On Wednesday morning, Megyn Kelly—the former Fox News anchor who has defended blackface and claimed that Santa could not possibly be Black—woke up feeling like stirring the pot a bit. And so she returned, unprompted, to her favorite punching bags: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
The pair have not done much of late, though Harry’s official title was finally removed from the royal family’s website on Tuesday (I guess Queen Elizabeth’s death had kept their webmaster busy). One might think that in itself would provide Kelly with plenty of snark ammo, but instead she chose to do some aggressive commentary on unrelated popularity poll results. Cameron L. Walker, a correspondent for the UK’s new right-wing TV channel GBNews, had tweeted simply, “The Prince of Wales is the No.1 public figure a majority of Americans feel good about and that Republicans and Democrats can agree on, according to a new @GallupNews poll.”
That’s a relatively innocuous statement, even if the subtext is clearly an anti-Meghan and Harry dig. But Kelly felt the need to add bitter commentary for emphasis, writing in a quote-tweet: “Paging Harry & Meghan - your campaign failed. You remain loathed & the Prince (& Princess) of Wales, beloved.”
Kelly’s unprompted aggression struck me as so bizarre that I had to go spelunking into her tweets to see how long and to what degree she’s been miserably obsessed with the (former) royals. And that made something very clear: Megyn Kelly has an absurd amount of hatred for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. For the past three years, she has tweeted criticism of them fairly regularly—sometimes related to things in the news cycle, but also very frequently for no reason at all other than she apparently remembered they exist.
Right-wingers on both sides of the Atlantic have added hating Meghan and Harry to their list of culture war shibboleths, so Kelly is not alone in her “loathing” of the pair. This is obviously rooted in racist hatred of a Black woman who dared enter—and then leave and criticize—one of the most hallowed institutions of whiteness. But especially in the pathetic echo chamber that is Twitter, it comes across as completely ludicrous, boarding on the absurd, and begs the question, Megyn, why are you so obsessed with Meghan (and Harry)??
Please join me on a brief journey examining that obsession.
