NBC host Megyn Kelly on Tuesday insisted that Fox News was not being racist when it used the same racially-coded phrases that white supremacists have praised President Donald Trump for using.
During an interview with former white supremacist Christian Picciolini, Kelly asked if Trump had sent any "dog whistles" to the white supremacist community.
"I do believe that there were dog whistles," Picciolini revealed. "But to somebody like me, I can tell you that's a bullhorn. I heard them loud and clear. When they referred to globalism, I knew that they were talking about the global Jewish conspiracy. When they use terms like 'the liberal media,' those are terms we use to use but we use to call it the Jewish media."
"Can I just say," Kelly interrupted on behalf of her previous employer. "Having worked at Fox News for 13 years, we used to criticize the MSM [mainstream media], some would call them the liberal media and it didn't mean that."
"It meant, you know, left leaning," she said. "People who were not open minded toward the views of half the country, conservative people."
"That's also the power of their marketing," Picciolini pointed out. "They can take words that are hateful and massage them to get them into the lexicon to make it normalized."
"So you pick something that is okay," Kelly opined, "a term that has nothing to do with white supremacy and you adopt it. And to your people, it has a very different meaning. Like, with a wink and a nod."
Kelly, however, did not explain why Fox News continued to use the same "dog whistles" and phrases as Trump after they were adopted by white supremacists.
