Megyn Kelly criticized Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss at AmericaFest on Friday, accusing them of trying to dictate what qualifies as conservative during a discussion with Jack Posobiec.

JACK POSOBIEC, HUMAN EVENTS: Well, Megyn, you mentioned him, and your name came up on this stage last night in regards to pretty much all of this, would you like the opportunity to respond? MEGYN KELLY: Well, I found it kind of funny that Ben thinks he has the power to decide who gets excommunicated from the conservative movement, which shows a willful blindness about his position in it. It reminded me a little of when the girl who was the head of our middle school chorus told me she was going to take all my friends away from me. Chorus? Head cheerleader, maybe, but like, so I resent the whole thing, I object to the whole thing. Ben and I, he had the nerve to call me a friend right before he called me a despicable coward for not calling out the people he once called out, so he both wants to parent me and be my child. He wants to tell me what I have to do and who I have to say what to, and then when I don’t, he and some of his friends want to act like utter victims because I won’t do what they say. They need me. I have to be their daddy and step in to protect them, and I am not their daddy, and I resent that he thinks he’s in a position to decide who must say what to whom and when. Thank you. So I don’t think we are friends anymore. I’ve been a very good friend to Ben. Nobody knew who the heck Ben Shapiro was when I started putting him on my shows on the FOX News Channel, and I helped make him a star, and I’ve been very, very good to Ben over the years, and he’s been good to me too. He just recently came on my tour, as did you, and I gave him the most kind introduction I could possibly give him because I know that he’s losing subscribers a lot, and so I tried to do something nice for him by giving him a long 10-minute intro and personally vouching for him, and we mixed it up on Israel out on stage. It wasn’t Israel because we’re on the same place on Israel. We mixed it up over whether Tucker Carlson should be excommunicated from the conservative movement, which I do not believe, and thank you, and when it was over, we hugged, said goodbye, and then we had a nice text exchange a couple days later saying our friendship was important to us, and the next thing I saw was him attacking me on stage last night as a coward, so that’s not friendship, and I think that’s fine with me with friends like that. POSOBIEC: There was also some response where it seemed like that call was being co-signed by the new head of CBS News Bari Weiss, and I wanted to know if you wanted to respond to that as well. KELLY: So it’s a similar situation with Bari. None of this is about them calling me out for anything I’ve said or haven’t said, or it’s certainly not about Erika Kirk as Ben tried to make it sound last night. It’s about Israel. Those two are very pro-ardent Israel activists, which is fine, but they don’t get to dictate how the rest of us feel about Israel or what we do with respect to our friends and our friends’ opinions on Israel, and I’ll tell you, you know, Bari Weiss wants to couch herself as Erika’s protector, Erika’s defender. She’s retweeting the Ben speech, saying anybody who doesn’t call out conspiracy theorists is a coward. Erika Kirk barely knows Bari Weiss. Bari doesn’t know anything about Erika. Bari Weiss has never been to a turning point event. Do you guys remember her here, standing up for what we believe in when Charlie was alive? I don’t remember her standing up for our principles. I don’t remember her defending Charlie the many times he was called a racist or an anti-Semite. I really don’t remember that at all. What I do remember is she had Erika Kirk come on one town hall in which Bari Weiss tried to play both super important VIP executive and super fabulous star anchor at her new network CBS, pro-tip Bari, that’s no way to win friends at your new organization, to try to steal all the hosting abilities of the on-air talent. So good luck with that, and what she did when she had Erika there was to have the nerve to bring on the man who asked the final question of Charlie right before he got shot, Hunter Kozak, to put Erika in the position of having to defend whether Trump uses hateful rhetoric. The nerve. POSOBIEC: I’ll just say I didn’t appreciate when I saw that that happened, and I don’t think that that ever should have happened. I don’t think that question should have been asked, and I noticed that when Hunter Kozak did that, he immediately went to try to get Erika to denounce Trump, denounce his rhetoric. This is a man who was standing in front of Charlie, in front of her husband when he died, and he never once even said to her the basic human decency of saying, I’m sorry for your loss. KELLY: He was sick, and that was a Bari Weiss move, because trust me, I’ve done town halls. You know who the questioners are, and you know what the questions are in advance in that setting. So she knew it was coming, and she thought it was appropriate to have Charlie’s widow answer for Trump’s violent rhetoric. I’m sorry, that’s disrespectful, and I will not be taking any lessons from Bari Weiss in how to treat Erika or anyone else.

RealClearPolitics Videos