You Do Uterus: In the Trump era, politics is about basic decency

Kylie Cheung | Daily Trojan

Former Fox News star Megyn Kelly has had a rough go of it over the past few months since leaving the network earlier this year. Kelly, who has previously agreed with a guest that Planned Parenthood “profits … by selling body parts,” moved to NBC at first to lead a prime time political journalism show, only to pivot to an apolitical morning talk show when the former yielded abysmal ratings.

Kelly’s departure from politics wasn’t exactly a loss for anyone. Despite her smart, hard-hitting criticisms of President Donald Trump throughout the campaign trail, her hostile, inflammatory and often objectively inaccurate commentary on Black Lives Matter and feminism hardly made her the voice of reason. And yet, it was a disappointing — even tone deaf — move indicative of Kelly’s blindness to her own privilege. Her years of profiting from engaging in the political sphere, her career built on misrepresenting and ignoring the lived struggles of marginalized Americans, has always been a choice for her — a choice she was able to make because she had a choice in the first place. Others, who are in a constant battle for rights, recognition and survival, lack this choice in the Trump era.

But Monday saw Megyn Kelly Today go down a different route. Kelly, who has been open about the harassment she experienced during her days at Fox News, seemed to momentarily abandon her determination to turn a blind eye to politics, using her opening monologue to criticize an overarching culture of sexual harassment, male abuse of power and the silencing of female victims at Fox News.

“Women everywhere are used to being dismissed, ignored or attacked, when raising complaints about men in authority positions,” she said of the network’s workplace. “They stay silent so often out of fear — fear of ending their career.”

And while Kelly spoke about a very specific topic in her monologue, the fact that she spoke up at all had broad and unmistakable political implications. In light of new revelations of sexual predation in the entertainment industry and recurring revelations at Fox News involving the network’s former CEO Roger Ailes and former prime-time host Bill O’Reilly, the issue of sexual harassment and abuse of power has been widely discussed in recent weeks. Men hold the vast majority of positions of power across most industries, and abuse of power to sexually exploit and degrade women remain prevalent — handfuls of public figures are refusing to be silent about this.

What Kelly brought to the dialogue was new largely because it came from her — an individual who had all but sworn off talking about politics and activism on her new show. In speaking up, taking a stance and, in this particular case, standing with women, Kelly demonstrated how thin the line between politics and basic human decency has become, that silence even from those who are typically quiet has become impossible.

The election of Trump, who has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual abuse, harassment and assault, and even admitted to assault on a hot mic tape from 2005, confirmed that there is disagreement among our nation’s voters and party leadership over whether sexual abuse is OK and warrants punishment. From Trump’s presidency, we have seen neo-Nazis equivocated to protesters for racial equality, almost unprecedented attacks on freedom of press and unapologetic attacks on women’s sexual and reproductive liberty. On college campuses across the country, there is constant, almost endless debate about whether self-admitted white supremacists should be welcomed, and rewarded with platforms to discuss topics like why black people are genetically inferior to white people, or why minorities and women should be stripped of equal rights.

With fundamental issues like this one dominating national politics today, how can anyone say that politics is just politics, that it should be left untouched in our everyday lives? For women, people of color, the LGBTQ community and other groups whose right to exist in this country is being challenged, who are being insulted and degraded by the political conversations that many Americans are very seriously partaking in, this simply isn’t an option.

Silence may not be a proactive, direct attack on people’s rights and freedoms, but it has stark consequences nonetheless. Silence is the force that enables oppression, that says “the sexual harassment and disenfranchisement of women are all OK, and can continue so long as they don’t affect me.”

At a time when, across political lines, activism, speaking up and all other actions characteristic of “social justice warriors,” “feminazis” and “liberal snowflakes” have become widely stigmatized, we can no longer ignore this basic reality — that “being political” doesn’t even mean being political anymore. In most cases, it just means being a decent human.

Kylie Cheung is a sophomore majoring in journalism and political science. She is also the editorial director of the Daily Trojan. Her column,“You Do Uterus,” runs Thursdays.