Smells Like Mean Spirit: Fox News Veterans Duke It Out Amidst MAGA Meltdown
The battle between former colleagues Megyn Kelly and Mark Levin takes a nasty turn as conservative civil war intensifies. Levin calls Kelly a "degenerate bigot." Kelly brands the Fox anchor "a bitter old man"
Right-wing talking heads like Megyn Kelly and Mark Levin once reserved their sharpest slings for liberals, immigrants and Joe Biden. But suddenly they’re dropping their biggest bombs on each other.
Kelly, a former Fox News anchor and NBC host, has been engaged in an increasingly ugly social-media shoot out with her former Fox News colleague Mark Levin, the longtime host of the syndicated The Mark Levin Show and star of Fox News’ weekend staple Life, Liberty & Levin.
The two veteran anchors have been feuding since a Turning Point convention in mid-December, when Ben Shapiro‘s keynote speech attacking right-wing conspiracists like Tucker Carlson triggered a mini meltdown in MAGA-world. After lashing out at Shapiro and seemingly aligning herself with Carlson, Candace Owens and Jack Posobiec, Kelly took heat from former friends and supporters who accused her of trading her credibility for clicks. But what began as a debate over principles and tactics has taken an increasingly personal turn in recent days, with Levin denouncing his former Fox colleague as a “degenerate” and “laughingstock,” and Kelly dismissing Levin as an “irrelevant, bitter man.”
The bad blood between the former colleagues escalated on Tuesday when Levin’s latest anti-Kelly screed appeared on X. “Meg Kelly, whose ratings were so bad on NBC she became a laughingstock, was canned for promoting blackface on Halloween,” Levin wrote, referencing Kelly’s untimely departure from the Today show in 2018. “You see, she was always a degenerate bigot. This is why she’s cool with Candace Owens and Jack Posobiec. This is why she slobbers over Qatarlson. She’s part of the Woke Reich — the queen of the modern Klan. More to come.”
But Kelly claimed to be unfazed. “You’re just upset bc I’m not afraid of you or your baseless slurs,” she quickly clapped back on her former Fox News colleague.”You’re an old, irrelevant, bitter, angry man who could never make it in the Fox News primetime. We used to laugh at you there for your red-faced tantrums over … everything.”
The growing ideological rifts within the MAGA movement burst into the open at AmericaFest, Turning Point USA’s annual conference, when Ben Shapiro took to the stage and called out what he referred to as “grifters” in the conservative movement. “The conservative movement is in serious danger, 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,” he said, in a speech that earned him a standing ovation from the crowd.