Megyn Kelly and the ascendance of conservative women

What's made Kelly shine is her ability to remain an unflappable and even scornful authority when confronted with increasingly hysterical Republican men

Megyn Kelly
(Image credit: Victoria Will/Invision/AP, File)

Newt Gingrich insisted in his now-infamous confrontation with Fox News' Megyn Kelly that American politics are divided into "parallel universes." By this he meant that Donald Trump supporters have a brilliantly intuitive read on Trump's political chances that differs so completely from the rest of the American public's — which foolishly trusts numbers and polls — that no reconciliation between the two systems is possible. But he could just as easily have been describing the divide between a certain subset of political men and a nation that's wearied of their finger-wagging, their hyperbole, and their peculiar and apparently unfixable tendency to conflate being "concerned about sexual assault" with being "fascinated with sex."

Megyn Kelly appears to be in the latter group, and so — judging from Ana Navarro, Dana Perino, Meg Whitman, Barbara Bush, and Condoleezza Rice — are several other conservative women who have had enough.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.