Megyn Kelly at Turning Point AmFest 2025: What's Really Behind the Rift on the Right, and the Truth About the Candace-Erika Summit

0:00Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.

0:12Ladies and gentlemen, we're here with Megan Kelly at AmFest 2025. Just when you think Turning Point can't go next level on the walkout, they can. They can shift to 11. Megan, I've got to ask, how does it feel to be on this stage without Charlie? Oh, like you, Jack, I miss him so much. And this is how we would always do it, right? Because just for me, I prefer a Q &A. I just think it's more interesting than a speech. And we would sit at all of these things. And he was always so great, not to make you feel nervous, but he always knew exactly what question to ask. How to get you up and down on a story.

0:54He had a very good judgment for what was interesting to the audience, too, and was always so generous with his time and his approach. So that, of course, I'm going to miss, but I can't believe it's been three months. In some ways it feels like yesterday and in some ways it feels like another lifetime that we've seen him, right? Somebody brought up an event I was at just a few days before Charlie's murder and I remember thinking to myself, we were sitting, we were having lunch and everything was totally normal, everything was just normal life and then suddenly God snaps his fingers and shows you that you are not in control, that he is in control, that you are a spectator, you are a reactor, you are someone who is living out God's will.

1:45And I think that's one of the biggest things for me that I've been, and look, you know, it's not easy doing all this, but one of the things that I've been working hard to remember that God's will is absolutely paramount in all of this. I know we don't have it all figured out but I'll tell you I was backstage a little while ago and I went to see Erica in her green room and you know she's so strong she's the picture of class but she was alone you know and I saw her I met her for the first time backstage at one of these events and she was with just their daughter, who was just a baby at the time.

2:29They didn't have their little boy yet. And she was seated. She looked so beautiful. She had her baby with her. Charlie was in and out of everything. It was crazy. We were in Florida. He was like sweaty. And she was just like an angel sitting there in the middle of the chaos, like completely managing it and nonplussed. And I just couldn't help with seeing her backstage alone, thinking this, it doesn't feel right. You know, she shouldn't be alone. she should be with the love of her life and that's why we have to make sure we get justice for the man who took him. Absolutely. And Megan you you were talking about this on your show recently and you and I had a little conversation about it as well and you said you know can a Christian want that kind of justice and can a Christian believe in that kind of justice?

3:21It's a great question. It's something a lot of people wrestle with. And the Bible tells us that the sovereign is given the sword to wield justly. And so when you talk about things like the death penalty, when you talk about things like capital punishment, we understand that it is not done out of vengeance. It is not done out of anger. It is done, as Charlie said himself, out of valuing the life of the victim and showing that that life had worth, showing that that life had value. And by the way, it is a way to start to reap, I believe, as a way to start to repay the debt that's incurred by every single moment that was stolen from Erica, for his daughter, for his son, for every single Christmas, for every single holiday, for every single birthday, for every single baseball that'll never be thrown and caught, for not being able to walk his little girl down the aisle, that's a debt that needs to be paid.

4:25That's right, Jack. And that's to say nothing of the debt that is owed to all of us, to everyone who is sitting here who knew and loved Charlie in whatever way it worked for you. I mean, if Charlie could see this, he would be so proud. He would be so happy be so Lifted up by all of you, but we've all been robbed. We've all been cheated And so yes, we will both be watching that trial minute by minute and I Believe justice will be done. I think it will and and you know I do believe that Charlie is watching us right now and I'm sure up in heaven I'm not sure quite what the radio schedule is But I think Charlie's probably on from 9 to noon and then from noon to 3 is rush That's amazing.

5:14And of course they do a handoff, because why not. But Megan, one of the things that's come up in the wake of all of this, and you know, people have said there's so much division in the movement, and you know, is there divisiveness, are there two sides, are there fractures coming up, there's division, and Charlie was that uniter. So I'll just ask you the question as interviewing here today, do you think that there has been an inseparable rift in the conservative movement that we've seen since the death of Charlie? I mean, there's a rift, but it was starting even before we lost Charlie. And it revolves around Israel.

5:53There just is. It's gotten worse without him. He was helping us navigate it. And this is another area in which I miss him so much, because I feel like Charlie and I were completely in lockstep on this. and you guys may have seen the episode that we put out, what we re-released of Charlie and yours truly talking about Israel weeks before he died where we had a really powerful heart-to-heart on where we both were. We were both ardent Israel supporters and had both been extremely defensive of American Jewish people on college campuses getting harassed and those hostage pictures getting torn down and very outspoken about it and horrified by it.

6:37And then we had a discussion at the Student Action Summit in July where there was a passing comment about if Epstein was an intel asset, whose would he have been, which Charlie asked me. And I said it would make sense that it was the Israelis, since he was very close with the former prime minister and the former president. And then we both got called anti-Semites, like by some legitimate Jewish organizations for that conversation. By the way, Benjamin Netanyahu would go on to say, I was right. And we were both on our heels. But Charlie was with young people every day for a living, in particular young Republicans.

