CAMPUS NEWS
The Daily Beacon • Wednesday, April 27, 2022
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Fox Nation’s Tomi Lahren talk mostly calm, despite plans of student protestors ABBY ANN RAMSEY Staff Writer
On April 21, UT’s chapter of Turning Point USA hosted right-wing political commentator Tomi Lahren in Dabney-Buehler Hall, despite attempts from left-leaning students to hamper the event’s success. Lahren works for Fox Nation, hosting the shows “Final Thoughts” and “No Interruption.” She gained traction around the time of the 2016 election when people began noticing her controversial videos, like ones criticizing Barack Obama and Beyonce. In late 2016, she went on Trevor Noah’s “The Daily Show,” firing up the internet with comments comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to the Ku Klux Klan. The New York Times called her “the right’s rising media star.” A few days after speaking to a crowd of about 50 people at UT, Lahren took to talk about her experience. “I spoke at University of Tennessee a few days ago and experienced a new leftist ‘tactic,’” the tweet said. “These liberal freaks on campuses are now gorging themselves on watermelon and refried beans in an attempt to barf on conservative speakers. Yes. You read that correctly. Good lord!” A tactic involving refried beans and watermelon did, indeed, occur on Thursday. Kurt Schelzig, a freshman electrical engineering and philosophy major, told The Daily Beacon after the event that he brought a watermelon and can of beans with him to distract and disrupt. He was not trying to make himself throw up. Rather, he said he just wanted to eat the watermelon throughout the event to distract from what Lahren was saying. He said his plan was inspired by comedian Eric Andre who acts ridiculous at far-right events.
The cops took my watermelon outside ... they took my beans. It made me very uncomfortable. KURT SCHELZIG Freshman and self-proclaimed anarchist
“These people feed off debatery and engaging with them and asking authentic questions or whatever,” Schelzig said. “I know what I’m talking about on some of these things, but they feed off that. So I was like okay I’m going to come in here and I’m going to try to make it clear to her that she should be uncomfortable on campus.” Schelzig planned on giving her the can of
beans – just for her to have. Before he could put his plan into action though, his beans and watermelon were confiscated upon entering the room. However, he still attempted to serve as a distraction when he was one of the first ones to speak in the Q&A. “I may disagree with you on some things, but I can appreciate that you may be the most active person I’ve ever seen advocate for white nationalism without ever saying it,” Schelzig said. Some audience members laughed at his comment, while others shook their heads. Schelzig continued but asked a question about a comment Lahren made in July comparing flight attendants enforcing airplane mask mandates to Nazis. “Let me ask this better,” Schelzig said. “How do you manage to consume so many lead paint chips? Because I usually barf on like the third or fourth bag.” Lahren remained calm throughout his comments, told him he was making a fool of himself and added that he should see a doctor about the lead chips. That’s when he revealed his distress about the watermelon and beans. “The cops took my watermelon outside … they took my beans. It made me very uncomfortable,” Schelzig said. “I’m a very pro-second amendment person, I’m a very pro-first amendment person. It seems ridiculous that the cops would take my watermelon.” As crowd members booed and laughed, Lahren tried to shut down the interaction by telling him he could spend an exorbitant amount of money on a new watermelon due to Biden’s impact on the economy, emphasizing that she appreciated his “zest for performance” and telling him she was going to take questions from serious audience members. Schelzig, a self-proclaimed anarchist, explained to Lahren his frustration with the gist of what she had said in the 20 minutes before he started talking. One of Lahren’s main points was that conservative students are marginalized on college campuses. He argued that conservative speech and even Ku Klux Klan speech is allowed on campuses, while anarchist and socialist speech is heavily regulated. After that comment, Lahren quickly stated that she believes in free speech and called on someone else, shutting down the interaction. What sounds like a dramatic interaction took up only three minutes of the 90-minute event. Outside of that, there was little distraction from people who disagreed with the speaker. Bailee Paxson, a sophomore sports management major and president of UT’s Turning Point chapter, said outside of this incident, the only other distractions were flyers posted around the lecture hall that said “Hate has no place here. Go home Tomi.” The flyers were marked with what could have been poorly scribbled hammer and sickle symbols. Leading up to the night, Paxson said they had the other usual problems like people
Tomi Lahren of Fox Nation speaks on the suppression of conservative beliefs on college campuses at Buehler Hall on Thursday, April 21, 2022. Edward Cruz / The Daily Beacon taking down posters across campus within minutes of them being hung. The lack of backlash at the actual event may come as a surprise to those who noticed that a few weeks ago, Haylee Duncan, a senior psychology major, took to Twitter to virtually protest Lahren’s talk. Complete with a photo of the EventBrite page featuring Lahren’s picture and a link for reserving tickets, “Since UTK wants to invite her let’s show her some love!! Buy out all the tickets and steal the seats.” Duncan’s goal was to get as many people as possible to reserve a free seat and then not attend so that Lahren would speak to an empty room. There was just one problem with this plan, however. Paxson set up the webpage to where it would take over 200,000 reservations to sell out, even though Lahren was set to speak in a lecture hall. Even though this was not a method that would actually impede upon the attendance at the event, the supporters of Duncan’s plan made themselves pretty clear. “We definitely did have more Eventbrite tickets bought than people should have, but that is what we expected,” Paxson said. “There were a lot of names that were very clearly fake that we knew not to count.” Those names? According to replies to Duncan’s tweet, fake buyers went by names like “Hugh Jazz,” “Doodoo Fart” and “Myra Mains.” Her tweet ended up with 94 retweets, 35 quote tweets and 215 likes. She followed up days before the event, asking people to continue the reservation push. Thursday morning, she told students to show up at the event with tomatoes. “Don’t throw them … just hold the tomatoes
as a threat,” the tweet said. Duncan further explained her methods to The Daily Beacon, adding that she was disheartened by how reserving seats did not work the way she planned. She felt that Lahren’s invitation to campus helped to promote ideas that may perpetuate harm of marginalized groups or spread misinformation “I just feel like it’s not even really a political thing at this point,” Duncan said. “She’s just completely spreading misinformation, it doesn’t matter what side you’re coming from. We claim that we are supposed to be digging deeper into these topics. We’re supposed to be criticizing and becoming students who are able to discern fact from fiction.” For Paxson though, Lahren does not represent misinformation. Rather, she said the reason they invited Lahren – outside of her engagement to UT baseball alum, JP Arencibia – was because she speaks out against assuming someone’s beliefs on every issue based solely on the party they vote for. “She’s very big into, we all fit on a spectrum of our beliefs, it’s not like oh, you have to fit in this box because you’re a conservative or you have to believe all this because you’re on the left or you’re a liberal,” Paxson said. Instead of seeing Lahren as the extremist that Duncan sees, Paxson sees someone who encourages open conversations between Democrats and Republicans. In fact, Lahren is controversial not only with liberals but also with conservatives as she surprises people with her pro-choice views that led to the loss of her job with TheBlaze.
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