The Interview
Megayn Kelly’s new show debuted this past Sunday, “Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly,” on NBC, kicking off the show with a Vladimir Putin interview, but Kelly is causing quite a storm with one of her new guests for this up-coming Sunday’s show.
Apparently, Kelly invited none other than Alex Jones, the internet conspiratorial lunatic extraordinaire, to be interviewed on her show—and the internet as well as other places are up in arms over the scheduling.
Jones, the owner of a crackpot conspiracy site, Infowars, and the host of the “Alex Jones Show,” has said that the Sandy Hook massacres, in which 20 school children and six employees of Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School were mowed down in a volley of bullets by mentally ill loner, Adam Lanza, was a complete hoax.
Globalists and World Domination
Apparently, the detached-from-reality-thinking goes, the parents of the children were actors, according to Jones, and the deaths were all part of a grand plot by the US government, in which it seeks to control and enslave the world’s population by staging massive national tragedies, such as the World Trade Center attacks in 2001 and the Marathon bombings of 2013 among others, all fakes according to Jones.
The social media storm was swift and decisive, calling out the former Fox News host as an abettor of a dangerous and callous man. One man wrote that he will be boycotting Kelly’s interview with Alex Jones, saying in part “I refuse to listen to anything that evil, conspiracy theorist, scumbag has to say.”
Still others were calling for a boycott of the entire network.
Social Media Reaction
Another tweeter, Shannon Watts, the mother of a Sandy Hook victim, was rightly outraged at the prospect of such an interview, informing Kelly that “This is the mother of a child murdered at Sandy Hook – a tragedy Alex Jones says never happened,” and emphatically asked Kelly, “How could you @megynkelly?”
Similarly, Nebla Márquez-Greene, mother of a little girl also killed in the Newtown massacre, sounded off on Twitter about the wrongheadedness of giving a platform to the likes of Jones. In one tweet she said that “In @megynkelly’s America, cruelty gets u on national TV on Father’s Day.”
She wanted to know what Kelly would advise her to tell her surviving little son, Isaiah, about the interview. Kelly appeared to have little to say but offered less than compelling reasons to this mother for why she would have a Sandy Hook “truther” on her show.
The reaction was not only swift but wide, with former First Daughter, Chelsea Clinton, tweeting that nothing could justify the spreading of lies and monstrous mistruths about such a horrific act.
The Cabal
Jones, dangerously reaching and influencing the hearts and minds of millions of people and who once had Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a follower, believes that a coterie of globalists, a cabal, has designs on world domination.
Jones has said in a You Tube interview that gay marriage is a ploy of the globalists to break up the family and bring ruin to that bastion of people’s allegiances, leaving those allegiances wide open for the Illuminati to gobble up. He went on to argue that the globalists eliminated God from civil society, not because of atheism or proper governance but so the state could become the new God and the object of the people's complete loyalty, apparently his take on the separation of church and state.
And he has said on his eponymous radio show, “Obama is a hardcore Wahhabist; he is al Qaeda.”
And Megyn Kelly thinks it is a good idea to hand over a national media platform, where millions of people are watching, to a man whose detached views unquestionably crush the hearts of surviving family members and have the potential to incite more violence and more tragedy?
What is this woman thinking?
Bad Ratings and the Justification
Kelly offered as part of her justification for interviewing such a man something of a journalistic cop-out: “Many don’t know [Alex Jones]; our job is to shine a light.”
Yea, that’s right, Megyn, shine a light on Alex Jones and bring more people with the potential for mental illness in contact with his toxic ideas, potentially creating future tragedies in American schools and other public places.
But others are pointing to less than spectacular ratings for the debut of her new show. According to a Media Maters for America article, Kelly’s show fared badly in the ratings wars and actually fell short in a run-up against a rerun of 60 Minutes. In other words, the Alex Jones interview was an effort to turn around the poor showing at her debut. Her goal, according to the article, was to create a viral media event in which “Kelly calls out her right wing guest’s nonsense” on national television, thus creating a ‘Megyn moment.’
Well, judging by the controversy she has stirred up in promoting this up-coming interview, she is not getting the response she had hoped for.
Trump Praised Jones
But Megyn Kelly, of course, is not the first to confer legitimacy on the crack-pot conspiracist, Jones. Kelly herself has tweeted that the President of the United States “has been on and praises Alex Jones’ show,” also in defense of her decision to schedule the interview.
Perhaps as a sign of worse things to come for NBC, however, a representative for JP Morgan Chase openly expressed on Twitter having second thoughts about advertising with Kelly’s show.
A JP Morgan senior advertising executive described feeling “repulsed” and rhetorically suggested that she did not understand why her company would spend money on a show that features people like Jones.
In the end, it appears as though we live in a time in which crazy is the new normal.