audience of her eponymous show, “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. 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. . . . Now, much of this is related to both illegal, and, in some cases, legal immigration that, of course, progressives love,” she went on, peppering her monologue with claims that “it’s not about race or ethnicity,” but sounding an alarm on how the country had “radically” changed thanks to immigration. “This is a national emergency and we must demand that Congress act now,” she concluded.

Like magic, white nationalists crawled out of the woodwork to cling to her hem. “One of the most important (truthful) monologues in the history of MSM,” wrote former Klan leader David Duke in a tweet that has since been deleted. Across the aisle, she was slammed for seeming to sympathize with racists—Media Matters, which originally tweeted the clip from Ingraham’s show, wrote that her “anti-immigrant rant” was “ripped from white supremacists.” On air Thursday night, Ingraham insisted that her views were being “distorted” by some, including a “racist freak whose name I won’t even mention.” “Despite what some may be contending, I made explicitly clear that my commentary had nothing to do with race or ethnicity,” she said, asserting that she’d simply been discussing necessary steps for “keeping America safe and her citizens safe and prosperous.”

Walk-back or no, the screed appeared to be one of the most drastic moves rightward for Ingraham to date, and one for which she’s not likely to face repercussions—not only did her show survive an advertiser boycott after she mocked a Parkland shooting survivor, it roared back with higher ratings. Moreover, it put her in sync with another of the network’s stalwarts, Tucker Carlson, who has been rallying against shifting demographics as early as March 2018: while immigrants are “nice,” he said at the time, “This is more change than human beings are designed to digest.” Demographic changes, he said, are “happening all over the country. No nation, no society has ever changed this much, this fast. Now before you start calling anyone bigoted, consider and be honest: how would you feel if that happened in your neighborhood?” And last month he cut to the chase, telling his audience, “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.” (It’s unclear whether he was citing a bona fide statistic.)

As CNN’s Brian Stelter and Tom Kludt noted, Ingraham’s and Carlson’s comments are more than likely to resonate with the people who watch their show, the majority of whom skew older and whiter. Duke and his fellow Klansmen, then, serve as a useful foil: a group of annoyingly vocal, unambiguous, Hitler-loving racists that conservatives can point to as proof of their own relative enlightenment. Even as they scuttle away from Duke’s antiquated brand of racism, the “white anxiety” now permeating Ingraham’s and Carlson’s shows is growing into a powerful and potent talking point, particularly in an age in which demographics are shifting, and the dog whistle from the Oval Office grows ever more piercing.