Fox News personality and podcast host Tomi Lahren has fired back following an admission by a right-leaning New York Times columnist this week that he was wrong to disparage supporters of former President Donald Trump.
Bret Stephens, who wrote a mea culpa op-ed on Thursday in which he admitted judging Trump’s supporters entirely too harshly.
“What were they seeing that I wasn’t? That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo,” Stephens wrote.
That “failing status quo” is exemplified by unsafe neighborhoods, financial insecurity, burgeoning “wokeness,” and so much more that the left-wing elite and RINO class have visited upon most of the country for decades.
“This was the climate in which Trump’s campaign flourished. I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions,” Stephens noted further.
Lahren responded by saying that most Americans out in the country are often “overlooked” by political and media elites.
“What really bothers me as someone that comes from a small state in South Dakota. We are often overlooked. We are those Trump supporters. We are those blue-collar ranchers, farmers out there who don’t get a lot of attention except when there’s a snowstorm or there are fireworks on 4th of July at Mt. Rushmore, we don’t get a lot of attention,” she said during an Friday on Fox News’ “Outnumbered” program.
“So when people on the coast, when elitists in big cities look down their nose at us and call us rednecks and just Trump supporters, and Hillary Clinton calls us deplorables and they call us racist without ever taking the time to talk to us,” she continued.
“That really fired a lot of people up. And we feel that way now. And I’m so glad that Fox takes the time to go and talk to these people in the Midwest, in the heartland, we are not just the flyover states, we matter,” Lahren added.
“We vote. Might be from small states, but when you put us all together, we make a difference. And guess what? Y’all are fleeing to our states. So remember that,” she said.
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Co-host Harris Faulkner went off on Clinton for calling Trump-supporting Americans a “basket of deplorables” who she accused of being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”
“Her husband was the one in dynamically similar straits that we are today economically who said ‘I feel your pain’ to every single American. He was able to do something that really we haven’t seen anybody do since, and that’s bring the entire country together. Maybe just for that moment. Lord knows he had his issues, right,” Faulkner continued.
“But with her, it particularly was damaging for her to express her hate for half the country after having been in the White House for eight years when it wasn’t specifically like that, when people were really down and you didn’t kick them when they were down. You tried to help them with a better economy, with saying that you understood them,” she added.
The problem, the Fox News host said, is that today nearly all left-wing elitists think just like Clinton did back then and, presumably, still does.
“So now you fast-forward, and we get the Clinton crowd. The Hillary Clinton version of that crowd. And we’re only growing more of them, because it’s easier sometimes to profligate hate than it is to shed your grace in love, apparently,” said Faulkner.
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