A Brief History of Megyn Kelly’s Unhinged Tweets About Meghan Markle & Prince Harry

On Wednesday morning, Megyn Kelly—the former Fox News anchor who has defended blackface and claimed that Santa could not possibly be Black—woke up feeling like stirring the pot a bit. And so she returned, unprompted, to her favorite punching bags: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

The pair have not done much of late, though Harry’s official title was finally removed from the royal family’s website on Tuesday (I guess Queen Elizabeth’s death had kept their webmaster busy). One might think that in itself would provide Kelly with plenty of snark ammo, but instead she chose to do some aggressive commentary on unrelated popularity poll results. Cameron L. Walker, a correspondent for the UK’s new right-wing TV channel GBNews, had tweeted simply, “The Prince of Wales is the No.1 public figure a majority of Americans feel good about and that Republicans and Democrats can agree on, according to a new @GallupNews poll.”

That’s a relatively innocuous statement, even if the subtext is clearly an anti-Meghan and Harry dig. But Kelly felt the need to add bitter commentary for emphasis, writing in a quote-tweet: “Paging Harry & Meghan - your campaign failed. You remain loathed & the Prince (& Princess) of Wales, beloved.”

Kelly’s unprompted aggression struck me as so bizarre that I had to go spelunking into her tweets to see how long and to what degree she’s been miserably obsessed with the (former) royals. And that made something very clear: Megyn Kelly has an absurd amount of hatred for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. For the past three years, she has tweeted criticism of them fairly regularly—sometimes related to things in the news cycle, but also very frequently for no reason at all other than she apparently remembered they exist.

Right-wingers on both sides of the Atlantic have added hating Meghan and Harry to their list of culture war shibboleths, so Kelly is not alone in her “loathing” of the pair. This is obviously rooted in racist hatred of a Black woman who dared enter—and then leave and criticize—one of the most hallowed institutions of whiteness. But especially in the pathetic echo chamber that is Twitter, it comes across as completely ludicrous, boarding on the absurd, and begs the question, Megyn, why are you so obsessed with Meghan (and Harry)??

Please join me on a brief journey examining that obsession.

Kelly’s first anti-Harry tweet really gives the game away immediately, quoting sections of a Daily Mail column that criticize him for doing anti-racist work. I’m more than ready to believe that Harry did this in a weird, grating way that did not adequately take into account his immense privilege. But that doesn’t seem to be Kelly’s issue here; she’s more upset that he talks about racism at all.

Those ellipses are doing a lot of work.

Like many of us, Kelly live-tweeted Meghan and Harry’s bombshell interview with Oprah. Some of those tweets were simply repeating some of the more surprising revelations; one even sounded somewhat kind. The rest of those tweets, however, were outraged that they cared about racism within the royal family. This is also where Kelly begins to fully turn on Meghan herself, criticizing her naïveté about marrying into the royal family.

I think I’m detecting a bit of sarcasm here!

The day after the Oprah interview, Kelly is in full anti-Meghan mode.

Look, I was not a particular fan of Meghan and Harry’s Netflix series. Like my colleagues, I found the sweetness of their love story drowned out by the navel-gazing—but that’s the pitfall of a self-produced docuseries!

I find Kelly’s criticism here genuinely hilarious, because...duh! Harry spends a ton of time in the series talking about how much therapy has helped him. He agrees that he needs therapy!!

“Prances” did make me chuckle.

You know what you could do if you were actually fed up with Meghan and Harry? Ignore them and never speak or tweet of them again!!

A few days later, she tweeted some popularity poll results. I find her habit of addressing them directly in her tweets to be supremely irritating for reasons I cannot exactly put into words.

Kelly really feels it necessary to defend the royal family against accusations of racism—something any thinking person was thoroughly unsurprised to hear.

This was a reply to another tweet and I just...this is exhausting. Unadulterated mean girl behavior.

Calling the royal family racist really stuck in her craw.

Which brings us back to today’s weird tweet. There are many more that I didn’t include in this roundup, for the purposes of keeping both you and me sane.

When Kelly inevitably pops off about Meghan and Harry again, we’ll be sure to keep you updated.