I actually had kind-of forgotten who Megyn Kelly was. I once had liked her, but got sick of her as she became too important for her audience. My last straw was herdespicable eight-minute interview of Newt Gingrich in October 2016, exactly two years ago. It was a disgraceful moment, a Fox debacle that most of us conservatives never will forget. Listen to it even today. A fortnight ahead of the elections, Newt boldly predicted that Trump would win Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Indiana, and that the GOP would hold the Senate — and she attacked him bitterly on each. Really, revisit it, knowing what we know now, with her brazen conclusion that Newt should deal with his “anger issues.” From that moment on, I equated the “Kelly File” to the “Circular File.”
The #MeToo movement’s precursors thought they had destroyed the one conservative outlet on TV — Fox News Channel — when they drove out Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. Soon enough, Greta Van Susteren somehow apparently got it into her head that, as one of the last nighttime regular anchors, she suddenly was too valuable for Fox to lose, too, so she reportedly made some ridiculous contract demand, thinking Fox desperately would pony up. Instead, Fox let her go. The Left, like vultures hovering over dying people in the desert, waiting for sumptuous carcasses to devour, was savoring their soon-to-be served victory: Fox was falling apart, Rupert Murdoch retiring, rumors that the sons would be more liberal and turn Fox into yet another CNN / MSNBC / CBS / NBC / ABC. What sound would the Fox make?
1. What Does the Fox Say?
But something fascinating happened: The Left overplayed their hand yet again, and Fox News became ten times better than iteverwas. Tucker Carlson — the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink — needed a bit of practice to get into his groove, but he now is far better than O’Reilly was. He is younger, attracts a more valued younger audience, extending conservatism’s viewpoints to an additional generation — OK by me — and, most importantly, no more of the O’Reilly garbage where the moderator would pretend he is a moderate. Tucker is forthrightly conservative, no excuses, no covering it up. Yeah, I miss Bernie Goldberg and, even more so, Dennis Miller, the Sage of Santa Barbara. But it’s OK. And, honestly, if O’Reilly truly was even half the crude woman-abuser that all those multi-million-dollar secret payouts suggest he was, good riddance. I await my copy of “Killing the Multi-Million-Dollar Settlements.” Meanwhile, Sean Hannity deserved to be elevated as Fox’s new linchpin.
If Tucker has been a fine improvement over Bill, Martha McCallum has been a delightful advancement over Greta. Greta lost me when she campaigned vigorously against Mitch McConnell’s decision to prevent Merrick Garland from being interviewed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. That move marked the beginning of McConnell’s redemption, and Greta blasted him for it, demanding that the Republicans at least give Garland a chance to appear for hearings. McConnell understood — as did I, as did all sensible conservatives — that any qualified judge like Judge Garland would make a nice impression during the televised hearings, and then it would be ten times harder in the court of public opinion to avoid confirming him. (Those still were the halcyon days before the dawning of the The Age of Spartacus, a new era when the confirmation process also includes subverting ideological opponents by digging up perjurers to allege attempted rape and completed rape and gang rape and train rape.) So McConnell wielded the power vested in him by the voters who gave the Republicans a Senate majority and put the kibosh on Garland, to Greta’s daily overwrought dismay.
As Obama taught us: elections have consequences. So, good riddance to Greta. Or, as she might have put it: Last Call. And Martha has been wonderful.
But the best improvement of all — the “Wow! Factor” for me — has been the disappearance of Megyn (i.e., Me-Again) Kelly… and the emergence of Laura.
Laura is so great. Laura isso, so great. Laura, Laura, Laura. Omigosh — did I say that Laura is so, so, so great? Laura! Laura!
Truth to tell, I usually am much too busy to watch much or any of Tucker, Martha, or Sean. Maybe five minutes, part of an opening monologue, if I am grabbing a bite or a soft drink. I mean, really: I have a synagogue congregation to lead, Torah and Talmud classes to teach, 100 law students to teach Civil Procedure and Advanced Torts, scores upon scores of law school exams to grade, depositions to take, mediations to handle, an increased number of speeches to deliver. And articles to write for The American Spectator. I just don’t have the time for much TV. And I certainly am not going to waste precious minutes listening to Jessica Tarlov, Chris Hahn, Marie Harf, Lesley Marshall or the rest of the gang of “fair and balanced” annoyances who consume valuable air time and inhale precious air.
