Even before the spit hit the fan this
week regarding her unhinged screed about “barely legal” underage rape survivors,
veteran news actress Megyn Kelly was already serially flirting with bad taste. Days
before her pedophilia rant on “The Megyn Kelly Show” podcast, Kelly passed
judgment on the feud between the right-wing pundits Tucker Carlson and Mark
Levin over right-wing anti-Semitism. “Just fucking put a lid on it, fuckin’
Mark Levin,” Kelly said, siding with Carlson after he had white supremacist
Nick Fuentes on his show.
Regarding friendships and family
relationships ruined by politics, Kelly declared: “Fuck them.” Those
celebrating the assassination of right-wing entertainer Charlie Kirk were “fucking
douche bags,” Kelly said, scorning an anti-Kirk sign [where? More context
needed for this to make sense] with a curt “what the fuck is that?” She called the
newspaper of record “The New York Fuckin’ Times.” Of Democrats, Kelly said,
“These guys are fuckin’ radical.”
Well, as Walter Cronkite no doubt
would have said of twenty-first century podcast media: “That’s the fuckin’ way
it fuckin’ is.” Kelly’s f-bombs cited her are but a small sample of what she
dropped on audience ears during a few mid-November days on her show, which runs
for two hours from Monday through Friday beginning at noon (EST) on Sirius XM.
A visual version of the show gets posted later in the day on YouTube.
With her own Sirius “Megyn Kelly
Channel” debuting on November 4 and a tour of live appearances in progress,
Kelly is the flavor of the month. Her show started in late 2020, shortly after
she bombed out at NBC following her success at Fox News Channel. She joined
Sirius in 2022 and, lately, her show is gaining traction.
But this Wednesday, things turned
weird even by Kelly’s standards when she discussed the dead sex pervert Jeffrey
Epstein and his friendship with President Donald Trump. Kelly, who is a lawyer,
seemed to build a careful distinction between Trump and Epstein, saying that
there is a difference between females who are young and those who are even
younger, and that Trump’s alleged sexual escapades as Epstein’s wing man stayed
on the legal side, while Epstein preferred the underage victims.
But then she made a sharp turn in
legal logic when she quoted an anonymous source as having told her “Jeffrey
Epstein was not a pedophile. . . He was into the `barely legal’ type. Like, he
liked 15-year-old girls . . . He wasn’t into, like, eight-year-olds, but he
liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were,
but would look legal to a passerby.”
Although most jurisdictions
consider the legal age of sexual consent to be from 16 to 18, Kelly – again, she
is a lawyer – seemed to imply that the boundary is fluid and is determined in
part by the predator, and that it is fine to lure underage women into sex
slavery as long as they’ve hit double digits.
“We have yet to see anybody come
forward and say `I was like, eight, I was under 10, I was under 14, when I
first came within his purview,’” Kelly said, as if this was exonerating. “You
can say that’s a distinction without a difference. I think there is a
difference between a 15-year-old and a five-year-old.”
Regular listeners to Kelly’s show
on Friday tuned in at noon to discover not a live show but, instead, a rerun of
a show recorded on Nov. 7 in Miami before a live audience with guests Eric
Trump and Piers Morgan. No announcement was made as to Kelly’s absence.
Requests to Sirius for comment were not returned as of mid-afternoon. Immediately
after the rerun Friday, Kelly appeared live by telephone on the “Meghan
Kelly Wrap-up Show” hosted by Emily Jashinsky on the Megyn Kelly Channel.
But in a half-hour interview, neither addressed the news of the day: Kelly’s
comments about Epstein and pedophilia.
Sirius bragged in a press release
last month that The Megyn Kelly Show is “one of the most consumed news
shows in the country . . . regularly charted as a top 4 news podcast and top 10
podcast overall in America on both the Apple and Spotify podcast charts.” In
the same release, Kelly announced: “Linear television is dead. People can’t
stand those stilted, censored conversations.”
Certainly, she is uncensored. From her potty mouth, Kelly fires sharp-tongued
commentaries about the culture war, often condemning transgender people. With
lawyerly guile, Kelly tried to drive a wedge into the alliance of the Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer community.
“How are these L.G.Bs not realizing
that the T.Q.s are bizarre,” she asked, saying that they are “not part of the
same universe” and that trans people undermine youth. “They’re trying to
convert little gay boys into girls,” she said, shouting theatrically as if
trying to sway a jury. “Reject the T.Q. insanity.”
Unlike some talk-show hosts, Kelly
takes no phone calls from listeners when in her Red Room studio in New York,
but she allows a few questions from audience members on her tour while
recording her show on stage with guests. In Atlanta, a Chattanooga teacher told
Kelly that Trump’s ICE police deported some of her former students now in their
20s who came to the United States from Mexico as babies.
In that they know no other home,
the woman asked, what might Congress do to make things right? Not a single
thing, Kelly said. “I think the answer is nothing — because they need to go
(back to Mexico),” Kelly said, to the cheers of her live audience. “I’m sorry.
I’m not heartless. But we have enough of our own problems . . . You came in the
wrong way and you’re going to have to leave.”
When Epstein’s emails leaked early
in the week, Kelly didn’t minimize the story as Fox did, devoting the first 36
minutes of Wednesday’s show to the scandal. She used terms like “kiddie porn”
and “barely legal” and “middle finger” and “Democrats are now salivating.”
Regarding blame for the Epstein
coverup, she said: “Republicans are fucking over that game.” Regarding unproven
allegations against the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Kelly said “It’s a fucking lie.
This is utter bullshit.” Regarding the Attorney General of the United States –
Trump’s employee who often double-talks around Epstein questions – Kelly actually
bucked the party line: “I have to be honest. I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s
word” regarding Epstein, she said.
Kelly certainly is a dynamic
performer. She varies her volume, pace, and tone the way a boxer mixes jabs,
hooks and crosses, some to the body, some to the head, and some below the belt.
Her tour concludes on November 22 in Glendale, Arizona, where her guest will be
Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie, and now a leading figure for white Christian
nationalism dressed up as Turning Point USA.
In that the Kirks were a pious and
Godly couple, let’s hope the widow Kirk is not horrified by Kelly’s constant
use of the word “fuck” in all its forms. Maybe, backstage, she can whisper the age
of consent into Kelly’s legal ear. And, perhaps a fellow Ka-RISS-chin in the
audience will stride to the microphone and say “Megyn, you’re better than all this.
Please knock it off.”
