Student plans to disrupt Tomi Lahren talk fi zzle

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 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.

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

Rachel Stewart, a junior in the Haslam Scholars Program, has been selected as a 2022 Truman Scholar. Stewart is one of 58 students across 53 different universities to receive the prestigious award.

The Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation awarded its first scholarship in 1977, a “living memorial” to the nation’s 33rd president.

The scholarship, which provides $30,000 for the graduate school of the scholar’s choice and a gateway to a plethora of career opportunities, is given to college juniors who have an outstanding record of education and public service.

Stewart is UT’s first Truman Scholar since 1997.

Paul Gellert, Stewart’s advisor and director of global studies, commented on Stewart’s achievement.

“I am thrilled that Rachel has been awarded a Truman Scholarship,” Gellert said. “She is highly deserving of this honor.”

Stewart started out as a global studies and political science major. The nuclear engineering department also intrigued her, and she loved how the classes challenged her to think in a different way.

Stewart’s passion lies within environmental, sociological and radioactive issues, digging deep into hazards like nuclear waste, and questions such as who has access to certain elements and how these hazards affect marginalized communities.

With many areas of study on her mind, Stewart found that her original major did not encompass all the aspects she desired, so she designed her own major through the College Scholars Program: environmental justice and radioactive waste management.

It all comes back to the people and to helping.

RACHEL STEWART 2022 Truman Scholar

“Her ambitions to combine study of nuclear engineering (to understand the environmental impacts of mining and energy production), environmental sociology (to understand social structures and processes and their particular relation to environmental issues) and deep area knowledge (including language, history and politics) are impressive,” Gellert said.

Stewart credits both her hometown of McRachel Stewart of McMinnville, TN, is the first UT student since 1997 to be awarded the Harry S. Truman Scholarship, an award for U.S. undergraduates pursuing a career in public service leadership. Courtesy of the official Facebook of the Southern Standard Newspaper

Minnville, Tennessee, and her time studying abroad in Tajikistan as factors that flourished her interest in environmental justice.

McMinnville, a small, rural town in middle Tennessee, offered her an environment to explore and a green space to grow up in.

“I would go down to the creek by my house and read ‘The Kite Runner.’ I liked learning about Afghanistan through a different lens. It’s where my interest in central Asia began. I would also read Persian poetry,” Stewart said.

Her high school recycling, “or the lack thereof” as she notes, was another aspect of her hometown that prompted her to think of how things could be made better.

Stewart traveled to Tajikistan after her senior year of high school. There, she learned how to speak Tajiki Persian and saw how all of her fields of interests were related to one another.

“I saw waste management in Dushanbe, non-centralized recycling and non-regulated landfills and waste areas,” Stewart said. “All of these sparked my interest in sociology and culture and how everything relates back to the environment.”

A pillar of her community, Stewart has made an impact within campus life and the Knoxville community. She has worked on compost extensively with the Office of Sustainability, fascinated by a compost facility that she had not been offered in McMinnville.

She has also been a long-time, active member of Students Promoting Environmental Action in Knoxville (SPEAK). She moved from a contributing member to vice president to president, enhancing the compost quality of the club, increasing engagement with the community and bringing an environmental justice lens to the club.

Seeing that SPEAK was the main sustainability club on campus, she wanted to expand and started the Compost Coalition. The Compost Coalition works with the Office of Sustainability to bring awareness and education to composting, such as what composting is, how to interact with it and how to access it.

While she was president of SPEAK, the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) reached out to Stewart and notified her of UT’s role in the Y-12 National Security Complex.

In 2020, UT made a bid on a management and operations contract with the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, thereby helping to fund development of nuclear weapons. Stewart saw UT’s involvement with Y-12 as an issue.

“It all goes back to waste,” Stewart said. “Waste should be useful and should go back into the community. That’s why composting interested me so much.”

Stewart decided to act.

She organized with OREPA, circulated petitions, addressed the board of trustees and worked with the Progressive Student Alliance to attract more people to the campaign. Institutional investing is an issue she wants more people to know about and engage with, especially students.

When asked if she had a mentor in or around campus that has helped her reach her goals, Stewart had a long list.

“My advisors Dr. Gellert and Dr. Ergas in the sociology department, Wayne Mason from the office of sustainability, Ralph Hutchison from OREPA, the Haslam Scholars program,” Stewart said. “I want to name everybody. It takes a village.”

After getting her bachelors degree, Stewart plans on getting a masters degree in health physics — studying how radiation impacts people and the environment — with a concentration in nonproliferation.

For her career, Stewart wants to work for the Department of Energy (DOE) as a health physicist, bridging the gap between the DOE and having meaningful relationships with communities.

“I want to connect activists and knowledge spaces on a higher level,” Stewart said. “All while prioritizing local voices that are being affected.”

Stewart is currently studying abroad in Kyrgyzstan, studying uranium mines and volunteering in research around waste management. It was in central Asia where she found out she was a 2022 Truman Scholar.

Stewart had worked on the scholarship application since the fall 2021 semester, submitted her application in February and interviewed as a finalist in March. Mid-April, in the middle of a desert in Uzbekistan, Stewart got a phone call informing her that she was one of the winners of the Truman Scholarship.

The first event the scholarship offers, the Truman Scholars Leadership Week, is only a month away. During this week, the scholars will meet each other and work together all while attending sessions, completing community service projects, presenting policy projects and interacting with public servants. Stewart is excited for the opportunities to come.

“I’m excited to engage with the foundation as a whole, the alumni and my own cohort. I’m excited to learn with them and from them,” Stewart said.

After reading the biographies of the other Truman Scholars, she feels confident about how much other people care about the work.

“It all comes back to the people and to helping,” Stewart said.