What Happened To Megyn Kelly?

The one thing I cannot and will not tolerate is a bully. The one thing I cannot and will not tolerate is a boy. Hello, hello, and welcome to a bit fruity. I'm not Bernstein. Live from New York. No, that's not good. I'm trying all week to do her voice and I can't do it. You got to call Charlene's people or Charlene's, Charlene's. Charlene Theron. She did such a good Megan Kelly. She really did. She really did questionable message in that film, but. Hello. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, so I've been watching Megan Kelly lately. The former Fox News anchor is now an independent podcaster and has the number four news show in the country on Apple podcasts. I tuned in over the last few weeks because she's been on a wild crusade against Jane Doe, the anonymous young woman and former Cornell student who alleges that seven fraternity brothers at the Ivy League school gang raped her in 2024. Not only does Megan Kelly categorically not believe Jane Doe. What happened was Jane Doe had this incident occur in October of 2024. Three weeks later, after talking to her friends, you know how it goes. A woman will have shame about a night like this for obvious reasons. And then as weeks go by in her mind and especially with the help of other young university co-eds, it gets transformed from a night of regrets that the young woman is ashamed of into a night in which she's the victim and the boys are the perpetrators. But she's waged a seemingly endless and impossibly cruel campaign against her, calling her a vindictive liar, insulting her appearance, suggesting she liked it. I'm just going to be honest, she's not the most attractive gal and she possibly enjoyed being admired. This is how women make these mistakes by these guys at Cornell. And tearing into anyone who takes her at her word, chiefly, Olivia Rodrigo. Shut up and stick to singing. Megan's behavior falls neatly into a pattern of other female conservative media personalities juicing their numbers by railing against a woman who comes forward with claims of abuse. Brett Cooper and Candace Owens have both done this to great success for themselves. But wait, wasn't this Megan Kelly who was honored by Variety magazine at their 2016 feminist Power of Women Gala, the Megan Kelly that Vanity Fair called an improbable feminist icon? Wasn't this the Megan Kelly who herself came forward about sexual harassment by her Fox News boss, who weathered a storm of misogynistic abuse from the literal president of the United States, and who wrote a feminist adjacent book about it called Settle for More? What happened? I listened to that book on audio, all 10 hours of it, and I have thoughts. Today, we will try to bridge the colossal gap between the 45-year-old Megan Kelly of 10 years ago and the 55-year-old Megan Kelly of today. This is the story of God, if I say the name, Megan Kelly, one more time the windows in this room are going to shatter, but this is her story. That was great. And to help bridge that gap, I have brought along two of my girlfriends, two Megan Kelly obsessives. Welcome to the show of The Bituation Room, Francesca Fiorentini, and of The Majority Report, Emma Vigeland. Hello, hello, my dear friends. Lovely to hang out with the two of you, especially because we get to talk about Megan Kelly where I honestly, my fixation on this era of Fox News really propelled me into this career. This was, this was their heyday, honestly. Oh yeah, I was going to say I wish we were hanging under different circumstances, but this is good. I mean, do we deserve different circumstances this day and age? No, but it's time. Someone needed to do this. She, I hope she watches this. I think she will. The first thing that I want to say before we really get into the meat of this episode is that, like I said, I listened to Megan Kelly's memoir on audio book, and I'm not trying to be like annoying about it, but it really was like quite a slog to get through mostly because most of the book is not that interesting. So the book was basically mostly written because of her feud with Trump, but then while it was getting ready to go to publish, she came forward with her allegations against her then boss Roger Ails. So then the chapter about that was basically added as this addendum and the whole book sort of climaxes in its final pages with this like female empowerment message. I think the culture is changing a bit. It's already different from how it had been a decade ago when Roger was harassing me. So I finished listening to it. And then I looked at the 100 tabs I had open on my laptop of Megan Kelly's podcast over the last couple weeks and the things that she has been saying about Cornell's Jane Doe. And again, I'm not trying to be annoying, but it literally made me like nauseous. Like it made me feel like physically sick. What has become of this woman in the last 10 years? And I had to leave the house for a while and take a walk. As a as a woman, it is deeply depressing to see somebody who appeared to come to the right conclusion based on her own individual experience, but realize essentially that if you're in the Fox News ecosystem, they have an open casting call for any blonde woman that's going to fetishize the male gaze and overlook sexual assault and misconduct by men. And so she proved to be the shrewdest of the bunch to survive in that ecosystem and you see what it takes. It takes your entire soul. I just love that it sounds like her memoir ends with just like a book of stickers that just say like girl power and like you got this, you know, and like a little high heel. And then she immediately turns around and has turned into this. I mean, I don't want to get ahead of the story here, but I do feel like Megan Kelly over the last 10 years is a classic. If you can't beat them, join them, path of least resistance. And it is actually what a lot of Republicans under MAGA have done because they're obviously ghouls, they're liars, they're grifters, but more over their cowards and they're terrified of the base that they helped create. And it's easier for them to simply be like, well, I don't want this hate. So I'm going to actually become a mouthpiece of it. I'm going to lean into that so I can avoid that. And they won't say that I'm like actually afraid of my life if I go against Trump, but that's what actually happened. There's a Stockholm syndrome, you know, like nature to Megan Kelly. And also the fact that you have not heard more misogynist things out of almost any commentator, maybe Matt Walsh, but Megan Kelly takes the cake because she's a woman, and so she uses identity politics specifically to be so hateful, vitriolic and disgusting, as you mentioned. She overcompensates like Dave Rubin, who is another commentator that she has collaborated with, who we covered on the majority report the other day, repeatedly used the F slur to refer to Zoraan Mamdani over and over again. All right, Zoraan's just a f*** it. And I really mean that. He's just a f*** it. And like, I don't know how to just like I get, yes, he's a jihadist. He's duplicitous. He's a wolf in chiefs closing, but he's just like a f*** it at the end. And then I don't know that there's a lot of rumors that he sleeps with dudes. I'm not even talking about that. You can be gay and not a f*** it. There's a difference, right? And like, he's just like a little f*** it. That's how I want to describe him going forward. He's a gay man himself and is very self conscious of that reality. And so he has to overcompensate by giving his audience the exact kind of pure hatred that they would be looking for. But he has less credibility in their eyes. So he has to go overboard. A lot of people will say, oh, it's, you know, it's a money thing. She's following the money. And I think that that's absolutely true. And that's always in play when we talk about someone who does this sort of thing professionally. But I also think it's more complicated than that for reasons that we will get into. But I first want to start by establishing the 10 year gap chasm even that this episode will attempt to bridge for people who are out of the loop. And I wanted to do that by showing you two pieces of Megan Kelly media. One from 10 years ago and one from this week in January 2016, Megan Kelly was put on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. And the accompanying article was titled, "Blow Hearts Beware, Megan Kelly will slay you now." Oh, girl, slay with that white supremacy and misogynistic violence apology. You slay. Okay, but do you know what's interesting if you're looking at this cover, which I will put on the screen for people watching the video version of this? Everything of this era is so distinctly 2016 because if you blur your eyes just a little bit, who do you see? Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton. Yep. Look, as the um, uh, short Bob Haver who would like to go shorter, but I don't think I can quite pull it off. I love this cover. I just devoid of who is on it, like aesthetically Megan Kelly with this hair cover. cut really crushed it like I was sold I was like hot damn she looks fucking fly and we're gonna do this rebrand she's coming around and it's really interesting that there has never been although we could argue Ashley St. Clair is the only young now young woman who has done a full 180 on Maga but I this was sort of when we thought maybe maybe Megan would be that person I will give her credit and say that this look is fierce she's hot she looks great there I think it's giving Claire Underwood which is much higher praise than Hillary Clinton and that was that same era I also included one of the photos from from this piece Megan Kelly and her Hillary Clinton cut sort of reclined I mean everyone it was like such like it was the girl boss pant suit nation era says in big bowl text foxes first lady the brightest star at Fox News Megan Kelly is a newly minted feminist icon who sees her gender irrelevant and the conservative champion who has transcended politics with her skillful skillful skewering of GOP windbags most notably Donald Trump so I mean we'll get into this era more deeply but I guess one has to wonder and as many probably were in real time how can you be a newly minted feminist icon who sees her gender as irrelevant I mean look as a man I don't want to speak over women in the feminist movement but isn't isn't seeing gender as relevant sort of like key to any sort of gender policy no no no talk less no not at all in fact see she's you're so feminist you've overcome patriarchy in your mind you overcome it it's one thing to say that you see gender as a construct which is correct it's another to say that you see it as irrelevant it reminds me of the people that don't see color you're sort of acknowledging that racism exists but you're acting as if you are above it in some way and in that round about fairly kind of narcissistic contention about your ability to discern broad social societal ills and deep systems like patriarchy white supremacy what have you you're downplaying the entrenchment of those systems of power in our institute but this is also a time where people thought they could be a feminist they could argue for like women having you know power in the workplace and you know this is the Cheryl Sandberg era right and and yet what they wanted they wanted to cut off feminism from the movements of feminism right through whether it's the suffragettes to the 60s and 70s to you know to you know the queer rights movement whatever it was they wanted to be like yeah but not like that feminism but not like Ugly and poor like it's Regina George feminism and so that was like this little aspirational moment of like maybe we can do feminism without all the baggage you're teasing so many great names who are to come I promise okay that was newly minted feminist icon Megan Kelly now from this week amidst the ongoing public discussion about the Cornell rape case pop singer Olivia Rodrigo herself and outspoken feminists posted Instagram stories lambasting Cornell writing quote shame on every institution who protects rapists Olivia also shared an image of Emma sulk wicks a former Columbia university student and performance artist who famously carried a mattress around campus with her in 2014 to protest the schools in action against her rapist Olivia posting about this infuriated Megan Kelly who addressed Olivia on her show trigger warning from here on out is is all I got to say about this Olivia in some you don't know what the fuck you're talking about shut up and stick to singing I like you better when you were in front of a microphone singing your weird little depressing songs shut up you don't know what you're talking about it's better to keep your mouth shut and let people suspect you're an idiot then to open it and prove them right never hear that saying applies to you sweetheart be quiet go away see at the concert got it it's just it's amazing adults are talking okay take your seat we we don't need the participation of no nothing morons who have been auto tuned into fame and suddenly think they have something profound to say on the culture wars sit down and be quiet got it or I'm going to have to start pulling your music and your lyrics and take a deep dive into exactly the kind of messaging that you are pushing on young women because I guarantee it's not going to end well for you Olivia be quiet the adults are talking be quiet one of the biggest pop stars in the world or else Megan Kelly is going to talk about you on her podcast and that's not going to end well for you you can do a deep dive uh-oh into your lyrics she's gonna go online like she's the genius website and decide what the origin of this lyric could possibly be you know don't let anybody tell you that Megan Kelly didn't internalize every lesson possible from fox news because that is a fox news hallmark this young girl who is so woke doesn't understand what the adults understand via their life experience she may remind you in fact older viewer of the Megan Kelly podcast of your non-binary grand kid who says that your views are retrograde and offensive but no no no no no you're right she's wrong and I'm going to give you what you really want which is a dressing down towards your grandchild oh I mean Olivia Rodrigo the young kid that doesn't understand the the ways of the world fox news is really good and and she clearly internalize these lessons as serving as a pacifier that soothes their core audience from having to deal with the ramifications of their racist or misogynistic or