There's something uniquely infuriating about watching someone fail upward. And nobody—absolutely fucking nobody—has failed upward quite like Megyn Kelly.

From her bigoted "Santa is white" rants to her disastrous NBC tenure that ended with a $69 million golden parachute for spouting racist garbage, Kelly has mastered the art of monetizing controversy while pretending to stand on principle. She's not just a hypocrite; she's a dangerous one—a wolf in journalist's clothing who's spent years poisoning public discourse while claiming to be one of its guardians.

Remember December 2013? While most of us were hanging ornaments and buying gifts, Kelly was on Fox News engaging in the most pressing debate of our time: making damn sure everyone knew Santa Claus is white. Yes, really. This highly educated attorney and "serious journalist" dedicated airtime to declaring, "Santa just is white" and that Jesus was white too, despite historical evidence suggesting otherwise.

The absurdity would be laughable if it weren't so revealing. In that moment, Kelly showed exactly who she was—someone willing to use her platform to defend whiteness itself from the terrifying prospect of inclusion. It wasn't a slip; it was a mission statement.

The look in her eyes during that segment—that smug, condescending certainty—showed everything we needed to know about her worldview. The message was clear: tradition means whiteness, and any deviation is an attack to be defended against. This wasn't journalism. This was cultural warfare disguised as news.

Kelly's most famous moment came during the 2015 Republican presidential debate when she confronted Donaldo Shitsburger about his history of misogynistic comments. "You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,' 'slobs,' and 'disgusting animals,'" she said, her voice dripping with practiced moral authority.

When Donny McStinkbottom later suggested she had "blood coming out of her wherever," Kelly briefly became a feminist icon—the conservative woman standing up to male chauvinism.

But here's the problem: Kelly's feminism has always been performative and selective. When it served her career to confront Turdly Trump, she did. When it served her career to stay silent about Fox CEO Roger Ailes's sexual harassment for years, she did that too. Only when Gretchen Carlson filed her lawsuit in 2016 did Kelly suddenly find her voice, revealing in her memoir that she, too, had been harassed.

The stench of opportunism is unmistakable. Kelly waited until the waters were safe, until speaking wouldn't cost her anything, and then rewrote herself as a crusader. You can almost hear the book deal being negotiated while she was typing her "brave" revelations.

If there's a single moment that encapsulates Kelly's toxic ignorance, it's her 2018 NBC "Today" show segment where she questioned why blackface is inappropriate for Halloween costumes.

"What is racist?" she pondered with furrowed brow. "You truly do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface at Halloween or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween. Back when I was a kid, that was okay as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character."

The entitlement required to position yourself as the arbiter of what Black Americans should be offended by is staggering. The willful ignorance of American history required to "just ask questions" about blackface is breathtaking. This wasn't naive curiosity—it was the raw exposure of a worldview marinated in privilege.

NBC paid her $69 million to go away after this debacle. Let that sink in. Kelly failed so spectacularly that she was paid more money than most people will ever see in their lifetime just to disappear. If there's a better example of white privilege in media, I've yet to see it.

Perhaps most damaging has been Kelly's willingness to provide platforms for dangerous voices under the guise of "hearing all sides." Her 2017 interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones—a man who tormented Sandy Hook parents by claiming their murdered children never existed—wasn't journalism; it was exploitation.

The pain of grieving parents became a ratings opportunity. The trauma of a community became a career move. When advertisers pulled out and public pressure mounted, Kelly defended herself with journalism's most hollow excuse: "We need to shine a light." But lights don't legitimize; they illuminate what should remain in darkness.

Similarly, her softball interview with Vladimir Putin in 2017 failed to challenge one of the world's most dangerous autocrats on anything substantial. The woman who built her brand on "tough questions" suddenly couldn't find any when sitting across from an actual despot. The contrast between her aggressive questioning of domestic political figures and her deference to Putin tells you everything about her priorities: ratings over responsibility, every time.

Kelly has mastered the art of throwing punches while crying foul. In 2016, she accused Newt Gingrich of being "fascinated with sex" when he objected to her focus on Trump's sexual misconduct allegations. The exchange went viral, with Kelly positioned as the reasonable journalist cornered by an angry man.

But this same "reasonable journalist" would soon suggest on her NBC show that fat-shaming "worked" for some people. The same voice that condemned misogyny defended body shaming. The same figure who positioned herself as a champion of women regularly undermined women's movements when they didn't align with her brand.

In 2017-2018, as the #MeToo movement gained momentum, Kelly often deployed "concerns" about whether women were "taking it too far"—effectively providing cover for men while maintaining plausible deniability about her intentions. It was classic Kelly: claiming the middle ground while subtly reinforcing the status quo.

After NBC fired her, Kelly did what every failed mainstream media figure does: she rebranded as a crusader against "cancel culture" and "media bias." The irony is thick enough to choke on. The woman who built her career within the most biased cable news network in America suddenly positioned herself as an objective outsider fighting against institutional power.

Her independent media career since 2019 has been a masterclass in grievance monetization. Unable to secure another major network position, she's cultivated an audience of disaffected viewers who believe they're getting "unfiltered truth"—when what they're really getting is the same old right-wing talking points laundered through Kelly's practiced "reasonable" tone.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kelly regularly platformed vaccine skeptics, giving dangerous misinformation the veneer of legitimate debate. The consequences of such "just asking questions" approaches to public health are measured in lives, not ratings—but Kelly has never seemed particularly concerned with that distinction.

What makes Kelly truly dangerous isn't just her bigoted views or her hypocritical stance on women's issues. It's her ability to present herself as a reasonable, thoughtful voice while advancing unreasonable, thoughtless positions. It's her practiced tone of authority, her strategic deployment of "just asking questions" rhetoric, and her cynical manipulation of journalism's norms to legitimize views that deserve no legitimacy.

According to media critic Jay Rosen, "The problem with figures like Kelly is that they use the forms of journalism—the interview format, the investigative tone, the claim to objectivity—while violating its substance."[^1] Kelly doesn't practice journalism; she performs it, like a child playing dress-up in her parent's clothes.

Former MSNBC host Touré put it more bluntly: "Kelly represents something insidious in media—the laundering of biased perspectives through a veneer of objectivity."[^2] This is precisely why her failures continue to be rewarded: she delivers exactly what power structures want while maintaining the fiction that she's challenging them.

The Kelly phenomenon isn't an accident; it's the predictable result of a media ecosystem that values controversy over truth, personality over substance, and ratings over responsibility. She is both its creation and its perpetuator—a perfect closed loop of profitable outrage.

As consumers of media, we have a responsibility to recognize figures like Kelly for what they are: entertainers masquerading as journalists, opportunists posing as truth-seekers, hypocrites claiming principle. Their questions aren't asked in good faith. Their concerns aren't genuine. Their outrage is manufactured to serve themselves and the power structures they pretend to challenge.

True journalism—the kind that serves democracy rather than undermines it—requires rigor, consistency, and a genuine commitment to truth over controversy. It requires acknowledging one's own biases rather than hiding behind a facade of objectivity. Most importantly, it requires valuing human dignity above ratings.

Kelly has built her entire career doing the opposite.