Tomi Lahren is afraid. She weaves her way through throngs of people out on the streets near the White House with her head down, her long, platinum-blond hair covering most of her face, hands clutching the lapels of her overcoat. These people are a threat, Lahren believes. If they recognize her, she might be attacked. Verbally. Physically.

It’s late afternoon just one day after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, an event Lahren witnessed from a seat on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. But yesterday’s formal inauguration ceremonies have given way to today’s more free-form Women’s March, which half a million people are attending. Lahren has already disparaged this gathering in one of the vitriolic videos that have made her into a social media sensation with 4.3 million Facebook followers. In her short, shareable “Final Thoughts” segments, the 24-year-old conservative firebrand has backed Trump and bashed everything from Black Lives Matter (“the new KKK”) to the mainstream media (“liberals who masquerade as journalists”) to refugees from war-torn Middle Eastern countries (“rape-u-gees”) to all manner of liberal “snowflakes,” including the “disgruntled women” from whom she’s now trying to hide.

Lahren has been avoiding the march all day, hunkered down in her hotel, the members-only Metropolitan Club. But now she’s nervously navigating her way through the crowds so she can get to the Hay-Adams Hotel near the White House. That’s where I asked her to meet for the first of several interviews that we’ll conduct over the next three months—a time in which Lahren will lose her job, and nearly lose her mighty Facebook page.

“There are protesters everywhere outside my hotel,” Lahren texts me shortly before our scheduled meeting. “I will need you to escort me to our interview. I had a bad encounter last night. I can’t venture out alone. It’s too dangerous.”

There have been no arrests or reports of violence during the Women’s March, and even though I walk Lahren into Off the Record, the Hay-Adams’ basement bar, without incident, she’s still rattled. As soon as we sit down, Lahren tells me that, last night while walking from her hotel to the Liberty Ball at Washington’s convention center, she was recognized by a different group of protesters from the ones outside today. She describes them as “people wearing hoodies with the black-power symbol on the back.”

“They shouted, ‘That’s Tomi! Get her!’” Lahren says. “So I jumped into a cab. I didn’t hail it. I just saw this cab, and I booked it inside.”

There had been violent protests in downtown Washington as Trump’s inauguration parade was happening just blocks away, but the riots—led by anarchist groups that were looking to sow mayhem—were largely contained by nightfall. Lahren tells me, though, that she sees no difference between yesterday’s anarchists and today’s Women’s March attendees. “These people have signs saying, ‘Fuck Trump,’” Lahren says, gesturing to a room full of cheerfully intoxicated people, some of whom are still wearing the pink “pussy hats” symbolic of the protest. “But they’re also carrying signs that say ‘Love.’ They’re supposed to be preaching a message of unity? Bullshit. These are the most unloving and intolerant people I’ve ever been around in my life. Conservatives don’t act like this.”

She scowls. Deep lines form in her forehead. She narrows her eyes, which are covered in a thick layer of black shadow. This is the same angry Tomi Lahren whose video rants against sanctimonious liberals have been going viral since shortly after she graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, three years ago and landed her own show—initially with One America News Network and later with Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.

Today, Lahren is both more popular and more outraged than she has ever been. She has more than 700,000 followers on Twitter and Instagram in addition to her 4.3 million followers on Facebook. Her famous “Final Thoughts” videos, which averaged 5 million views near the end of the presidential campaign, still routinely top a million. Lahren’s best-known video, a scathing, racially charged denunciation of quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem, reached a staggering 66 million views.

Her appeal comes both from being outrageously outspoken—taking hard-line positions with little or no areas of gray on matters of race, immigration and national security—and from speaking in a vernacular you’d sooner associate with reality TV than political talk shows. To wit: The famous tongue-lashing she gave Kaepernick contained the memorable phrase, “mouth diarrhea.” Add in the seemingly incongruous combination of Lahren’s all-American good looks and her level of agitation and indignation, and you see why some are calling Lahren the perfect pundit for the mad media moment of the Trump era. Today, political correctness—and sometimes even politeness—is out, being brashly outrageous is in, and we’re all increasingly looking online for a good fight. And Lahren says bring it on. “People can love you or they can hate you,” she says. “It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m making a connection with people and getting a reaction. I’m going to stand in my truth no matter what. I have a voice, and I’m going to keep using it.”

Within weeks, though, Lahren will use her voice to say three words that will lead many of her conservative fans to attack her and will change the course of her career. Those words: “I’m pro-choice.”

