SEEING RED

Fox Host Fumes Over Ranking of Worst States to Live In

CNBC’s new quality-of-life rankings put nothing but red states at the bottom, and MAGA world is not taking it well.

Laura Ingraham joined a chorus of MAGA moaners over a new ranking of the worst states to live in the United States.

On her Fox News show, the host cited a separate survey of 650 CEOs ranking the most business-friendly states as evidence that something was off with CNBC’s quality-of-life list.

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“The top 10, including Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, are Republican,” Ingraham said. “So, money and people, resources, are pouring into red states. How do the socialists brush this off? Well, they do so either by ignoring it or distorting the data, or [with] a little help from their friends.”

Those “friends,” Ingraham suggested, include CNBC, a network not known for its socialist sympathies. The business channel released a report titled “These are America’s 10 worst states to live in for 2026,” weighing factors like crime rates, air quality, healthcare, workers’ rights, and civil rights. Tennessee topped the list as the worst state, followed by Texas, Indiana, Louisiana, Georgia, Utah, Missouri, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Every state made the list under a Republican governor and a GOP-controlled legislature, and every one of them backed Trump in the 2024 election.

“This CNBC report just came out,” Ingraham continued. “They listed the 10 worst states to live in for 2026. All the states on this list, OK, Trump won. Every state except Georgia in 2020. And the list included four of the top 10 states for business. How does that make any sense?! They have kind of a weird calculus there, but this is obviously a blatant effort to denigrate more conservative states.”

Ingraham lives in Virginia, where Democrats control both chambers of the state legislature and the offices of governor and attorney general. Her salary is likely to be worth over $10 million a year, based on previous reports around her network peers.

Ingraham was far from alone in her outrage. The CNBC ranking, published over the weekend, set off a wave of angry and often misleading reactions from conservative figures scrambling to explain why their home states landed at the bottom.

Tom Fitton, president of the conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch, framed the rankings as a culture-war attack, posting on X that “CNBC says the ability to kill unborn babies and engage in woke racism makes states better to live in.”

Kansas City radio host Pete Mundo took a similar tack, writing that the states in question are “some of the highest in-bound migration states in the country,” and suggesting abortion access and transgender rights were dragging down their scores.

Texas Representative Brandon Gill pointed to population growth as evidence the list was wrong. “If Texas was so bad, people wouldn’t be fleeing blue states in droves to move here,” he wrote.

Ryan Fournier, co-founder of Students for Trump, was more blunt, calling the list “absolute bulls--t” on X. “These states have some of the HIGHEST business rankings and the BEST economies in the entire country,” he posted. “If they are so ‘terrible,’ then why are Americans constantly fleeing blue states to move to them? I guess people just hate Tennessee and Texas so much that they can’t stop packing up their U-Hauls and relocating there!”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, an on-off Trump ally, jumped to the defense of Tennessee, which “topped” the list. “If Tennessee was really the worst state to live in, people wouldn’t be moving there in large numbers, which they are. Typical nonsense,” he wrote.

Not everyone was upset, though. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office, which frequently trolls Trump and his allies online, seized the opportunity to needle a Republican leadership that has often accused its opponents of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

“Notice something in common? All led by Republicans—many suffering from California Derangement Syndrome,” the office posted.

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