7:17And he was seeing what I was seeing in my neck of the conservative woods, which was, this party's changing on the issue of Israel. I mean, when I was at Fox, you supported Israel, period. Like, no one was really interested in your actual opinion. You just supported Israel. which was fine for me because I did but the party started to turn after 10-7 uniform support and sympathy for Israel in 10-7 but as the war went on two years later people were starting to turn on them it felt like too much and then we were under pressure get involved we had the Iran bombing and so on and the pressure started to mount on those of us who were pro-Israel to not allow the doubters their say to try to censor them or disagree with them publicly or call them out and neither Charlie nor I felt like that was what we wanted to do at all nor was it our job we we're not the policemen of the conservative movement I'm not he wasn't Ben Shapiro isn't either well well Megan you 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?

8:34Well, 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? A head cheerleader maybe. 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.

9:14He 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 it we mixed it up over whether Tucker Carlson should be excommunicated from the conservative movement which I do not believe and What 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.

10:43So that's not friendship And I think that's fine with me with friends like that There was also some response where it seemed like that call was being co-signed by the new head of CBS News, Barry Weiss. And I wanted to know if you wanted to respond to that as well. So it's a similar situation with Barry. None of this is about them calling me out for anything I've said or haven't said. It's certainly not about Erica 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.

11:31And I'll tell you, you know, Barry Weiss wants to couch herself as Erica's protector, Erica's defender. She's retweeting the Ben speech, saying anybody who doesn't call out conspiracy theorists is a coward. Erika Kirk barely knows Barry Weiss. Barry doesn't know anything about Erika. Barry 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.

12:10What I do remember is she had Erica Kirk come on one town hall in which Barry Weiss tried to play both super important VIP executive and super fabulous star anchor at her new network CBS, Pro Tip Barry. 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 Erica 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 Erica in the position of having to defend whether Trump uses hateful rhetoric. The nerve.

12:56I'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 Erica 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. He was sick. And that was a Barry 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.

13:34So 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 Barry Weiss and how to treat Erica or anyone else So Since we're spilling all the tea tonight Tea I did not want spilled for the record. I kept my powder dry Hey, they said I could interview you, so I'm asking all the questions here. We're turning the tables on Megyn Kelly for once. So, Megyn, you mentioned something on your show recently that I know a lot of people have been chatting about. There's been a lot of chatter about this.

14:16The sit-down, the peace summit heard around the world between Candace Owens and Erica Kirk. And you mentioned that you played a role in brokering this. Tell us the story, if you would. Well, Erica has asked me to tell the story and is fine with me telling the story, so I will. Otherwise, I would not have gotten into the details.

14:42So from the beginning of Candace's programming on this, I've been in touch with Turning Point. And I know you have, too. We've all talked about it behind the scenes. But I've had long, long conversations with everybody at the highest levels on how to handle this. And I think everybody was confused about what the next right move was. Because it was so extraordinary. And I'm not going to get into the substance of those discussions, but suffice it to say that I think everyone felt the best course initially was to try to just rise above it and not respond in a tit-for-tat manner. and as it went on um it started to get more and more problematic for turning point for erica and so on and erica called me and said i want to do a sit down with candace and i want you to moderate it and i said what say what and i said you know she said a word from you would silence her on this forever.

15:50Like, it doesn't have to be an oral word. It could be like a text or an email. Maybe that's the best way to see if we can put this to bed. But Erica really felt that they should sit down together face to face. And I've gotten to know Candace a little better over the past months, and I actually thought she might do it. Like, I wasn't sure, but I don't know. An invitation from Erica would be hard to resist. And she said, you know, would you please come and facilitate it, really? Just like they were going to have the discussion, but I was, but Erica's thought, and Candace originally wanted to do this too was for them to live stream this out that same Monday that the Turning Point guys were gonna live stream their event and of course I'm like oh my mother of God what am I getting myself into but I actually felt I felt like it was divine right order and I have to tell you Jack I've prayed so many times so many times to Charlie and to God to give me the right guidance on how to handle this whole thing the fracture within the conservative movement, my friends turning on me because I won't call out my other friends like Tucker.

16:51This dust-up between Candace and Erica and Turning Point and Candace, which is fraught, and yet I understand. I know people are very angry at Candace right now, and I understand it, but I have to say, and Ben, yet another thing he mocked me for, was saying she was a young mother, Candace had like literally just had a baby. And I'm sorry, maybe Ben doesn't understand, But that is a vulnerable position for a woman and then her friend got shot in the neck And so I did think she deserved a wide berth right after Charlie's death To explore what she wanted to explore. I had real empathy for her And of course, I don't agree with what she's said about turning point Erica and she knows that but my point was simply that I thought maybe Charlie helped me understand to keep my powder dry in the whole thing so that maybe I could be in a position to help it happen is what Erica wants.

17:40Maybe Candace does want an off-ramp. And I'm willing to try. So Candace and I were in touch. And she was very nice. She said, I'm thrilled it's you. I'll do it. So they were going to do it out here in Arizona. And then there was a security issue, Candace said, that she said she couldn't come. And then Erica said, I'll go to you. I'll go to Nashville. It's just extraordinary. I mean, Erica's been all over the country trying to honor Charlie's commitments on his book tour. She was exhausted. She had this coming up this week. I mean, she's going through. She has two babies at home who are, she's now a single mother too.

