Shelagh Fogarty, an LBC radio host and former BBC presenter, tweeted “Shoot them” during the election protests in the U.S. capitol on Wednesday.
Fogarty, whose show runs on weekdays at 1 p.m. local time in the United Kingdom, followed up her incendiary and now-deleted tweet with another message, clearly directed at U.S. law enforcement, alleging “You would if they were black”.
In the end a female rioter, named by family as 35-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt, was indeed killed bya gunshot to the neck as she attempted to climb through a window of a door to the chamber of the House of Representatives.
While Fogarty has deleted her tweet, she does not appear to have recanted, judging by a subsequent reply to another Twitter user.
“This is Shelagh Fogarty. She is entirely sane and, frankly, a voice of reason. If she’s saying ‘shoot them’, they probably need to be shot. She wouldn’t say this lightly,” said a user posting under the handle @LeftardAnne.
“No but I said it badly and apologise for that,” Fogarty agreed.
“I was stunned that in a country where so many police officers seem so terrified of black people they shoot them on sight that these Capitol officers were so obliging to white supremacists,” she alleged, declining to acknowledge the fact that a woman was indeed shot dead.
LBC (‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’) is Britain’s top talk radio enterprise, is a something of a left-leaning organisation, and has terminated right-leaning contributors for making controversial statements in the past.
Brexit leader Nigel Farage recently left his talk radio host gig at LBC under a cloud last year, with reports indicating that the split came after staff and left-leaning presenters had pressed for his removal after he criticised Black Lives Matter mobs tearing down statues in Britain as a “new form of Taliban“.
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