Megyn Kelly stepped in to defend Elon Musk on Monday, decrying that the watchdog group Media Matters that put him in hot water last week has the “sole goal” of getting conservatives “fired, ruined, canceled.”
Musk, the tech mogul and owner of X (the social media formerly known as Twitter), said Saturday that he intends to sue Media Matters following a report that found the platform placing advertisements for the likes of IBM, Sony and NBCUniversal next to antisemitic, pro-Hitler and white nationalist content. The blowback was swift beginning Thursday when IBM, Disney, Apple, Warner Bros. and more companies were among a mass exodus of advertisers following the Media Matters report and Musk’s own antisemitic tweets.
The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company pic.twitter.com/55vl7PspaQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2023
Standing in defense of Musk, Kelly said Monday she believes the nonprofit has long targeted conservatives.
“Since I joined Fox and started coming up, [Media Matters] would take anything and everything I said completely out of context, try to spin it into a controversy and then try to get me fired,” she said on Monday’s episode of “The Megyn Kelly Show.” “I mean, over and over and over and over my entire career … including when I went to NBC.”
The organization — which was founded in 2004 by journalist and political activist David Brock — is a web-based information and research center that monitors and analyzes conservative misinformation in U.S., per a description of the site.
“They pushed and pushed and pushed anything that I said that they could make controversial all over the internet,” Kelly continued. “Their sole goal is to get conservatives fired, to get anybody right of center fired, ruined, canceled. That’s what they exist for.”
In response to the report, Musk announced Saturday he would be filing a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against the business “the split second the court opens on Monday” — a threat that has apparently not yet come to fruition.
Musk disputed Media Matters’ methods, saying that the organization tried to “manipulate the public and advertisers” by creating a fake account to curate a timeline that would “misinform advertisers about the placement of their posts.”
In addition, Musk said, “These contrived experiences could be applied to any platform.”
On Saturday, Media Matters President Angelo Carusone responded to Musk’s threat.
“Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a bully who threatens meritless lawsuits in an attempt to silence reporting that he even confirmed is accurate,” Carusone said. “Musk admitted the ads at issue ran alongside the pro-Nazi content we identified. If he does sue us, we will win.”
Kelly ended her comments Monday, calling Media Matters a “hack” and an untrustworthy company.
“I cannot believe that these big blue chip companies are jumping when Media Matters says jump,” Kelly said of the advertisers’ respective departures. “Are they so clueless they don’t understand it that this is a hack organization, that you can’t trust anything this group does?”
Watch the full segment in the video above.
