Megyn Kelly
Whether she likes it or not, Megyn Kelly is a part of Beyoncé‘s Cowboy Carter Tour — but that’s not stopping the political commentator from slamming the superstar for including footage of her in the trek’s visuals.
In a recent clip from The Megyn Kelly Show titled “Beyonce Tries Playing Victim,” Kelly said it had recently come to her attention that “Beyoncé, who’s on some world tour right now reinventing herself as a country star, is running videotape during the show of yours truly.”
“Here is another one of the most privileged, beloved women in the world — and richest, based on her own fortune, never mind the man she’s married to,” the TV personality continued, referring to billionaire Roc Nation founder Jay-Z. “But [she] still has to look for the one sliver where she could play the victim and be aggrieved because big bad Megyn Kelly said something completely milquetoast about her entry into country music.”
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Billboard has reached out to Bey’s rep for comment.
Kelly’s remarks come more than a month after the Destiny’s Child alum kicked off her world tour in support of Billboard 200-topping album Cowboy Carter, which found Bey exploring her love for country music across 27 tracks, including collaborations with icons such as Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton. At a certain point in each show, a blurred-out clip of the former Fox News anchor blasting Bey for “sticking her big toe” into country music during an appearance on Australia’s Sky News plays on venue screens.
The moment in the show is representative of how many people were critical of the 35-time Grammy winner for experimenting with country music once Cowboy Carter dropped in March 2024. Many parts of the industry were unwelcoming — the album earned zero nominations at the CMA Awards and country radio did not embrace any tracks — but Bey would become the first Black woman to ever reach No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart with lead single “Texas Hold ‘Em.” Cowboy Carter also took home both album of the year and best country album at the 2025 Grammys.
But despite Bey’s success since the last time she spoke on the subject, Kelly doubled down on her early criticism of Cowboy Carter. “She and her marketing people were treating that entry [into country music] like the second coming, like it’s Jesus incarnate,” she added on on The Megyn Kelly Show. “‘All hail Queen Bey, she’s here to rescue country music,’ which was a perfectly thriving industry long before Beyoncé showed up.”
Following stints in Los Angeles, Chicago and the New York City area throughout the month of May, Bey is now gearing up to bring her Cowboy Carter trek to London for a string of shows at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium kicking off June 5. Her five-night stay at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., grossed $55.7 million with 217,000 sold, marking the biggest single-venue engagement reported to Billboard Boxscore in 2025 so far.
Kelly’s complaint about the Sky News footage isn’t the first instance of someone taking issue with the Cowboy Carter Tour visuals, however. In May, attorneys for Sphere Entertainment Co. CEO James Dolan sent Bey a cease-and-desist for using imagery of the Las Vegas Sphere in a video interlude, after which the musician cheekily superimposed the city’s Allegiant Stadium over the first venue in the visual.
The commentator has called the star a bad sport, an “elite snob” and much more over the years.
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During the first night of the Democratic National Convention, Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-CA) kicked off her speech by noting that she and Vice President Kamala Harris “share a lot in common,” specifically, the fact that they “both graduated from historically Black colleges.”
Butler’s show of HBCU love to Harris was a pretty uncontroversial thing if you ask Black people since we tend to be pretty well-accustomed to the pride HBCU alumni take in their alma mater. To us, the nod to HBCUs by Butler, who attended Jackson State University, was simply a good look for the culture on the national political stage. But to white and fragile America’s favorite Karbon Kopy Karen, Megyn Kelly, what Butler said was a clear affront to white people.
“Laphonza Butler spkg – (she filled Feinstein’s seat) – celebrating that she and Harris both graduated from historically black colleges. Imagine the white person up there: I’m proud to tell you I went to a mostly white university!” Kelly tweeted.
Now, no one should have needed to point out to Kelly that HBCUs only ever existed because white people didn’t want Black people learning in the same classrooms as them, just as no one should have to point out that “White History Month” isn’t a thing because, in America, white history is celebrated by default the other 11 months of the year. Of course, like the rest of white conservative America, Kelly ignores America’s racist history, which is why she once defended blackface and claimed it’s not racist. Kelly also ignores her own hypocrisy, which is why she thinks a shout-out to HBCUs is racist, but she didn’t think it was racist when she insisted that Jesus and Santa Claus are white and should only be depicted as white.
Instead of utilizing a smidgeon of common sense, Kelly set herself up to get dragged by the fine folks on X, most of whom offered her the history lesson she shouldn’t have needed.
Check out the reactions below.
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