***

“Americans stand up and fight for faith, family, and freedom. Syrians run away.”—Tomi Lahren

On a Thursday afternoon in early March, Lahren emerges from an ice-cold set where she’s been taping Tomi, the hourlong political talk show that Beck hired her to host in August 2015. The show is being filmed inside Mercury Studios, a 72,000-square-foot facility in Las Colinas, one of Dallas’ lookalike suburbs. They used to make "Walker, Texas Ranger" out here. Also, "Barney & Friends"—the kids show with the purple dinosaur.

"Barney" went on the air on PBS four months before Tomi Lahren was born. And Chuck Norris’ crime-fighting, butt-kicking CBS series ended its eight-season run four months before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Lahren was 9 years old then.

“We need a picture of you,” Jessica Grose, producer of "Tomi" and one of Lahren’s few close friends, says, as the doors to the set close behind her. Grose wants someone to capture Lahren’s outfit for Instagram, where Lahren’s 779,000 followers are often treated to snaps of Lahren wearing clothing she’s paid to endorse, like her own “Team Tomi” shirt, made by the Bullets and Bombshells Gun Society.

For the show today, Lahren, who stands about 5-foot-3, has paired 5-inch heels with shiny, black, skintight pants and a black tank top. The ensemble is more Motley Crue than Megyn Kelly. That is, if Vince Neil were a Trump voter: Lahren’s tank top has a silk-screened image of Donald Trump hugging an American flag.

It’s been more than a month since I walked Lahren back to her hotel in Washington, and when she first spots me outside the set, she gives me a nod and tugs the bottom of her shirt, which cost $29 and is made by an outfit called DrunkAmerica.com. “I wore this just for you,” she says, smiling.

Once we settle into a conference room upstairs from the studio, Lahren tells me she might like to someday be the host of a conservative comedy show, a counterpoint to "The Daily Show" and Stephen Colbert on "The Late Show" and John Oliver’s "Last Week Tonight" and Samantha Bee’s "Full Frontal" and so on and so forth. “Conservatives can’t stand all this shit anymore because it’s all bashing Trump,” Lahren says. “People think I like to be angry all the time, but I also like to be a smartass.”

I’m surprised. I’ve spent hours with Lahren by this point, and I’ve heard her laugh only twice. Still, John Burk, a U.S. Army veteran who is friends with Lahren and appears on the Fox reality show "American Grit," backs her up. “Tomi is a cutup off camera,” he says.

Lahren’s father, Kevin, says his only child was a happy kid—and a studious one. “I don’t think we even once had to ask her to do her homework,” he said by phone from the rural South Dakota home where he and his wife, Trudy, raised Tomi.

Both Kevin and Trudy, who are Republicans but not particularly active ones, grew up on working ranches and had hoped to keep working in those family-run businesses for their entire lives. But they had to find other work because of the kind of economic dislocation that Trump railed against on the campaign trail: consolidation in the meatpacking industry; the rise of megameat buyers, like Wal-Mart, with the power to push cattle prices lower; increased global competition. Lahren has hit the same themes in her commentaries and credits her parents for “really giving me an appreciation for the values of hard-working, everyday Americans.”

Tomi was “opinionated and outspoken” at a very young age, her father says. And she was determined to turn her outspokenness into a vocation. “I knew I was destined to do something in terms of having a voice, sharing my voice, being someone who could inspire others through dialogue and through monologues,” she says. “My life goal in college was to someday get a show where I could do that.”

She got that show sooner than she expected. While at UNLV, Lahren applied for an internship with The Blaze but was rejected. So she tried for an internship with One America News, at the time a conservative startup based in California. The network’s owner, Robert Herring, called her in for an interview, so Lahren drove five hours from Las Vegas to San Diego. Instead of an internship, Herring offered her a full-time job as host of her own show, "On Point." “I think he saw that I had something to offer, something to say,” Lahren says. “I’ll always be indebted to him for that.”

Lahren left OAN for The Blaze in August 2015 after butting heads with ownership over the numerous appearances she was making, speaking her mind, on Fox News and other outlets. Because OAN was trying to compete with Fox, its owner, Herring, didn’t want Lahren on its rival’s air so much, the Times of San Diego reported earlier this year. “I gave her a choice, and she left,” Herring told the Times. (He declined to comment for this story.)

