By The Free Press | Created at 2024-10-01 09:23:44 | Updated at 2024-10-01 11:22:45
2 hours ago
If you’re reading this, chances are you don’t always love legacy media outlets.
Maybe you have seen the mainstream media spin the truth or omit information, possibly in service of a political agenda. Or maybe you’ve watched journalists you respect act as partisan cheerleaders rather than down-the-middle purveyors of information.
In the last few years, there has been an explosion of independent media: podcasts, Substack newsletters, Twitter feeds, YouTube shows—all promising an alternative to the mainstream.
A few days ago, I sat down with someone who cut her teeth in the mainstream media, becoming one of the most influential voices in the political debate. From her meteoric rise at Fox News to her misbegotten stint at NBC, Megyn Kelly has been a central figure in American journalism for over a decade.
You might recall her contentious exchange with then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2015 Republican presidential debate, after which Trump famously accused Kelly of. . . having her period.
Kelly has since abjured the mainstream—she now hosts a podcast on SiriusXM, and also on YouTube—which has fast become one of the most popular political shows in the country. And her success captures the broader media shift away from brands like Fox and NBC to more personal, one-on-one relationships between commentator and consumer.
This new world is not without its own problems. People are hungry for unbiased, unfiltered information. But is independent media always trustworthy? Does it need some of the guardrails and editorial processes that were once common at legacy outlets? Because if one peers into this “independent”—and often right-wing—media landscape, one cannot help but notice the frequent descents into conjecture and conspiracy theory, from commentators like Tucker Carlson, Tim Pool, and Bret Weinstein.
Almost everyone in the media can be seduced by confirmation bias and audience capture, and I don’t pretend to be an exception. Maybe it’s just how we consume news in 2024, but there seems to be so much more of it these days.
On today’s episode, Megyn and I discuss all of this: where she stands politically right now, how the legacy press is handling the presidential election, her guiding principles as a journalist, and how she says she avoided “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—even as some of Trump’s most die-hard supporters showered her with threats.
Scroll down for an edited transcript of part of our conversation, or click below to listen to—or watch—the entire thing.
How she resurrected her career after NBC:
Michael Moynihan: The other day I got this email newsletter from Semafor, and the headline was: “Inside Megyn Kelly’s YouTube Success.” And the first line was that TV network insiders thought your broadcast career was likely over after NBC. And then the rest of the article went on to point out that is not the case, that you have made quite a success of yourself on YouTube. Tell me why you think that is.
Megyn Kelly: I think the reason we’ve done well in this space is I’m genuinely honest. When I don’t know something, I’ll tell them. When we’re speculating about facts and we don’t actually have it nailed down, I’ll tell the audience. And I think over the years they’ve gotten to know I’m not going to mislead them just to earn their love. I want their respect more than I want their love. And I’m also very quick to understand that my opinion is not the only one in the world, that I might be wrong on something.
My audience may disagree with me on something, but I think the bargain is that I’ll tell them how I actually feel after we establish a real set of facts and then how they feel about it is up to them. I don’t judge them and they can tolerate me. So that’s kind of how I think it works. And I think in today’s day and age, that’s refreshing because there are so many guardrails around conversations. This is one of the reasons why Bari and I first fell in love. She’s also trying to create a space where you can have real conversations. And I think I’m just probably slightly more R-rated and blunt in my particular approach.
MM: Someone did say to me the other day that Megyn swears a lot on her show, and I was like, do you listen to the show that I do? How are you different now? Has your worldview changed?
MK: Yeah. I feel like I’ve changed a lot, actually. I would say the me that was on Fox News was doing a different thing than I’m doing now. You know, I was trying to be a straight news journalist who gets opinions from people, and I would guide the discussion. And occasionally I would get fired up over some nonsense that happened on the show. I was always trying to toe the line to guide the discussion without being too opinionated.
Tom Lowell, my executive producer, and I used to joke, like how far are we going to lift the dress up? You know, not that far. Not in that role. And now the dress is all the way up. Now I’ve given my opinion on almost everything. There’s only a couple of areas where I wouldn’t. I realize there’s just no other way of doing this business than really being honest about how you feel.
