Previous post
I used to listen to Megyn Kelly all the time. Not out of loyalty or habit, but because she was sharp, disciplined, and investigative. She booked strong guests and wasn’t afraid to ask real questions. Nonsense was never part of her repertoire. When Megyn was good, she was very good.
That’s why her recent turn toward the unhinged is so jarring.
One really has to question how Megyn Kelly made such a quick turnaround in just over two months.
What happened? (AKA Who is paying her to be this way now?) pic.twitter.com/811nQLeEVY
— RBe (@RBPundit) December 22, 2025
This isn’t about one fight, one conference, or one speech at Turning Point. This is about a sudden shift in tone, posture, and behavior that feels less like growth and more like whiplash. And it started months ago. Megyn didn’t gradually evolve. She snapped. Louder. Touchier. More grievance-driven. More interested in applause and smashing that Like button than in restraint.
I noticed it well before AmericaFest, but that mess put a spotlight on it.
After AmericaFest, Megyn gave Vanity Fair her version of events.
Moments after Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, opened the conference with a speech calling her late husband a “peacemaker” and urging an end to the squabbling, Shapiro issued a blistering jeremiad that recalled William F. Buckley Jr.’s attempted excommunication of the far right. “The conservative movement is in serious danger,” Shapiro said, “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair.”
Kelly argued that figures like Shapiro and Weiss are actually fueling the rise of antisemitism through their attempts to censor criticism of Israel. “They are making antisemites,” she said. “Tucker is not making antisemites. They are.”
[…]“I found it kind of funny that Ben thinks he has the power to decide who gets excommunicated from the conservative movement,” Kelly responded in her own appearance onstage the following night. “It reminded me when the girl who was the head of our middle school chorus told me she was going to take all of my friends away from me.” – Vanity Fair
Megyn wants us to believe she’s bravely standing up to conservative gatekeepers. She casts Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss as establishment scolds clutching imaginary rulebooks while she alone speaks truth to the people. That framing flatters her. It also ignores something obvious.
Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss actually built something. Not just brands, but institutions. Media companies with staff, standards, and structure. You can dislike their judgments without pretending they’re just random scolds yelling from the sidelines.
Megyn, meanwhile, is trying to build her own media universe. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it does explain the edge in her voice lately. It explains why criticism suddenly feels like betrayal. Why everything turns personal. Why disagreement now gets treated like an attack.
This feud didn’t escalate because Megyn was silenced. And let’s be clear, she is not silenced. And shouldn’t be. No, this escalated because she wanted it escalated.
She went straight to calling people cowards. She accused former friends of acting out of fear. She reframed a standards dispute as a moral ambush. She turned a debate about Candace Owens and conspiracy culture into a referendum on Israel loyalty. That wasn’t brave. It was convenient.
The former Fox News host — and later disastrous NBC experiment — says she hates cancel culture. Fine. So do I. But yelling “coward” at anyone who disagrees with you isn’t a principled stand against cancellation. It’s just another version of it. When every criticism becomes persecution, standards stop mattering.
If you want to watch someone so convinced of her own righteousness that she loses all perspective, here you go.
What changed wasn’t Megyn’s opinions. It was her posture.
She stopped sounding like someone in command of the room and started sounding like someone reacting to it — and that’s not attractive. The line between critique and personal grievance blurred. The show began to feel less like a guided conversation and more like a live-wire performance calibrated for reaction. That shift became hard to miss.
Rush Limbaugh understood something a lot of modern media figures don’t — and yes, I’m bringing up the legend, because the contrast matters.
Rush provoked constantly. He offended daily. But he never let the audience drive the bus. He decided where the show went. He used humor, repetition, and clarity to lead listeners somewhere, not chase whatever noise happened to be loudest that day. He didn’t confuse volume with authority. Frankly, if Rush were still with us, I suspect Megyn wouldn’t hesitate to blast him too.
Megyn used to operate closer to that model. Lately, it feels reversed. When crowd energy rises, the rhetoric escalates. When applause hits, the language sharpens. That’s not command. It’s a feedback loop. And feedback loops are unforgiving.
What bothers me isn’t that Megyn disagrees with Ben or Bari. Disagreements are normal. Movements argue. That’s how lines get tested. What’s striking is how quickly disagreement turned theatrical. Debate slid into display.
You can push back without turning everything into a spectacle. Megyn is smart enough to know that. Which is why this phase feels so unnecessary.
So why is Megyn acting this way?
My read is simple. She’s stuck in an awkward middle phase — powerful enough to matter, but not powerful enough to control where the movement goes. It’s a frustrating place to live.
She’s no longer fighting her way in. She’s also not sitting securely atop an institution the way Ben Shapiro or Bari Weiss now are. They’ve locked in structure and authority that doesn’t rise or fall on nightly applause. Megyn has influence, but it’s audience-dependent influence, not institutional power.
And when you don’t control the institution, you end up chasing the crowd instead of leading it.
Feature Image: Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons/edited in Canva cropped and added background
Good luck using a blog to fix a media personality.
Anyway, you are sort of on the right track, I think. A media personality is like a brand. Rush Limbaugh understood why people wanted to listen to him, and the longer his career progressed the better he got at giving his audience what they wanted. That is, Limbaugh stayed on brand, and he actually improved his brand. That is hard work. Fortunately, for Limbaugh, what Limbaugh gave his audience was also good for him.
Megyn Kelly has not figured out why her audience listens to her. That is, she cannot define her brand. Worse, what she now wants to give her audience is not especially good for any of us. The gotcha nonsense is silly.
_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
2 Comments