Right-wing pundit Megyn Kelly recently accused Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) of using a “blaccent”... and the conversation that followed continued to go south.

During an episode of her podcast, “The Megyn Kelly Show,” Kelly and her guest, podcaster Adam Carolla, fumed about Crockett’s recent appearance on the talk show “Sherri.”

Kelly played a clip of host Sherri Shepherd recalling the time Crockett slammed former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) during a 2024 hearing, by referring to her as a “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body.”

The dig was in response to Greene telling Crockett that she didn’t think the Texas Democrat understood the purpose of the hearing that day, saying, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

When Shepherd asked Crockett how she prepares to respond so quickly to such insults, Crockett responded: “There’s no preparation for that.”

“I’m a Black woman in America,” she said, adding that she’s “a Black woman first.”

“The level of disrespect that is continuously lobbed against us as Black women... for me I’m like, wait a minute now, I am one of the 535 most powerful people in this country, and for some reason you think we’re on the same level but you’re going to disrespect me?” she continued. “It’s not going to happen.”

Kelly, who is white, responded to the clip by mocking the way Crockett speaks.

“She’s back with the blaccent,” she scoffed to Carolla. “She doesn’t talk like that, right? She talks like you and I talk.”

“But she dials it up. ‘I’m a Black woman first,’” she continued, attempting to mimic Crockett.

Kelly and Carolla then went on to complain about Crockett’s “535” remark, which referenced the fact that she is one of the 535 voting members of Congress. Carolla called it “narcissism” before he went on a long-winded rant accusing Crockett and other Black public figures like former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama of engaging in a so-called “race hustle.”

“It’s by the way hurting your culture and your people. This ‘as a Black woman in America.’ Tell me about it bitch,” he said. “I grew up poor, I grew up white. I dug ditches for a living and I couldn’t be a fireman in L.A. County because I’m white.”

He later accused many prominent Black women of playing “the race card.” Kelly later added that Crockett “would like us to think she’s a bigger idiot than she actually is.”

The term “blaccent” usually refers to someone who is not Black but who speaks in a way that mimics Black culture and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Crockett, though, is Black, which makes Kelly’s attacks all the more perplexing.

“Paradoxically, the absurd one-sidedness of this is the actual race hustle that aims to mock and discredit Crockett and other talented Black women,” said Shaun Harper, a professor of public policy, business, and education at the University of Southern California whose expertise includes issues surrounding racial equity.

“What qualifies Kelly and Carolla to be the arbiters of Black authenticity?” Harper questioned. “Nothing. Crockett’s authenticity is one of numerous features that appeals her to Black voters.”

“More importantly, they appreciate how fiercely she defends their rights and holds her congressional peers accountable for anti-Black policymaking,” he told HuffPost.

“Given her obsession with them, Kelly should have Crockett and Michelle Obama on her show,” Harper added. “I bet she won’t say to their faces what she so boldly and wrongly says about them to Carolla and others.”

Crockett is often the target of right-wing, anti-Black and racist attacks. She is often criticized for the way she speaks, her cadence, and her use of AAVE. Conservatives have routinely accused Crockett of being disingenuous because the way she speaks doesn’t align with their views of how someone who attended private school or law school should speak.

Last year, Laura Ingraham referred to Crockett as “street,” claiming that the representative had communicated in a “different way” in the past. Greene had once asserted last year that Crockett doesn’t understand the “Black American struggle” and that she puts on a fake persona to pretend she does, despite the fact that she went to private school and law school.

Civil rights attorney Portia Allen-Kyle had previously told HuffPost that Greene’s remarks about the “Black American struggle” proved that the then-congresswoman “doesn’t understand the reality that Blackness is disrespected in this country no matter how many degrees you hold or how much money you make.”

“She reduces the Black experience to some caricature of poverty and struggle— as if class alone defines Blackness,” she said at the time. “That mindset exposes her bias. Greene thinks struggle is the only stamp of Blackness and she dresses up her ignorance as commentary.”

Crockett has responded to the right-wing fixation over the way she speaks before.

“I don’t have an ‘accent’ ... if anything, it’s Texan, maybe mixed with a little bit of St. Louis,” she said in a TikTok video posted in March last year “And then determining that my ‘accent’ is fake because of the types of schools I went to ... seriously, y’all?”

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