greedy convictions and that was one of the crudest examples I've seen of that where she literally is just like yelling at this young woman uh as if she's her mother and I think that serves as some sort of catharsis for a very conservative older audience that is out of touch with young people I also think this is like clearly engineered to be like clipped on tiktok in a way that seems like pretty desperate and bizarre and are either of you familiar with Jeffrey star I have to bring him up I'm sorry he's the makeup guy right he's he's like the makeup guy this has the same hallmarks of Jeffrey star doing like a live battle on tiktok like trying to insult someone it's like yeah say that again say that again and see what happens you think you can fuck with me you can't fuck with me but it's like I mean it's also I was gonna be like but Megan's 55 but also like Jeffrey stars 40 it's embarrassing all the way I don't know I just think that like I wish people's internal ugliness matched their external ugliness because when I hear this kind of vitriol from her I also see someone who's taking advantage of the fact that she is a woman to chide and be misogynistic towards women but also kind of taking advantage of her pretty privilege I don't she's not like my thing but let's be real like just like blanket you know skeletal white woman pretty privilege and then being able to say the most abhorrent things dropping the f bomb which I love about Megan Kelly's podcast it's just her on fox news but with the f bomb shut up fucking shut up I don't know Megan's you know gender like the amount of like men versus women who watch her show but I bet anything 100 percent it's mostly men. Candace Owens is a different thing Candace Owens is at least trying to appeal to women Megan Kelly is only trying to appeal to men to sue their fears their egos their you know false accusation and all of that shit that's what she was designed and she knows she's doing that that's so on point Francesca because there is an industry of women that are trying to appeal to men's bassist instincts and that can be very lucrative in the short term but it has diminishing returns in the long term because if you're no longer in your prime then you have to resort to increasingly extreme tactics to continuously appeal to men being a woman under patriarchy that is fixated on responding to the male gaze I mean it really is like running on a treadmill you're not making any progress because under patriarchy our systems are designed to protect men and they encourage women to avail themselves of their agency and if you don't do that and if you're an independent and you're an individual and say a podcast host that has opinions well then you are going to have to just orient those opinions because you're a woman that is speaking to the men in that instance women that are constantly seeking male approval are usually the women that you can trust the least I thought we could walk through Megan Kelly's life now aided by her memoir if that's okay I didn't listen to 10 hours of this for nothing and I do think it'll it'll help us make sense of some of what has happened here Megan Kelly was born in 1970 in Champagne Illinois in what she calls a tiny apartment she was raised in upstate new york with the message from her parents being quote "Be who you are, even if who you are isn't all that impressive." She says she grew up with no delusions of grandeur. She said, "We got no false praise. In my family, trophies were for winners, and there was no pressure to win." I've never heard that style of parenting. I do fundamentally believe that you should encourage your kids to believe in themselves and believe that they're special, but I guess it's not the worst thing. She says that she had a quote, "Norman Rockwell upbringing," which, "Yeah, wait." This is all fucking bullshit. My life, it was mostly just like, imagine American flag, just a pristine American flag, and just missionary position, vanilla ice cream, and God. This is a lie. This is all a fucking lie. Also, it sounds like your parents didn't fucking love you. Don't try so hard. There's no trophies for anybody, and also you're probably not going to amount very much. Megan Kelly's dad was a college professor and a quote unquote, "education consultant." He was well-traveled and well-educated, and in the early 80s, Megan enters middle school where she says she was very badly bullied, which I want to talk about for a second. This bullying was partly related to her weight. She said people would walk by her and mutter, quote, "try the salad." It was also related to her acne, which she says she still struggles with. Someone told her, quote, "try using windex on your face." It's pretty terrible. She was apparently bullied very badly. She called it emotional torture for a year. Once she received a call from someone in the quote-unquote "incrown" who asked her, "Do you know where all the kids from my party are?" And she said, "No." And they all said, on the other end of the phone, "We're here and hung up." She says she's traumatized by her middle school bullying to this day, and after about a year of this, a girl named Heather befriended her in the cafeteria, and as Megan tells it, quote, "We became friends. All you need is one. My mother had told me, and I learned she was right." All it takes is one brave, decent person to change your life by thinking that you're worth something. Bitch, how have you applied that to your life? Exactly. Are you, so now you're just set out to be the internet's worst bully? Hurt people, hurt people. She's the Israel of Fuck News host. This is Megan on the hard shell she created to survive the bullying. I thought about how I'd been a different person before the bullying. I was more trusting, more open, more cheerful. Going through severe social ostracism at such a precarious point in your life, it changes you. In an effort not to be hurt again, I put up a rock-solid wall. Even once I'd recovered socially and felt more comfortable in my own skin, a part of me still felt uneasy about letting others in. I decided consciously or not that I could avoid being hurt again by projecting strength. That meant not owning up to any vulnerability, and spinning a narrative about myself that would convince others I was too strong to attack. Ultimately, I emerged from the experience, both stronger and weaker. Stronger because I vowed never to tolerate that kind of relentless targeting again. And weaker because I still did not fully understand the true toll the abuse had taken. It would be many years before I really came to understand what a problem the protective veneer I was creating could be. Can I just say, she just sounds like a repressed wasp? Maybe she's not a Protestant, I think she's Catholic. But I come from a little bit of experience in that back. Let me weigh in here. I don't know if there's much that's unique about her experience. She's smart, she's a tough bitch. She learned how to shut off her emotions and use that to her advantage. There's a lot of blue-blooded white women that work in New York and L.A. in Chicago that act the exact same. But what makes her story unique is. Is that she got a book deal? She got a book deal and she has a specific level of shamelessness that was quite a nice fit for the network that she ended up at. On the experience as a whole, she says, Be fucking for real. Come on, girl. Be fucking for real. But this is exactly the origin story of any conservative that doesn't have a systemic mindset about injustices. If they've ever experienced it, they use it to exceptionalize themselves and take them out of, I don't know, and I wouldn't even call it an injustice. It's just like a temporary middle school bullying situation. I mean, come on, we've all dealt with something similar. But at the very least, you should be able to take a lesson from that. And what she learned was, I can tolerate the people that aren't as gifted as myself. But I'm going to take this as an opportunity to screw everybody else. Look, if someone had given Carrie a microphone and an audience after being bullied in high school, she might have had a very successful career and not killed a bunch of her high school bullies. But we are living it seems in the Carrie vengeance moment of Megan Kelly's life. And she hasn't let that go. But also, I don't think 2026, Megan Kelly would reread 2016, Megan Kelly, and agree with fucking base anything that she's saying here. That was the thing. I was like, I was going back and forth as I was listening to this audiobook between like, the things that get clipped from her show all the time and get disseminated across the internet. And then as she was like, but I'll never tolerate a bully. I was like, this is really just about Donald Trump and her trying to rewrite a narrative that puts her in a more heroic position and opposition to him. Yeah, in a way that I think is like a psychologically crushing to herself, not to mention damaging to a ton of other people. The thing is, before we move on, it's just important to know that conservatives have no irony meter. They are, they are comfortable hypocrites. If this is, I will never tolerate a bully who's bullying me in this one circumstance because it's me, I don't know, I'm important. I don't know if I should about anybody else. I can be the bully. It's just again, it's like, they're bandwidth for not hearing themselves or like, do one to others as you would have done unto you. Like they don't do that. They just live in their hypocrisy. After middle school, Megan says that she got her teeth fixed and took up running and lost 15 pounds. And in high school, became head cheerleader. So, so that's, you know, a good way to get over that hump. And she says that when another cheerleader growled at her and called her a bitch in the locker room, Megan physically attacked her and quote, "We ended up rolling on the ground in our cheerleading uniforms, pulling at each other's hair. This sounds far sexier than it actually was. The gym teacher had to pull us apart. I'm no advocate of violence, but I do believe in self-defense. And the growler, she never bothered me again." The growler, that's the end of the bullying chapter. The bullying chapter ends with her beating another girl up in the locker room and being like, that's how it's done. And honestly, that is kind of a representative example of what Megan seemed to have taken away from this whole situation. It's just like, "I don't think that's the first time she's put hands on people. She definitely seems like she was saying." I mean, the growler, another cheerleader, as she, as she's seen, but I'm a cheerleader with Natasha Leon. This kind of gone a really different way, Megan. If you just opened your mind to the possibility of something's outside. I know, if only. Yeah. What kind of growl was that? Now, just currently. Podcast is a bit fruity. Megan's dad died when she was 15, suddenly. She was a sophomore in high school. Megan and him had gotten into an argument because she wanted a class ring that he didn't want to buy her. And then two hours later, he had a heart attack and died. And Megan was tortured over this for a very long time. This portion of the book is one of the more earnest and interesting and genuinely awful portions of the book. Megan goes on to Syracuse University studying political science because she didn't get into the famous new house school for journalism where she wanted to be. One night, Megan was at work at a campus cocktail bar. She was a sophomore where she was a waitress. The bouncer was a man named Jim. One night, they got drunk together. And as she tells it, here's what happened. He used to walk me to my car at the end of the night after our shifts were over. One night, we kissed. He came back to my apartment and we fooled around a bit. I fell asleep and when I woke up the next morning, I was fully clothed. Jim was gone and his t-shirt was in my bed. Immediately, I drove to where he lived. "I have to talk to you," I said. "I'd imagine so," he said. "Did anything happen?" "No, but only because I'm a nice guy," he joked. Kudos to him for not raping her. I love living in rape culture. It's just, it's nice. It's like a smog that just continuously invades every one of your orifice. And you can't breathe. And you have anxiety when you're walking home at night. This isn't the only world I know. I'm a fish. I live in water. Are you gonna put me on land? Are you crazy? He's a nice guy. And then I married him. No, she didn't marry him. She didn't marry him. So, What I'm hearing is much like the woman in the Cornell 7Ks, she too got drunk, fell asleep or blacked out from said drink and didn't remember what happened. But had he actually assaulted her, according to 2026, Megan Kelly, she wanted it. She had invited him in. She had said yes, up until the point when she couldn't consent, but whatever. She was into it. Right? That's sort of what I'm hearing. What is that like the focus on that was him? It's like no, because I'm a nice guy. And again, audience is nice guys, or guys who like to think they're nice because they don't rape except that one time that they did, but the woman forgave them. Megan ends up going to law school in Albany and strives all the way to becoming an editor at the Albany Law Review. I didn't realize Megan Kelly was a lawyer. At the time, she imagined herself becoming a suburban lawyer with a family and my god, I wish she had. Living in Chicago, she became an attorney at a law firm called Bickle and Brewer, which was obviously a male dominated place as all law firms still are, that she described as having a techno prisoner's mentality, which worked for her, she said, because quote, "I'd probably always had a bit more testosterone than most girls." Okay, Megan. Oh. The gender is a construct and the women can have high T and, you forgot, Francesca, gender is just irrelevant to her. It's not a construct. It's just not something she, she doesn't see gender, she doesn't see gender. This is a very deeply anti-trans person who's like, yeah, but I'm sick so I can say that. But that's why transphobes are so disproportionately fixated on trans women because their misogyny kicks in. You are in their mind rejecting the superior gender to be a part of and you're making yourself into a woman. How could you, that would make you supplicant to men? And she makes that quite clear when she talks about testosterone being some sort of advantage for her, right? She is making a definitive statement there about the hierarchy of genders, she's just doing