MM: What are those things that you wouldn’t talk about? You said there are some guardrails. What are they?
MK: I don’t talk about abortion. I just don’t talk about my own personal feelings on abortion. To me, that one just seems like such a crazy one to cross and offer your own opinions on. It just felt so deeply personal and is so personal to every woman I know that I just don’t feel right about it.
On being “center right”—but not ideological:
MM: Are you a conservative at this point? I feel that you’re more conservative now than maybe you have been in the past four or five years. Is that wrong?
MK: Well, I really do feel that the ground shifted under my feet. I don’t feel like I’ve changed my positions on anything other than the trans nonsense. And I explained how I had evolved on that and really am very regretful of the way that I covered that early on in my career. I mean, I forgive a piece of it because my heart was in the right place, but I feel like I was taken advantage of by people who were bad actors.
In any event, I just think the world has changed. It’s gotten so crazy. You could be open-minded to immigration, for example. Like, okay, a lot of corporations seem to need it. Maybe it’s jobs that Americans aren’t taking. It’s the foundation of how our country got started. And then, whammo, you’ve got illegals in the country running around murdering American citizens. And it’s a hard no now. I don’t know if that makes me more conservative or just appropriately reacting to the situation on the ground as it changes. I would tell you that I’m not ideological, that I see myself as center right. I can’t think of much that I’m liberal on, but I’m not like hard right on most things. And I’m easily able to converse with actual liberals and center lefties. And the far lefties aren’t for me.
MM: One of the things that I think interests people, me included, is that you’ve had some really rough exchanges with people in the past: Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich where you told him to come back to your show when he’s gotten some manners. He has come back to your show. Donald Trump has.
MK: Well, I try my best to remove myself from the situation, my own ego. If it’s somebody who is a new subject, like Trump, like Steve Bannon, eventually it’s much more helpful to my audience and to me in terms of my own mental health, frankly, if I can just remove my own ego from it and say, you know, when Trump was coming after me, was he really coming after Megyn Kelly the woman or was he coming after Megyn Kelly the journalist? The “branded” Megyn Kelly? I definitely believe it was the latter and I believe that’s totally fair game.
It’s not to endorse everything that Trump did and all that, but I’m just saying, Megyn Kelly the journalist is fair game, and that made it easier for me to cover him fairly. And same thing with Steve Bannon. He was trying to get a president elected. He wasn’t trying to ruin my life. He was trying to get a president elected and he did it.
And plus, as a rule, I’m very, very forgiving. I’m tough to offend in the first place and I’m very, very forgiving. Life is too short, and you really have absolutely no friends if you’re a journalist if you hold grudges against people who say or do mean things where you’re concerned.
Why MAGA will outlive Donald Trump:
MM: Where do you see the conservative movement these days? Have you moved with it as it’s moved into this more populist direction? Does Trumpism stay? Is this the party that we have forever now?
MK: It will long outlive Donald Trump, and I think it will long dominate past Donald Trump. I think the old conservatives, my pals over at National Review, are an important part of the party. They are a necessary part of the party and represent a huge faction of old-school conservatives. But they’re the minority now in the GOP. And I think MAGA is ascendant and will dominate for decades to come. I navigate it easily because, as I said, I’m not ideological. So what I like to do is try not to dig my heels in too hard in any of these issues. And since I’m not inclined to be a political person, that’s easy for me.
I want to understand what the factions are. What are these guys saying? And it’s the reason why, even when they were actively warring with each other in the same ten-day span, I could have both Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro on my show. I can take different guys or gals from different factions and put them on together and give them a fair hearing. And I want to maintain that. So I try not to really dig too deep personally into any one of these positions that’s driving these factions apart.
On defending Tucker Carlson and dealing with fringe voices:
MM: Do you think that there are boundaries that one shouldn’t trespass in the way a William F. Buckley used to police the kind of outer fringes of conservatism and say, “That’s too far for us.” Do you think that’s happening, particularly with somebody like Tucker Carlson?
