Donald Trump Is Right About Megyn Kelly

Ying Ma

Media, Unites States

Conservatives need to stop thinking about women using the left's paradigms.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly said that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is overrated and treated him unfairly at the first GOP presidential debate last August. Yet with the exception of Trump’s most die-hard supporters, few on the right agree. This is a sign of Trump’s problems with women (73 percent of them currently have an unfavorable view of him), but it is also a symptom of the GOP’s wussiness to ask tough questions about a popular female anchor, as well as of its failure to challenge the insidiousness of the Left’s prevailing narrative about women.

At issue is conservatism’s decades-old battle against identity politics, in which hostility has been declared toward the grievance industry that gins up phony allegations of racial, ethnic or gender injustice.

On the Fox News Channel, Kelly has exhibited a penchant for kissing up to liberal women, fawning over their feminist agenda, berating conservative men and behaving unprofessionally toward guests. No prominent conservative has ever dared to question the perception that Kelly is an exemplary anchor, or to observe that she spends far too much time peddling a softer, kinder version of feminist dogma.

Trump is the only major national figure on the right who has challenged Kelly’s status as a demigod at Fox News. By declaring unabashedly that Kelly is not very good, Trump has—unwittingly—offered conservatives an opportunity to reflect on the grave disservice that a star on the only major conservative television network often does to conservatism.

As it turns out, Kelly’s not being nearly as good as everyone says is directly intertwined with her being not very conservative.

Long before Kelly paid any attention to Trump, she was busy badgering conservative men on Fox News. Most notable was an exchange with talk radio personality Mike Gallagher. On his show, he had referred to her maternity leave as a “racket,” griping that men do not get the same paid leave. His comments were in poor taste, but it was Kelly’s response that was far more shocking.

While berating Gallagher on her show, Kelly exclaimed, “The United States is the only country in the advanced world that doesn’t allow paid—doesn’t require paid maternity leave….If anything, the United States is in the dark ages when it comes to maternity leave!”