so in a more coded way, she's praising herself by claiming that she is more like men than other women. Exactly. I'm not like other girls, Fox News hosts, Megan Kelly. As a 24-year-old in the mid 90s, she was offered a starting salary at that law firm of $85,000, which is about $200,000 by today's standards adjusted for inflation. And it's only going up. She is treated very inappropriately as a woman in that office in a number of ways. First of all, women in her office were required to wear skirts, which is now illegal dress code discrimination in certain states, but also men in the office would ask her to do like secretarial work, like paper copying in the 90s. I also do love how this workplace really made it so she could have an easy transition to Fox News, who also had some pretty strict standards about what women could and could not wear in terms of what their audience wanted. She eventually stood up to one colleague who would have her do like paper copying stuff, telling him that she would not do this. And fortunately, she was supported by her boss in that move. The book is peppered with tidbits of lukewarm advice to women. And the advice that she has for women in the workplace based on this experience is a real zinger. This is why it's important to build up your value. You need to make yourself indispensable in whatever post you have, whether it's the cash here at the grocery store or a burger flipper at McDonald's. The harder you work, the better attitude you have, the more your colleagues come to feel they need you, the greater job security you earn, and the more risks you can take. No structural critique of the system, so she really is a true conservative. Just making it clear that it's on everybody else to adapt to exploitative systems as opposed to challenging them. And it's on you if you're not able to do so. She's just so superior to the rest of us. She was able to navigate it. Somebody reader the Barbie monologue, come on now, we just do the Barbie monologue on her. Have we tried the Barbie monologue? I like the Barbie monologue, okay? I'm fully, I don't care if it's cringed, but like this is her just saying, no, no, no, no, you should work five times as hard. You should have to overcome. You should just swallow it, suck it down, deal with it because it's going to pay off. And of course, look at her fucking life. It absolutely didn't pay off in a lot of ways. But the thing is, I mean, she is correct in saying that like if you are in a higher position, if more people depend on you in the workplace, then when she says, then you can take risks. What she means is you can stand up for yourself against a sexist or otherwise bigoted man. And she's right, but the problem is she's also just endorsing that. She's like, you only deserve to be able to stand up to people who are being bigoted towards you. If you have earned the right to do that through your labor, it's the hard work bullshit. It's the hyper capitalist hard work bullshit. And we just saw this Walmart worker who's been at, you know, this place, Walmart for fucking 44 years and they gave her, you know, a bouquet of flowers. Like working hard does not equal upward mobility. Unless again, you were already a fairly well off law school student, white woman who's like, I have two more rungs of this ladder to climb. And then, you know, I can fucking tried everybody else. Well, it serves her mythology and that's all that matters. One of the biggest things that I took away from the experience of preparing for this episode is just that like there needs to be way more iron scrutiny as we will give later on to liberal media institutions because this woman through this book is transparently conservative. All of the advice that she gives even stuff that sounds like pseudo feminist platitudes is conservative. This advice is conservative. It helps no one. And so it's like, why, why are you being invited to the like variety power of women event? Oh, because the variety power of women event also features speakers, like genocidal Amy Schumer to this day. Why are you being put on the vanity fair that's like, don't fuck with Megan. It's like, it's because they all worship money. They all worship the same God. Yeah. Anyway, after a number of years, Megan Kelly becomes burnt out from being a lawyer. Her first marriage is in shambles because neither of them have time for each other, and she's uninspired by life generally, even though she has a lot of money. She notes that after 9/11, she's inspired by broadcast journalists carrying the country through a difficult time. This sounds like, I don't know, it's like every celebrity memoir, like high achiever girl boss or boy boss type memoir has this like, and I said, like, and I'm proud to be an American. 9/11 made me want to be a journalist. I mean, maybe I maybe I'm sorry, but if you're still talking about 9/11, making you feel patriotic after we saw what 9/11 rot, two wars, including one in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands up to a million people by some estimates, and also just led us into an endless quack Meyer that continues to this day. Yeah. You're sus. And I'm not shocked that that is something that she would list there, given her brazen islamophobia. Exactly. I mean, you just have to remember, like she, that's, it sounds like PDAG's it. If this is true, you guys under, you know, I was an anti-war organizer in the year 2003. I was in New York City. The media in the aftermath of 9/11 was North Korea style ubiquity. Mark Goose stepping to war, you know, a half a million Iraqi children because of the sanctions we had issued on Iraq to be damned. If you stepped out of line, whether you were filled on to you or the dixie chicks, the chicks, you know, like you were dead in the water. So what she admired was authoritarianism, which she admired was the propaganda. Like if you actually were inspired by that moment, you yourself wanted to, yeah, you, you, you were inspired by fucking fascists. Well, she was also inspired by Oprah and Dr. Phil. So add it to the list of their sins. Seriously, when, when are we going to talk about the, the blowback of Oprah, okay, America deserved Dr. Phil. I don't think so. Honestly, and the thing is that Oprah, like she could have just been a really good decent actress. She does well in acting roles, but she chose to give us the snake oil salesman. Many of whom have for some reason run on a Republican ticket for a higher office. Oh my God. Oprah, what have you done, girlfriend? So Megan is totally disillusioned with her law career. And she just keeps insisting like, I knew I was destined for something bigger, which is a feeling I think a lot of people have at work, but it's just funny because the thing that, the bigger thing that she would go on to do is become a culture warrior at Fox News. But you know, hey, bigger is a relative term. Literally everyone under capitalism, except their destined for something bigger. Our system just doesn't allow for it. I don't. I deserve it on YouTuber. I deserve this. I'm like, here, here, where she tells me I don't deserve anything else. I'm sorry. I just made myself the least humble person on the podcast today, so maybe I'm obviously lying. I'm obviously lying. But yeah, no, I definitely think, you know, I always wanted more. Anyway, so she decided to become a broadcast journalist with no experience after moving to DC for her then husband's job, Megan lands a part-time job on a local news channel in DC. Okay, bridge of Jones. Within months, she's added dinner, some sort of like journalist dinner thing in DC and she meets someone from Fox who offers her a meeting. Megan says that she had always liked Fox News. In particular, I loved how all of these beautiful female anchors and reporters seemed so strong and smart. Again, this is one of so many lines in the book that it's like you know that the book deal that she got was framed to her as like it has to be some sort of like female empowerment thing. So she has to retroactively insert a female empowerment narrative to wanting to be an anchor at Fox News and the best she can do is they're all so pretty and blonde. I love their skincare roots. They have really nice legs. Wait, wait, but the next line is a total doozy quote. I always admired Catherine Herridge, who is another female broadcast journalist. Who Megan says seemed to have Audrey Hepburn's face and Margaret Thatcher's brain. Whoa, that's how dare you do that, Audrey Hepburn's face. Did Margaret Thatcher even have a brain or was it just hooked up to Chicago with all those like free market fundamentalist economists? That's basically what Margaret Thatcher was. If I tell you that this is nowhere near the worst invocation of Margaret Thatcher, you will hear in the next hour, I just need you to believe me. I 100% believe you because that is Megan Kelly's probably idol in terms of her feminist vision, union busting white lady. She's like, that could have been me in another life if I wasn't this hot. The conservative movement misses this though, like someone who's truly a conservative. Someone who just loves Maggie Thatcher. I feel like these young influencers these days, they don't even know their lore. They don't even know they're standing on the shoulders of these neoliberal union busting bitches. Put that on the tiki talk, put that on the, you all are talking about how much you love Hamas, but that's because you don't know about the warm embrace of Maggie Thatcher. You even know you're going to kill me and I have to keep going. Yeah, wait till the pro pali crowd, here's Maggie Thatcher, I mean, then you're back to capitalism, baby. You need to reel him in with something. Okay. So Megan takes the meeting at Fox and by the grace of God, she in the same day also meets with Roger Ails. And you know, I think if you read between the lines, she is a beautiful woman who at this point has at least five months of broadcast journalism experience. So she needs Roger Ails. And this is around 2004. And despite the network not having interest in her and originally literally telling her to her face that they are passing her over, she gets yet another call saying that Roger Ails, the chairman of Fox had pushed for her and she gets hired as a field reporter for the network. It bears repeating all the time that this is what conservatives think DEI is for minorities. She walked into Fox, a white lady that Roger Ails found sexually appealing and got a job that she by her own admission had a very little experience for, but you know, that's what it is. Yeah. Well, good lesson here for my fellow white women out there, patriarchy does not apply to everybody in the same way. There's a thing called intersectionality that people should read about where white women are very privileged in society and within the context of the systems that they enter into are going to be discriminated against, but it's not going to be the same as, say, a woman of color. And that's evident all the time. I do think it is crazy that her professional experience is just lace with sexism. And Roger Ails running like a fucking, you know, Haram under his grip. You know, he's, he's the Weinstein of news media. He's clearly grooming her at this very, very young stage. And you know, it, however many people he assaulted harass, I mean, it was, that was the culture and still is the culture, by the way. And when you take those opportunities when somebody is sexually attracted to you, when you try to use that to your advantage, if they assault you or they treat you poorly or retaliate against you in that way, it is still the woman's fault. Even though opportunities in those systems are few and far between, still it's the woman who bears the brunt for not either acquiescing or for taking the opportunity in the first place. Right. Or like she slept her way to the top. Yep. Yeah. Megan begins, of course, seeing herself more on camera now on national TV and became more self scrutinizing over her appearance. She says she has insecurities that follow her to this day, quote, I constantly feel like I need to lose weight. I don't feel attractive at all without my hair and makeup done. I have the same self doubts as anyone, but I am an expert at hiding them all. Same girl. Just a shame that you choose to talk about other women's bodies when this audiobook is still out there. I don't know if she realizes this audiobook is still out there. But to be honest, Matt, it was a lot less feminists, honestly, even aesthetically than I then I anticipated because she still is exceptionalizing herself and using any language that is related to women's liberation and quickly retreating from that to back to a place that is about how phenomenal she is and how able she is to rise above the systems that other women aren't. You can't shit on women day in and day out, don't believe them, they're horrors, whether they dress like what do they look like, she wanted it and then turn around and be like no, but I love myself. Now it doesn't work like that. Of course she hates herself, precisely for her femininity or for being a woman. I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to today's sponsors. 