Megyn Kelly Compares America to Rome in Decline
Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people. Please read more.
Megyn Kelly has come a long way from asking Donald Trump tough questions about his history of misogyny and being played by Charlize Theron in a film about being sexually abused by Fox News’ chairman Roger Ailes. Today, she presides over her own media empire including a show on SiriusXM that, Media Matters reports, has given her a platform to promote the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, criticize the intelligence of Black women, paint immigrants as rapists, claim trans people are more likely to engage in mass murder, and endorse Trump’s use of governmental power to intimidate and prosecute political opponents. In fact, her show is doing so well that SiriusXM is giving her an entire channel.
On the July 21, 2025 episode of her show (no link because she gets paid when you click), Kelly hosted former Obama Chief of Staff and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to continue his (morally and strategically wrong) campaign to convince Democrats to stop supporting Transgender people. He found a ready audience in Kelly, who used the second half of the show to return to many of her favorite anti-Trans talking points, this time with a historical twist: an analogy between America and the Roman Empire in decline. It’s among the most tried and true right wing analogies out there.
“I was thinking about this last week,” she told the commentators she gathered to discuss Emanuel’s remarks. “Right before the fall of the Roman Empire, the culture completely imploded with debauchery…we’re right back there in some ways with like throuples and people trying to normalize pedophilia…and the cutting off of children’s genitals in the name of like equity and inclusion, dividing us by race, trying to make little girls boys when they’re not.” Kelly ends with the rhetorical flourish typical of such comparisons: representing the contemporary world as teetering on the brink of destruction and casting efforts to prevent that destruction as a heroic battle or war. “It’s the road to end times,” she warned. “If we don’t fight back against it, we’re going to completely lose everything that’s dear to us.” All this over less than 1% of the population wishing to live lives true to themselves.
Kelly’s hateful analogy has some basis in ancient sources. But those same ancient sources reveal what such narratives of decline are really about.
Others have reported on the hypocrisy of Kelly complaining about those who “normalize pedophilia” and then a couple months later defending Jeffrey Epstein. Here we can focus on her comparison between Rome and America. Kelly doesn’t pause her tirade to cite any sources for the elements of Roman history that worry her about American society, but she could have mentioned the historian Sallust’s complaint that “men played the woman” during the late Republic, Polybius’ claim that Roman youths had adopted the “vicious tendency” of “abandon[ing] themselves to amours with boys,” or the decadent excess found in the portrayal of Trimalchio’s banquet in Petronius’ Satyricon.
Then again, once you start citing sources you open up the possibility of recognizing that Sallust, Polybius, and Petronius, each in their own way, were not objective observers of the reality of Roman culture but political actors who, in the case of Sallust and Polybius, manufactured fear and outrage about civilizational decline in order to create support for the politicians they were aligned with, Scipio in the case of Polybius, and Julius Caesar in the case of Sallust. Petronius, a member of the emperor Nero’s inner circle, represented Trimalchio — a freed slave who became wealthy — as a degenerate buffoon in order to help old-money aristocrats worry less about the erosion of their traditional grip on wealth and influence. In other words, these aren’t objective observations about a crisis in Roman culture. They’re self-serving narratives crafted for political gain.
So Kelly’s hateful analogy between America and Rome finds some basis in ancient sources. But those same ancient sources reveal what such narratives of decline are really about: political partisans trying to make people afraid, make them believe that any cultural change can only make things worse, and make them think that the only thing that can save society from collapse is an authoritarian leader, whether that’s Julius Caesar or Donald Trump. It’s such an old trick, you might even call it ancient.
