Underemployed television talent Megyn Kelly—the former Fox News star who jumped to NBC News for $23 million a year but was fired 17 months later for some impolitic comments about Halloween blackface—has been off the air for more than two years.
Which gives her a lot of free time, apparently, to fight with liberal celebrities and Democratic office-holders on Twitter on behalf of her one-time nemesis, soon-to-be ex-president Donald Trump, and Trump’s irate and aggrieved supporters making baseless claims of election fraud.
Late Monday, she posted a snippet from the latest installment of her podcast, The Megyn Kelly Show, in which she doubled down on her angry attacks against Democrats and President-elect Joe Biden for their alleged “hypocrisy” in his Saturday speech calling for national unity and an end to the demonization of political adversaries.
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“For four years they have been called the dregs of society,” Kelly—who claims to channel the rage, sorrow, and injured feelings of millions of disaffected, disenfranchised Trump supporters—declared in the segment, which includes soundbites of such celebs as Rob Reiner and Joy Behar, among others, as if Biden is personally responsible for their rhetoric.
“It wasn’t enough to go after Trump. Anyone who supported him was labeled a racist, xenophobic, transphobic bigot,” Kelly claimed hyperbolically. “Now that Biden’s won, those 71 million Republican voters are supposed to simply choose ‘healing.’ And all that stuff that the left said about them being absolutely awful, well, forget about that. ”
While Kelly’s audio op-ed is rife with false equivalencies, at least she acknowledges that Biden won. Because she does little if anything career-wise that isn’t calculated, the question is, what is Kelly up to? Now that she has formed her own independent media company, Devil May Care Media, with an assist from former Glenn Beck executive Chris Balfe, is she positioning herself to become a congenial destination for allegedly persecuted Trumpkins?
Whatever is going on, Kelly’s freshly configured hyper-partisan persona is hardly designed to appeal to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s new world order, which in recent days, with a couple of notable exceptions, has treated the 45th president of the United States as fatally damaged goods.
“Megyn promised to speak without worrying about corporate overlords silencing her,” Kelly’s former Fox News colleague Juliet Huddy told The Daily Beast. “That’s why she launched her own podcast network—and clearly she’s showing she’s fearless when it comes to criticism, which she’s obviously getting a lot of. If anyone had any doubt about her political convictions, I think she’s cleared those doubts up.”
Newmax CEO and majority owner Chris Ruddy, meanwhile, told The Daily Beast: “Megyn Kelly is a great television talent. She’s got a big following, and I would be open to considering her for Newsmax. We have had some discussions with her but I can’t reveal the details.”
Aside from discussing a possible role at Newsmax—which has become even more aggressively Trumpist since Nov. 3 and has yet to call the election for Biden—Kelly has also spoken to the even more virulently Trump-worshipping One America News Network, along with other television outlets, according to a knowledgeable industry source.
However, a source close to Kelly, who will celebrate her 50th birthday on Nov. 18, told The Daily Beast that she has “received multiple 7-figure offers to return to TV” and has “turned them all down” because, in the end, she wishes not to answer to bosses, and still has plenty of cash from the balance of her truncated three-year, $69 million NBC contract. What’s more, the source said, she wants to spend more time with her family. “Money is no longer a lure,” said the source. “Her kids are.”
Yet in the week since more than 75 million Americans, compared to Trump’s around 71 million voters, gave President-elect Joe Biden a preliminary total of 290 electoral votes—20 more than he needed to win, compared to the current president’s 214, the statistical projections of Kelly’s right-leaning, previously Trump-friendly former employer—Kelly’s personal Twitter feed has been a raging, pro-Trump bickerfest.
Hardly the level-headed, politically adept, champion of sexually harassed women portrayed by Charlize Theron in the Fox News docudrama Bombshell, the Twitter version of Megyn Kelly is a scrappy, razor-tongued brawler. Indeed, she has been squabbling with everyone from Biden to the Cuomo brothers to Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California, to even her former Fox News colleague and current CNN commentator, Kirsten Powers.
“Poor @Kirsten Powers. Always promising to be better and then…not,” Kelly retorted after Powers, a former Daily Beast columnist, tweeted at Kelly and Ric Grenell, Trump’s erstwhile acting director of national intelligence: “yeah it makes total sense that Biden’s call for unity and healing and the end of demonization political opponents would be offensive to you and them. Smh.”
Late Monday, Powers—who famously joined an epic on-air battle with Kelly in July 2010 over her apparent obsession with the New Black Panther Party, continued returning fire: “Hi Megyn. Yes, I will always try to do better, will fall short, and will continue trying. If that makes me pathetic in your book, so be it. If you ever decide to try and do better, I can promise you—I won't mock you for it.”