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You can head over to NordVPN.com/frudy to check that out. That's NordVPN.com/frudy. Thank you so much to the sponsors of today's episode and now let's get back to it. One of Megan's first big cases to cover at Fox was the 2006 Duke LaCrosse rape hoax. This was a case that was centered around a young black stripper named Crystal Mangum who was hired by the young men of the Duke LaCrosse team to dance at a party that they were having at a house. Crystal accused three members of the Duke University LaCrosse team of raping her and a district attorney named Mike Nyfong. Seemingly out to make a name for himself took Crystal up on her case. Mike Nyfong ended up running away with the story that Crystal herself was becoming less and less sure of. He withheld evidence from the court. The case fell apart. Crystal ended up admitting to making it up. Mike Nyfong was disbarred. This is an impossible oversimplification of like a very long and drawn out and complicated case but we must press on. The point is that Megan Kelly was extremely affected by this case. As are many who crusade against the idea that we should ever believe survivors of sexual assault and Megan was also according to her one of the early people to question the truth of the accusations. Conservatives generally just love this case because they're like a black woman almost destroyed the potential lives of three innocent white men. Megan was very affected by this and still brings it up in her coverage including of the Cornell case and not just white men look cross players and Matt you and I grew up in the Northeast and you know the kind of wealthy white boy that is playing LaCrosse. I remember one of the Duke LaCrosse players lived probably 15 20 minutes away from me and this was a big point of discussion in my hometown. Just like the Jesse Smollett case this was an anomalous instance of racist violence being untrue. We know that hate crimes are still widely unreported, underreported and that black people in the United States are infinitely more likely to experience hate crimes and white people and still the most likely category to be victims of hate crimes in this country in general. Like the Jesse Smollett case it was anomalous but it gave Fox News and their conservative audience the perfect antidote to give license to their racist audience to say hey you can ignore other instances of hate crimes and racialize sexual violence and it's not that big of a deal don't let any doubt creep into your conscience. This is an anecdotal example that should disprove all of the data that says otherwise. Exactly. I mean just to jump on that like this is also the conservative brain that I think that we've seen at work not just on Fox but especially in the YouTube space especially in this sort of like centristy bill mar mill mar adjacent you know space of like let me lift up the outlier case and make that bigger than all of the systemic injustices than the fact that most rape victims know the people perpetrating it right that it's usually not a you know an exotic dancer hired for a party it's usually your friend that you text to say come over to my party and then she does because she thinks you're her friend and you're not going to assault her. I actually will say and I think Emma probably identifies with this a lot I think that actually news is by its nature much more conservative it has a conservative bent why because nobody wants to it's not a story that like well once again a dozen campus rape smattered across the nation if not multiple dozen because it's the start of the school year because campus rape is a thing that's not a good story that's not the headline the headline is ah somebody made up an alleged campus rape that immediately is going to get the clicks the eyeballs that's going to get that's going to drive the attention economy so it's almost like in and of itself the news has a conservative bent because it only pays attention to outlier stories and not actually the everyday fucking violence that people are made to live under you know it's interesting because I was reading articles from 2006 when the Duke lacrosse case was ongoing and I was struck by one from CBS when CBS was you know so reputable and it was titled Duke mom does not blame sons accuser quote I don't hate her I think she panicked and made up this story and so there was like more forgiveness for this person who seemed to be you know mentally not well who seemed to be having been taken advantage of by a predatory lawyer from the mother of one of the accused like way more grace than Megan Kelly has 20 years later Megan Kelly on her show this week is like crystal man was a deranged this and that and the other thing because you know she needs to keep talking about that case to justify her own coverage now of the Cornell one angry at Cornell and Ivy League University and just the same as they did with the Duke players down in Durham 20 years ago crystal man gum who was a very disturbed young woman who made up those charges entirely made up those charges against three boys who almost lost their freedom because the psychopath but in keeping with you know I structured a lot of this episode around Megan Kelly's relationship to patriarchal violence early on in her fox fame Megan had her first stalker who was a man with a psychosexual obsession with her he had previously been reported to police for doing this to two other women it went on for months she had to hire around the clock security that stood outside her apartment while she slept with guns here's Megan describing the experience it is very hard to shake a stalker it's like getting a letter in the mail sorry your life is now ruined for at least a decade it often ends violently still nine times at a 10 stalking is treated as a misdemeanor and the victim to get a restraining order typically must be present with her stalker at any hearing which is insane most women cannot afford a lawyer to go on their behalf and even if you get the judge to rule in your favor there are never any teeth in the penalties it's not until a stalker does something worse than stalking that the courts finally get interested when you have a stalker you walk down the street differently a stranger would cross toward me and I would tense up I was on edge all the time given the constant threat and his focus on me I couldn't go through public spaces the same way there was no feeling better about it every movement was fraught with questions what's my escape plan what weapon will I use if I'm attacked pulling into my garage was a totally different experience every hackle was up am I returning to danger when this door goes down am I trapping myself in that was a scary time for me I kept a fully charged cell phone on my bedside table and took other measures to put layers between me and an intruder I started to learn how to handle a gun which felt empowering but also somehow sad it was one thing to learn to handle a weapon out of interest it was another to do it out of fear again Megan you shouldn't have had to go through this we should have a system of policing that takes women's concerns seriously and yet the narcissism of the inability or the unwillingness to acknowledge anything structural about how our system of law and order you know we're not that far off from sam tells us anecdote all the time when he was younger his mother couldn't get a credit card in her name couldn't get a credit card in her name you think that like our laws currently are updated to reflect the women's agency are you get are you kidding me but again this isn't about feminism this is about reinforcing her own self mythology which seems to be necessary given what we've talked about about her inability to deal with you know her reality it sucks that it happened to me I mean she's sort of broadening it out she talks a little about how difficult it is when you do of a stalker how you live in fear and it's like Yemen patriarchy sucks that was a really frustrating element of listening to this whole book was like there are parts where I'm just like your heart's not in it at all when it comes like some of the feminist platitudes stuff and like you don't believe a word you're saying this like sort of like girl boss stuff but when she talks about these harrowing incidents which like I can't imagine and I hope I never have to imagine what it's like to have an armed guard in front of my apartment while I sleep horrifying genuinely like life changing horror I've had small incidents with like you know people who don't like me in person like being really mean and like even like being screamed out on the street by a Zionist which has happened sometimes you know because I live in a city and like they're around like that has affected me a lot I just like I really do want to honor the humanity despite the fact that she refuses to honor anyone else's humanity like I want to honor her humanity in this because that's horrible and she even does do a solid job of laying out like it is insane that I would have to and I've heard this from other female friends who have dealt with stalkers or stalking ex-boyfriends, et cetera, that you can't get, first of all, you need to afford a lawyer to be able to get a restraining order in the first place. Imagine dealing with this, if you couldn't have a company that will pay for your armed guards for you, that's a whole other thing. But she acknowledges, in order to get a restraining order, you literally need to be present in court with the person harassing you. It's antithetical to what a restraining order is. Exactly. Surely we shouldn't have to be in the same space. But you do, you do. A friend of mine went through this as well, and she did. And it's in the same way that often a more structural analysis of policing leads you to how, wow, our police is really just there to kind of protect capital. What do you know? Patriarchy is inherent in our current systems of domination and exploitation as is white supremacy and as is capitalism. These are interlinked systems that feed off of one another and are largely a part of the same beast. And it takes courage to acknowledge that reality, but that's not something that Megan Kelly seems to be adept at. Megan is also at this point moderating some of her politics according to her. And has this to say about her early position on trans people? Dr. Keith Ablow came on and tried to say Chaz Bono shouldn't be allowed on dancing with the stars because watching him could turn kids transgender a preposterous notion. I told him to me, it seems like you're adding to the hate. Megan Kelly, I know it's the theme of today's episode, but what the hell happened? This is child abuse, Lani. It's absolutely child abuse. This is also very indicative of the time of conservatism that the, you know, Obama era going into Trump was all about. It was like they weren't obsessed with gender and culture wars and trans people and queer people. There was opening around that. I mean, equal marriage actually did have a cultural effect. It was a law and I do think it had a cultural effect. This Supreme Court, you know, approved of gay marriage, but it was really Biden who came up before Obama. People forget on the Ellen DeGeneres show supporting gay marriage. And then what do you know? Obama came after that and public opinion shifted. In my view, it showed how Obama was cowardly on that issue and could have led further and earlier on and moved public opinion instead of just waiting for polls to do that for him. And Biden, I think kind of dogged him there shockingly. I'll just say conservatives were, they had more of a leg to stand on and they weren't so desperate. So they weren't desperately clawing at the anti-trans anti-gay culture war stuff. Even Trump's first, you know, campaign. Remember all of the like young gay influencers who were part of that from mylonianopolis, other dudes with bow ties who I'm forgetting about. Lucien Wincher. To the law, Cabin Republicans. Yes, yes. And it's just like this was a moment where I was like, yeah, it's all good. You know, I mean, if you're a white cis man who's gay, you can be part of the MAGA movement. Yeah. And I did just do a mylonianopolis episode on the eve of his deportation about why that all collapsed as it predictably would. But it's also really not true that Megan Kelly was this like level-headed moderate at Fox News that she retroactively purported herself to be in this 2016 book. In October 2013, Megan Kelly premiered her own show on Fox News, a prime time spot called The Kelly File. That holiday season, two months into prime time, she arrived with what remains. I know. I know. One of her most famous TV moments. After the black writer Aisha Harris wrote an essay in slate questioning why Santa Claus, a fictional character in case people forgot, has to always be depicted as white and how that alienated her growing up as a black girl. Megan said, just because it makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn't mean it has to change. You know, I mean, Jesus, it was a white man too. But you, you know, it's like we have, he was an historical figure. I mean, that's a verifiable fact as is Santa. I just want the kids watching to know that. But my point is, how do you just revise it, you know, in the middle of the legacy of the story and change Santa from white to black? Yeah, I mean, you can't. Okay. I've got news for you, Megan. Jesus was not white. He probably looked a little bit more Palestinian and Santa, I gotta say, he's not white. He's not black. He's Chinese. Rudolph, non-binary. You've already killed her. She's already dead. Krampus is polyamorous. And I'm sticking by it. And everyone is afraid to say that Krampus is polyamorous. But I will say it's actually kind of like crazy. This was a big deal. When Megan Kelly said that Santa and Jesus were white, this was like a really, really, really big deal. Like Jake Tapper, all of the other channels covered the fact that Megan and Kelly said that Santa and Jesus were white. And I think rightfully so, I mean, it's just, it's a, especially, it's ridiculous to say Jesus was white. But it also strikes me as quaint compared to just like what runs on Fox News every single day now. She also turned to the camera and said kids, Santa's white, okay? And she like, doubled down on it. I think either that day or the next day, this was one of her biggest hits. What made this so momentous was how matter of fact and serious she was about Santa is white kids. He's white. There was no like Santa's white. I know. Like there wasn't a folksy like I know. But in the fairy tale and my mind in Christmas, Santa's got to be white, right? I'm sorry. Like it was matter of fact, this is textbook. Read your fucking encyclopedia. Santa is white. And she, I think that's the other thing about Megan Kelly that kind of reminds me of Anna Kasparian is that she is so helplessly self-serious and has absolutely no tinge of humor, self-effacing, reflection. None of that. Santa's white kids. And put, I'm sorry, I'm not Christian, but putting Jesus and Santa in the same breath like they are both real people. That is the most war on Christmas, shit, ever. Like it is the war on Christmas has always been capitalism. The war on Christmas has always been Santa, you know, moving away from like the story, the Christmas story, born in a manger, blah, blah. Like so that was also a separate. Because again, it was funny. I was just like, oh, the right was more sensible then. But then I am now remembering that this was prime war on Christmas time. Yeah. Now remember they were saying Obama at this time was anti-American for putting Dijon mustard on his hot dog and wearing a tansuit of the press conference. I mean, they were really, really reaching at this point. Francesca, I know you have to run and I will continue this episode with Emma. But before you go, I have to reveal that around this time, around the time of white