Hope you’ve got a big old bag of popcorn and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol on hand, snowflakes, because Tomi “Syrian refugee children are whiners” Lahren has been suspended from her show on conservative website TheBlaze for a week. The move is either due to her pro-choice statements on The View last Friday or for being an intellectually lazy hypocrite, depending on who you ask.
The Washington Post takes the former view, reporting that Lahren came under attack from her fellow conservative windbags after calling herself pro-choice and saying, “You know what? I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well,” on the morning chat show late last week. In response to critiques that one cannot be a conservative without being pro-life, she said on Twitter, “Conservatives don’t have to exist in a monolith and share the same brain on every issue. It’s okay.” So yeah, uh, good for her we guess. Except there’s one little problem:
Not only did Lahren call pro-choice activists “baby killers” on her show three months ago, she recently said, on the record, “Modern day feminism isn’t about equality … It’s about man-bashing & free birth control”—on International Women’s Day, no less. She’s also defended the GOP defunding Planned Parenthood, opposed birth control subsidies, called the Women’s March on Washington pointless, and basically done everything she can to call feminists fat and ugly.
Hate to break it to you, Tomi, but the patriarchy didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that what you do with your body is your own business. It’s taken centuries of struggle by—gasp!—feminists, of all races, to give you that autonomy. That’s not even getting into the appalling and dangerous racist propaganda Lahren spews on a daily basis (Muslims and Black Lives Matter are two of her favorite targets); the drivel that falls out of her mouth on Beyoncé alone should disqualify her from ever speaking about women again.
Which brings us to the intellectually lazy bit. While Lahren’s suspension does line up neatly with her pro-choice comments and the predictable resulting far-right-wing backlash, there’s another thread running underneath that narrative. Her boss, TheBlaze founder Glenn Beck, has recently criticized Lahren for changing her principles with the wind, citing that “baby killers” video we mentioned earlier and noting that her pro-choice stance was a “relatively recent” development.
As documented by The Daily Beast, Beck stated his own opposition to abortion yesterday on his radio show, but said “If you’re pro-choice, you can have a job at TheBlaze …I don’t hire people who are sycophants.” He added: “It takes intellectual honesty and a willingness to actually think these things through, and to do more than just read Twitter and Facebook to get your news and opinions,” he said, not mentioning Lahren by name even though we all know that’s who he was talking about. The two have also recently feuded on Twitter, with Beck pointing out that one cannot be a libertarian and support Donald Trump, prompting Lahren’s camp to call him “jealous.”
This is not to say that we’re on Glenn Beck’s side or anything. We’re just enjoying this Jiffy Pop. As Lahren said in her “Final Thoughts” segment on International Women’s Day, “Yeah, some challenges might be a little greater for some women but let me tell ya—it feels a whole hell of a lot better to overcome those challenges than it does to dwell on them, complain about them, or use them as an excuse to fall short.” Okay, then, Tomi. You’re on your own—just like you wanted.