On Friday night, Bill Maher welcomed Megyn Kelly onto his late-night show Real Time. And, as you probably expected (if you know anything about the HBO host), he spent the bulk of the sit-down interview defending her.
“I’m glad you got a warm round of applause,” offered Maher, before asking Kelly if she “missed being on the air.”
“I missed being a voice of reason in the storm, because there’s so much hysteria in the media—for and against [Trump]. And when I left The Kelly File, I remember feeling like I might have a societal obligation to stay, because I did owe it to my audience… but I have three little people who I owe more to in my apartment,” the ex-Fox News host replied.
After some platitudes over Bombshell, which Kelly maintained she had nothing to do with but which she claimed was “a force for good,” the two got into how the “media is broken” and, according to Kelly, “biased [politically]” against Trump.
“It’s disheartening to me,” said Kelly. “The media is completely biased [politically].”
“You know what the media is biased toward? Money. They’re biased toward money and conflict, because that’s what sells,” shot back Maher. “I was watching the Virginia rally this week—there was a gun rally, it was peaceful—and you could see how disappointed the media was that the Civil War didn’t break out.”
“Look: I think there was a liberal slant in the media even before Trump got in there,” argued Kelly, adding that “CNN became the thing Trump said they were, and they weren’t, and now they are, and now they’re indistinguishable from MSNBC.”
“You have to admit, it’s very hard to cover a guy like Trump who does awful things,” replied Maher, “because then you’re gonna look left-wing.”
Kelly disagreed, telling Maher that while Trump attacked her for months during her Kelly File days, she refrained from speaking out against him because she thought “it’s not about you—it’s about the audience, and the truth.”
Eventually, they got around to Kelly’s firing from NBC—which happened after she defended people wearing blackface on occasions like Halloween.
“When that happened, I was angry for you, because this cancel culture…when they do polls, they find, like, 80-90 percent of the people in this country hate this shit. Even liberals hate this shit,” said Maher. “This is one reason why Trump got elected, because people hate political correctness so much that they’ll even take it in the mouth of a werewolf when he’s not politically correct.”
“I mean, you even apologized for something that I didn’t think was that awful,” he continued. “It’s like, why couldn’t you just say, ‘OK, I was a little inartful at how I expressed that, my bad, let’s move on with our lives.’ No. Instead it’s, you have to go away for all-time. Who are these perfect people who have never made any mistake?”
“They’re gross, because all they care about is getting a scalp on the wall,” Maher added of “woke” culture. “They don’t care if you’re really a racist, which you’re not… They always want to find the worst version of what any person is.”