But there’s always time for Laura. I make time for Laura. My wife and I set the clock for 10:59 p.m., sit down at the TV, and there she is. Laura.
Laura. Laura. Laura. Best thing the #MeToo movement ever did — inducing Megyn to leave, opening a slot for Laura.
So thank you, Megyn Kelly, for going to NBC. Thank you #MeToo movement for helping pry Megyn from Fox… and for helping energize Republicans a month before midterm elections to put up a fight to save our country and her culture.
2. So What Ever Became of Me-Again?
I had lost track of Megyn. Sort of like the old Dion song about Abraham, Martin, and John: I just turned around, and she was gone. Only, unlike the song, I did not ask where she had gone. Did not care. Just thankful she was gone.
I took the book that I had ordered, Megyn’s memoir Settle for More, and I decided not even to settle: I just tossed it out. Never read it. Best ten bucks I ever recycled. Actually, I weighed whether to throw it into the recycle bin or the food trash. Then I heard they were going to ban plastic straws in California, so I took it out of the recycle can and dumped it with the food garbage. My contribution to The Cause.
It turns out that Megyn apparently went to NBC, was given an hour on an extended Today show, immediately was hated by the liberals there, arrived too late to experience the chance to sue Matt Lauer, was hated further by those afraid she was coming with star power and would out-shine them, was hated by others jealous of her salary that was more than theirs, and — as we Fox News regulars could have told them — ultimately just was hated because, well, Me-Again. She got herself into trouble quickly, trying to make waves by interviewing Alex Jones. Kept getting herself into trouble — you cannot go on NBC and say that Jesus was White — not fully fathoming how it works when you submit to Leftist control. She lacked the theological flexibility of an Alisyn Camerota who understood “Now that I am moving from Fox to CNN, I no longer believe in conservatism but instead believe in Left liberalism.” Instead, Megyn finally got her face blackened to the point of needing to confess her sins in public, teary-eyed, darkness at noon.
Under Joseph Stalin, when people got out of line in the Communist Paradise, they did not merely get denied a committee chairmanship or get demoted to an office without a panoramic view. Rather, Stalin had opponents arrested in the middle of the night. Clandestinely swept off to hidden secret prison cells. Then tortured for days, weeks. No sleep. Or awakened every thirteen minutes, just as soon as they would nod off, and reawakened again and again, for days and weeks on end. More torture. More sleep-deprivation. Made them crazy, broke them, their spirits, their empty souls. And finally, completely emptied, and having done nothing wrong within Communism except for having crossed Stalin, they would realize that they were not just being punished but that, sonovogun, they actually soon were going to be murdered. So, with nothing left to believe in but extending their own wretched Marxist-atheist lives, convinced as atheists that it all ends when they expire, they sought desperately to avoid execution by agreeing finally to confess publicly to all sins and crimes that Stalin’s goons told them they had perpetrated. Utterly destroyed, they capitulated and publicly confessed. Elaborate show trials were staged, giving them platforms to read long handwritten confessions of their endless crimes. They stood teary-eyed, broken, spirits destroyed. But at least they now could live their full days, continue eating their borscht and potatoes, gulping their unflavored yogurt into their twilight years, washing it all down with their vodka. They confessed to having opposed Stalin, to plotting against Stalin, to subverting the working class by having been corrupted Communists, enemies of the proletariat. Then they each tearfully, contritely, dutifully, publicly signed their respected confessions.
And then they immediately got shot to death anyway. Arthur Koestler wrote a great book capturing that period: Darkness at Noon.