Beck made no such demands on Lahren. He said he hired her because she had “bubbled up on Facebook” and had already found an audience. She had, in part because of a July 2015 “Final Thoughts” she delivered on the murder of four Marines by Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, a Muslim and naturalized U.S. citizen. Lahren argued it didn’t matter that Abdulazeez hadn’t been linked conclusively to any known terrorist groups. “I’m sorry, but radical Islam is becoming the rule, not the exception. Yesterday’s moderate is today’s terrorist.” She then suggested President Barack Obama needed to be much more aggressive in the fight against terrorists overseas. “Put the fear of God in their desert."

About a year after that, Lahren used another attack by a Muslim-American, the killing of 49 people in an Orlando nightclub by Omar Mateen, to make a painfully awkward joke at the start of her presentation to 400 young women at a Turning Point USA conference in Dallas. Lahren started her speech to the group, which spreads a pro-conservative message to high schoolers and college students, by mocking Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe, Lena Dunham’s body and Caitlyn Jenner’s sexuality. She then turned to Mateen Aini, her “social media guy” and the senior vice president of digital and new business at Beck’s Mercury Radio Arts, and said, “Not a good day to be named Mateen.” She chuckled and applauded herself. The audience, which had greeted Lahren as though she were a rock star, also laughed. “I have a lot of jokes,” Lahren told the crowd after continuing on and mocking Clinton’s penchant for pantsuits. “Just take it with a grain of salt.”

This year, Lahren will speak again at the Turning Point USA conference. Except the audience will be bigger, with more than 1,000 girls and women, ages 16 to 24, expected to attend. “She’s a hero to many of these young, conservative women,” says Charlie Kirk, the group’s founder. “Tomi says the things that a lot of young conservatives are thinking.”

In many ways, what Lahren says is not just what young conservatives are thinking, but what all conservatives are thinking and what many are already saying. Lahren recorded more than 400 “Final Thoughts” in three years at One America and The Blaze—more than 16 hours’ worth—and she’s mainly stuck to partisan talking points. She’s “backed the blue,” railed against the nation’s treatment of military veterans, said Obama was on an “apology tour” for America and that Hillary Clinton was—you guessed it—corrupt. At times, though, she’s colored outside the lines of respectable conservative commentary and embraced conspiracy theories suggesting the Clintons are behind a multitude of politically motivated murders.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that Lahren looks like she was cast from a mold of pretty, young, blond conservative talking heads who have populated the airwaves in recent years. And the language she uses in “Final Thoughts” makes you wonder if a marketing team is writing her video essays, trying to tailor them to appeal to some clichéd notion of what Joe Sixpack’s Middle America wants to hear. Her polemics are peppered with approachable, folksy phrases like “frickin’,” “bud,” “horsecrap” and “buttload.”

But there is no marketing team. There are no writers. There’s just Tomi. “No one has ever written a word for me, and no one ever will,” says Lahren, who speaks off-screen exactly as she does on-screen.

Her words come out rapid-fire. “Final Thoughts” often sounds like just one word with two syllables—something like falthoughts. She speaks with the same folksy phrasing she uses in her videos, often dropping the “g” in words ending in “ing.” She can be unpleasantly cocky. She swears. A lot. She seems, as she puts it, “legitimately pissed off” at a lot of issues.

The rapper Wale has compared Lahren to a pro wrestler. (Wale also recorded a “diss track,” called “Smile,” that dubbed Lahren “miseducated.”) Lahren, he’s said, “gets her whole vibe off of being unpopular.” But she gets more than a vibe. She gets followers. Lahren says that her own analysis of her Facebook followers suggests that about 70 percent of them are her fans. The other 30 percent, she thinks, “hate my guts.”

“You have to be authentically you,” Lahren says. “If you are yourself, you might offend some people, but at least they can respect the fact that you’re honest and you’re genuine. People can tell contrived anger, especially young people. Some people have only one viral video because when they try to make another you can see that’s what they’re trying to do. But when all my shit is viral, I’m not faking it. I strike a chord with people, and it’s not because I have a phenomenal voice or presentation. It’s what I’m saying. The topics I’m choosing to write about truly anger me.”

And just like the on-screen Tomi Lahren, the in-person Tomi Lahren will sometimes say things that anger other people—things that are well beyond typical talking points and out of bounds for most media commentators. “If you ask me, ‘Do I think Black Lives Matter is a terrorist group’,” Lahren tells me, “I will say, ‘Yes, I do.’”

For taking positions like that, Lahren has been called “White Power Barbie” by people on the left. More recently, though, another nickname has been circulating with people on the right: “Abortion Barbie.”

