More than any other, the subject of race is where Kelly has consistently displayed views that should disturb anyone remotely left of center. Viewers with a keen memory might remember Kelly’s 2010 headfirst dive into right-wing conspiracizing when she joined the Fox News pile-on on the “New Black Panther Party,” a small, fringe,
racist and separatist group that has no connection to the original Black Panthers.
The NBPP’s claim to fame rested on a video that surfaced in November 2008 of two of the group’s nightstick-wielding members patrolling outside a Philadelphia polling station in military-style gear (and eventually being made to leave by the police), prompting full-blown conservative hyperventilation about widespread voter intimidation. Despite the fact that no similar incident was ever reported anywhere else, Fox News spent months magnifying the story, with Kelly one of the
chief culprits.
Over one two-week period, Kelly devoted
45 segments adding up to more than three and a half hours to the subject, according to figures from Media Matters. It’s worth noting that Kelly did this while she was
still part of the theoretically “fair and balanced” news section of Fox News, rather than its opinion wing.
Kelly’s race-baiting has not tamped down more recently. In 2015, she directed her
righteous outrage at the Obama administration over its plan to diversify neighborhoods, citing nameless experts to call it “the most radical, politically explosive change President Obama has attempted” and “social engineering of the worst kind.”
She
waved away the racist emails found in the notoriously racist Ferguson police department on the basis that “very few companies” in America have no racist emails. (Perhaps she was just extrapolating from her experience at Fox.)
These are mere drops in an ocean of dubious, racist statements by Kelly, which have included her
insistence to children watching her show that “Santa just
is white” (which she later
tried to claim was a joke), that “Jesus was a white man too” (
he wasn’t), and her
calling a Michelle Obama speech about the First Lady’s experience with racism an example of America turning into a “Cupcake Nation.”
