Days after Megyn Kelly used her show as a venue to hash out what is and isn’t racist, it seems that the one-time Fox News anchor’s unlikely stint at the Today show may be drawing to an abrupt close.



On Tuesday morning, during a segment on how the UK’s Kent University had made a list of inappropriate or offensive Halloween costumes, Kelly asked the question one might ask a trusted adult when one is a very young child.

“But what is racist?” she asked her all-white panel. “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 white face. That was okay when I was a kid, as long as you were dressing like a character.”

She pointed to the Real Housewives of New York star, Luann de Lesseps, who darkened her skin for her Diana Ross costume on this past season, as an example of blackface done tastefully. (It wasn’t.)

Later that day, she sent an email apology to her colleagues, in which she wrote, “Today is one of those days where listening carefully to other points of view, including from friends and colleagues, is leading me to rethink my own views.” She followed that up with an on-air apology on Wednesday, in which she said, “I have never been a PC kind of person, but I do understand the value of being sensitive to our history, particularly on race and ethnicity.”

The utterly unsurprising blunder has since been criticized by her colleagues. At a town hall on Wednesday, NBC News Chair Andy Lack condemned the remarks, saying, “there is no place on our air or in this workplace for them,” while her colleagues on the Today show discussed the ignorance of her sentiments on air. The Daily Beast reports that NBC executives are “furious.”

On Wednesday, Kelly reportedly fired her agent, Matt DelPiano of CAA, and would be changing agencies. On Thursday morning, CNN reported that her departure from the 9 a.m. hour of the Today show is “imminent,” with two unnamed sources telling reporter Brian Stelter that the show will be ending. She will reportedly not host Thursday’s show, but she is, for now, still scheduled to be a part of the network's midterm election coverage.

It is thrilling to see the outrage news cycle in motion. But why is this what breaks Megyn Kelly? And why did NBC hire her in the first place?

At Fox News, a network inherently dedicated to racist and xenophobic fear-stoking, Kelly became known for presenting abhorrent views with extreme, and seemingly beguiling, professionalism. In 2013, she said on her show without a hint of irony or self-loathing that, “Jesus was a white man, too. It’s like we have, he’s a historical figure that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa. I just want kids to know that. How do you revise it in the middle of the legacy in the story and change Santa from white to black?”

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She’s suggested that an Oklahoma man who allegedly beheaded a woman was a “self-radicalized Muslim,” suggesting his crime was connected to religion, despite evidence to the contrary. She stoked fear about voter fraud in Colorado weeks before an election, and falsely suggested a new law would let people print out their ballots at home. She obsessed over the New Black Panther Party, a highly-fringe group that, as Dave Weigel wrote in The Atlantic in 2010, posed no real threat to voters other than an isolated incident. She has asked , “What is the evidence that what happened to Eric Garner, or what happened to Michael Brown, has anything to do with race?” She has lamented the “anti-cop… thug mentality” in “black communities.” She repeatedly belittled transgender people, once mocking and misgendering Michelle Kosilek, who sued Massachusetts for gender reassignment surgery, saying, “I bet he looks pretty good,” and, “He only has breasts and the hair now.” When a black teenage girl was thrown to the ground at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, Kelly said the 14-year-old “looked like a young woman,” and was “no saint, either.”

When Kelly did her press tour for her new NBC News show, she insisted repeatedly that she no longer was interested in being political. It was a convenient way of distancing herself from her past comments, and the blaring ethos of her former network, without expressing interest in atoning for any of it. And yet Lack hired her, still.

In the two years since Lack announced that Kelly would be joining the network for a three-year contract equaling almost $70 million, her morning show, where she replaced Tamron Hall and Al Roker, has suffered from abysmal ratings, leading the Wall Street Journal to publish an article entitled , “NBC Bet $69 Million on Megyn Kelly—Then Viewers Vanished.” NBC staffers have reportedly regularly call her show a “disaster.”

Given her history, Kelly is performing exactly as we might expect her to perform. How convenient to be able to use that as an excuse to bring her on, and then get rid of her.

Joanna Rothkopf Deputy Editor Joanna Rothkopf is the former deputy editor at Esquire.com and a writer for Last Week Tonight.

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