***

“Modern day feminism has to be the dumbest load of hypocritical crap ever masqueraded [sic] as an equality movement.”—Tomi Lahren

Over her desk at The Blaze, Lahren had hung a Trump-Pence poster. She was the only one of The Blaze’s on-air talents to openly back the new president. That includes Beck, who savaged Trump as a “dictator in the making” during the 2016 campaign and made a big show of refusing to vote for him. “I like to poke the bear,” she told me.

Sometimes, the bear pokes back. That’s what Lahren discovered on St. Patrick’s Day of this year, when she went to New York and appeared on "The View." Lahren had been trying to get on the show for months, calling the producers herself to see whether they’d book her. It was just one part of a self-promotional strategy Lahren has undertaken ever since she got her first job, with One America News. “When you have a network that’s not accessible to everyone, you have to do the hard work yourself to promote and get eyes on things,” she explains.

After the presidential election, Lahren appeared on "The O’Reilly Factor," "Hannity," "Real Time with Bill Maher" and "The Daily Show." On the last, host Trevor Noah exasperatedly questioned Lahren over her criticisms of Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter, and she left the show feeling set up. “'The Daily Show' made me believe I was going in for a funny little comedic bit, but then he [Noah] tried to blindside me and make it into a political debate,” Lahren says. “I didn’t appreciate that.” But, she adds Trumpishly, “I gave Comedy Central the best ratings that they’d had in months and months and months.”

As big as "The Daily Show" was for Lahren, "The View" might have been even bigger for her personally. She’d grown up watching the program, and, one assumes, yelling at the television screen. She also told me she once aspired to be a host on the show—a sort of Elisabeth Hasselbeck 2.0. “I’ve wanted to take a swipe at those people on 'The View' for so long,” Lahren says.

But there was no swiping from either side. "The View’s" panelists treated Lahren respectfully, asking a handful of questions about Trump’s travel ban, the investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government, and about her views on abortion. Lahren told the panel that she’s a “constitutional … you know, someone that loves the Constitution.” She continued, “I’m someone that’s for limited government. So I can’t sit here and be a hypocrite and say I’m for limited government but I think the government should decide what women do with their bodies. … I can sit here and say that, as a Republican … stay out of my guns and you can stay out of my body as well.”

As it turns out, hell hath no fury like anti-abortion conservatives scorned—or, at least, surprised. Within hours, Twitter was erupting with conservatives condemning Lahren. “I don’t believe in the choice to murder an unborn child,” one person tweeted at Lahren. Another tweeted, “A truly sad day for Tomi; taking a leftist’s stance because she appeared on a left-wing program.” Lahren eventually shot back on Twitter, “I speak my truth. If you don’t like it, tough.”

Among those lashing out at Lahren was her employer, Beck. He even mocked her misstatement about being a “constitutional.” “I am NOT a ‘constitutional,’” Beck tweeted. “I believe in LIFE, liberty, and property. Just an old fashioned ‘constitutionalist.’” Beck also charged Lahren with flip-flopping on the issue of abortion. A few days later, Beck suspended her show for one week.

Lahren responded by filing suit against Beck and The Blaze, seeking an exit from her contract, which was due to expire this September and which network executives told me in early March that they’d hoped she’d extend for another year. “Tomi can do things here that she wouldn’t have the opportunity to do at a Fox News, and she knows that,” Chris Gannett, a vice president at The Blaze, told me just after I met with Lahren at Mercury Studios. (Gannett has since left the network.) “She’s our star. But she’s not an indentured servant. She’s free to do whatever she’d like to do. We value her, and we think that feeling is in kind. But, we’ll see. We hope she stays.”

She’s not staying. After Beck countersued Lahren, claiming she was “divisive,” “unprofessional” and “constantly complaining,” the two sides settled the case on May 1. Lahren was let out of her contract and given control over her Facebook page—which the network had contended, in court, that it had a claim on. No one is talking about the terms of the settlement, but whatever it cost Lahren to keep her Facebook flock (she had to delete all the videos recorded at The Blaze, for one thing) seems likely to have been worth it. How do you rebuild that big a following without even having a TV show?

One of the things that most upset Lahren about the falling out with Beck and a part of her audience was that, because of the suspension, she wasn’t able to better explain her position through a new “Final Thoughts.” Nor was she able to counter Beck’s charge that she had flip-flopped on the issue. In a recent interview with Playboy, she insisted she hadn’t changed her position on abortion, contending that she has always been pro-abortion rights as a matter of national law, but personally anti-abortion. But her position is actually a bit murkier than that.

