After Tomi Lahren spent the weekend dealing with fallout from her appearance on The View last Friday, the show returned this week with a segment on the controversy.
On Friday, Lahren, who hosts a show on The Blaze, criticized pro-life conservatives in her appearance on the ABC program, arguing it was hypocritical for proponents of limited government to support the idea that government should have a say in what women do with their bodies.
Of course, the panel managed to completely misrepresent Lahren’s conservative critics in the course of the discussion, creating a strawman at which they could lob vapid softballs.
“Do you have to be on the same side of every single issue of your political party?” Whoopi Goldberg asked.
Sara Haines piled on, arguing, “I don’t know who falls in line with everything. We’re such complicated human beings, to fall in line with every partisan topic, I think that would be hard to do.”
Sunny Hostin complained, “They’ve been so terrible to [Lahren], and I think that’s one of the problems with conservatism. There’s so many faces to it.”
None of these critiques actually address the predominant conservative rebuttal to Lahren’s statements.
Though some did use her comments as an opportunity to argue that all conservatives must necessarily be pro-life, most took offense because Lahren flat-out called every pro-life conservative a hypocrite. She also used her appearance on The View, a show with a notoriously liberal bent, to debut that hypothesis.
If Lahren had gone on the program and expressed her position on abortion without brazenly calling every conservative a hypocrite, or without having been on the other side of the issue throughout her short career, she would not be facing the same degree of backlash.
If The View wants to have an honest conversation about abortion, the hosts should start by accurately representing Lahren’s critics.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
