Rapid City Graduate Is Rising Media Star on the Right

Tomi Lahren, now 23, graduated from Central High School in Rapid City, South Dakota, where she was student body president and representative to the Rapid City School Board.  She was the first intern for Congresswoman Kristi Noem.  Lahren may already be South Dakota’s leading conservative voice.

       Britain’s Daily Mail has described how this news anchor has side-stepped the narrow US broadcast monopoly by turning to Internet-based alternatives, where her audience is sometimes in the millions.   Last year, she told the Rapid City Journal that “Young people don’t feel they can relate to the conservatives they see on Fox News. They need a new face, that can speak to them, not at them.”

    Moderate GOP posturing from states like South Dakota won’t make a difference when the national Democratic Party has staked its identity on radical liberalism rather than the compromising center.  

     It’s easy to tout the virtues of compromise when one side holds 99%.  “Give me half of the remaining 1%. You keep the other half,” the argument goes.  Such is the case with national media today, including “progressively moralistic” local affiliates.

       Lahren would undoubtedly agree that, though no longer in favor, learning by rote has been successful over the centuries.  Propaganda and marketing work the same way, but for negative purposes.  Keep pounding home the same idea hour after hour, day after day, and it will stick.  “We’re a nation of immigrants” (so flood the US with even more) or “a woman has a right to her own body” (to justify promiscuity and abortion).  No further argument available from most of those who think so.  Sloganeering works.

      For Lahren, most GOP conservatives who get elected to the federal government don’t realize how truly smothered the political right is by liberal power brokers at every point. 

     Most recently, Lahren has taken a job on Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, but it remains to be seen if the political right will be able to make the transition from marginal Internet options to federally controlled “free and in the clear” mainstream television, now tightly controlled by the FCC.  Was Orwell right about the power of what he termed the “Thought Police”?