Once again, these hateful conservatives are out here saying the quiet part loud with no remorse. And this time, it’s in writing. Megyn Kelly, the ex-longtime Fox News anchor, responded to a tweet from Cori Bush, the Democratic U.S. Congresswoman from Missouri, with a shocking amount of racist glee on Tuesday.
“The Declaration of Independence was written by enslavers and didn’t recognize Black people as human,” Bush tweeted. “Today is a great day to demand Reparations Now.” And Kelly, who now hosts a podcast after being ousted from her latest network news job due to her response to a blackface scandal (more on that later), quoted Bush’s tweet and wrote, “I love knowing how this day ‘triggers’ her. Genuinely brings me joy.”
And there you have it. Megyn wants us to know that she gets nothing but pure joy from witnessing the pain that a modern descendant of enslaved Americans feels when an entire nation celebrates the history and culture that enslaved her family and still benefits off of their stolen work. Knowing that there are individual Black Americans who are hurting because their ancestors built the damn nation for free, plus the cost of their lives, and now rich white people are getting the benefits while the descendants merely ask for simple reparations, well, that just really tickles her funny bone and makes her happy — especially during the same week that the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action. That must just be the icing on the cake for Ms. Megyn Kelly. She loves this kind of stuff!
Megyn Kelly’s long history of racist comments
I’m taking a little solace in the fact that Kelly’s career has materially suffered because of her overt racism, among other things, and has been going downhill for several years, while Bush’s has been on an upward trajectory because she is the best. Cori Bush was once a homeless single mother, then a pastor and a nurse-turned-community organizer, turned Congresswoman serving on the House Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and as Vice Chair of the Majority Leader Task Force on Poverty and Opportunity, just to name a few things.
On the other hand, Megyn Kelly was once Chief Blonde Lady at Fox News and anchored her own show, The Kelly File. She did suffer some pretty shitty sexist situations close to the end of her time there. You’ll probably remember some of the treatment she got from then-candidate Trump as a Fox journalist and mediator during the 2016 election for being a tough questioner. He famously told CNN, “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” And remember when we were all scandalized by Trump saying that? Those were simpler times when we were shocked and aghast by his relatively low-level sexual harassment. Relatively.
A highly positioned female journalist and political pundit did not deserve that kind of treatment, and I supported her at the time. But the truly enlightened among us know you don’t have to abuse others just because you have been abused. It’s called cycle-breaking, Megyn! After her contract ended soon after the presidential election, Kelly moved to NBC, where she lasted a few more years before her contract was terminated. NPR referred to the series of events as her “implosion.”
Kelly was ousted from her network job at NBC (with her multi-million payout still intact) following some truly out-of-touch and gross comments she made on-air about white reality star Luann de Lesseps’s god damned stupid scandal over wearing blackface on an episode of the Real Housewives of New York for her Diana Ross costume.
Like a freaking idiot (and when there’s smoke, there’s usually fire), speaking on her segment of The Today Show, Kelly addressed the controversy by saying, “What is racist? Truly, do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface for Halloween or a Black person who put on whiteface for Halloween. When I was a kid, it was OK as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”
Damn it, Megyn! You were a kid in the 70s before women could get credit cards! So maybe things have changed a little bit. Plus, no, it wasn’t OK then, you thought it was because you were safely entrenched in a universe of white middle-class confirmation bias where no one called you out for being offensively racist. And as a public figure, you should just freaking know not to defend blackface even if your racist ass secretly wants to support it. (Which we all know it does.)
Also, this is the same woman who, in 2013, said on the air, “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white. Jesus was a white man, too.” So there you have it. We’re not surprised by your racist glee, Megyn Kelly. We’re just disgusted.
(featured image: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Fortune)
