MAGA media pundit Megyn Kelly got into a heated exchange with a student about whether Donald Trump is to blame for inflaming political tensions in the country before the shooting of Charlie Kirk.
Kelly, 54, took part in a speaking event by Turning Point USA, the conservative organization founded by Kirk, at Virginia Tech, alongside Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
During the event, a male student asked Kelly how she could support a president who “contributes to the rhetoric that got your friend Charlie killed.”
“You saw his rally recently, he said, ‘I hate my enemies.’ [White House Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller said similar things. How can you support him when he contributed to what got Charlie killed?” he asked.
Kelly dismissed the student’s suggestion, claiming it “assumes facts not in evidence” and is “not true.”
The student noted that the Department of Justice had scrapped a study from its website that concluded that far-right extremists have committed “far more ideologically motivated homicides” than far-left or Islamist extremists since 1990.
The student said the pulled DOJ study showed “70 percent of political violence is committed by Republicans.” Kelly minimized the number, “Once you pull the crazies out of there, it is overwhelmingly left-wing violence,” Kelly said.
She went on to respond to the student’s first point about Trump’s rhetoric, saying it caused Kirk’s killing was a “defamatory blaspheme, and it’s inappropriate in the setting.” The student interrupted her to state he wasn’t saying Trump directly caused Kirk’s murder, but the president had “contributed to the political atmosphere.”
“Then your point is utterly empty,” Kelly said. “Let’s just make clear: this guy was motivated by leftist ideology. We know it from the bullet casings. We know it from the Utah governor. We know it from his own mother.”
The student asked Kelly, even if this was the case, “Does that make it okay for the sitting president of the United States to incite violence against liberals?”
Kelly then denied that Trump had incited violence and defended the remarks that the president made during a memorial for Kirk in Arizona on Sunday.
“He did not hate his opponents,” Trump said of Kirk. “He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry,” Trump added, prompting laughter and cheers from the crowd.
Kelly said the remarks were a “self-deprecating” joke, which was “playing off” the emotional moment when Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, revealed at the memorial that she forgives the person who shot and killed her husband.
“He said, ‘We disagree. I need to do better. Erika is going to try to convince me, but I’m in a different place,’ and that’s completely normal for a politician to be thinking about his political fights,” Kelly said.
She added that Trump has “every right to loathe his enemies,” claiming they “tried to put him in jail for the rest of his life” and “bankrupt him.”
The student fired back, “Rightfully so, he’s a criminal,” while Kelly was speaking. When Kelly stopped and allowed the student to be heard, he paused and said, “Thank you for your time” before walking back from the mic.