Santa, speaking of kids, Megan and her second husband had their third child, their second son. She has three kids, all of whom we're conceived through IVF. And do you want to know the name of her third child? Braylon? Tucker? Braylon? Tucker? I'm just thinking of the why the stuff I could think of. Nicholas. I mean, if it's St. Nick, I'm getting a hint. It's Nick. Nicholas. Say it with me. One, two, three, Fatcher. Yeah. See, you check off, that was check off's Fatcher. You put Fatcher early on, you planted that seed and you made sure the audience saw the Fatcher in the glove compartment. And then you bring it back. You were the before shadowing and there you go, expertly done. And I was like, maybe like in like, I don't know, like wasp conservative circles, thatcher is like actually just a name that people give to their kids. Nope. She does, in fact, confirm later on in the book. She goes around the time that we were pregnant with her third son, Margaret Thatcher's name was in the air. And so yeah, I mean, she named her third kid after Margaret Thatcher. You know, she was also probably a very self-hating. In fact, I'm pretty sure like the biographies of Thatcher were like, she too faced an insane amount of sexism, but very much internalize that. You know, I mean, it's like you, you can take it and then you throw your entire community, everyone else who's like you under the bus, you're the outlier, you're the most male, and you get access to the boys club. And that's a badge of honor. Like I've started to mention so much of Megan Kelly's feminist status that she would reach was a corporate invention, a product which manifested in a number of things, least of all, the $10 million advance she received for this book, which by the way, if you don't know a lot about the publishing world, no one gets that. No one gets a $10 million advance. And in the book, she tries to land a million different pseudo feminist platitudes, evidence of her own icon status. Megan, back to you. That segment was also the beginning of my friendship with Cheryl Sandberg, who called me up after seeing it and said, I love you. We had a long talk, the first of many, and she has become an inspiring force to me. I love how her brand of feminism highlights the things we can all agree on as women, empowerment, advancement, equality, sisterhood, and steers clear of the more divisive issues. I told her I am not a feminist. Cheryl, one of the preeminent female role models in America, passed no judgment on my feelings about that term. An example for our younger generation, some of whom openly booed me on Stephen Colbert's late show one time for saying I do not consider are myself a feminist. I almost scolded the young women then and there. Is there no room for ambivalence about that term? We need more women in this sisterhood tent, not less. Who gives a damn what label we use so long as we are living a life that supports other women? My problem with the word feminist is that it's exclusionary and alienating. I look at a lot of the self-titled feminists in this country and think, "If that's the club we're talking about, I don't want in." Feminism has become associated de facto with liberal politics. Call me crazy, but Gloria Steinem proudly wearing an "I had an abortion" t-shirt might be a little off-putting to some. This is not to take a position on abortion. It's just to ask, why do we have to make the most divisive issues a key part of the feminist platform? Wouldn't we do better to simply unite on female empowerment? What do you think feminism is? Like, what do you think social justice is? What do you think anything is? Right. Well, it's the same logic that would say that Black Lives Matter is exclusionary or hierarchical because it's specifically pointing out a group that has been discriminated, the Kenstone trying to advocate for their liberation. She doesn't call herself a feminist, so I'm curious why she has any opinion on what feminism would include. She's just upset that it is, I guess, to revolutionary because Gloria Steinem decided to talk about abortion rights at one point. She's the one making feminism exclusionary. She could be a feminist in her very conservative way if she chose to, but she issues the title because feminism by definition is about undoing the patriarchy and her training for decades at this point has been about making men feel comfortable. Perhaps she does so in a way that is well-reasoned. She's a smart woman. She can make her arguments on her late night show on Fox News and have facts that present her kind of conservative perspective if she showed so chooses them being really generous here. But she can't call herself a feminist because her the core brand proposition, everything that she has bought into is based on male hierarchy and it doesn't matter that she's a white woman. And you can see that her whiteness is showing in her inability to have solidarity with other people when she becomes a feminist conveniently or talks about women's issues conveniently is when she gets to the very top of that hierarchy, which is white men. And white men will still subjugate white women when they aren't able to use them as an object for larger state violence or repression of minorities. And she goes, I mean, Cheryl Sandberg, my god is a whole other thing that we don't totally have time for today. But I will mention just because Cheryl Sandberg's name comes up that my favorite thing Cheryl Sandberg ever did is when early on in the genocide in Gaza, she gave this interview where she was talking about how terrified she was of the purported rise in anti-Semitism. And Cheryl Sandberg compared herself to Anne Frank or I guess another like small child during the Holocaust where she said, it's so scary. I'm asking my non-Jewish friends if they would hide me. I was on a walk with one of my closest friends who's not Jewish. And just out of nowhere, not expecting to say this, what came out of my mouth was, well, you hide me. Like if it comes to that, will you hide me in my family? Cheryl Sandberg is an American billionaire. When would they need to hide you? Did you lose your password to the safe room and your first and second home? But it's so instructive, not just of Megan Kelly, but of the broader vision of quote unquote feminism that liberal media bought into at this time in the mid 2010s at the height of like people like Hillary Clinton representing mainstream feminism where Megan Kelly says, I like Cheryl Sandberg's version of feminism. Well, yeah, because Cheryl Sandberg is a billionaire and what feminism means to her is that you can be a capitalist who subjugates a zillion people beneath you and you can do it as a woman. And you can still get to feel victimized. Speaking of Zionism, Cheryl Sandberg is an expert in that where you're in a position of unquestioned authority, hierarchy, privilege, and yet you're able to harken to some sort of self-victimization narrative to justify it. It's a fascist mythology when applied more broadly, which is that, you know, fascist leaders are often both the strong man and also the victim constantly. Trump epitomizes that quite well, but it's applied basically to her personal life where, you know, there's no empathy for those below her, but asking for constant empathy for her position. I also think these really odd passages that she has in her book are again a product of this book deal being positioned as like, we need you to be like the feminist icon Megan Kelly, but also you just spent a decade and a half at Fox news, vocally being against abortion, vocally being against the women's equal pay movement. She at one point called female college students, quote, buttercups who need to toughen up. So it's like, well, how do we make a feminist out of this person who clearly isn't one? And that's where we get these like mumbo jumbo like, well, I'm friends with Cheryl Sandberg. And you know what Megan Kelly, I believe that you are. Well, our media loves rehabilitating rancid conservatives for the most opportunistic shifts and moments in their career. And they all eventually retreat from it. And Megan Kelly is no exception. And now we enter what you've all been waiting for. I don't actually know what you've all been waiting for, but this was exciting for me. The year of Trump. By the mid 2010s, Megan Kelly was earning upwards of $10 million a year at Fox. Election season 2016 rolls around and Megan Kelly is gearing up to host alongside her fellow Fox anchors. The first Republican primary debate featuring Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and some others that nobody remembers anymore. You don't remember our dear friend Lindsey Graham, Lindsey Graham on the Iran. You don't remember Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay, the straight, straight, straight Lindsay. We were almost going to have another gay president. I know. Well, and by almost mean he had no traction in the party, but he did run for president and then talk about Trump as like this existential threat because of his Islamophobia. If that just gives you a sense of where we were at in 2016, hopefully, it gives you some context. Five days before the debate, Megan Kelly reported on Ivana Trump's Trump's first wife claims that Trump had raped her in their marriage. The fact that Megan reported on this at all, angered Trump and his team who privately lambasted Megan and Roger Ails for talking about it on air after months of Donald Trump trying to preemptively curry favorable press coverage ahead of his 2016 campaign announcement. So by the time the debate rolled around, Trump was pissed. And then Megan Kelly asked the famous question. You've called women. You don't like fat pigs, dogs, slabs, and disgusting animals. Your Twitter account only Rosie O'Donnell. No, it wasn't. Your Twitter account? Thank you. For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O'Donnell. Yes, I'm sure well. Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women's looks. You once told a contestant on celebrity apprentice, it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president? And how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the democratic nominee that you are part of the war on women? The following day, Trump gave an interview to CNN on the phone where he said of Megan Kelly famously, she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. And you know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her way or ever. The fallout from these comments were instant. Someone leaked Megan Kelly's phone number and people left voicemails calling her a whore. Michael Cohen Trump's attorney threatened on Twitter to quote unquote gut Megan Kelly, death threats skyrocketed. A few days after as the press was getting insane and Donald Trump would not stop tweeting about her, Megan Kelly took a week long trip to the Jersey shore. She said that there was quote, an uncontainable level of rage. She had 24 seven security photographers, trespassed the backyard of her beach house and onto her porch. The Kelly family had to keep the blinds closed the whole time. Megan talks about how while on that trip at the beach, her husband played an tennis tournament and lost. And the guy who he lost to immediately walked over to Megan Kelly in the bleachers pointed at her and yelled Trump 2016. Back home amidst Trump's incessant tweeting about Megan Kelly, that was kind of inexplicable. But Megan chalks it up to the fact that she was a woman who Trump could not control, which I think is a pretty correct analysis of the situation. Yes, it's a correct analysis of misogyny and patri- hierarchy girlfriend. It's not just your specific circumstance, but yes, Trump is an example of that. So back home in New York City, a man found Megan's apartment and went to the door man and demanded to see her paparazzi and other men started showing up outside of her apartment building and photographing her and her husband and their children. Right before a later Republican primary debate a few months later, which Megan would also be hosting, her daughter named Yardley ran up to her and said, "Oh, look, I can't blame the kids for their names. I can only blame Megan." Her daughter Yardley ran up to her and said, "Yardley said she was a little nervous. Why?" I asked her. "I'm afraid of Donald Trump," she said softly. "He wants to hurt me." "No, he does not," I emphatically corrected. Doug and I exchanged a shocked look. "Well," she said, "he wants to hurt you, so he wants to hurt me too." "No, honey, never," I told her. Doug and I had never discussed and never would discuss threats in front of our children. Donald Trump does not want to hurt mommy," I told her. "We just had a little disagreement. We're friends now," I lied. "Not for long." When I was listening to this stuff, I'm just like, "So what do you say to your daughter now?" I mean, I think that what makes me sad about this is that women in general internalize patriarchy in their own ways. I'll just speak from my own experience. I had a mother that really emphasized feminism, and I still carry that with me to this day, but that didn't enoculate me from deep feelings of self-hatred as a woman that I probably wasn't aware of until I just got a little bit older. For example, I've always been super interested in politics, if not obsessed with it, from a really young age, but basically since I was 12 or 13, I fixated it on it and I made it into my career. I struggled so much. I was in an all-girl school where I was encouraged to speak out. I went to college and the idea of being opinionated, especially being a left-winger and being opinionated, which would ruffle the feathers of men, was so daunting to me that I basically shut down that part of myself for a really long period because I wanted to appeal to the male gaze. I had a lot of anger towards myself. Why can't you just be like everybody else? Why can't you shut down your rage or your opinions to make yourself more palatable and attractive to the frat boys, and everybody else was after? All these girls were able to get guys so easily, and I thought I was decent-looking, but I just was a little bit too opinionated to appeal to them, and that made me feel really poorly about myself until I got a little bit more life experience and realized why was I chasing this? It was because of the structure I was in. I was in the sorority, you know, and that was what the whole thing was geared towards, and every girl and woman cis or trans, what have you, is going to have these experiences of moving through the world and understanding that