18:19But she really wanted to put this to bed. And so she said, I'll go to you. And then it morphed into, let's not do the live stream. Let's just do it. The two of us, which I thought was great. So they both went in there. Erica brought a trusted friend and employee here. and Candace had someone very close to her. And they, by all accounts from both women, had a very good meeting. Now, will it last? Where does it go from here? I was joking earlier, like, what's more tenuous, the Gaza peace deal or this situation? What I really want is for Candace to move on from Turning Point and Erica. I have no problem with her asking questions, but not about them.

19:05But I also object, for the record, to the people who have tried to shut Candace down entirely on inquiring into what, if any, role did Israel have here? And I want to make clear, I don't think Israel had any role. I think Tyler Robinson killed Charlie. My only question is whether there was some trans-TIFA element that helped him. However, it's okay to ask questions about Israel. and it was Andrew Colvette the executive producer of the Charlie Kirk show who sent those texts to the FBI of Charlie's those that from that private message it wasn't a text it was private messages like a group chat in which he said the Jewish donors to turning point were driving him up on the wall and that he'd had it with them and that he they were making demands of him that he was not prepared to meet, and he was at his wits end.

20:03And he had told me personally that he found their behavior, and I quote, repulsive. So I was fine. Again, I don't think Israel had anything to do with it, but why did I have an obligation to stop Candace from asking those questions? I didn't, and I didn't call her out because I favored her asking them.

20:27So then Megan, what is the way forward? What is the way forward for the right, for Turning Point? Charlie is on assignment with God, Erica is here now, the organization is here now. What is the way forward for the movement? Look, I think we're far more united than we are divided. And I think while— I agree. Right? Yeah, I think we're far more united. I mean, I would just put one final period on the pro-Israel activists, which are not to be confused with regular Jewish Americans who are lovely and don't run around trying to tell you what you can and cannot say. But I think they need to stop being such ardent bullies because it's dividing our movement.

21:09Unnecessarily over a country that is not ours. Over Israel, not America. We need to care about America. America first is the principle that will get us through. And I think we need to remember that the people who are literally killing us, like literally killing us, are the ones who are the true enemy. These crazy radical leftists are the ones about whom we need to worry, not our own side.

21:35You know, Megan, we only have a couple of minutes left. I just wanted to tell you, would you guys mind if I embarrassed Megan a little bit? Would that be okay? A little bit? Hold on, hold on. I'll tell you a story, because it's actually embarrassing to me. that, you don't know this, but about a decade ago when I was still in the military, when I was in my Navy unit, we would be there in Navy intelligence, and of course in my office we only watched Fox, right? And every single day while we were watching there in the military, we'd be sitting and we would have on the Kelly file. And believe it or not, folks, I just want to let you know that the people of the military, The people that I knew people like me who are just guys who are serving we loved everything that you and all the people Were doing to support us to support the things that we were doing to support the patriotism That we thought that we had and keep in mind this was under Obama So we were in many cases feeling very isolated feeling very You know very looked aside and blamed for a lot of the things that were going wrong When we realized that these were political decisions that were happening keep them up.

22:43This is the era of Benghazi This was the era of the drone strikes, etc, etc So we I just wanted to say that I hope you know That there are so many people in the United States military in my state's law enforcement That would be out there watching you day in and day out and there still are today And we wanted to thank you for having our back. Oh Jack that is so sweet The fact that you would put it, the thanks goes the other way. It does not go from the military to the game. All right, now the embarrassing part? Okay, I'm going to admit it. We used to kind of have like an office pool about Meghan, and keep in mind, this is a couple of guys in the military.

23:22We always used to try to guess which color you would wear that day. It being Fox, it was a high likelihood of neon, pink, red, or yellow. I was always green. I always went with Kelly green and Kelly green Megan Kelly one thing that would have cost you the bed immediately was orange because Roger did not allow Oh, no ours ever black occasionally black. They didn't love black, but they would They sometimes let you get away with it You know why because there was a wardrobe leader there who really felt like the orange like the neon colors would pop So somebody who is channel surfing would see like oh the bright pink and a blonde head I'll stop what does she have to say and lo and behold that formula worked and Fox News became number one within a few short years after launch There you go.

24:04You know, I've tried that myself, but I don't really have the same effect, Megan. No, it's different in podcasting, but you have a voice for podcasting, Jack. One of the many reasons why you're supposed to do that. My dad says I have a voice for radio, too. Megan, thank you so much for your leadership on this, for your guidance, for brokering peace in a situation like this, for stepping up and being a leader when you could have been divisive, when you could have taken sides, but I'll say it from my side and you as well. I'm not on America's side or excuse me, I'm on America's side. I'm on Turning Point's side and I'm on Charlie's side.

24:37Right on. Same. Same. Sign me up. Thank you all so much. Give it up for Megyn Kelly. God bless.

24:47Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.