Fox News hosts are now defending Ralph Northam

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (D) may be facing calls to resign from his fellow Democrats, but he's found a few unlikely allies on Fox News.

A number of the network's hosts and contributors have been defending Northam following the publication of a yearbook photo showing a person in blackface and another in Ku Klux Klan robes. Northam initially said he was in the photo, but later backtracked.

On her Monday night show, host Laura Ingraham blamed the controversy on the "rise of the PC puritans," saying Democrats are "tripping all over themselves to prove how enlightened they are by throwing even their own under the PC express," per Mediaite. While agreeing the photo is "really bad," she said that "to say someone is a racist because of what they did in med school with a Halloween costume, I don't think that’s going to go into a good place for this country."

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Analyst Andrew Napolitano also offered a bit of a defense of Northam by saying this whole controversy is actually just about President Trump. “Why do they want [Northam] out?" Napolitano asked, per Mediaite. "They want to be able to tarnish Donald Trump as a racist." He also suggested Northam can be forgiven because former President Lyndon B. Johnson also had a history of racist behavior.

Host Chris Wallace asked whether "you should judge a person's whole life of work against one terrible mistake," while Fox politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, said Northam was being attacked by a "lynch mob" and that "if I was Northam, I would dig in." A guest on Tucker Carlson's Monday night show called the whole controversy "a kind of minstrel show," saying the photo mattered less than Northam's stance on abortion.

Others at Fox, including Sean Hannity, have been less forgiving, and considering the outrage Northam's comments about abortion sparked at the network, it's safe to say this somewhat soft stance is a one-time deal.