MK: No, not with him. I’m not going to say there are no boundaries because I’ve certainly revolted in watching certain personalities go really out there. He’s not one of them. There are some people who push you too far. But I wouldn’t say Tucker is in that category. I think Tucker is and remains a very, very positive force for good, even though he does some podcasts that I don’t align with or agree with or, you know, I don’t approve of.
But he’s a force for good. And I’ll give you just one example. He put Casey Means, a Stanford-educated doctor who wrote this book called Good Energy, on his show. A year earlier, he had her brother, Calley Means, on his show. Both of them explore reasons why our food system is poisoned. Why our healthcare system is so focused on treating the illness as opposed to preventing the illness. That went totally viral because it was really interesting. And then next thing you know, Robert F. Kennedy is out there endorsing Trump, saying “Make America healthy again,” and citing Casey Means and Calley Means. And you have all these doctors from Harvard and from Stanford and all over the country saying, yes, these are very good points. We should be talking about this. And now the national conversation has been changed.
Maybe Tucker will do something on the moon landing that some people may think is crazy, or maybe he’ll go really controversial on Churchill versus Hitler. But it’s worth it because he generates attention and he—more times than not—uses that attention for good.
MM: I wonder, though, if there are certain things that are disqualifying. You know, saying something like, “Churchill was the biggest enemy of World War II,” which is obviously an insane thing to say. That people are doing this to vindicate or actually lessen the guilt of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis is quite worrying. What are the guardrails if somebody says something that is just so transparently crazy?
MK: No, I hear you. But I don’t see Tucker as that. I understood his piece on Churchill to be a revulsion by Tucker to anybody who he considers a neocon. He really is anti-war. He’s kind of a peacenik, especially when it comes to the United States of America. And anybody who’s got their foot on the gas recklessly pushing toward that kind of conflict is going to get it from Tucker. And that is the lens through which he probably decided to reevaluate Churchill, and just how bellicose he was. So that’s how I categorize that for Tucker.
On Trump and Laura Loomer:
MM: Donald Trump recently was hanging around with Laura Loomer, who is herself a 9/11 truther and went to Shanksville to the 9/11 memorial there with Trump. That kind of stopped me for a second. Who is allowing people that are this fringe and this crazy that close to the former president and potentially the next president? Does it worry you at all that people like that can infiltrate Trump’s circle?
MK: I guess it doesn’t worry me, but it doesn’t seem like a great idea. I wish that Trump would be a little bit more careful. I don’t know whether it’s true that she influenced him before he went out there for that debate. I think there’s a large section of the right that is very conspiratorial, and I understand how they got there and they’re a little dangerous in the conversation. It’s not that they should be out of the conversation, but they are a little dangerous because they’d have us question everything, everything. You know, I don’t like 9/11 trutherism at all. I don’t posit that the government told us every piece of truth at every relevant time about the Saudis and everybody else. But in no world will anyone convince me it was an inside job. And I get irritated when people try to take the discussion there. So that’s upsetting to me. However, Trump has proven himself able to espouse rational policy, and when he was president for four years, actually enact it, notwithstanding his penchant for listening to various corners, even very controversial corners. So it doesn’t keep me up at night. It’s not great, but it doesn’t keep me up.
On the collapse of the legacy media:
MM: Let’s talk about how the media has handled this presidential election. What do you think about the media’s involvement in this election in the way they’ve handled Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump?
MK: I’m enjoying watching them shatter what’s left of their teeny, tiny credibility. I mean, it’s frustrating because we have a presidential election weighing in the balance, but it’s kind of satisfying when you want to pound them out of existence just to watch them do it to themselves. Great, you go ahead. You finish the job. You got it. You got this, Dana Bash. I’ll just sit over here. I’ll wait.
I know that the press was against Trump in 2016. Trust me, I saw it everywhere. One of my greatest challenges was trying not to become one of them when he was attacking me every night and my family was under armed security guards because of him. I think I did a decent job of it. It wasn’t perfect, but I think I did a decent job of not being totally unfair to Trump and getting Trump Derangement Syndrome.
