Recently in the news, it was announced that Tomi Lahren had been suspended from her position of waving her hands and making incendiary remarks behind a desk at TheBlaze. The reasoning for her suspension was a pro-choice comment regarding abortion rights, stating that as a conservative, she could not be "for limited government" and "think that the government should decide what women should do with their bodies.” This is a stark contrast to the majority of her party's beliefs on the subject, and I applaud her stance on the hypocrisy of the GOP to claim authority over a woman's body.
But that does not mean that she will become a beacon of feminist light to me.
Tomi Lahren's entire political existence has been that of the blonde bombshell mouthpiece of the GOP. More than once have I experienced a discussion on the basis that "Well, she's a woman and she feels this way, so you can't say that the GOP hates women!" While I agree that everyone has a right to hold an opinion, there are some opinions that are invalid in their presentation and basis.
If you take a look back at her style of discussion when she first started in journalism, she held a clearly different style of discussion over topics including climate change, racial slurs, and gun control. The Scramble, a University of Las Vegas affiliated program, brings on guests and discusses issues that are affecting society in any given moment. Lahren's stint as hosting the show's third season shows a very distinct separation from the woman we see today. Where now she offers one-line statements meant to extract a rise from the audience, she used delve deeper into the complexity of an issue, such as gun control, and hold a civilized discussion with others. Where that quality, which she now demands from everyone else she debates, went in her life, we may never know.
Hypocrisy also abounds in Tomi Lahren today. She has become one of the largest figureheads bent on tearing down the millennial generation, of which she herself is a member. Lazy, entitled, any whiny are her three favorite words to describe her own generation. When looking back in her public history, she herself was starkly "millennial" in her college years. A particularly glaring example of her hypocrisy is revealed when she tweeted "Bad news: had to get get a job. Good news: It's at my mom's store and chill as F #livinthedream" in 2013. Her defense of the comment? "I had to get a job even though that was my summer vacation. . . Yeah, when I was on my vacation even, I had to get a job." Seems a bit entitled considering that it is extremely common for students at any level to acquire a job during the summer. This tweet is a stark contrast from the anti-millennial message that she heavily relies on for her older audience. It is in this "I am not one of them" attitudes that you can see the way in which Lahren panders to the aging GOP. She is their hope for a new generation of conservative ideology that is being challenged with every passing day.
Regardless of her style of "discussion" (some would call it belligerence) and her blatant hypocrisy, there is something that we cannot forget in light of this pro-choice revelation: She still enables anti-LGBT, racist, and xenophobic beliefs to be discussed in the main stream. She acts as though she leads some rebellion against an evolving society that no longer accepts the bigotry sewn into its very fabric. It is the controversial traditionalism of her words that must continually be questioned. She refuses to accept that the world is no longer black and white like it was back in the early 1900's, and that there is a changing perception of how we as a society should act towards one another. She uses her platform as a battering ram against anyone who calls her or the system out for inequity, all because it asks too much.
And do not forget that racist, xenophobic, and anti-LGBT ideologies are dangerous institutions of violence in this country, not just character flaws.
No matter how pretty it may be packaged coming from the glossy lips of a pretty young woman, there is a poison that lingers in her words. There are still people out there who take her covert bigotry as a seed of hope that their actions are justified, that overt hate still has a place at the diverse table that is America. Her America, where any ideas that aren't like hers are appalling and anti-American, and my America, where Americans exist in a diverse web of life, are two very separate worlds.
This is why you won't see me trying to accommodate for Tomi Lahren in my world, because Tomi Lahren's world does not accommodate for anyone else but those like her.