Three months before she went on "The View," Lahren did an interview with the New York Times in which she was said to be pro-choice. Few of her fans seemed to take notice of that description, printed on December 4, 2016. Days after that story ran, Lahren hit a different note on abortion in her “Final Thoughts” segment. Railing against a petition that sought to remove Wonder Woman, the comic book icon, as a United Nations honorary ambassador, she said, “I don’t get the way their [modern-day feminists’] brains work. I really don’t. Free birth control so I don’t have kids, but free abortions in case I want to execute my fetus? Interesting movement ya got goin’ there.”

Then, a month later, speaking to me on the day of the Women’s March, Lahren said, “I wouldn’t say I’m pro-choice, but I don’t care about social issues. So, gay marriage and abortion and stuff, do whatever you want to do. Just don’t ask me to pay for it.”

Two weeks after that, while conducting a genial interview on her Blaze show with Tony Tinderholt, a Texas state representative who has proposed a bill that would allow the state to prosecute women for murder if they obtain an abortion, Lahren criticized Women’s March attendees over abortion. She told Tinderholt, “I was awoken at about 6 in the morning to women marching down the street saying, ‘My body, my right,’ and I thought, ‘What a disgusting display.’”

Beck didn’t take issue with any of that, nor, he has claimed, with those three words—“I’m pro-choice”—that Lahren said on "The View." Instead, it was just one word—“hypocrite”—that irked him. “I would disagree that you’re a hypocrite if you want limited government and yet you want the government to protect life of the unborn,” Beck said on his own radio program three days after Lahren’s appearance on "The View." He then delivered a long, professorial explanation of where the framers of the Constitution stood on abortion and on limited government.

The public shaming was extraordinary. Lahren was the star of Beck’s network. Her ratings were higher than those of any of The Blaze’s other personalities. And yet, Beck didn’t just have a private sitdown with his top-rated talker and try to explain why he thought she was misinterpreting the Constitution. Instead, he mocked her on his own air, even jabbing at Lahren’s process for choosing and preparing for her “Final Thoughts” topics. On the same day he suspended her show for a week, Beck said on his show, “It takes intellectual honesty, and it takes a willingness to actually think these things through and to do more than just read Twitter or Facebook to get your news and your political opinions.”

That was an especially painful slight for Lahren, who often gets the “dumb blonde” criticism even though she was a straight-A student through high school and college. In fact, Dan Michalski, a Las Vegas-based writer who was a teaching assistant in one of Lahren’s journalism classes, says Lahren, “was almost always the first person to turn in her assignments, and they were almost always done perfectly—almost annoyingly so.”

Still, Lahren has acknowledged that, when it comes to books, she’s “not a reader.”

“I have a very short attention span,” she told the Daily Caller’s Jamie Weinstein last year during a podcast in which she also joined a chorus of conspiracy theorists who say the Clintons are behind several murders. “So sitting down with a book is very difficult for me.”

Lahren does have surprisingly ecumenical reading habits, however, and she has little patience for the kinds of news outlets favored by most movement conservatives. Her knowledge of current political events comes not from connections to the powers that be in Washington—her only real political experience came from working as a summer intern in Rep. Kristi Noem’s Rapid City, South Dakota, office—but from her daily news diet that includes reading the New York Times and the Washington Post and watching CNN, MSNBC and ABC’s news programs. “I read numerous sources, mostly liberal,” Lahren says. “I don’t read a lot of Fox or Red State. That’s not really my jam. I don’t want to assume their voices.” (At home in South Dakota, Lahren's family regularly got together to watch the ABC Nightly News. “I think it was frustrating for Tomi to see some of the bias on that program,” her father, Kevin, says. “But it was always the thought that, ‘We’ve got to watch so we can see what the enemy is up to.''’)

One of the secrets to Lahren’s success is that she uses social media to decide what has the best shot at going viral. If one of the trending topics she peruses on Twitter or Facebook “pisses me off,” then she’ll write her “Final Thoughts” segment about it. (With court-ordered control of her Facebook page again, Lahren is still posting her “Final Thoughts” even though she has no show through which to state her opening thoughts.)

Think what you will about what she says, but her social media strategy—find out what people are talking about and then talk about it some more so they can then talk about what you’ve said—is unquestionably savvy.