But it’s worse now. It’s worse because at least in 2016, they were close enough to their roots that they’re not supposed to offer opinions and they’re not really supposed to put a thumb on the scale. You know, if given an opportunity, they wouldn’t just completely run cover for Hillary Clinton. They’d give her some challenging questions. And let’s face it, she wasn’t a likable person. So that was kind of easy for them.
So now they’re in a panic. Even though they had Trump for four years as president, they saw he wasn’t some lunatic. He actually really helped the country in many ways. But then January 6 came. That was bad. And so they’ve got their worst assumptions about Trump all in full gear and they’re just truly open campaign operatives.
On the attacks on her from Donald Trump and the left:
MM: You’ve been called a racist. You’ve pretty consistently been called a racist. You’ve been pretty consistently called a transphobe. Tell me how that affects your life.
MK: So it’s never caused me to second-guess who I am. And honestly, over all those years, it’s like God would send me somebody, like some person of color at my school or at the deli or on the street would come over and be like, “You’re great, right on, high-five. Keep doing what you’re doing.” Just like a little angel to let you know, everyone knows this is bullshit. You’re fine. Keep speaking the truth. And so that’s what I do.
You know, the only people I’ve ever gotten harassed by are leftists, like on the streets of New York, who just sort of yell generic things at me. It’s not like “You’re racist,” but just nasty things. They don’t like me as a Fox News anchor. And the hardcore Trump faithful were very angry with me after that debate and when Trump kept stirring it up. And I definitely got a few F-bombs and threatening comments and emails and texts.
On her controversial exit from NBC:
MM: So everybody has hated you at a certain point, running the gamut from left to right, people are just denouncing Megyn Kelly on the street?
MK: Totally. But can I tell you, of all the people who have hated me or come after me or tried to ruin my life, there’s one who sits above them all as the absolute worst. And that one goes by the letters N-B-C.
MM: When NBC tried to destroy you, I mean, was that purely politics?
MK: What actually happened prior to my abrupt departure from NBC is a long story. But I’ll tell you another quick story, which is sometimes in contract law, when someone is wrongly pushed out of a position, they are forced to sign a deal in order to get the money that is already owed to them and that they would be entitled to—if any jury saw this case in order to actually just get that without having to litigate—they have to sign these things called confidentiality agreements. And as a lawyer, I’m well-schooled in those.
And so at this point, not connected at all to that discussion, I really choose not to say anything more about NBC.
Why she’s voting for Trump:
MM: We have another month and a half to the election. Give me a bit of prognostication.
MK: Well, honestly, I shudder to think of Trump losing. I have said openly that I’m going to vote for Trump. I said it the day that Biden pushed through his Title IX changes and just rolled out the red carpet for men and boys to go into our daughters’ locker rooms and bathrooms and beyond and try to redefine what a woman is with his pen.
I mean, a non compos mentis president just decided to redefine womanhood. That was a bridge too far for me. And that was the first time in my career I’ve ever come out and said, this is who I’m voting for. And just so your audience knows, I am a very independent voter. In my eight presidential elections that I’ve been alive to vote for, I voted for four Democrats and four Republicans. I’m not like some right down the line Republican voter. I vote for the person, not the party. But I’m definitely voting Trump. And I can’t think of a world in which we wake up and he didn’t win, because it’s going to mean a dramatic transformation of the country when it comes to the illegal immigration situation. It just can’t go on like this. We can’t have a country where, under Kamala and Biden, 10.4 million illegals came in. Under Trump it was 2.3.
MM: Is that your top issue, the one that is motivating your vote more than any other?
MK: It’s the one I think is the most important and most dangerous for us all. But the gender thing is huge for me. You know, I’ve said before, I’m almost a single-issue voter. But then the almost is in there because of the immigration issue. It’s not a huge issue that’s affecting millions of people like the immigration thing is, but we’re chopping off the body parts of perfectly healthy minors who just need a little therapy on divorces, on body image, on depression, on puberty. We have an entire system, the medical system, the school systems that are working together to push them, without question, toward sterility, an entirely changed life where their penis is chopped off, where a young girl trying to create a fake phallus loses almost all of her forearm, and it’s down to the tendon and bone, only to create something that will never look like an actual male organ. And then when these kids get through it and realize, my God, I’m actually not trans at all.
