New Orleans If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword. That’s a very old saying. Megyn Kelly seems poised to understand that even if the proverbial pen is mightier than the sword – or at least used to be – you can still fall the same way.
It is not a spoiler alert to say that I’m not a Megyn Kelly fan. Almost a decade ago, I was interviewed by her. The producer who convinced me to go on the show had sworn to all that is holy that certain subjects would be out of bounds, as I had required. Mainly, having left ACORN in the USA at that time, I would refuse to comment on anything involving the leaders and staff at that time. The original interviewer was supposed to be someone else, but in a last-minute substitution “from the top,” Fox executives, now famous in the #MeToo era, had decided the story was high profile enough that they wanted to showcase their new rising star. Needless to say, she jumped outside the lines of our agreement to suit herself. My aggravation with her and her style is memorialized forever in “The Organizer” documentary.
But, enough about me and Megyn. She made her career by being a flamethrower and conservative agitator willing to step on anyone to move forward at Fox. She had one or two moments when she even pretended to be a journalist rather than a personality, like a put down of Karl Rove and his diminished credibility on an election night broadcast. But, when it wasn’t all about her, she was a hardliner.
And, as the current controversy establishes over her defending and representing monocultural whites and their ability to wear blackface regardless of the well-known history of racism involved with the practice, she’s a racist as well. A columnist for the Washington Post listed a number of examples in case anyone might have thought this was just a momentary slipup on the air.
- Fox News apologized after her show used a caption referring to first lady Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama.”
- Kelly claimed that a black teenager pinned to the ground in her bathing suit by a police officer was “no saint.”
- She argued that Sandra Bland, a black woman found hanging in her jail cell three days after being arrested in a traffic stop, would still be alive had she just obeyed police.
- She accused the black community of having a “thug mentality” that considered it “cool” to “sort of hate the cops, and hang out — and be somebody who doesn’t necessarily prize being there for your family.”
- She claimed that Jesus Christ, a Jewish man born in Bethlehem, and Santa Claus, a fictional character, were white.
None of her record leaves any room for doubt. NBC shares the blame of course. They were willing to overlook her many extremes to try to make a devils’ bargain with conservative viewers and give her a king’s ransom of a paycheck.
She lost them viewers. She lost them credibility. She made a career out of walking over the line of common sense and good judgment. She lived by the sword, and she fell the same way.
Unfortunately, she may be on the way out at NBC, but someone will hire her, so these are notes to remember, because she’s not gone yet.
