Refreshing

The Fox News person Megyn Kelly was on Fresh Air yesterday. She was surprisingly reasonable for a Fox News person.

As Donald Trump continues to court controversy via Twitter, Fox News host Megyn Kelly tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that the president-elect “really does need to be aware of the power that he has when he releases these tweets.”

Kelly felt that power firsthand in August 2015, when she pressed the candidate about his derogatory comments about women during the first Republican primary debate. Trump responded with a Twitter attack, which was quickly followed up by a barrage of insulting tweets and even death threats from his followers.

“What people don’t realize about Donald Trump — and I don’t even know if Donald Trump realizes it — is that every tweet he unleashes against you … creates such a crescendo of anger,” Kelly says.

It was like that with Dawkins, until his medical advisers told him he had to stay off Twitter. He seemed not to realize that his tweets could inspire a whole big crowd of nasty people, Breitbart-type people, to mob the unfortunate person he had tweeted about. I once explained it to him, but he went on doing it. Powerful men with millions of angry fans really should learn this basic rule of Life On Twitter.

They talked about the ambiguities of “political correctness.”

GROSS: Yeah. And then he said to you, I don’t have time for political correctness. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably not be based on the way you treated me but I wouldn’t do it. And he gets lots of applause for that, too. So did that surprise you? Did you feel like the audience was siding with Donald Trump against the women who he had insulted?

KELLY: Not in that moment. Not in that moment. I think, you know, my own read on it with a couple of days perspective after it happened was they were applauding him for being not PC and being strong, right? This is what voters related to in him all along, that he was strong and he was not afraid to take on a Fox News anchor even on a presidential debate stage. And I do think there’s a lot of people in our society who have had it with PC culture. And I, Terry, am one of those people.

You know, I think we have gone too far into the PC culture. But there’s a limit to how far we can take that. You know, you may find somebody refreshing until they drop the N-word on you and then you’re no longer feeling refreshed, you’re just feeling offended.

But then what is “political correctness”? If “the N-word” is no longer “refreshing” then what words are still refreshing? How about “bitch,” is that refreshing? Is “cunt”?

In other words are we calling it “refreshing” to insult people for being the wrong sex or color or class or age or size or sexual orientation? If so, what’s the difference between “refreshing” and “bullying”?

They talk about that, briefly.

You know, you may find somebody refreshing until they drop the N-word on you and then you’re no longer feeling refreshed, you’re just feeling offended. And where we draw that line as a society is sort of akin to what the Supreme Court said on pornography, you know, you know it when you see it. And it’s different for each person. But I would submit to you that Trump’s history of comments on women go well beyond the line if you look at them in their entirety past just the normal backlash to PC culture.

GROSS: Well, are you concerned that, you know, being anti-PC is being used as an excuse by a lot of people to justify saying really nasty, racist, sexist things?

KELLY: Well, you have to watch for that. I mean, there’s no question that’s a risk of the backlash to it. And I’m a Fox News anchor so I understand how these folks feel. I understand how flyover country feels, how Republicans feel about this. And my general sense is that they feel they’ve been lectured to enough on how they’re supposed to speak and how things that were very innocuous or innocent over the past several years were spun back to them as you’re racist if you say that, you’re racist if you do this, things, you know, that are not racist. And so they’ve gotten their backs up. And so when Trump came up as this PC buster, they said, yes, you know, he’s our champion. And he was given a permission slip for everything he said and did because of that.

I remember arguing with an aunt who had an unpleasant obsession with “the Jews,” years ago. She found me both annoying and absurd. I found her shocking. Stalemate.

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