Right-wing satire site The Babylon Bee sparked a MAGA civil war this week after posting—and then deleting—a satirical gag implying Megyn Kelly might get blown up by an Israeli-style pager attack. What the Bee apparently thought was edgy humor instead set off a wave of accusations that the site had crossed into outright “inciting murder” against the former Fox News star.
The post mocked Kelly for supposedly tossing “an old pager just to be safe,” a direct nod to Israel’s 2024 electronic-device strike on Hezbollah. It also seemed designed to jab at Kelly’s recent skepticism toward Israel’s war in Gaza. Within minutes of Kelly responding with a blunt “WTF” and tagging Bee editor-in-chief Seth Dillon, the post and the accompanying article vanished.
But the damage was done, and the right-wing reaction was immediate and vicious.
“This is a fun way for the Babylon Bee to call for murder,” paleoconservative podcaster Auron MacIntyre said, echoing the sentiment of a growing corner of the populist right that has turned sharply against Israel and anyone seen as defending it.
The Bee’s pager joke didn’t happen in a vacuum—it detonated inside a conservative movement that’s been ripping itself apart ever since Tucker Carlson’s friendly sit-down with white supremacist and die-hard antisemite Nick Fuentes sent shockwaves through MAGA media. The fallout has only grown nastier, and Kelly has planted herself firmly on the side of Carlson and Candace Owens as they face accusations of mainstreaming antisemitism and conspiracy theories, especially after Charlie Kirk’s assassination raised the stakes.
Kelly has been defiant. When pressured to condemn Carlson and Owens earlier this fall, she brushed it off: her “fight is with the left, not these two.” She followed up a few weeks later with, “Too f***ing bad,” insisting she “loves” Carlson and doesn’t believe he’s “an antisemite at all.” As for Owens, Kelly said it had become a “point of pride” that she wasn’t “attacking her” while the rest of the right turned on the former Daily Wire host.
She’s taken similar fire over her Israel comments, saying “it’s time to wrap it up in this American’s view” and that she “will not be shamed out of it by being called an antisemite.” And in case anyone missed it, she recently hosted Carlson again—where he told critics of the Fuentes interview to “buzz off.”
Dillon, meanwhile, has been publicly pushing back against the “no enemies to the right” doctrine embraced by Kelly and others. In an op-ed for The Free Press, he wrote: “Recently, however, I’ve come under fire from fellow conservatives for pointing out what should be obvious: There are bad ideas on the right, too. Never scrutinize your friends, I’m told. Focus on the enemy.”
That friction made the Bee’s joke feel less like satire and more like a shot across the bow. The deleted article said Kelly had “quietly tossed her pager in the trash this week in what her team described as ‘an abundance of caution,’” and claimed “the garbage container outside Kelly’s studio had been destroyed in a mysterious explosion.” It also included a fake quote from her spokesperson noting that while she “has no fear that she’s in any danger from platforming antisemites” and “has no known associations with members of Hamas,” she ditched the pager anyway.
Critics pounced. Glenn Greenwald, who has leaned into the pro-Fuentes wing of this fracture, blasted the Bee: “Last night @TheBabylonBee — which should just re-name itself The Tel Aviv Bee — threatened Megyn Kelly that she’d be murdered by Israel for refusing to de-platform all Israel critics. As Israel loyalists often do, they used the pager image to pretend it was all just a joke.”
Jake Shields accused the Bee of “threatening to kill Megyn Kelly.” Far-right account Aesthetica said the satire outfit was “inciting murder against conservatives who won’t go along with their cancel campaign.” Vish Burra went even further: “The Babylon Bee, run by Israel First MIGA morons Seth Dillon and Joel Berry, published a call to murder Megyn Kelly, then quickly deleted it.”
But in an awkward twist, some pointed out that Kelly seemed far less bothered when a similar pager joke was made about a Muslim commentator. After conservative activist Ryan Girdusky told Mehdi Hasan, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” Kelly dismissed Hasan’s outrage and mocked him: “Mehdi Hasan leaned so far into playing the victim, he reminded me of those World Cup soccer players and their drama, pretending that they’re hurt.”
Meanwhile, Kelly has drawn fresh backlash for something completely unrelated: defending Jeffrey Epstein as not technically a pedophile. “He was into the barely legal type,” she said. “Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this, I’m just giving you facts.”
The Babylon Bee may have erased its pager bit, but the political shrapnel is everywhere. Instead of defusing tensions, the joke deepened the rift inside a movement already tearing itself apart—another reminder that the fiercest battles in MAGA world aren’t with the left, but with each other.