so many of our systems are designed to put you in a disadvantageous position compared to 50% of the rest of the population, or if you want to just make it white men, a minority that has a monopoly of power, of control, of force, of cap, though what have you. You have to instill in young girls and daughters a level of resiliency and understanding that you can't internalize these systems and make it about your own personal failings because you will never get past that if that's the case. That's just how pervasive, and I use this word a lot, but quotidian, and how embedded all of this is into the structure of our society. You will lose yourself a steam if you go down that path. And Megan Kelly didn't teach her daughter that, it seems like, and she still seemingly can't conceive of it herself. And that makes me sad for her, actually. One of the other things that makes me sad for her is throughout this like really insane, almost year-long title wave of misogynistic harassment that Trump leveraged against her, perhaps opportunistically, basically the entire Republican establishment rally behind Megan, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz to name a few all condemned Trump's hostility towards her. Dr. Phil sent Megan Kelly a letter that said, quote, "Bullies that poke you with a stick want to see you jump." Every single one of those men kissed the ring eventually. All of those men have been part of Trump's administration. They have all campaigned with Donald Trump up until this year. This is just another portion where I was like really, I don't know, finding it easier to find humanity in Megan Kelly, her entire sort of industry of colleagues, which at one point stood by her because also it was politically opportunistic because they all wanted to see Trump fall because they wanted power for themselves. I get that, but still, it really is to me a story of if you can't beat them, join them because imagine if all of the people who are closest to you supported you said what you're going through is wrong. Said it's again, it's wrong that you have to go to at one point she talked about going to Disney World with her family with an armed security guard next to them the entire time. Imagine if everyone around you said we support you and then and I'm not talking about decades. I'm talking about within a couple of years. They are all kissing the feet of the man who did that to you. I don't know like I don't know what that would say logically do to me. She internalized it and she sees herself as stronger than others and so she's running past it and doing what she's doing now. But that story about the tennis tournament where her husband lost and the man used that as an opportunity to get his rage out against Megan Kelly was a good preview into who Trump ended up turning into, which was basically like his ability to say the most vile things and have no shame about it provides a thrill for his both misogynistic racist homophobic transphobic Islamophobic audience would have you. That is such an emotional response that taps into something that men, most men probably aren't even aware of, which is it's soothes their anxieties about potentially in any way losing power in the hierarchy. He gives them the ability to live I carelessly through his lies, but also his insults, which is what they wish they could say to that bitch in their life. And it doesn't end there though. And that's the point is like okay initially it's it's wish fulfillment and living by proxy versus this celebrity now event, you know towering political figure. It creates an opening and we've now seen with the manosphere we've seen with the Me Too backlash Trump ran in 2024 opening his campaign fantasizing about Kamala Harris getting beat up in in the ring against a boxer and then talking about how she was such a slut. It just it doesn't end there. It just creates a permission structure and that's where we are in 2026. After nearly a year of harassment, Trump agreed to sit down with Megan at Trump Tower where he was apparently very conciliatory. It seemed that at that point, he had gotten his rage out. They took a very bizarre photo together where he's like giving a thumbs up and she describes in the book how she kind of just wanted to jump out of her skin. But then afterwards, she felt really good about the meeting. She viewed it as conciliatory and allowing her to rise above. I can't take her feelings away from her, but I was listening to that and thinking like was this you rising above or was this you escaping? Trump is apparently quite good at this. He is more than happy to direct hate towards you in public because it's all showbiz for him. But he'll have a glad hand to patch you on the back and private. I don't know why she would take that as an anyway virtuous or comforting, but to each their own. Megan said quote, I was taken control of my life. And then she has this like particularly bizarre reflection about how if she had been sequestered in campus safe spaces that she would have never been able to survive that year of her life. Adversity is an opportunity and one that has allowed me to flourish. It has made me stronger, my skin a little thicker. And as with any turmoil in your life, none of it is for nothing if you survive it and take stock. Imagine if I'd had no conflict prior to this. If I'd had no practice in how to shore myself up. If I had only existed in my safe space with my trigger warnings, I'd have had no means of coping. This is why the cupcake nation mentality. Everyone's a winner is so dangerous. When we try to protect the young from any vaguely uncomfortable ideas or encounters, we do them a grave disservice. Being tested by different viewpoints in my life, being sometimes Sometimes offended, or occasionally hurt, or even targeted, is a big part of what prepared me for the challenges I have faced in my career, especially this past year. I had done the grueling sit-ups and my core was strong. I could withstand some gut punches. It's so crazy that she goes through something so harrowing. Because she has so internalized what she views as this necessary suffering, because she doesn't want to threaten any of the systems that, among other things, make her a lot of money. She's like, "Yeah, I went through that horrible thing, but isn't it great?" Kind of. That I also went through a lot of other horrible things. I, I, I, I, me, me, me, I, I, I, that's basically why this might have been, at least for me, a difficult read or listen, because you could conceive of this book in a way that makes it so that Kelly has an experience of empathy and uses what she went through to talk about something larger than herself, but based on the excerpts that you have provided, it seems like she's only able to return to her experience. That is immensely limiting. I say this a lot on this podcast, but there's no moral virtue to suffering. Like we, I think, oftentimes are forced for psychological survival purposes or any number of other reasons to like compartmentalize and neatly package bad things that we've been through into this literally Kelly Clarkson top of mind. Like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Sometimes what doesn't kill you just fucks you up. You shouldn't have happened. We've talked about patriarchy. We've talked about white supremacy. We've talked about capitalism. We haven't talked about Christian nationalism, which is, you know, very much a part of these structures in our country as well, which interlinks with capitalism in that myth that suffering is in some way a prerequisite for something greater. It allows you to surrender yourself and your limited time here on this planet to suffering under capitalism or to hiding a part of your gender or sexual identity in service of Christ. It's a very convenient narrative for people that want to lead around a population like sheep, whether you're a televangelist or you're Donald Trump yourself. It's a thought negating power negating structurally critical negating mode of thinking that is essential to any authoritarian project or to maintaining systems of domination and supremacy. And just as Megan Kelly's year of Trump, as she calls it, was finally calming down around the general election in 2016, then Roger Ailes, her boss, chairman of Fox News, was sued by fellow Fox host Gretchen Carlson for sexual harassment. According to Megan, she read the story and quote, "The story in the lawsuit sounded very familiar to me because it had happened to me years earlier." The story is this, in summer 2005, Megan had been with Fox less than a year. She says that there was a routine at that point where Roger would call Megan into his office, shut the door, and play a cat and mouse game with her where he would weave between comments on the very sexy bras she must have and how he'd like to see her in them mixed with some professional advice. She said that the remarks got more disturbing over time. He made, quote, "offers of professional advancement in exchange for sexual favors." And Megan tried to laugh it off. She says, "It was an impossible dynamic." Megan wanted to be treated as a professional, but he was, quote, "trying to change the stakes for her advancement." Megan, as anyone would in this position, was hoping that he would lose interest or just take the hint. And then things escalated. In January 2006, Roger called Megan into his office, tried to grab her repeatedly and attempted to kiss her two times. She'd be lying to the door. He asked her, "When is your contract up?" And then tried to kiss her again. Megan, after some time, reported this to a Fox News supervisor who told her that he probably just has a crush on her and that she should avoid him. Megan didn't want it to blow up. She didn't want to report it. She didn't want to make it a thing. She just wanted it to stop. Quote, "If I caused a stink, my career would likely be over." The infantilization of Roger Ails, as if this is a crush, like when you're in fourth or fifth grade on the playground, no, this is a predator who is expressing his power over women via a transactional sexual favor because he knows that he has the power to make or sink their careers. Eventually, like I said, Gretchen Carlson came forward, and this is 11 years after Megan Kelly experienced what she experienced, and then so too did four more women at Fox News. Roger, in retaliation, started a campaign within Fox News to deny the allegations and pressure other women into recanting or not coming forward at all. There's a movie about this called Bombshell. When Megan refused to join Roger's campaign internally, he engineered hit pieces about her in the press, here's Megan. The biggest downside to the PR campaign was the pressure it put on the victims, to whom the message was loud and clear, we're with Roger. If you speak out, no one will believe you. To fascinatingly sharp conclusion to come to for a person who is now on the other side of the equation of not believing women who come forward. Megan Kelly decided to come forward to investigators, resolving that it was her duty to, quote, "pay it forward to other women," quote, "for my daughter who deserved to have her mother stand up and say, 'This man will not do this to another woman at Fox News ever.'" Very conservative construction to use her daughter. Like I love how she's acting like a conservative man, even as a conservative woman who can't seemingly relate to girls and women's issues without invoking their daughter as if they couldn't empathize with a woman before. Megan Kelly's almost doing the exact same thing because she knows her audience. That's what will appeal to them, right? She attributes a lot of her decision to come forward to her daughter because she was tortured about it and also admits rightfully that the only reason she was able to, in her mind, was because she had achieved star status. She couldn't be booted off. Yes. Evidently, she would leave, but she had a lot of money and her own show and her own name. And she has since given interviews about how she knew she couldn't come forward when things first happened other than to the supervisor who basically completely failed her because the supervisor felt, you know, fealty to Roger Ailes. She couldn't do anything about it because she wasn't yet the Megan Kelly that the whole country would come to know that she would lose her job that she had had for less than a year. And so it just drives me crazy when in this Cornell coverage that she does now, she's like, well, why would Jane Doe wait three weeks? You waited 11 years. She judges women that were not able to achieve a level of success that she did and overcome the issues of sexual harassment or assault in their workplace. She sees the fact that she succeeded in spite of that as a virtue and makes broad assumptions about women who were unable to succeed in spite of that or perhaps they were retaliated against because their boss had a reaction or maybe their boss had some sort of psychosexual fixation on them and punched them for that. She would still see those women as not being able to sufficiently and savvily enough navigate the waters that she was able to. It's still a hierarchical viewpoint. It honestly reminds me of how JD Vance talks about Appalachia and his book came out at around the same time and a lot of liberals praising it about how this is how you truly understand Trump's America. What JD Vance was saying in that book was basically like poor white people in Appalachia, it's the same thing as those poor black people that we've been demonizing for all of these years in the cities. It's a question of morals and ethics and discipline and those are the stories that conservative media will elevate but frankly liberal media will elevate as well because as we've seen liberalism and like free market beliefs that are about maintaining a system that we all know is exploitative under capitalism but just having some humanistic values around the edges. That's a lot more compatible with conservatism and now fascism than it is with leftism and collectivism. Megan also mentions. It's already different from how it had been a decade ago when Roger was harassing me which is again so amazing because she was saying this 10 years ago saying how far we'd come from 10 years prior and then now look where we are 10 years in the future where we've regressed far backwards from the point in which she was narrating this audiobook in part because of people like her. The O'Reilly factor coincided with Megan Kelly I believe. Yes. They were close friends. I'm not shocked. He was