Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens butted heads over whether it was appropriate to blacklist Harvard students whose organizations co-signed a letter blaming Israel for atrocities committed by the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas last weekend.
Kelly, the host of the SiriusXM podcast “The Megyn Kelly Show,” took to the X social media platform on Sunday to criticize Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy for opposing calls to deny job opportunities to the Harvard students whose groups signed onto the controversial letter.
Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire, enlisted the support of at least a dozen business executives who have vowed to automatically reject the resumes of students whose groups are signatories to the letter.
Ramaswamy, the biotech mogul and political activist-turned-candidate, said that while the students were “dead wrong,” he did not think it was “productive to hunt down individual members of college student groups for the purpose of blacklisting them.”
“We don’t hire those who do the killing and we don’t hire those who applaud the killers while the savagery is underway,” Kelly, who commands an audience of 2.9 million followers on the platform formerly known as Twitter, wrote in response to Ramaswamy, adding that if he was “open to hiring one of the lunatics, though, good to know!”
Owens, a commentator for the online news site Daily Wire, chimed in to back Ramaswamy, calling Kelly’s assertion “incredibly disingenuous.”
“You know that many of those students are not out there because they want babies to be murdered,” wrote Owens, the conservative commentator who has more than 4.3 million followers on X, referencing the 1,300 Israeli civilians who were massacred by Hamas gunmen last weekend.
Owens wrote that while college students are “stupid,” they were “young” and “experimenting” with ideas as she had done when she was “radically pro-choice.”
“You are an adult woman who is advocating for their lives to be permanently pigeonholed because they have the wrong ideas which are likely being spoon fed to them in their classrooms,” Owens wrote to Kelly.
Kelly fired back at Owens.
“Being liberal is not the same as taking to the streets to cheer murdered babies and blame said murders on the victims,” the former Fox News primetime host wrote.
“But you go ahead and hire as many of them as you want Candace.”
Owens responded to Kelly, writing that the students were “misguided” and “in need of education, not blacklists.”
Owens blasted Kelly for tagging the name of her employer, the news site Daily Wire.
She said the move reeked of “inherent pettiness” and “immaturity.”
“Would you like a direct contact to management? Help me help you,” Owens wrote to Kelly.
Kelly responded: “I talked to them just two weeks ago when they asked me to put you on my show to promote your crime series and I said sure I will do you and Candace that favor.”
Owens wrote that she was “sorry” that she “couldn’t actually make your show in the end.”
“Megyn, you seem to be taking this personally,” Owens wrote.
“I am not attacking you, I am attacking your position that students should be put on blacklists or that the majority of them are genuinely marching to celebrate the death of grandmas overseas,” she added.
Kelly then wrote that Owens was “attack[ing] someone who has been nothing but nice to and supportive of you.”
“Then when that person call you out, you just keep saying ‘I am the mature one!'” Kelly wrote.
“Take care Candace. I wish you well,” she added.
The Kelly-Owens dust-up highlights the divide among right-leaning media figures over the appropriate US response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Isolationist-leaning voices such as Owens, Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk oppose American involvement in a foreign conflict while Kelly, Ben Shapiro, Meghan McCain and others favor a more robust US posture in support of Israel.
The Harvard controversy has also pitted famous alums against each other.
While hedge fun billionaires Ken Griffin and Bill Ackman have demanded that student leaders involved in the letter that was circulated after the Hamas attack be shunned by the private sector, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers pushed back, saying that it was “getting a bit carried away.”
