Trevor Noah Grills Tomi Lahren On Black Lives Matter & It Gets HEATED (Video)

Conservative media darling Tomi Lahren is not short on fans – nor critics. At only 24, she has made a name for herself as a far-right-leaning media personality, one whose voice has come to represent fiscally and socially conservative millennials. Her outspoken viewpoints have helped make her one of the most watched political commentators on the internet, her Final Thoughts videos garnering view counts in the tens of millions. She has more than three-million followers on Facebook alone, and her appearance on the November 30 episode of The Daily Show has earned her the attention of countless others – including Charlamagne tha God.

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It’s not surprising that Lahren has amassed such a bright spotlight on her work; she’s a young, attractive, unfiltered woman who is not afraid to voice her opinions, regardless of how they may jibe with narratives found in mainstream media (for an idea, Heads can check out her views on Colin Kaepernick, which got her the dubious honor of being named the Breakfast Club’s “Donkey of the Day”). Considering her viewpoints are staunchly opposite of the rhetoric embodied by host Trevor Noah, Lahren’s appearance on last night’s show is commendable, and their lengthy interview resulted in true, heated dialogue rather than a screaming match. Nevertheless, there were a few controversial statements made, each of which help to amplify the voices of young Americans who are otherwise not included in prominent political media.

Early in the interview, Lahren says “it’s time to make America great again,” making it clear she supports President-Elect Trump and his political viewpoints. Noah asks her to extrapolate, particularly as it relates to her candidate’s infamous “Pussygate” sexual harassment scandal. After saying that she isn’t comparing Trump to the Pope or God, she adds “I’m still comparing someone who’s said some nasty things to a woman who’s done nasty things,” referring to Hillary Clinton. “Words, to me, are far less egregious than actions,” she continues, before arguing that liberals fail to give Trump credit for his positive actions, including the fact that his glass-ceiling bursting campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is a woman. “She’s a kickass woman, and nobody wants to give her that credit because she’s a conservative,” Lahren puts forth, to which Noah responds “No one wants to give a person credit for kicking ass for somebody who has [for example] stolen jobs from people and screwed them out of money that they deserve,” referring to the scandal surrounding Trump’s construction-project finances.

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Near the 9:30 mark, Noah asks Lahren to expound upon her opinion surrounding Black Lives Matter, a movement she has called militant in the past (and in far less flattering terms). “For somebody who’s not a racist, you spend a lot of time having to say ‘I’m not racist,'” Noah tells his guest, before asking her what her biggest issue with the movement is. “I think it started with good intentions…the moment they started pushing ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,’ which is a false narrative proven time and time again to be a false narrative, the minute that that became their slogan, the minute that protesting turned into rioting and looting and burning and militant actions, that’s when I lost respect for Black Lives Matter.”

Naturally, Noah is quick to rebuff her points, asking her to explain how she can attribute the words and actions of a few (for instance, those who say “fuck the police” or “fry them like bacon”) to an entire group of people. “I saw it in the city of Dallas. I saw what a Black Lives Matter protest looked like,” she says. “And I saw five fallen officers because of it. Point blank the shooter said he’s doing this because of Black Lives Matter. In an effort to highlight what he believes is hypocrisy on Lahren’s part, Noah says to her “you’re the same person who said just because Donald Trump has KKK supporters, doesn’t mean he’s in the KKK,” which earned him a rousing round of applause from the studio audience.

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He then asks her to apply the same line of thinking towards police, based on the narrative that, clearly, there are a few bad police out there who are killing Black people. “You tell me, are police racist? Because they’ve been shown to harass Black people unfairly. They’ve been shown to shoot Black people when they’re unarmed. Does that mean the police are racist then?” he asks her. In response, she rebuffs his accusation that she’s being hypocritical in her use of logic, saying “did you know that a Black man is 18.5 times more likely to shoot a police officer than a police officer is to shoot a Black man? Those are statistics no one wants to talk about.” Several minutes later, at the 14:44 mark, she says “because I criticize a Black person or I criticize the Black Lives Matter movement, that doesn’t mean I am anti-Black. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like Black people or that I’m a racist. It means I’m criticizing a movement. I criticized Colin Kaepernick; that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in his First Amendment rights. It means that I believe in my First Amendment right to criticize him. It doesn’t make me a bad person, it doesn’t make me a racist…I’ve never used racial slurs to address people. I’ve never looked down on someone because of their skin color. To me, true diversity is diversity of thought, not diversity of color. I don’t see color.”

“You don’t see color? So what do you do at a traffic light?” Noah asks. And that’s not nearly the end of it. Also discussed are her hopes for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, why she thinks Trump is reasonable and level-headed, the alt-right label placed on her, and much more.

As Lahren says in the interview, “You can call me whatever the hell you want. I won’t back down.” Should she?