Megyn Kelly’s Beyoncé meltdown has nothing to do with Sydney Sweeney

Nearly all of this summer’s controversies have been mind-numbing in many ways, perhaps none more so than the reactions to American Eagle’s “good jeans” ad featuring Sydney Sweeney. President Donald Trump has since proclaimed Sweeney MAGA’s sweetheart. Megyn Kelly has posted about Sweeney dozens of times, claiming the left is obsessed with her. And now the popular right-wing podcaster is using the outrage to reignite her feud with Beyoncé, which suggests that beneath Kelly’s opportunistic interest in the culture wars lies a deeper personal grievance.   

“There has been an insane meltdown this week over Sydney Sweeney’s new American Eagle ad campaign. And I have to tell you, I have a lot to say on this,” Kelly told her podcast audience last week. “We are sick and tired of the nonsense where you are not allowed to ever celebrate someone who is white, blonde and blue-eyed; that we have to walk into a room apologetic for those things. In a way, this ad is the final declaration that we are done doing that s**t.”

Kelly, who first garnered a national platform because former Fox News head Roger Ailes considered being “blond” and “blue-eyed” a talent, was curiously singing a different tune about the “Euphoria” actress just a month ago. “Sydney Sweeney’s the new toast of the town out there because she’s got these enormous breasts that everybody’s obsessed with,” Kelly said about the starlet’s rise to stardom. 

Being angry and attacking anything and everything for attention is the whole premise of “The Megyn Kelly Show.” So after spending days obsessing over the left’s so-called outrage, she’s dutifully shifted to overanalyze and critique another ad, revealing that, as critics suggested, the jeans brouhaha provides a safe space to promote white supremacy propaganda. 

“This is the opposite of the Sydney Sweeney ad. Quite clearly there is nothing natural about Beyoncé,” Kelly wrote in a post on X. “Everything — from her image to her fame to her success to her look below — is bought and paid for,” she added. “Screams artificial, fake, enhanced, trying too hard.” 

For over a year now, the singer has partnered with Levi’s, appearing in ad campaigns and commercials for the iconic denim brand. The latest ad, released Tuesday, features Beyoncé in a curly blonde bob wearing head-to-toe denim embellished with rhinestones. “Cowboy Carter,” her most recent album, features a song titled “LEVII’S JEANS.” 

Needless to say, Kelly’s diss is completely untethered from reality. Earlier this year, Beyoncé became the first Black woman to win a Grammy for Best Country Album, and “Cowboy Carter” won the coveted Album of the Year prize. Her success seems to have disturbed Kelly. 

“All hail Queen Bey, she’s here to rescue country music, which was a perfectly thriving industry long before Beyoncé showed up,” she complained on her show. Beyoncé’s most recent tour, which Billboard has declared the highest-grossing country music tour of all time, features a blurred-out clip of Kelly blasting the former Destiny’s Child star for “sticking her big toe” into country music. 

It’s hard to believe now, but there was once a time when there was a perceptible difference between Megyn Kelly and Ann Coulter. Even though Kelly regularly squandered any chance to be even slightly thoughtful, her schtick on Fox News was “very serious journalist” covering the rise of the New Black Panther Party like it was some ominous threat. She comically lost it over a fictional character — Santa Claus — after Aisha Harris published an article arguing there should be room for a Black St. Nick. Kelly would have none of it. “Jesus was a white man, too. He was a historical figure, that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa.” 

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After Donald Trump degraded her during a 2015 GOP primary debate, Kelly escaped to a sweetheart deal at NBC, bumping Tamron Hall and Al Roker’s highly-rated 9 a.m. slot. Kelly hosted her daytime talk show for little more than a year before fumbling the bag by fondly reminiscing over the good ‘ole days of blackface as a cheeky Halloween costume. In 2018, she flopped again with a so-called “hard-hitting” interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Hell hath no fury like a woman who tried to go mainstream and ended up humiliated. Kelly’s since gone full bore back to being a firebrand political pundit. She’s morphed from interviewing the women who accused journalist Mark Halperin of inappropriate behavior to hiring him to join her massively popular podcast empire. Meanwhile, she has called CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins a “cold-hearted b***h” and celebrated MSNBC’s firing of Joy Reid, whom she called “the most racist person on television.” Kelly also called former Vice President Kamala Harris “an unqualified political aspirant” because, she baselessly claimed, Harris “actually did sleep her way into and upwards in California politics.” Kelly even had a problem with Harris’ having attended Howard University, a historically Black college. In her 2024 endorsement of Trump, who had demeaned her eight years before, Kelly said, “He will be a protector of women.”

Earlier this year, Kelly — for what must be the first time — tried to promote positivity toward women without directly denigrating anyone else in the process. In a post on X, she offered career advice to women, telling them they could have both a successful career and a fulfilling personal life: “The only thing stopping you? Your decision to settle for less.” Her base told her to shove it, and she did. (GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is currently having the same epiphany, publicly floating that the GOP is anti-women. I expect her transformation to be just as short-lived.) 

It’s always funny when conservative women who aid right-wing men in ushering in autocracy are surprised when those same men don’t want to see them in power. Just because you’re on the bottom of the hit list doesn’t mean you’re not on the list.