Megyn Kelly Can't Take a Joke

The broadcaster who mocks “snowflakes” melts down over the mildest parody imaginable.

Megyn Kelly can dish it out, but apparently she can’t take it—not even when the joke is an obvious reference to Israel’s pager strike on Hezbollah that everyone recognized instantly. It’s an especially ironic look for someone who now spends so much of her time providing cover for people like her friend Tucker Carlson as they mainstream bigotry into the conservative bloodstream, yet she’s the one who unravels over a harmless Babylon Bee headline. The Bee ran a light, goofy story about her tossing out an old pager “just to be safe,” and instead of laughing it off like any confident media veteran, she fired back with a dramatic “WTF.” The Bee has since deleted the tweet.

Kelly treated it like a personal attack, as if satire itself had crossed some sacred line. It’s wild: a broadcaster who built a career mocking hypersensitivity now can’t even handle a friendly parody playing off the most obvious news story of the week. The whole moment is a perfect snapshot of where she is right now: thin-skinned, hyper-defensive, and so wrapped up in her own narratives that even a harmless joke leaves her rattled.

Last year, CNN had its own brush with a pager-related “joke,” but the contextand the reaction could not have been more different. During a segment on CNN NewsNight, conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky quipped to Mehdi Hasan, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” directly referencing the same Israel-Hezbollah pager strikes. The remark instantly sparked outrage, with Hasan asking on air whether a guest had just suggested he should be killed. Within minutes, CNN pulled Girdusky from the broadcast, and the network later banned him entirely, calling the comment “completely unacceptable” and saying there was “zero room for racism or bigotry” on its platform.

But take a look at Megyn Kelly’s reaction to the CNN incident (H/T @MaxNordau on X):

Megyn Kelly has leaned so hard into the chase for clicks and attention that she’s lost any sense of consistency. She positions herself as a warrior against hypocrisy yet wades deeper into it every time she defends the indefensible and crumbles at the slightest jab. The persona she’s selling no longer matches the behavior she’s displaying, and the gap between the two grows wider by the week. At some point, the contradiction catches up. This is that point.