Megyn Kelly at a 2023 event. Gage Skidmore
Megyn Kelly first came on my radar screen about twenty years ago, around the time that the Duke Lacrosse scandal erupted. She was a street reporter on Fox News, and I think she was still using her old married name, Megyn Kendall. One night I was watching a report about those poor boys, and she gave what I thought was one of the most intelligent and unbiased explanations of the legal, and moral, issues. From that moment on, I was a semi-fan.
I say “semi,” because I didn’t really watch a lot of Fox in those days. It’s not that I was against the network, although Sean Hannity annoyed me from day one. I wasn’t that politically plugged in twenty years ago, and preferred to immerse myself in whatever “Law and Order” episode or franchise was playing in prime time. But I was aware that there was a smart blonde lawyer making her way up the media career ladder, and I admired her from afar.
Then, she moved over to NBC after tiring of her title as the Conservative Contessa, and dipped her lovely toes in the main, um, stream. As we all know, that didn’t go too well, after the liberal haters wrongly accused her of being a bigot. She correctly stated that Santa Claus, a Scandinavian who lived in an igloo, was not black. That got her more than one lump of coal, and she was effectively canceled. That made me an even bigger fan, because of the way she flipped the bird to the woke folk.
And then during the dark days of Covid, Megyn was a beacon of light, sanity and entertainment when she started a podcast that I listened to religiously. I brushed my teeth to Megyn, did two hundred daily sit-ups to Megyn, blow-dried my hair to Megyn, did my 10,000 steps to Megyn, and fell asleep to her dulcet voice warning us about trans ideology. She was a bit weak on abortion, choosing not to come out as pro-life because she sensed that her more moderate listeners would lump her with we, the crazy anti-abortion zealots, but she was on the right side of history on most things.
Then came the day when some people on the right started doing what some people on the left had always done, and began to open their minds to crazy conspiracies. The first time I realized that something was terribly wrong was when I saw people nodding their heads to Candace Owens, who simply cannot hide her anti-Semitism. Candace is in some ways a black Megyn, who rode the conservative tide to relevance. Her whole “Blexit” con was about how black people needed to turn their backs on liberalism. The problem is that Candace was once a very liberal, very BLM sort of chick, and she only became “conservative” when she saw how much money and celebrity she could gain by courting the disaffected people on our side of the divide.
The difference between Candace and Megyn, however, is that Megyn is both book smart and street savvy. Candace, for all of her pretensions at being learned, is all about the grift. I never believed that Megyn said things simply to get ahead. I believed, and at some level still believe, that she does in fact have a moral core and an inner North Star.
And she has done many good things, including platforming my friend Joseph Massey, a brilliant poet who was almost destroyed by the MeToo movement but who rose from the ashes like a literary Phoenix. Ironically, Megyn got some left wing cred by turning on Roger Ailes in her own MeToo moment.
But this past week, she has decided to dig in her heels and refuse to distance herself from her good friend Tucker Carlson and by extension, her sort of friend Candace Owens. The latter was dumped from the most conservative of conservative platforms, the Daily Wire, for her own refusal to distance herself from the mentally ill but morally confused Kanye West.
As far as Tucker, the guy filmed himself in Russia praising Putin, and he also has a problem with “hummus eaters” which I take to mean “The Jews Who Killed Jesus,” so I’m surprised he still has any friends left.
When criticized about her refusal to criticize them, Megyn tweeted this. You can almost see her stomping her cute little toddler feet, in lacy anklet socks:
“Look at this. No, I have no obligation to “separate” myself from anyone. I run my own media company and my own show. That show is where I express my own opinions and I will decide what/what not to opine on. If you need me to condemn Candace or Tucker for their opinions in order to listen to me, then I may not be for you. He’s a close friend and she is under enough pressure w/o gratuitous shots from me. My fight is with the left, not these two.”
And I yelled back at my iPhone, “no Megyn, we are better than that. Your fight, our fight, is with bigots and human rights violators and really bad people, no matter what side they are on.”
And the people on the subway, who never followed Megyn in the first place, looked at me as if I was crazy.
I know that there will still be conservatives who will follow Ms. Kelly. She has a huge fan base, and doesn’t need me. She has absolutely no idea who I am, even though I am likely six degrees of separation removed from her husband Doug who grew up on the Main Line.
But I am done with pretending that she has anything of value to say, when she is incapable of using her powerful platform to fumigate the moral decay on the right, and only worries about zapping flies on the left.
I’ll miss the Megyn who fought for the rights of the Duke boys. I’ll pass on this updated version.