And where will they turn? That cannot be undone. None of it can. They will never have children. Those women will never breastfeed. They will never be able to change the forearm and the body parts and the voice and the Adam’s apple and all of it. It’s horrific. It’s like a science fiction horror film, what we’re doing to minors who we won’t even let get tattoos until they reach a certain age. It’s deeply immoral. It’s genuinely evil.
On her shift on trans ideology and why Democrats are stuck in the woke moment:
MM: It’s interesting because I’ve seen you on this issue over the years and you were on the other side. The last couple of years I’ve seen that change. What was it that did that? Was there some experience in your child’s school? Was it something personal?
MK: Once they started coming for the children, I really got alarmed. It’s not that I didn’t know children were involved in this thing. I did a segment on NBC with so-called trans children and I urged people to be understanding and to be non-bullying. And I think most Americans start from that point. We don’t want a bully. We want to be accepting. We don’t want to be unkind. And certainly women in particular, we always tap into our empathy.
And so that’s how I started. And by the way, I have trans people in my family and in my husband’s family. And I had no wish to be offensive to them. I understood. I think these are genuinely trans people who genuinely had gender dysphoria from a very, very young age. This wasn’t a societal contagion like what is affecting our girls in particular right now. But then that was 2018. Now, by the time we get to 2020, 2021, I looked around and the whole world has shifted. This is being offered to our kids like lasagna and chicken parm on an Italian menu. You just pick the one you want, you can do it.
And I did see at my daughter’s school that in the tenth grade, which only had 50 students in it when we were in New York, suddenly they had some nine girls who would declare themselves trans. It’s a social contagion. And you have Lisa Littman at Brown, who put out that very good study, which got completely assailed, that showed it was a social contagion. You had Abigail Shrier’s book in 2020, Irreversible Damage, which showed it’s a social contagion. I realize we’ve taken a dark turn. It’s happening right now to young kids, to 13-year-olds. If we don’t start talking about it and start standing up for our girls who are being hurt, and our boys, too, we’re going to get a whole lot more of it. So, yeah, it’s a big thing.
MM: I wonder if, on the Democratic side, they’re realizing that the 2020 moment, that woke moment, and even maybe the #MeToo moment has passed and they have to tack more to the center, that maybe the Democrats are coming back to earth on some of these culture war issues.
MK: I wish that were so, but I don’t believe that for one minute. I think they are just as far left and hard left on these issues as they were in 2020. They’ve just realized they need to hide it. Kamala Harris would not have selected Tim Walz as her running mate if I were wrong. She would have said, I don’t want that. And we’ve got to move on from that. That was a crazy period in our history, and I’ve seen the light on this, and I just don’t think there’s any evidence of that. I believe Kamala Harris, among the few things she’s genuinely committed to, are abortion and full wokeness, DEI all the way. With no exceptions. I think that’s one of the things she found attractive about Tim Walz. And there are many ways the government, including the president, can shove that down our throats.
What makes her optimistic:
MM: Megyn Kelly, give me a positive vision of America’s future. Because you’ve given me quite a dark one.
MK: Okay. So first of all, I’ll start where we began, Bari Weiss and yours truly. And you’re in there too, Moynihan. So, Bari, I’ve said to her before, I think on the ideological scale, she’s definitely not a far lefty. She’s probably like, if 1 is the super far left and 10 is the super far right, I put her at like a 4 or 5 and I put myself at like a 6 or 7, you know. And yet we’re dear friends. I absolutely adore her. She comes on my show and I go on hers, and that works. We can talk to each other. We still love each other and don’t care about the differences that divide us. They’re unimportant in the grand scheme. I accept; I don’t judge. But all three of us have helped create and exist now in this ecosystem. That is the antidote to all the media problems that we discussed. And it’s not only working, it’s crushing. It’s literally crushing mainstream media. Their numbers are down. They’re down. They want to get into our lane.
That’s good because they’re being rejected. They’re unimportant and they’re irrelevant. The nation knows it, and they know it too. Their time is very limited. So that’s a good thing.
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