booted for his sexual harassment of his employees. You can google Bill O'Reilly Lufa if you choose to do so or he kept calling it a falafel but he meant Alufa, which is a classic movie. - Classic makes us feel to that, right? But one of his most infamous clips was when he said that tides go in, tides go out. You can't explain that. And he was talking to an atheist in that instance. Obviously the way that the tides go in and out is easily explainable by science. - I'm like, wait, isn't that just the moon? - Yes, yes. But in that instance, right? You can see the conservative frame of mind, which is naturalizing hierarchy, naturalizing the way that things are, not thinking critically about it, but treating it as a matter of fact, and then how the chips fall is how nature decided human beings should be categorized. And for people that are very wealthy, it's a lot easier to fall into a subscription into that narrative. And that's why we're facing the fascist threat that we do because the money wants to believe that and convinces itself of that because a survival depends on it. - Megan concludes on this chapter of her life by observing. - The bottom line is, the more we criticize harassment victims for their understandable reluctance to go on the record, the more women we will shame into silence forever. - Couldn't agree more. - What's up, Megan? - Yeah. - I mean, like. - Come on, girl. - Megan Kelly leaves Fox shortly after all of this understandably everyone's relationships at that network, we're in tatters at that point, and it was really the end of Fox as we knew it in the 2010s. And Megan is briefly ushered into the mainstream as, as Vanity Fair put it, a newly minted feminist icon. And it is on the surface understandable why she had in the past year, you know, crusaded against Trump. She had crusaded against Roger Ailes. She helps topple one of those men. Megan Kelly is invited to the Met Gala. She is invited to the Vanity Fair Oscars party. She was invited as she says too many of these sort of Hollywood adjacent parties. At one, she says she met Taylor Swift, who called Megan a powerful woman. - Aye. - I mean, it's in the book, it's in the book. - I'm not, Swifties are gonna be like, oh, you're just invoking Taylor Swift. - They're cults, they're cults, they're cults. This is perfectly in line with Taylor Swift's brand of feminism that climate criminal billionaire and Megan Kelly probably have so much in common. Swifties already hate me. You can cut this out if you want, Matt. - I am because I can't take it anymore. Um, it's just so funny because every time she invokes another woman to be like, I'm around women and we're all feminists. They're literally all billionaires. (laughing) It's great, it's great. The normalization of Megan Kelly earned her not just a book deal with a reported $10 million advance, the timeline of that book by the way ends here. But in 2017, less than a year out of Fox where she was reportedly by that point making $15 million in her final year, she inked a three year contract with NBC to host a normal person, not conservative daytime talk show called Megan Kelly today. A successor to the today show. And for this three year contract, she was offered, da, da, da, da, da. Megan, I told you to not look it up. - I didn't look it up. I didn't look it up so you get to surprise me and get my organic reaction. - Do you want to take a guess? - On an annual basis? - It was a three year contract. - In 2017? - Yeah. - 12 million year? - For three years, she was offered $69 million. - Okay. You won't even get a nice. That's what I mean. - You're not giving me what I want. - I'm not giving you a nice because that's not nice. - This show was fine if boring. Megan is unfortunately much better suited to being a right wing provocateur than she is trying to do what Drew Barrymore frankly does a much better job of now. - I mean, the today show had Hoda at this time. - Al Roker. - Yeah, yeah. I mean, Hoda and Kathy Lee, which was great television. Everyone was drinking at 9 a.m. for some reason. Everyone was having a good time. And then they're gonna parlay it into this icy bitch. I say with respect, like, I mean, being a icy bitch is awesome. And she could have been a great lawyer, I think, in another life, truly. And instead of being a media personality, but daytime TV was not for her. - No, no. But, you know, she did cause play as a warm person or at least she tried to. And I was watching some episodes of this and it was interesting. She did a segment where she had trans kids and their parents and also trans parents on. And demonstrated what I thought was a pretty clear ability to call bullshit on the quote unquote social contagion myth of LGBT kids. - In the same way that that parent that is concerned would never question their own identity. But somehow they think that someone else might be influenced to question their identity. And it doesn't work that way. You know who you are. That's the messaging that we're sharing. There are no people confused about their gender identity. - And they don't get confused by spending time with a transgender person. - Not at all. - Yeah. - It's the same where if you are not a gay person, you don't become gay by spending time with gay people. - Exactly. - There's more room for love and acceptance and everybody's heart, what? - There's more room for love and acceptance and everyone's heart, yada yada. (laughs) - Everyone except me. - You could tell her heart wasn't in it, but at the same time you could tell that she was like, like that came to her. Like I do believe that there was an aspect of 2010's, your love is love vibes that did affect her. - I mean, I think that I feel lucky to have grown up in a period that had a level of openness in this regard. I mean, Lady Gaga talking about gay rights, RuPaul's Drag Race got Greenlit in like 2008 or 2009. I mean, there was a period and I do think the Obama era opened it up of kind of more liberal values at the very least being portrayed on television, but you see without material protections and without a disciplining of the Capitol class and the people that hoard our wealth who would rather these be the fights that we're all engaging in as they take and take away from us without that being addressed, things foment. - And with people, frankly, like Megan Kelly at the helm of liberal media at this point who were so transparently not committed to these sorts of movements that they were reporting on while they were trendy. And I know, I mean, Megan Kelly is one person a rather extreme example based on where she would evolve just a few years out from this. But like, there is also a class of media that doesn't really care about anything except their own contract renewals, which is something that we talk about in independent media all the time. - Yeah, and just to button this part up, I'll say, like, there's a quote that I can't stand and I think Obama had deployed it and this is around that time too, about like the arc of history is long. - Is long but bends towards progress. But always bends towards justice. And that's just such an erasure of the blood and the sacrifice of activists that get us to this point because you see where they're at right now, Matt. You see that Megan Kelly feels that it's more advantageous for her to go along with this kind of more like vague cultural openness and liberalism than it is to go with a far right fascist or exclusionary or bigoted view towards LGBTQ people but flash forward 10 years later, that's not the case. And you see that attitudes towards gay marriage have now declined and it coincides perfectly with the war on trans people. This is called intersectionality. You can't abridge other people's rights and expect that everyone else is going to be protected. It's just not how it works. Megan Kelly's daytime stint was cut short. Can you imagine if they were paying 69 million fucking dollars, the fact that she couldn't complete three years trying to be a normal person? For 69 million dollars, she couldn't be normal. Anyway, her daytime stint was cut short when during a Halloween segment, just 14 months into her contract, she defended white people wearing black face as part of their Halloween costume. I will put a clip in of that happening. I'm sure you remember that. There was a controversy on the Real Housewives of New York with Luan as she dresses Diana Ross and she made her skin look darker than it really is and people said that that was racist. And I don't know, I felt like who doesn't love Diana Ross? She wants to look like Diana Ross for one day. I don't know how like that got racist on Halloween. I do, but I'm now seeing in the outline who was the subject. I literally did not realize that the subject of this conversation and the reason for Megan Kelly's firing from NBC News was Countess Luan. (laughing) - On the Mount Rushmore of Housewives, this bitch. I mean, first of all, I've seen, I paid a way too much money with my friends to see her caviratio, magnetic and person, gorgeous, just like totally incredible. Luanne was born to be a star. I'm not necessarily sure how she thought she was okay, going out in public like this. She dressed like Diana Ross, and then tried to claim later on the show that it was just like an spray tan. Girl, you 100% did blackface, and you had friends that let you go out like that. In the 2016 era, I will never forget it. - Luanne Deliceps of the Real Housewives of New York, put this photo on Instagram, of her dressed up as Diana Ross for Halloween. - That is honestly so insane to look at. - Oh my goodness. Needless to say, Megan's contract was killed by NBC. But guess what, Emma? - What? - She kept all $69 million. As part of her contract severance, they paid her the outstanding $30 million that she had not yet paid, and she continues. That must be an amazing agent that she has, contract lawyer. They got that, got that locked up, fully moldy. - This usher's in the era of independent Megan, where we are today. In 2020, Megan Kelly founded Megan Kelly Media with its flagship podcast, The Megan Kelly Show. Name recognition, baby. Megan reverts back almost immediately into right wing hate mongering, and throughout the early 2020s ramps up her aggression and rhetoric to a place that quickly surpasses the old school republicanism she was doing at Fox. Broadly speaking, I think it's really interesting how Megan Kelly's success is seemingly a product of personal and professional controversies for her coinciding with these different cultural waves that she's able to ride, like old school Republican, back in the 2000s, early 2010s, to this hashtag NeverTrump Republican, which was very briefly a thing, which Megan Kelly was able to ride right on the eve of the 2016 election, which then she rode the wave of me too, into this briefly held status as a quote unquote feminist icon, and then back, right back into this hardcore right wing populism of the 2020s, by way of, I've been canceled, I was canceled by the woke left. That's why I had to leave NBC and she rode that and this like right wing obsession with cancel culture that was sort of end of 2010s early 2020s, right back into being a right wing podcaster, which was also the industry wave at the time. I just, I think she is a savvy operator, you know? And it's not to say that she's never had ideological commitments, but again, I think she is at the end of the day, a careerist who has done a great job making money. - Well, it really largely doesn't matter what she believes. I've started to abandon that in my analysis to a degree because it's more about are you willing to be obsequious to the powers that be and ride certain waves and make few waves and she learned, seemingly the lesson that she learned from the Trump thing was to keep her mouth shut and to just deal with it because she had a brief foray into the more traditional liberal corporate media ecosystem and they punished her for her racism. Now she can go back to the cozy warm embrace of patriarchy and not have those views challenged whatsoever and in fact, it's just as lucrative. You mentioned the never Trump Republican and say that that was a brief thing. Unfortunately, some of those same actors are still attempting to manipulate the Democratic party to this day. There were consultants that were never Trump Republicans including Sarah Longwell. - I was gonna say, are you about to beef with Sarah Longwell on my podcast? I'm kidding, I'm kidding, do it. - I don't care. What's amazing is how much they care and how much fun it is for Sam and I because yeah, like never Trump Republicans are a cancer in the party and they've been leading us down a really, really bad path including Gearing Kamala Harris to campaign with Liz Cheney and abandoning all of like the more popular stuff when she was pulling better. And it led us to this moment of fascism. So the fact that they have the temerity to suggest that they should call the shots for the party going forward is hilarious to me. But that's like is if we were to welcome Megan Kelly back in. Oh, I guess anybody's welcome to be a media figure here. If you have the platform to have the Capitol behind you to say how the party should be going, maybe we should listen to you. No, I care what the voters say. But you see that where our systems of power and money are oriented, they would desperately prefer to offset and to obscure the ideological fight right now within the democratic party about moving the party towards taxing billionaires and providing material benefits for people and addressing those kinds of things. Like that incentive is always there. And it's just a question of who is shameless enough to fill that vacuum. And Megan Kelly, I think, has the perfect balance of shamelessness and intelligence to maneuver through that minefield towards the bucket of gold, which is like what she's really after at the end of the day. The day before the 2024 election, Megan Kelly officially endorsed Donald Trump on stage next to him at a rally, where she gave a speech calling him a quote, he will be a protector of women. And it's why I'm voting for him. And this is where I get like nauseous, as I mentioned, at the top. Because in this, you see a woman who was harassed and abused by this man for nine months. I'm afraid of Donald Trump. She said softly, he wants to hurt me. Holding his hand and looking up at him. And there's a nauseating element to that, right? Now, not only have all of her male colleagues who want supported her or quote unquote supported her, kissed the ring, but now so is she, to a man