With deranged pundit Tomi Lahren, conservative dogma has hit a new low

With every new political controversy, a slew of discourse surrounds it. The United States’ current political polarity almost guarantees the conversation will have strong opinions on either side of the discussion, assuring the ability to have a discussion will be harder than if we were not so red or so blue.

What becomes tiresome is hearing the repetitive “we need to have a national discussion about (insert issue).” We consume these issues, and read up on them often, but it seems like we get nowhere fast in solving them. Perhaps the salient issues the news media present us with are mostly astounding, warranting shock but not actual conversation. Those who supply us with content are more concerned with creating clickbait, those who consume the content are fine with the lack of facts in their source.

Talking heads such as Tomi Lahren present a false intellectualism many consume uncritically. Lahren’s arguments are often times incoherent, rambling and devoid of fact. These reactionary rebuttals spring from an intolerance of dissent while being disguised as if her argument was dissent itself.

In her recent video on Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem, her argument ignores what makes his valid. Lahren rambles: “Is our country perfect? No. But what have you done to make it better? What’s your contribution, sitting there like a fool?”

When she eventually gets to mentioning statistics, she concludes the cause of things like astronomical Black unemployment to be “those in black communities” failing to take some “responsi-damn-bility for the problems in Black communities?” No numbers stated, just an acknowledgement of the plight of Black Americans while handing the blame over to Kaepernick.

Lahren’s video about Colin Kaepernick shows he made her annoyed and uncomfortable – the case with most white Americans suffering from White Fragility. She also provided affirmation to those who still refuse to understand Kaepernick’s protest while failing to present a coherent argument against him.

Kaepernick’s peaceful protest of the national anthem is all but foolish antics. His actions were striking and the reasoning behind them compelling. The very fact he realized his platform’s influence and used it are commendable, but to speak so explicitly about the astounding trends of systemic injustice in the US make his argument valid.

And even though countless people have come forward to present facts supporters still rally around false intellectuals such as Lahren and Donald Trump. Media outlets like FOX News continue to have an avid following as well.

The “rebuttals” and discourse we hear from Lahren, Trump and those at FOX often pander to a segment of the population who couldn’t care less about the facts. It has made the rise of Donald Trump inevitable.

For many years conservatives have increasingly turned their backs on the so called “educated elite” – never mind that many leaders who sing this song happen to have gone to Ivy League institutions themselves. The overwhelming trend does show there is good reason for conservatives turning their backs on the educated: the more educated you are the more likely you are liberal.

Sociologist Alan Gouldner in his 1979 book, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class spoke of how the new highly educated class would embrace a fact-based “critical discourse.” This sort of discourse is at odds with the reactionary rebuttal conservatism of Tomi Lahren and Donald Trump.

This method of arguing – based solely on ideological convictions and tradition over acceptance – has encouraged a brand of conservatism that is anti-intellectualist in nature and has played a major role in Trump’s rise.

This ideological brand of conservatism is by no means new. Trump’s conservatism is an echo of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and his ideological manifesto, The Conscious of a Conservative, which changed the Republican Party. Since Goldwater’s book became the litmus test for conservative values, the GOP has become way too ideological for its own good.

Ideological conservative orthodoxy has helped in driving the fissure in America’s political discourse. The embrace of the reactionary rebuttal by top conservative minds and politicians is consumed without criticism. So how to fix it? Right now Tuesday November 8th seems to be the first indicator of how widespread the problem is. Until then, the acknowledgment of how problematic it is and understanding where it came from seems to be the best way to combat it.

Many of the problems “we need to have a national discussion about” could be solved by figuring out where they started. Trace back the route of hostilities we face today paying special attention to facts, similar to what Colin Kaepernick has done.

Unlike false intellectuals like Tomi Lahren and Donald Trump, you’ll be better off in the long run with this method.