I could not help but be reminded about that book and those show trials after someone sent me the YouTube clip of Megyn Kelly on NBC the other day publicly confessing her sins against Political Correctness. Apparently, she had gotten into a discussion about whether it ever can be acceptable for a Caucasian to dress in blackface, say at Halloween, to masquerade say as a tribute to Diana Ross. Kelly is a grown woman, a trained litigator who did well at one of America’s greatest and toughest-nosed power law firms, Jones Day. I, too, am a multi-year Jones Day alum, and they demand tough-nosed super-excellence. So she knows exactly what she believes. Thus, when she argued that it can be OK to dress in blackface like Diana Ross, she was clear-headed in her mind that this is something she believes in her heart and gut was OK to do when she was a kid, and she believes it is OK today to say that this is what she did as a kid. (I personally do not share that view.) She soon found out that, in NBC land, she essentially had just Roseanne-Barred herself from a future career at the network. She got the word via the Dictatorship of Social Media: she apparently is finished, through, kaput. So, to try to avoid execution, to lengthen her borscht-and-yogurt days in the Urals, she submitted to reeducation from NBC’s Ministry of Truth.
In her public mea culpa, you could not miss the shattering of her spirit, the broken soul. Not the Megyn Kelly who once caustically had stepped contemptuously on Newt Gingrich and who defiantly had tried to bring down candidate Donald Trump. Rather, this was the Megyn Kelly version of Lev Borisovich Kamenev, Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev, Grigori Yakovlevich Sokolnikov on the event of their respective confessions and executions. NBC took her life from her. They destroyed her. And there she was, on the screen, teary-eyed, lips quivering, face unsteady, apologizing and apologizing, more tears, red worn-out eyes, more quivering, more contrition. Thank you for teaching me, she conveyed. I came to NBC not just to speak but to listen. They signed me up for $69 million over three years to be a good student, to listen. And I have listened. I was wrong. I now am reeducated. Please do not dispose of me. I am fixed. I am corrected. See? I will devote my life to teaching White people never to dress in blackface. And — implicitly — I will teach whatever else you tell me to teach.
Her Thought Police, augmented by the Politically Correct in her audience, arose and gave her a standing ovation. It was like straight out of that scene in Network where Peter Finch’s Howard Beale madly rambles at his studio audience whatever he seeks to spout, then collapses on stage and is rewarded with standing ovations. Compare the end of this scene with the end of this one. Really — do it; it is uncanny. You could see that Megyn had attained salvation:
Amazing clapping embrace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like she.
She once was lost but now was found,
Was blind but now P.C.
Having recanted publicly, tearfully, begging for another chance, having confessed all her sins against the Thought Police amid Darkness at NBC — she emerged all primed and ready…
… to be shot.
Actually, there was one leading Stalin foe who did not get shot — Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had fled to Mexico. So he avoided getting shot. Instead, Stalin sent someone down there to thrust an axe in his head. And now Megyn, too, has been axed.
3. Epilogue: A Sobering Thought About Your Kids and Grandkids
And now, as you watch replays of that sadly pathetic confession and dismantling of the soul of Megyn Kelly before her axing, know that you are seeing what they are doing to almost every high school graduate who now enters virtually any American college except for Liberty University, Hillsdale College, Yeshiva University, Touro College, and a few Christian colleges. They take creative minds and free spirits and spiritual souls, and they destroy them. They beat them down and shatter them. They make clear that they will deny them a future — mockery at the university, bad grades, harassment in the dorms, no social acceptance, no future career path — unless they repent and confess their sins and break. In most cases, the college students predictably break over a year or two, if not four. It is not as public a humiliation as the Megyn Kelly debacle. But it is just as tragic.
We have allowed the Left Totalitarians and Mind Police and Thought Dictators to seize the colleges’ humanities and social sciences departments. Then, unaware of how much the university environment has changed in America these past thirty years, too many of us send our children to them to be broken down, dispirited, crushed, emptied — and then reeducated by the Thought Police. Ultimately, they are ready to confess publicly. And then to canvass the neighborhoods to get out the vote for Bernie, for Hillary, for Obama, or for one of the other Multi-Millionaire Redistributionists who are ready to redistribute your money, their parents’ and grandparents’ money — everyone else’s money but not their own.