who made her life and her husband's life and her children's life hell. So there's that. But doing it in service of a project that will injure and humiliate and torture and even kill so many other women who didn't have the choice in the matter. The choice that Megan Kelly is making to fall back into the embrace of Donald Trump. They didn't have that choice. The women who live in red states, who are now in places where they can't get abortions, where if they need an abortion, they have to figure out a way to scrape up the money. That's not something Megan Kelly has to worry about. And so this is just, it's where the nausea seeps in. And you know what? She was saying, well, I had to stand up to Roger Ailes and I had to stand up to Donald Trump for my daughter. What do you tell your daughter? Megan Kelly. It's really another prime example of how the conservative ecosystem operates and how it exists and how women have to navigate it. I often will say on our show, a good way to spot a right-wing argument is the look what you made me do argument, where they will blame their abuse or their subjugation on the characteristics of the subject of their abuse, where you shouldn't have been so mouthy. Hey, black people, you shouldn't wear your pants so low. Trans people, you shouldn't try to spread your ideology to other people. So we've got to strip your rights. Muslim people, hey, you shouldn't have done 9/11 collectively, apparently. We're going to surveil you for as long as we can. They will use any justification that they can to continue their mode of supremacy and dominance and victim blaming and crafting a narrative based on that is essential to that project. And what Megan Kelly did there was throw every other woman under the bus with the predator that we have in office right now. Whitewashing, his record of dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct, including being found liable for sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll and civil court. Whitewashing that for women to allow for Trump and the rest of the rapists in the Republican Party and in his cabinet to craft a narrative of victim blaming that we're seeing the consequences of it in the Cornell case. In the case we're about to talk about right now. Leadership does matter. Like, I'm all about material things. In politics, I think that sometimes character and culture and all of that gets a little bit too overemphasized because we're not talking about, say, like Medicare for All other issues that are most important in impacting people's daily lives, but I do believe this whole heartedly that like Obama, despite my issues with him in many ways on the policy front, he was like a statesman that showed how to be a positive masculine figure for a lot of other people and demonstrated a positive masculinity. And in 10 years of Trump, since the Me Too movement, what have we seen? We have seen the resurgence of an acceptance of rape culture, whether it's this case, whether it's the manosphere ecosystem, and there's gasoline on the fire because people's material conditions aren't being met. So men that are told that they have to be the breadwinner and have to find a wife and make a family who are unable to do so are quickly able to identify with Trump and other conservative influencers that tell them that the women in their life is the problem and that it's basically about controlling them and creating rules for them and subjugating them so they can feel empowered at home. They don't feel empowered in the workplace. Why would they? And you see how those things work together. Yeah. This really is the part that makes me nauseous. I know. Me too. Nope. No pun intended. Me too. That was good. It's accidental. And as we all know, and as I started the episode with Megan Kelly has only escalated her provocations since most recently in her crusade against Cornell's Jane Doe case. I'm about to splice in a few clips. If you don't want to hear Megan Kelly talk about this, skip ahead a couple of minutes. I totally get that because frankly, I don't either. I've watched Megan Kelly's coverage of the Cornell rape case and without subjecting you to more of it than is necessary, she says without evidence that these were probably just consensual three sums that Jane Doe is having says without evidence that Jane Doe's friends probably convinced her in the weeks following the incident that she was raped because that's just how things go. Megan Kelly says the pattern is often that a woman will have shame about a night like this for obvious reasons. And then as weeks go by in her mind and especially with the help of other young university coeds, it gets transformed from a night of regrets that the young woman is ashamed of into a night in which she's the victim and the boys are the perpetrators. A much more comfortable place for a young woman who participates in multiple three sums with different men on one night to be. I didn't I'm not a slut. I'm not easy. I'm not a humiliated desperate, give it up to anybody. That's not me. There are bad people involved in this, but I'm not one of them. She blames Jane Doe for taking three weeks to report the assault despite Megan herself having taken 11 years to report hers. And I'm sorry, but you know, three weeks like if you were violently gang raped repeatedly over the course of an evening, do you think it would take you three weeks? She of course compares this to the Duke lacrosse case. And just the same as they did with the Duke players down in Durham, 20 years ago, three boys who almost lost their freedom. She pledges to name Jane Doe if her identity is revealed because she doesn't deserve anonymity, according to Megan Kelly, for what she's putting these boys through boys. Megan Kelly calls them over and over again. And your name is as fair game as the names of the defendants. And I just I don't think we can continue this farce of pretending all accusers are actual victims whose identities must be protected and all defendants are presumed guilty and their lives will be ruined the second the complaint is filed. This is fucked up. I'm just done with this. And I can speak to this as somebody who did come forward against someone for having sexually harassed her. And did that using my real name and understanding that the person being accused was going to find out I had done that. Megan Kelly, of course, blames Jane Doe for having drank as much as she did. She had consumed about 10 standard drinks within the past three hours. That's a lot. It's a lot of liquor. Note to young women on college campuses and beyond. Don't consume 10 drinks in an evening and expect good things to happen to you. They won't. You can take it to the bank. 10 drinks in three hours. What what do you think is going to happen? And then once psychopathic in cells on Twitter doxed a woman that they believe could have been Jane Doe. Megan Kelly did a segment bashing her appearance calling her arms and legs beefy and insisted that maybe she enjoyed it because she's not the most attractive gal. No one will even consider the possibility that this woman made a decision to get it on with four men total not seven and enjoyed it because I'm just going to be honest. She's not the most attractive gal. She's extremely beefy in like her arms and her legs. She has a whole video online talking about her cancels. And she possibly enjoyed being admired. This is how women make these mistakes admired, wanted some women even, you know, foolishly say loved by these guys at Cornell. But this is probably a first for her. She's probably thrilled to be so admired because she clearly didn't grow up the incredibly beautiful one. I'm not trying to be insulting. I'm just trying to tell you the narrative that is likely to have occurred here. Why can't we account for that possibility? She has gone on like this for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. But I have a feeling we have all heard enough. Yeah. I mean what what else is there to say? You know there there was this text that the girl sent after where she sent it to one of the guys who she thought before she knew she was raped because that your brain compartmentalizes some of these things and it takes a little bit of a while even though it was clear from the Snapchat messages that that's what it was premeditated. She hadn't seen those yet. Yeah. And she was interacting with one of the boys that she thought was also kind of victimized by the situation saying like oh we all were like you know it was too crazy right? And you see the impulse there and I think every woman can identify it like it honestly gets me a little choked up just thinking about it like every woman has sent a text like that to keep the peace. Every woman has and I think about this great scene in one of the best comedies the past like five years bottoms where Rachel sent it as this group of girls has anyone been raped and no one raises their hand and then she says gray area stuff matters too and then everybody raises their hand and I can't speak to another woman in my life who who can't say the same that they haven't had a non-consensual experience it's just you know this was so extreme and the desire to keep the peace under patriarchy and make it so that you're not that problematic woman that is ruining these poor young brave Ivy League boys' lives the onus on them to protect themselves from rape that the idea that rape and predation is inevitable if not natural in this world by these men just shows the psychological burden that is and the onus that is placed on women to own their own vulnerability that is placed upon them by centuries of this in those texts that TMZ leaked I guess that were meant to discredit her all I see is like every one of my sorority sisters who have had to send a text that is similar maybe not in such an extreme circumstance but like sex they didn't remember and consented to just because they didn't want to be that girl how many of those girls are out there and Megan Kelly turned her back on all of them and all of them in the future and Megan Kelly knows what it's like to send that text because she had to balance the very tedious feelings of Roger Ailes for 11 years after he harassed her while no doubt during those years that he was harassing other women at Fox and I'll just say this like I've talked about this kind of vaguely but I was sexually harassed very early in my in my career and I forgive that because it wasn't as extreme as this but but it was very intense in the period and the pressure that you feel and especially with an on-air camera situation where all I wanted was to succeed and like find a way to make it in this very small field in progressive media and I put up with so much until I hit a breaking point and I remember crying and I texted my college friend group and said this is what happened and I think this is where I'm at and I stood up for myself in that moment but I remember before I did it thinking this could be the end like I'm done with this I'm going to go to law school and I'm okay with that you know and that's what's on the line and Megan Kelly knew that that's why she waited so long and that's why she stomached that abuse for so long to get to the point where she was making millions of dollars and like a true conservative she pulls up the ladder behind her I will conclude by for one last time hopefully in my entire life deferring to Megan in a clip from the Kelly file from from more than 10 years ago. >> Let's think about this in the largest sense, and I do want to underscore that Trump has denied these allegations. They're both campaigns are in a pickle because the Clinton camp wants to say, these women who accused Bill Clinton, nobody who's never found guilty, they never had a successful lawsuit. It was 30 years ago. Well, these women, they never had a lawsuit, and the truth is that victims of sexual assault, victims of rape, victims of unwanted brooping, they often don't come forward. They're humiliated, especially back in the day, they were told, move along, it happens to all women, you got to take it. It's a complicity. >> Because it would hurt your career. >> That's right. >> Couldn't have said it better. >> Couldn't have said it better, man, Megan, I'm trying to think of what my closing thoughts are here. >> I have to say, I have to say, I have to say. And I know I've mentioned how being deep in the work of Megan Kelly over the last couple of weeks has not been a pleasant experience for me. But I do do this for work every week, as do you, Emma, we cover slightly different things, but there's a lot of overlap in that we cover what horrible people are doing all the time. And this was the first one where I really felt like I had to stop a lot. >> I think, Matt, it's probably because we actually respect her intellect. She's smart, and it's scarier to see someone know what they're doing consciously. Does that fit into your experience with it, or that's just really mine? >> Yeah, I think so. And like, I just come back to those comments she made where she was like, I'm standing up because I want my daughter to be proud of me, and it's like, will she? I don't know. I don't know. >> I don't know. I love my mom, and I love that my mom would have never been like that. I mean, damn, but that's how it works. That's how it works. Some women internalized patriarchy to the point where it's basically fatal for their entire moral compass, and Megan Kelly has OD'd on that. >> I was out to dinner with my mom a few nights ago, and I told her I was doing this episode. And my mom is like, a liberal leaning person, but she's not super, super political all the time, and she just goes, oh, I can't take her. She's a traitor to women. >> To be honest, my mom would be saying the same thing, but just with a less Jewish, more white lady, yonkers, which she brings out when she's angry, and I love it so much, so, so much. >> Emma Vigolind and Francesca, whose outro I will put in here. Thank you so much for going through this with me today. I came to say, for joining me on this wild ride, thank you so much for literally trudging through with me. I love you so much. >> I love you so much, sweetie. >> Thank you for having me. If you're in Austin or Dallas, I'll be in Dallas, December 16th, and Austin, December 17th with my husband, Matt Leib, we'll be doing stand up, come see us, and listen to the habituation room, wherever you get your podcast, find us on the majority report, we're live, and we'll see you next time, and until then, stay fruity, or should I do like, and until then, stay fruity.