I Watched Megyn Kelly’s White Grievance Show so You Don’t Have to. Here’s What I Found.

From hanging out with Tucker Carlson to defending Nick Fuentes, the former Fox News host is exhausting some of the MAGA base, which nicknamed her "Grandma Groyper."

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

We need to talk about our favorite white activist, Megyn Kelly—because 2025 wasn’t just a year where she mentioned whiteness. It was a year where she treated it like a full-time job with benefits, a pension, and a union rep named, “Stop Making Everything About Race (Unless It’s My Race).”

And yes, before we go any further: I endured all this ranting about whiteness from Megyn Kelly so you would not have to. So if you were ever considering becoming a paid subscriber, I will proudly accept pity-paid subs for this act of torture. This wasn’t “content consumption.” This was an endurance test. This was me volunteering as tribute so you could keep your peace.

But seriously—after reading and watching all this “being white” commentary from Megyn Kelly, I started wondering: has this woman ever talked about her culture? Not her race. Her culture. Because she talks about being white so much you’d think she was born in a place called White Town, where the snow is all white, everyone drives white cars, all the houses are white, the dirt is white, the grass is white, the sky is white, and everything is just white. The clouds are white. The air is white. The Wi-Fi router is white. The Wi-Fi password is Whitey McWhiterson$$. The street signs are white. The family dog is somehow also white. And every morning the town crier stands in the middle of the village and yells, “GOOD MORNING, IT’S WHITE AGAIN!”

So I did what any normal person does when they’ve been trapped in someone else’s racial anxiety: I searched “Megyn Kelly” and “culture” side by side. And what did I find? Not “culture.” I found “woke,” “cultural decay,” “DEI,” and the usual genre where people scream about “free speech” while trying to ban every sentence that makes them uncomfortable.

Then I searched “what is Megyn Kelly’s culture,” and I got basically the same sludge—more performative outrage, more “the left is ruining everything,” more content that’s allergic to specificity. Google’s AI summary finally gave me something useful: Catholic first. Cool. That actually tells me something about values and upbringing. But it still didn’t answer the question in a way that felt human. Eventually—after several tries—it spit out what should have been easy to find from the beginning: Italian, German, and Irish.

And because it took multiple searches to learn anything about her beyond “woke,” I decided to confirm it with ChatGPT. And I swear it sat in thinking mode so long my computer started smoking and overheating—I thought the whole thing was about to self-destruct like a Mission: Impossible tape. But eventually—after what felt like seven minutes—it confirmed the same thing: Italian, German, Irish. Raised Catholic.

And right there is the whole point: Megyn Kelly is like a lot of MAGA—someone who seems to know very little about her own ethnicity, but is an expert on everything white. She loves being white. She loves being white more than she loves her ethnicity. Hell, there was a time in America when the Italian and Irish parts of her lineage weren’t even treated as fully “white” in the social sense. Not because biology changed, but because the rules of the club changed. That’s what whiteness is: it isn’t a culture, it isn’t a blood type, and it isn’t a personality trait. It’s a rank. A status category. A membership card that has been expanded and enforced over time to maintain hierarchy.

Which is why it matters that Race—the actual scientific consensus—doesn’t treat race the way Megyn treats it. Race is a social construct. People keep trying to talk about it like it’s a tidy biological filing cabinet, but the “boxes” are political and historical, not genetic. And once you understand that, Megyn’s obsession makes more sense: she’s not defending a biological identity. She’s defending a social position. She’s defending the ladder. She’s defending the ranking system.

So when Megyn says “don’t apologize for being white,” what she’s really saying is: don’t apologize for the power attached to the rank. Don’t apologize for the advantages. Don’t apologize for the way the system bends in your direction. Don’t apologize for not looking out for anyone else. Don’t apologize for the hierarchy. Guard it. Maintain it. Protect it.