If you followed Megyn Kelly's career a decade ago, you might have described her as a tough, fair-minded interviewer — someone willing to challenge guests on both sides, including Donald Trump, in ways that earned grudging respect even from people who disagreed with her politics.
But over the past year or two, she has increasingly given platforms to, amplified, and aligned herself with voices that traffic in antisemitism - conspiracy thinking about Jewish power and hostility to Israel that shades into something uglier. And a recent exchange on X illustrates exactly how far the drift has gone.
When Bill Ackman criticized Tucker Carlson for content about Chabad that Ackman said could get someone killed, Kelly fired back on Carlson's side. But she did not engage the substance of the Tucker Carlson question, and instead pointed out that Ackman had recently retweeted someone who had called her many profane names. The retweeted post, it should be noted, also contained a detailed substantive critique of Kelly's positions on Iran and American military strategy - but Kelly responded only to the insults, treating being called names as a moral equivalent to content that could plausibly incite violence against Jews.
Her response, implying that Ackman was a hypocrite for caring about the lives of Jews when he approved a message that insulted her, is not a small thing. It reveals the precise failure that the Torah's ethics of judgment is designed to prevent. Kelly had criticism in front of her. She chose not to engage it. She used the profanity as cover to protect her position rather than examine it - and then inflated the personal affront into something it wasn't, to gain moral high ground she hadn't earned, and effectively defended Carlson's antisemitic incitement at the same time.
How does a journalist get to that place? The Torah has a precise answer. And it has nothing to do with secret payments or deliberate malice.
"You shall not take a bribe, for the bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and distorts the words of the righteous."
— Deuteronomy 16:19
The most remarkable part of the verse is what it doesn't say. It doesn't say bribery corrupts the wicked. It says it corrupts the wise and the righteous.
The Torah is being psychologically precise: the danger isn't the villain who knowingly takes a payoff. The danger is the good person whose perception is quietly reshaped by incentive. even the most righteous, self aware person's opinions are shaped by the act of being indebted to someone.
The rabbis found something revealing in the Hebrew word shochad (bribe). It can be read as she-hu chad — "because he becomes one with him." Once someone receives a benefit from a party, their mind subtly begins to identify with that party's interests. This is why Jewish law prohibits judges from accepting even trivial favors from litigants.
How trivial? The Talmud in Ketubot (105b) is specific.
Ameimar was sitting and judging a case when a feather floated and landed on his head. A certain man came by and removed it from his head. Ameimar said to him: What are you doing here? He said to him: I have a case to present before you. Ameimar said to him: I am disqualified from presiding over your case, due to the favor you performed for me.
This trivial act that took two seconds, cost nothing, and was probably done reflexively, and yet Ameimar considered himself compromised. He had received a minute benefit from this person. That was enough.
But the Talmud goes even further with the story of Rabbi Yishmael, son of Rabbi Yosei.
His sharecropper customarily brought him a basket of fruit every Friday. One week the sharecropper arrived on Thursday instead. Rabbi Yishmael asked why, and the sharecropper explained that he had a legal case before the court, and since he was coming to town anyway, he brought the fruit along the way.
Rabbi Yishmael refused the gift and immediately recused himself. He seated two other scholars to hear the case. But as he walked nearby, he noticed something disturbing in his own mind: he kept unconsciously constructing arguments for the sharecropper: "If he wants, he could claim this, and if he wants, he could claim that."
His conclusion: "Blast the souls of those who accept bribes. If I, who did not accept anything — and if I had accepted, I would have accepted my own property, since the fruits legally belong to me — am nevertheless in this state of mind due to the proposed gift, all the more so those who actually accept bribes."
He refused the gift. The fruits were arguably already his. And his cognition was still distorted — simply because a benefit had been proposed.
Behavioral science has spent decades documenting some, but nnot the full extent, of what the Talmud described. Psychologist Ziva Kunda established in 1990 that people don't reason toward truth alone but toward desired conclusions. When people have a personal incentive, they search memory selectively, scrutinize opposing evidence more harshly, and lower the bar for evidence supporting their preferred conclusion. And they experience the result as objective.
