Megyn Kelly’s pivot to MAGA boosterism has reentered the public eye in a major way, and according to a new breakdown from The Atlantic, there may be a particular moment in her career that exposes the truth behind her “drastic” and “morally appalling” shift.
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Once considered a more non-conformist and feminist presence during her time as a star anchor at Fox News, and a critical voice against President Donald Trump to boot, Kelly has in recent years pivoted hard towards being an overt and often foul-mouthed MAGA mouthpiece on her daily SiriusXM and YouTube show. Her shift has once again turned heads online after a “disconcerting” reaction to the “Cornell 7” college sexual assault scandal, in which she attacked the victim as “not the most attractive gal” and suggested that she was “probably thrilled to be so admired.”
In a new piece for The Atlantic on Saturday, staff writer Sophie Gilbert dug into why Kelly’s shift towards this sort of rhetoric feels so much more drastic than other similar right-wing media “heel turns” in recent years.
“We’ve seen some drastic heel turns in the media over the past few decades, but none quite as morally appalling as a former self-described advocate for female empowerment suggesting that a woman in this situation might have craved the attention because no one would have wanted to have sex with her otherwise,” Gilbert wrote. “Normally, I have a pretty strong constitution for this kind of bad-faith rage bait. But Kelly’s display this week of what I can describe only as performative hysteria has been hard to watch. Less than a minute into her show on Monday, she invoked the Salem witch trials. Twenty-three minutes in came her first pronounced use of the word f—— (I counted seven in total). That the whole performance was interspersed with ad reads for supplements and a tiny avatar of Kelly pointing giddily at the ‘Subscribe’ button just added to the cognitive dissonance. It felt like watching morning television in Gilead.”
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Gilbert further noted that she has found it difficult to discern how much of Kelly’s reaction to the Cornell 7 case, and other similar outbursts she has had, is genuine, or is just a show to try and get attention online. She argued further that Kelly’s “apparent worldview — where she herself can face sexual harassment due to patriarchal power structures that protect and even reward abusive men, but other women are likely lying — has been shaped by her rise and fall on TV news.”
Kelly left Fox News shortly after Trump’s first term began, after she confirmed in reports that she had been sexually harassed by former CEO Roger Ailes. She moved to a much-anticipated new role at NBC News, but flamed out quickly and was fired after a series of controversial moves, leading to the position she currently finds herself in.
“This moment seems to have influenced Kelly’s current persona,” Gilbert explained. “Public humiliation is hard for anyone to endure, but for someone with a renegade streak (‘I’ve never been a ‘pc’ kind of person,’ she reportedly wrote in her apology email to NBC staffers after her blackface comments), seeing so many people celebrating her failure must have been immensely painful. By the time The Megyn Kelly Show launched as a podcast in September 2020, mid-pandemic, Kelly was snidely describing her guests as lefties, complaining about the assault allegations against the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, and raging at the ‘dishonesty’ of the press covering Trump.”
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