Megyn Kelly unleashed on primetime host Rachel Maddow for daring to publicly criticize MSNBC—as well as her network bosses for “letting” her do so.
Kelly went on about what she’d do “if one of my employees ever did this to me,” on the latest episode of her Megyn Kelly Show. “I would fire them so fast,” she said, “Are you actually going to let an employee, that’s what she is, Rachel Maddow—talk about you, your company, and your decision making this way?”
Kelly’s latest tirade comes after Maddow used airtime during her show Monday to call the axing of Joy Reid’s show—and the other non-white hosts’ shows during the network’s programming shakeup—“indefensible.”
“I will tell you it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two—count them, two—non-white hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend,” Maddow said. “And that feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.”
“She took her boss’s faces and rubbed them in s--t last night,” Kelly said Tuesday, questioning whether Maddow’s corporate overlord Mark Lazarus has the “testicular fortitude to stand up for yourself as a professional and executive.” What NBC execs should do, she said, is tell Maddow, “You’re fired for insubordination and for disparaging the network publicly in front of our four viewers.”
NBC did, in fact, have the fortitude to fire Kelly in 2018, when she used her show on the fourth hour of Today to defend wearing blackface for Halloween. Megyn Kelly Today was already languishing in ratings before her offensive on air comments and was canceled within weeks of the controversial moment.
But now it seems Kelly is team NBC, at least when it comes to her desire to see Maddow punished for daring to speak out. Maddow “should be fired,” she argued Tuesday. And the only reason MSNBC “won’t fire her,” she added, “I don’t say the ‘P’ word, but they are a bunch of ‘P’s,’” she concluded, without offering any explanation for why the network wasn’t too “P” to fire her six years ago.
The real problem for Kelly is that to her, Maddow “oozes sanctimony and self-righteousness,” she said. “What she got away with on the air last night was absolutely disrespectful and it was insubordinate.” And, to her, it is evidence of how she is “never one to not be the center of attention if she can find a way of injecting herself into a story.”
