Megyn Kelly needs help

Two people I love, geographically far apart, one of whom knows Megyn Kelly well, had the exact same reaction regarding her smearing of Oprah Winfrey after her historic DNC convention address.

“She’s sick,” they both said.

For the record, here is what Kelly said:

I’ll explain the difference between Oprah Winfrey and Megyn Kelly in a bit, but for now let’s stay focused on the cruelty, which is so much a part of the MAGA culture.

MAGA is fascism, and fascism is MAGA. Fascism is a dogma and philosophy built on violence, coercion and cruelty. I have written and talked about this incessantly for almost 10 years. When I call Trump a fascist, my purpose in doing so is not to be hyperbolic, but rather precise. He is.

Here is what Ann Coulter, a MAGA super skank and fascist, said about Gus Walz on X during a moment that every decent person in the world could comprehend was something beautiful:

Coulter has since deleted the post.

The moment was transcendent because it was an exhibition of love in its absolute purest form. It touched my heart and yours, but it offended the malice of people like Ann Coulter, whose disorders have been her vocation and livelihood. She is a mirror of Trump, his feminine reflection, equally vicious, cold and mean. It is indisputable that she is a public figure, much like Trump, but why should that mean that their inanities, insanities and cruelties are reported as news, as opposed to being regarded as cries for help from broken people?

Over at CNN, Scott Jennings continued to solidify his position under Matt Schlapp as the most embarrassing alumni of the Bush-Cheney political team. Here is an exchange that occurred when Jennings saw American flags waving above the convention of the world’s oldest political party, and the home of FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and Medal of Honor recipient Daniel Inouye:

ANDERSON COOPER: There is a I mean, the energy here is quite intense. It’s been building pretty much every night ever since.

AUDIE CORNISH: It is. I mean, last night you had a lot of speakers come to the floor and say, like Oprah did, I’m an independent. I’m talking to you or Republicans who spoke and said, look, this is what you should think tonight. I do see some effort to turn on some of the base that people thought she was vulnerable with, particularly Black men. There’s comedian D.L. Hughley.

You had Rep. Colin Allred, Maxwell Frost, you. And then, of course, the Central Park Five, which is a very moving moment.

But it’s the idea of taking these communities that people thought, is she soft with them or not? And her saying, look, I see you, I see and I see the different generations of you and giving them a nod tonight.

SCOTT JENNINGS: And this is a pretty loud in here right now. It’s maybe the loudest we’ve seen it, during the convention. I think there’s more people in here.

These American flags were sort of startling to me Van, normally you guys are burning these things. But tonight you’re waving them. Just kidding.

DAVID AXELROD: No, can I can I I’m sorry. Go ahead.

No, no. But it but but to me, this speech tonight by Harris, it’s the true beginning of the campaign for her I mean this this pre period has been weird because of the way she got into the race. Now it’s on.

There was no response to Jennings’ idiocy from his captive colleagues, but the question remains why CNN thinks MAGA needs an interpreter. Jennings is routinely dishonest, usually wrong, never insightful, and increasingly extreme. CNN CEO Mark Thompson should evaluate this situation through a journalistic prism. The presence of a propagandist does not indicate “balance,” but rather corruption, and explains perfectly the total collapse of trust between the American people and the media.

I first met Megyn Kelly during the 2008 campaign when she was rising at Fox News. She wanted a Sarah Palin interview and was relentless, funny and charming with regard to how she went about pursuing it. In the end, she never had a chance because I was against Palin being interviewed by any person whose IQ was 100 points higher than hers. At any rate, Megyn Kelly went on to great success inside the Fox News alternate reality sphere, but lacked the perspective to understand how detached that perspective was from reality. When she was hired at NBC, I remember sitting in former MSNBC president Phil Griffin’s office laughing about the magnitude of the disaster to come, and speculating about how much time Andy Lack, its architect, had remaining.

More than anything else in the world, Megyn Kelly wanted to be Oprah — or more precisely, she wanted to fill the vacant space left by her retirement from daytime television. Certainly, it is how NBC positioned the show, even though the ambition was as delusional as Trump’s claims that he would win the election. In the end, Megyn Kelly was undone by this epic weirdness, which would have been normal in the Fox sphere. Remember, the year was 2018 when she said this:

It wasn’t an isolated incident.

I don’t know what is in Megyn Kelly’s heart, but when you read these quotes, and consider her obsession with transgender athletes, it does raise some questions:

“Santa is what he is, which is white.”

“The girl is no saint either,” referring to a black teenager in a bathing suit who was pinned down by police officers at a pool party.

Kelly has talked about the culture in black communities like this:

And there's also culture, there's also culture that develops, where it's anti -- it's them versus us, it's anti-cop. It's sort of -- people have called it the “thug mentality,” and that's a controversial term. But that it's cool to sort of hate the cops, and hang out - and be somebody who doesn't necessarily prize being there for your family, and so on. And how do you reverse that? 

When discussing Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who is a cisgender woman, not transgender nor intersex, she said:

This is such an outrage. Look at this: this is a man. This is a man who is competing in the boxing tournament for women.

Is she a racist and a bigot, or just a sadistic and attention-grabbing bully?

Here is the main difference between Megyn Kelly and Oprah Winfrey.

Megyn Kelly was paid $69,000,000.00 to never appear on NBC again.

Think about that. She was paid $69 million for spectacularly failing and getting off TV.

Oprah made her money from being on TV.

Michelle Obama talked about this phenomenon in her DNC speech:

She [Kamala Harris] understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward [emphasis added].

Oprah Winfrey was born in 1954, the same year as Brown vs. Board of Education. She was born into an apartheid society at the edge of profound change, slightly less than 90 years after the abolition of slavery and the surrender of the Confederacy. What is it that Megyn Kelly can’t comprehend about the humiliation of unearned and unfair judgements?

What can’t she process about Dr. King’s explanation about the allure of white supremacy depicted at the end of “Selma?”

Does she not believe Oprah Winfrey is black? Or, does she believe Oprah’s success should trigger amnesia around brutal indignities?

Or maybe, what is wrong with Megyn Kelly?

The answer to that final question is beyond my reach, but I know it’s something big enough that she was paid more money than any person in human history to just go away, but she didn’t have the emotional intelligence to get the message — which is probably another big difference between her and Oprah.

My point is that the cruelty is a pattern, a marker and an identifier. It is contemptible, and it all belongs to Trump, just like Megyn Kelly, Scott Jennings and Ann Coulter.

America is so much bigger than these small people, and that, in the end, is the biggest difference between Oprah and Megyn.

Oprah is a giant, and Megyn Kelly is so small that you need a microscope to see her.

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