***

“Do you know how many of our [white] ancestors fought in the Civil War to free your [black] ancestors? The bloodiest war in United States history was over what was right, and it was largely white people fighting it.” — Tomi Lahren

Lahren is angry. Back in The Blaze’s studios, before all hell broke loose with her career, before her six-figure salary and $40,000 wardrobe budget vanished, before her mentor publicly turned on her and before people started calling her a baby killer, she tells me that Trump’s election to the presidency left her more upset about current political discourse than she was before he won.

“Things have changed for me dramatically since this election,” she says. “The way I’ve seen the mainstream media go after President Trump, it legitimately pisses me off.”

I ask whether she agrees with Trump’s statement that the media are “the enemy of the American people.” She says no, then immediately modifies her position. “In some ways, the media is the enemy of the American people,” Lahren says. “When you are instead trying to nitpick every little thing Trump does and says and you’re trying to sabotage him and demean him, delegitimize him, publish stories from unverified sources, and go out of your way to down him just for the sake of you hate him and you’re bitter, then that’s dangerous.”

Lahren has a stake in Trump’s success. She’s built her brand in the past year by building up Trump when others, Democrats and Republicans alike, were running him down. She may have gotten more followers for that approach, but she believes Trump got something, too. “I worked my ass off to get the message out,” Lahren says. “I believe that through my ‘Final Thoughts’ I had a big impact on the results of the election. I think my voice was needed and heard, and I think I tipped a lot of votes in a lot of states.”

One of those votes was her own. This was only the second presidential election Lahren was eligible to vote in. The first time around, she backed Mitt Romney. This time, she backed Trump. Well, eventually. Lahren started out as a supporter of Senator Marco Rubio. Just before the 11th GOP debate in March 2016, in fact, she suggested that Trump was dangerous, that he had the same mindlessly lascivious appeal as MTV’s "Jersey Shore," and she dubbed Trump “the Snooki of politics.” But, as Trump’s campaign heated up and Rubio’s cooled down, Lahren switched sides. Today, she’s fully behind Trump and his policies.

But Lahren promises that if Trump slips up, she’ll call him out for it. “I tell Trump supporters this all the time: ‘Do not let him be your messiah or your savior,’” she says, wearing that silkscreened picture of Trump on her chest.

Either way, for now, Lahren is focused on getting a job. In our final interview, conducted right before she settled with The Blaze, she’s talking to me from her home, which is in the Dallas suburbs near Beck’s Mercury Studios. There’s a new Cadillac ATS in the garage, and there are guns in the house somewhere, all of which Lahren will have to pack up if someone calls her and offers a new job, which she’s expecting a lot of people to do. “There are a lot of networks, a lot of companies, a lot of businesses and a lot of other folks that would be happy to have me,” Lahren boasts.

Lahren could go back to OAN, which has expanded its audience since she left in 2015. She could sign with Breitbart, if her pro-abortion rights/anti-abortion straddle would work for readers there. Or she could go to Fox News, which many of her supporters consider the most likely option.

Lahren welcomes the idea of a Fox News slot, and she certainly seems, superficially at least, like a fit for Fox News—a telegenic Trump supporter. But even though she’s been appearing regularly on "Hannity" since settling with Beck and The Blaze, it’s an open question whether the scandal-weary network would welcome someone who’s willing to toss off lines like, “Well, the BET Awards were last night. Notably, they were very black. Oh, but can I say that, what with my whiteness and all? Well, too damn bad.” And there’s no sign that Lahren plans to change her bombastic ways for her next employer. “People know what they’re getting with me if they want to bring me on board,” she says. “I didn’t build this brand on being someone who follows the conventional rules.”

Right now, Brand Tomi is available in only limited quantities. Lahren is still filming “Final Thoughts” from her home and still shilling patriotic apparel on Instagram. But at press time, this 24-year-old who has excoriated some millennials for being lazy, as well as being “snowflakes,” wasn’t working a traditional, full-time job. Lahren has worked at a Harley-Davidson dealership, at a wildlife park called Reptile Gardens, at an Express store and at two TV networks. But for now, she’s on her own. For the first “Final Thoughts” she posted after the dustup with The Blaze, Lahren stood in the kitchen of her suburban Dallas home and recorded herself with her iPhone. The video was grainy, and Lahren forgot to turn the phone sideways so that the image would properly fill a wide screen. That hardly mattered. Her cheerleading of Trump’s attacks on Syria and ISIS in Afghanistan — “Bombing the hell out of terrorists shouldn’t cause your panties to wad.” — hit 9 million views.

“I think that’s a testament to why people are watching me,” Lahren says. “It’s not the studio, the lighting, the production value. It’s my message, and my message is resonating with a lot of people.”