Tribunal News: Megyn Kelly is This Week’s Brett Kavanaugh
I have absolutely no interest in Megyn Kelly as a broadcaster. I never watch Fox News, and I watch NBC even less than that. Kelly, as far as I can tell from a few clips and a debate or two, was just another of Fox’s bevy of long-legged blonds that Roger Ailes thought looked good in a tiny cocktail dress while sitting on a high stool, especially when filmed from those “I-wonder-what-I-could-see-if-she-shifted-just-a-bit-to-the-left” angles.
(Please don’t tell me she’s a lawyer. Michael Avenatti is a lawyer. Joe Biden is a lawyer. Do a quick internet search on the number of Americans who become lawyers each year before wasting your time imagining anyone must be smart because she’s a lawyer.)
My lack of interest in Megyn Kelly, however, is more than matched by my extreme interest in what I have been calling the Tribunal, meaning the current “democratic” world’s iteration of the progressive psychological warfare method employed by all the great totalitarian regimes of the past hundred years, the method of fostering collective shame and intellectual self-censorship regarding all political opinion and personal attitudes deemed ideologically undesirable.
This week, Megyn Kelly, speaking on her morning discussion program on NBC, made the following off-the-cuff remark in the context of talking about changing societal attitudes about the meaning of racism:
What is racist? — because truly, you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface on Halloween. (The other panelists answer “Yes.”) Back when I was a kid, that was okay to do as long as you were dressing up as like a character….
There was a controversy on “The Real Housewives of New York” with Louanne (sp?), as she dresses [as] Diana Ross, and she made her skin look darker than it really is, and people said that that was racist. And I don’t know, I thought like, “Who doesn’t love Diana Ross? She wants to look like Diana Ross for one day….”
In the first paragraph of the quoted passage, Kelly points out that attitudes have changed, which was apparently the topic of the discussion. And yet merely for acknowledging that change (a simple statement of fact), without, I suppose, the mandatory knee-jerk condemnation of all things pre-Now, she is to be called on the Tribunal’s mat of death and accused of the unpardonable crime of not saying whatever the progressive vanguard has prescribed as Absolute Truth this month.
As for the phrase “dressing up like a character,” which might set some hypersensitive types ablaze with images of Al Jolson in blackface — big lips, “spook” eyes, and so on — Kelly’s meaning is clarified beyond all doubt in the next part of the discussion, in which she cites a current example from some reality TV program (I presume), in which a white character dresses up as Diana Ross. By “a character,” she obviously meant a famous figure of some sort, such as a celebrity, and not a caricature of a black man.
For these casual, commonsensical, and, I would add, not particularly definitive or judgmental, remarks — remarks made in the context of a discussion program about issues of the day, in which one might have thought differing opinions would be the whole point — Kelly has been summarily fired from NBC, and the network is apparently prepared to swallow her tens of millions of dollars of outstanding contract rather than allow her to speak on their airwaves again.
This, again, is the Tribunal in action. Isolate a target, invent an offense, make an example of that target. Henceforth, everyone will know that even speaking of the question of blackface — and speaking of it in terms entirely unrelated to the old-fashioned vaudevillian sense of the word — is a moral offense, a racist thought, and deserves not merely public censure but outright banishment from polite society.
Not a week goes by, it seems, in which we are not subject to yet another handful of these miniature morality plays: A public figure is shamed into apologizing for just thinking, let alone speaking, in a way not fully sanctioned by current Marxist orthodoxy. Then, after apologizing, the public figure is punished severely anyway, since apologizing (for thinking freely) is deemed an insufficient form of atonement. The audience at home learns the lesson: You should be ashamed if you have ever had such thoughts, or if you nodded and thought, “Yeah, that’s true,” when Megyn Kelly, a convicted purveyor of racial hatred and white supremacy, had the racist audacity to say, “Who doesn’t love Diana Ross?”
The progressives are playing for keeps. It’s all-out Marxism or bust for them now. The Tribunal is not a metaphor. This is the War on Reason, the War on Conscience, the War on Independent Thought. The progressives are winning.