Tomi Lahren, the host of Outkick’s “Tomi Lahren Is Fearless.”
Outkick
After breaking out as a 21-year-old creator back in the early days of Facebook-driven political commentary, Tomi Lahren spent the next decade establishing herself as a fixture in conservative media. Along the way, she carved out a perch across Fox News, YouTube, podcasts, and the social media accounts she uses to broadcast her perspective to millions of followers.
Those followers, not to mention the rest of her expansive media audience, have surely noticed that some of Lahren’s biggest targets for criticism these days are on her own side of the aisle.
Lahren, who co-hosts The Big Weekend Show on Fox News, in addition to hosting OutKick’s Tomi Lahren Is Fearless, has repeatedly called out Republicans and the Trump administration over stalled priorities like mass deportations. She’s also blamed the party’s economic record for making socialism palatable to younger voters, warned that the right is in danger of losing support from young women, and slammed plans to import foreign beef as a betrayal of American ranchers.
Tomi Lahren And The Changing Face Of Conservative Media
Where others might see that kind of infighting as conservative media splintering into rival factions of podcasters and influencers, Lahren told me she views it more like the natural growing pains of an ecosystem that’s expanding in real time.
“When President Trump was launching his first campaign, there wasn’t a ton of young, conservative media,” Lahren said. “I think it’s less that conservatives are fracturing and more that there’s a lot of young conservatives with platforms and followers who are expressing what I hope to be their firmly held beliefs and opinions.
“I don’t see as much of a fracture as I see a lot of different voices that have now entered conservative media, and those voices don’t always agree.”
Lahren herself is a product of that evolution, having come of age in a media environment on the right that increasingly runs on hot-take adrenaline. She worked at One America News Network and TheBlaze before joining Fox in 2017—and while she lives in Nashville, she commutes to New York weekly to host The Big Weekend Show.
Even as conservative media gets more crowded, Lahren believes that there’s ample space to widen the definition of what a conservative personality can be. It’s an instinct she traces partly to her roots in South Dakota, where people from smaller communities often felt ignored by national outlets.
“I have a unique perspective that I can share from the place of being a young woman from middle America,” she told me, pointing to a key demographic she believes the right routinely overlooks.
The Conservative Gap With Women
“The cross section of women who watch Fox News, but who also watch Bravo, is huge,” she added. “Most people wouldn’t make that connection—like, ‘Oh no, if you’re into conservative media, you’re not watching that trash TV.’ But I believe that the right is on the verge of alienating young women the way the left alienated young men over the last decade… We can’t win with just men. We have to be able to reach these young women. And me being a young woman myself, I see some areas where the right is alienating them.”
She’s not alone in that regard, by the way.
The morning after Lahren told me that she “very much sees this being a gap for conservatives in the upcoming election,” Politico’s Playbook newsletter highlighted the exact same issue—citing new polling that’s setting off alarm bells among Republicans over slipping support among white and married female voters.
“It feels like there are some men with big conservative platforms that I agree with on 90% of things who—they seem to just want to alienate women. And it’s like, you’re never going to bring independent women over to your side by saying things like: ‘Hey, I think postpartum is just really selfishness.’”
That last comment is, of course, a reference to the Lindsay Clancy trial, because of which Lahren has used her platform to bring an unconventional-yet-conservative lens to things like postpartum mental illness and the dangers of over-prescribing pills.
“To dismiss postpartum depression as if it’s a figment of the imagination, as if it is not real, as if it couldn’t possibly impact women, I think is irresponsible,” Lahren said on a recent episode of The Big Weekend Show. “I think there’s a discussion that needs to be had in the country about the drugs that mothers are put on, the number of drugs moms are put on, how postpartum is handled in our health care system, and just an overall discussion on this which so many women deal with.”
‘Always Looking To Expand My Lane’
Lahren’s willingness to push past traditional boundaries, meanwhile, doesn’t stop with policy critiques. She also opens up her aperture to encompass more than politics, weaving in pop culture, sports and entertainment.
Lahren, whose syndicated commentary airs on more than 160 Fox News Radio stations, hosts “Trending with Tomi,” a pop culture and sports segment on The Big Weekend Show. Recent episodes of Tomi Lahren Is Fearless have featured skateboarder Ryan Sheckler and Bravo personality Steven McBee alongside standard political guests.
“I think that there aren’t a lot of conservatives that are doing that,” she said. “They kind of just want to stay in their lane. I’m always looking to expand my lane.”
That expansion isn’t just about subject matter; it’s also about distribution. Her OutKick show recently crossed 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, marking another milestone for a career that launched on television but first exploded through viral digital clips.
Rather than viewing digital media as an inevitable replacement for cable, Lahren thinks the winning strategy is platform saturation. Pointing to Fox’s investments across podcasts, streaming, and digital arms, she maintains that legacy brands don’t have to choose between their core television audience and the digital generation.
“I do think that you just have to be everywhere,” Lahren said. “I think it reaches people that maybe just cable doesn’t.”
Be the first to comment