Dan Kahan's 2013 study found something even more unsettling: when data on a politically charged topic was presented, people with higher analytical skills became more biased, not less. They used their intelligence to build better defenses for the conclusion their incentives required.
But modern psychology has not yet formally studied what Rabbi Yishmael documented: that a rejected benefit — one involving property arguably already yours — still contaminates reasoning. The contamination, the Talmud suggests, happens at the moment the proposed benefit is perceived, not at acceptance. The bribe doesn't need to land to blind.
The science has confirmed the Torah's insight. It hasn't yet caught up to Rabbi Yishmael's.
This is not only about judges in court. The sages made clear that we are all judges, all the time. The obligation to judge fairly - dan l'chaf zechut - applies to all of us. We are all constantly rendering judgments: about people, events, claims, news stories.
And on social media are all Ameimars, with people removing feathers from our heads all day long.
When someone likes your post, they are doing you a small favor. When they retweet you, share you, comment "finally someone says it, " each one is a tiny benefit flowing from a specific audience, with specific views, that expects specific things from you. And the Talmud would tell you that each one subtly nudges your reasoning toward becoming one with the people rewarding you: toward their worldview, their grievances, their preferred villains.
Most of us experience this as validation, not corruption. People are responding because I'm right. That is precisely what Rabbi Yishmael feared. But we are all affected, and it in turn affects our own behavior.
If it affects occasional social media posters, all the more so it affects online influencers whose very income stream depends on those clicks and "Likes" and feedback. Their audience, like all audiences, rewards content that confirms what it already believes, triggers outrage, and provides satisfying villains.
The mechanism doesn't require a phone call from a donor or a wire transfer from a foreign government. It is built into the economics of attention. Feed the audience what it rewards, receive income. Do it long enough, and you don't experience yourself as compromised: you experience yourself as someone who finally sees things clearly.
And when someone criticizes you, substantively, the ego that has been shaped by years of audience reward will find a way not to hear it. Kelly dismissed a detailed critique of her Iran positions because it came wrapped in profanity. She treated being called a name as morally equivalent to Tucker Carlson's content about Chabad — content that Ackman argued could get someone killed. The insult became a permission slip to avoid the harder question: what if they have a point?
That is not only a failure of shochad, of incentive corrupting judgment over time. It is a failure of anavah, humility: the capacity to receive an uncomfortable truth and evaluate it on its merits rather than its packaging. Rabbi Yishmael noticed what was happening in his own mind and named it honestly, even though he had refused the gift and even though the fruits were arguably his. That kind of self-scrutiny is precisely what the attention economy trains people out of.
This is how Megyn Kellys get created. It isn't corruption in the ordinary sense, but the slow, incentive-driven drift that the Torah warned about, plus the ego investment that, over time, makes honest self-examination feel like surrender.
Jewish law's answer to judicial bias was structural: remove the incentive, require recusal, build in transparency. Good intentions were explicitly considered insufficient. Ameimar didn't trust himself to remain objective after someone removed a feather from his head. Rabbi Yishmael didn't trust himself after refusing a gift that was arguably already his.
The modern equivalent is transparency about incentives.
Journalists should disclose who funds them and who their audience is. Academics who write about political topics while being political activists should disclose that, and not hide behind "I have no competing interests" while omitting their own advocacy work. Universities that accept hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar and then find themselves hosting antisemitic speakers and publishing anti-Israel research should be required to acknowledge the connection explicitly.
The relationship between benefit and bias isn't always provable. Rabbi Yishmael couldn't prove causation either; he just noticed what was happening in his own mind and was honest enough to name it.
That honesty is enormously difficult. And when it comes to one's livelihood being dependent on such incentives, it is literally impossible to remain objective.
The click economy doesn't just make objectivity impossible, but actively rewards extreme positions - and this includes antisemitism. It is not only a moral problem, but a structural problem.
The rabbis knew this 2,000 years ago.
Monday, March 09, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
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