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Entity shares video of Tomi Lahren clashing with Trevor Noah on the Daily Show.

Last night “Nightline” aired an interview with ousted right-wing commentator Tomi Lahren. It was her first interview since being “fired” from The Blaze and filing a wrongful termination lawsuit. I say “fired” because she is still being paid by The Blaze, but she’s no longer welcome on the network.

Since Lahren is a polarizing figure (she’s gone after Beyonce, Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter and basically anyone who isn’t white) her downfall and subsequent sit-down interview was widely covered today. Most headlines, however, focused on Lahren’s feelings toward The Blaze and its owner Glenn Beck– rather than a single, crucial exchange which proves just how ignorant Lahren really is.

For example, “Tomi Lahren to Glenn Beck: ‘I won’t lay down and play dead’“, wrote The Hill. “Tomi Lahren pleads with Glenn Beck, TheBlaze: ‘Let me go‘”, wrote Entertainment Weekly. “Tomi Lahren: TheBlaze ‘deeply hurt’ me,” said Fox News (who, let’s be honest, is probably drawing up a contract for her as we speak).

But Lahren’s “hurt” over the incident didn’t interest me at all. After all, she’s made a career out of lambasting liberals for being weak, whiny, “snowflakes” who need to toughen up and get their “panties out of a wad”. Recall she called Colin Kaepernick a “whiny, indulgent, attention-seeking cry baby” for using his First Amendment rights. So no, I don’t particularly feel bad that she feels bad.

What really interested me is when “Nightline” reporter Byron Pitts asked Lahren if she regretted her infamous Black Lives Matter tweet. The one in which she said “Meet the new KKK, they call themselves ‘Black Lives Matter’ but make no mistake their goals are far from equality. #Dallas #bluelivesmatter.” At the time Lahren took a lot of heat and promptly deleted it.

Which is exactly what she told Pitts. “I deleted it” she said.

So Pitts repeated the question: “But do you regret it?”

“I think sometimes you need a little more explanation than the characters you’re allowed on Twitter,” Lahren explained. “I stand by my thought process behind it and I would like to explain it further –”

“Please,” Pitts interjected. “What’s the thought process behind it?”

Tomi Lahren's Black Lives Matter tweet

Tomi Lahren’s controversial tweet

But Lahren, the woman who always has something to say and who quite literally said she would love to “explain it further”, declined to answer the question. A look of panic splashed across her face, “You know Byron I would love to have a show that I can discuss all these things with you but I am not gonna get into those ones [sic] right now.”

This exchange was not even mentioned in the ABC write-up, but I believe it’s crucial to who Lahren is and what she represents, which is nothing at all.

When Lahren can write out a script and come up with inflammatory, racist statements and no one is on the other side calling her out for her inaccuracies, she’s the most confident person in the world. But when faced with a real reporter and asked a question point-blank, she stumbles.

The truth is she doesn’t have an answer. Most of what comes out of her mouth is senseless, untruthful and constructed merely to pander to an alt-right base. Recall this is the same girl who said things like “How dare you blame white people for the problems of minority communities,” “What about the oppression of black people? Please tell me how you’re oppressed?”, and “Do you know how many of our ancestors fought to free your ancestors [in the civil war]. It was largely white people fighting it …”.

She creates an us-versus-them dichotomy and then complains about divisiveness. Why? Because she makes money doing it.

Indeed, anyone who watches her videos, as I have for the past two years, understands this girl created a brand out of propaganda and hate.

Lahren is not able to speak off the cuff because she’s simply not intelligent enough to understand the nuances of the issues she tries and fails to cover. We saw this in her interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show  as well when she expertly dodged nearly every real question thrown at her by diverting her answers to America-first buzzwords with Kellyanne-Conway-like precision. And when, in that same interview, she made statements like “I’m a Millennial, I don’t like labels”, failing to understand the irony and the audience’s laughter.

No, Lahren is neither a truth-seeker nor a critical thinker. If anything she is great at reading a teleprompter, speaking passionately and getting people fired up through outrageous, offensive (often racist) commentary. What she is not great at is actually having a debate when it’s outside her own conservative, studio.

So let’s not focus on the fact that she feels “betrayed” and hurt after getting fired and instead focus on the fact that she’s an ignorant child who should never have been given a platform in the first place.

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