Megyn Kelly at the President-elect Donald Trump's victory rally with an inset of Candace Owens Scott Olson/Getty Images; Screenshot/YouTube If there were any lingering doubts about the widening fractures between President Trump and the MAGA media ecosystem that helped return him to power, Megyn Kelly all but erased them in March.
The former Trump critic turned second-term ally used her platform to accuse the administration of misleading the public about the death toll from the U.S.-Israeli military operation in Iran — a striking rupture for a figure who, in recent years, has largely moved in lockstep with the president.
“I don’t think those service members died for the United States,” the ex-Fox News anchor said of the 13 Americans killed so far, many in an Iranian strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. “I think they died for Iran or Israel.”
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Kelly has been openly critical of the Iran operation, but the bluntness of her remarks marked a clear escalation — fusing moral outrage with biting derision — as she mocked Trump’s framing of the conflict as a “fun little excursion into Iran” while invoking the “lost limbs” and “severe head wounds” of more than 300 injured.
She went further still, venturing into suggestions of a potential cover-up — rhetoric that would until recently have been almost unthinkable from a former network news anchor, but now feels entirely at home in the conspiratorial grammar of the online MAGA sphere.
“We don’t believe we know the full extent of the deaths either,” Kelly said on her daily web show, the centerpiece of her expanding media operation. “And we don’t believe we know the full extent of exactly how all these planes have come down — that we’re getting the full story.”
In many ways, Kelly’s trajectory is less an outlier than a case study: What happens when a traditional television career collides with the influencer economy, falters, then reconstitutes itself around a very different set of incentives.
Kelly, 55, is no stranger to reinvention. “I don’t think she has fixed political principles,” says one longtime colleague. “But she has an uncanny ability to adjust herself to the prevailing political winds.” She first gained national prominence as a Fox News anchor who, during the network’s first Republican primary debate in 2015, pressed Trump on his treatment of women — a confrontation that triggered a very public feud and helped precipitate her exit from Fox in 2017. That departure was bound up in something larger: Alongside Gretchen Carlson and others, she accused then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes of sexual harassment — a reckoning later dramatized in the 2019 film Bombshell, which cast her as a complicated but ultimately sympathetic figure of institutional defiance.
Megyn Kelly on the set of her hit Fox News program The Kelly File in December 2013. She left Fox in 2017 amid a public feud with President Trump. Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post/Getty Images But not long after achieving mainstream respectability, Kelly’s career unraveled abruptly. Her much-hyped NBC morning show, Megyn Kelly Today, was canceled after less than a year following widely condemned remarks defending blackface Halloween costumes — a public rupture that not only sidelined her from traditional media, but also appears to have reshaped her relationship to it.
Her makeover has been swift and, by most metrics, successful. In 2020, she launched The Megyn Kelly Show as an independent podcast. By March 2025, she had expanded into MK Media, a growing podcast network under her Devil May Care Media banner, with ambitions to rival established conservative outlets. Her YouTube channel now exceeds 4 million subscribers and drew 138 million views in February.
But scale, in this ecosystem, is not neutral — it exerts pressure. And increasingly, that pressure runs toward provocation. As she works to expand her empire, Kelly has found herself navigating a shifting political and media landscape. Her proximity to political commentator and conspiracy peddler Candace Owens, and her reluctance to distance herself from Owens’ escalating claims, has become a defining — and increasingly uncomfortable — feature of her brand.
In the arms race for attention that defines political podcasting, few figures have expanded their reach as rapidly as Owens. Since January 2025, she has added an estimated 10.9 million followers across all platforms while generating roughly 805 million YouTube views and more than 81 million TikTok likes, according to Media Matters.
As her audience has grown, so too have the controversies that fuel it. Over the past year, Owens has promoted a series of extreme and often unsubstantiated claims — including repeated assertions that French first lady Brigitte Macron was “born a man,” at one point declaring on Piers Morgan Uncensored that it was “beyond obvious” Macron “has a penis.” The remarks prompted a defamation lawsuit from the Macrons in July.
Owens also has advanced a series of increasingly baroque narratives surrounding the September killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, alleging — without evidence — the involvement of multiple governments and intelligence agencies and suggesting the killing was tied to a broader “deep state” agenda. Among her claims: that Kirk was a literal time traveler and that he had been monitored by CIA-linked operatives since childhood.
Her rhetoric around Jews and Israel has grown even more incendiary. Owens has promoted Der Talmudjude, a 19th century antisemitic tract, and suggested it exposes what Jewish public figures “really think.” She has also repeated long-debunked claims about Jewish involvement in the slave trade and cast Holocaust education as a form of “indoctrination.”
Since January 2025, Candace Owens has added about 10.9 million followers across platforms while generating roughly 805 million YouTube views. Screenshot/YouTube Critics, including her fellow conspiracist Alex Jones, have raised alarms about her rhetoric. But the backlash has done little to slow her rise.
What matters here is not just what Owens says, but how many people are listening — roughly 24 million across platforms — and what that scale demands of everyone else in the right wing conversation. Her ascent is not pulling conservative media in a single direction so much as forcing a sorting mechanism. On one side is a personality-driven ecosystem — Owens, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and, increasingly, Kelly — where provocation, institutional distrust and conspiracy-adjacent rhetoric are not bugs but features. On the other is a more traditional faction — Ben Shapiro, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and the Turning Point USA orbit — that, while firmly right wing, has drawn clearer lines around overt conspiracy and antisemitism.
The divide is less about ideology than structure: a collision between legacy conservatism and an influencer economy in which attention — not credibility — is the primary currency.
That tension has left Kelly in a narrowing lane. To break with Owens is to risk audience erosion; to embrace her is to risk becoming indistinguishable from her. For now, Kelly appears to be choosing a third path: saying just enough to signal independence while stopping short of a full rupture — a balancing act that grows harder to sustain as the incentives of the system keep pulling to the extremes.
This story appeared in the April 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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