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 shootout with her former Fox News colleague Mark Levin, the longtime host of the syndicated The Mark Levin Show andstar of Fox News’ weekend staple Life, Liberty & Levin.
The two veteran anchors have been feuding since a Turning Point USA 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 withCarlson, Candace Owens andJack 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.
Shapiro also rapped Kelly, along with Carlson and Steve Bannon, for their failure to renounce the conspiracy-minded podcaster Owens, who has repeatedly suggested, without evidence, that Charlie Kirk, Turning Point’s late co-founder, was assassinated in September as part of a global conspiracy that may have involved the Israeli government, the FBI and Kirk’s widow, Erika. (Owens responded to Shapiro’s remarks by calling him “a midget” and blaming Jews for the slave trade. Kelly has claimed that critics like Shapiro and CBS News president Bari Weiss have been motivated by their support of Israel.)
At Fox, where Kelly once served as a popular primetime anchor, the network’s usually voluble anchors have stayed silent as their onetime colleagues battle it out. No Fox News personality, other than Levin, has mentioned the contretemps. “It’s like crazy person versus crazy person. Who you gonna root for in that fight?” one longtime Fox News producer wryly tells The Hollywood Reporter. Fox News honchos are also not taking sides. Reps for the network did not respond to THR‘s request for comment.