Megyn Kelly Essentially

About

Megyn Kelly Essentially, also known as “Euphemism Megyn Kelly”, is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photo of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly accompanied by captions with dismissive statements about a variety of violent acts, likening them to something harmless.

Origin

On November 21st, 2011, Megyn Kelly appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s talk show The O’Reilly Factor to discuss the UC Davis pepper spray incident. In discussing the medical effects of pepper spray, Kelly described the volatile substance as a “food product.” Shortly after it aired, a YouTube version of the interview was shared on Gawker.^[2]

Bill O’Reilly: “First of all, pepper spray -- that just burns your eyes, right?”
Megyn Kelly: “It’s like a derivative of actual pepper. It’s a food product, essentially.”
Bill O’Reilly went on to defend the officer saying, “I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police. Particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.”

The first image macro created from Kelly’s appearance was posted to Reddit^[7] on November 22nd, 2011 and was captioned with “Pepper spray? / it’s a food product, essentially.”

Spread

On November 22nd, 2011, the original video was reshared on BuzzFeed^[1], The Daily What^[3] and The Examiner.^[4] Additionally, a petition for Kelly to “drink a full dose of pepper spray on national televsion” was submitted to change.org^[14] by Slacktory editor Nick Douglas. Compilations of Megyn Kelly image macros have been shared on Geekosystem^[10], Uproxx^[11] and BuzzFeed.^[9] The series was also covered by New York radio station WNYC^[15] and the Bigster.^[16]

Additional instances have been posted to Tumblr^[8] and the advice animals subreddit.^[13] A Quickmeme^[6] page has accumulated 1517 submissions and a Facebook^[12] community page has 113 likes as of May 2012.

Notable Examples

External References