Historic Mismatch Blows Apart

I see Megyn Kelly’s show is gone. Remarkable.

When I saw the news, I wanted to know what the problem was. People kept referring to blackface. I looked up her remarks, expecting to find something really incendiary. All I found was a few words in which she said blackface wasn’t a big deal when she was a kid. This is a firing offense?

Blackface WAS okay when she was a kid. Kelly is no spring chicken. She is closing on 50. When she was a kid, you could go to the store and buy Rice Krinkles cereal with a slit-eyed cartoon Chinese boy on the front of the box. You could watch The Dukes of Hazzard on your huge 20″ TV without closing your blinds.

NBC was waiting for her to kick a tripwire. If it hadn’t been the blackface nonsense, it would have been something equally pretextual.

I don’t care about her show. I didn’t watch it. I’m not here to defend her. I was curious to see how well her fate matched up with my predictions, though.

I looked up an old post I wrote about her move to NBC, and it pretty much describes what happened. She didn’t hurt Fox when she left. She hurt herself, and she hurt NBC. She got fired, which is what I expected. NBC rejected her like a kidney patient rejecting an organ from a giraffe.

You know who hurt Fox by leaving? O’Reilly. He was not a great role model for young men, but he had a monster talent for self-promotion, entertainment, raising ratings, and selling books. Tucker Carlson is not doing too bad, but he can’t carry O’Reilly’s Paul Stuart tie.

Megyn Kelly never did much for me. She came across as a liberal who pretended to be conservative in order to make it at Fox. As for her personality, she could be tone deaf and overly forceful. She also seemed to think she was doing her job way better than she was, perhaps because of the promotion she received. She didn’t seem good at self-monitoring.

Kelly did good work, but she wasn’t a major talent like O’Reilly, Shepard Smith, or Sean Hannity. I believe her time slot at Fox made her successful. Tucker Carlson’s modest degree of success shows what a good time slot can do for a person who isn’t exciting to watch.

You can’t move from Fox to another network and expect to do well. Has anyone done it? Kiran Chetry disappeared. Alisyn Camerota didn’t do well after she left. I looked over a list of alumni, and I didn’t see anyone who accomplished anything after they left. The liberal media establishment doesn’t forgive or forget, even when they try.

I looked up my old predictions because it amazed me when Kelly moved to NBC. I was amazed that she left, and I was amazed that they wanted her. They overestimated her drawing power, and they underestimated the cultural clash that would brew between Kelly and her new coworkers. I assume these looming problems were obvious to most people, so why did the move happen?

Strange.

I think Megyn Kelly is done. The news says Fox doesn’t want her, and Fox is the only game in town for journalists who have the smell of conservatism on them. She proved she can’t draw eyeballs on a mainstream leftists network, so no one else will want her. She’s headed down the Debra Norville rabbit hole.

It’s not a tragedy. She’s rich. She can go do whatever she wants.

It’s funny, though, many people can’t be happy with money and free time. They have nothing but their chosen careers to keep them sane. I have never been like that. I don’t get bored. I don’t care at all about achievement or having my name on plaques. I would like nothing better than to have a hundred million dollars and no real responsibilities. I would never, ever wake up in the morning and ask myself if I were wasting my life.

If I had a mainstream legal job right now, I would be drinking the leftist Kool-Aid through a funnel held between my boss’s knees. I would be forced to take sensitivity training. I would be told what to say and what not to say. I could be fired for blogging or for going to the wrong church. Gays in my firm would be scheming to try to get rid of me, and they would succeed.

In addition to that, I would be fungible. I can do a bang-up job with a lawsuit, but that’s not a rare gift. Being a good lawyer is like being a good Jiffy Lube manager. If they fire you, they can replace you in a week. People who are fungible have to toe the line, because they’re so easy to replace.

Having a mainstream job is like joining a fraternity. You have to humiliate yourself and deny your soul, and what you get in return is something that doesn’t feel anything like you hoped it would. You sell yourself for a bill of goods, you work, you retire, and then, your purpose ripped away by people who are suddenly eager to be rid of you, you wait to die.

Working for yourself or having investments…that’s the only way to avoid going nuts these days.

I don’t know if Kelly can be happy with money and freedom. Maybe she’s a driven person who tosses and turns at night if she thinks other people don’t find her dazzling. It’s not a rare condition, especially among TV stars and other frantic self-promoters who crave attention.

I saw a neat video the other day. A man from Scotland made it. His name is Gordon. He smoked some kind of fake weed, and his heart stopped. He found himself in total darkness, in a huge void. Like a lot of other people in the same situation, he started to know things supernaturally; knowledge came to him from out of nowhere. One of the things he instantly knew was that everything he had done in his life, without exception, was worthless.

He’s a songwriter. He never made the big time. He has written hundreds of songs. He’s also an artist. He realized all of that stuff was garbage. It meant absolutely nothing.

Of course, when he regained consciousness here on earth, he became a Christian.

I’ve known and heard of a lot of driven people. They obsess on achieving and on putting their names on things. Many of them love putting their names on buildings and projects. The Wollmann Rink. The Widener Library. Carnegie Hall. The Nobel Prizes. They like getting awards and tributes. They like being acknowledged for the impressive things they’ve done. They don’t realize something: it all burns.

Christianity is correct. The only god is the God of Christianity. The only reason we exist is to please him. The only accomplishments that last are things we do in obedience to God, and the only real rewards we will have will be the people we help to gain eternal life. All the other things you do burn. Shakespeare’s plays, every piece of Renaissance art, every Frank Lloyd Wright structure, the pyramids of Egypt, the theory of relativity, the discovery of calculus, the invention of the wheel…it will all be gone soon, and no one will care about it. People in hell will be the only people who continue to think about this nonsense. They will regret dedicating their lives to it.

Here’s an interesting fact I don’t see people discussing: knowledge is multiplying at a phenomenal, unprecedented rate, but the means by which we store it are more ephemeral than ever. Isn’t that strange? Hard drives, digital drives, and optical disks aren’t very stable or durable compared to paper, stone, and clay. The oldest painting on a cave wall is more durable than the last fact recorded on a computer disk. Weird. I think about that a lot. An incomprehensible amount of knowledge, which we think is precious and important, may well disappear over the next few decades.

Jesus is going to return, a lot of cataclysmic events will take place, and after that, no one is going to care who got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1974. No one will care who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. No one will be interested in meeting Jeff Bezos.

The last shall be first, and the first shall be last. Women who did laundry with their bare hands in order to eat will be wearing glorious robes and walking on streets of gold, and actresses whom designers begged to wear their creations in red carpet interviews will be burning in pits in hell while maggots gnaw their bones.

It’s good not to be driven, and it’s good not to let your career define you. Careers can be taken away.

I’m rambling. I’ll wrap up by saying I think Megyn Kelly’s peak just passed. I don’t think we’ll see her running a major show on a major network ever again.

Here is Gordon’s video. You might like it.