Former MTV VJ Kennedy on Her Libertarian Evolution

Nick Gillespie | 2.15.2012 3:00 PM

As current drive time radio host on KYSR in Los Angeles and former MTV VJ Kennedy explains it, early reactions to her political leanings were pretty consistent. "Your name is Kennedy, and you're a Republican, and you're on MTV? What?!"

At Reason Weekend 2012, Reason Foundation's annual donor event, Kennedy sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss her transformation from Dan Quayle fetishist to hardcore libertarian, a Republican tattoo, and her recent fight with HBO's Bill Maher over atheism.

About 28 minutes. Filmed by Joshua Swain and Anthony Fisher. Edited by Meredith Bragg.

http://www.facebook.com/Kennedynation

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o3 13 years ago

nice to see a women who stays in-shape
1. oo 13 years ago
  
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smz 13 years ago

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smz 13 years ago

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1. WWNGD? 13 years ago
  
  If you had a link in it, your link must have had some reference to naughty-bits in it.
"Furious" Styles 13 years ago

Caution: Kennedy may or may not be naked in the video. Start on your own risk.
RedDragon6009 13 years ago

I was a Kennedy fetishist back in the day; you know, when MTV actually played music videos.
1. Joe M 13 years ago
  
  Wow, grandpa, what was it like back in the olden days before running water?
  1. Gramps 13 years ago
    
    Well son, back then, your mom still had most of her teeth and decent body before giving birth to you completely ruined her.
2. R C Dean 13 years ago
  
  Who wasn't, Red?
  1. Yet Another Dave 13 years ago
    
    I wasn't. She and the rest of her crew came on and I pined for the days of Nina and Martha.
3. Leftist Behavior 13 years ago
  
  Early 90's MTV was halcyon days indeed. After I saw 50/50 the other day, I had to get on YouTube to watch some of Pearl Jam Unplugged after hearing Yellow Ledbetter in the credits.
  
  Yeah, I know, get off my lawn.
  1. robc 13 years ago
    
    Early 90's MTV
    
    was crap.
    
    You need to get off MY lawn.
  2. Episiarch 13 years ago
    
    MTV started sucking by 1988, and it was pure shit in the 90s. Nothing can compare to MTV in the early 80s, though. Pure gold.
    1. smz 13 years ago
      
      headbangers ball FTW (only when they played Napalm Death and Cannibal Corpse though)
      1. Episiarch 13 years ago
        
        Indeed. Headbanger's Ball was the only time during which they played Iron Maiden and Megadeth videos.
    2. Zeb 13 years ago
      
      It sucked, but they still had some cool stuff and showed the occasional music video. Still a lot better than now (or whenever the last time I looked was, which is probably 10 years ago).
      
      Also Beavis and Butthead.
    3. Red Rocks Rockin 13 years ago
      
      MTV started sucking by 1988
      
      Yo! MTV Raps is a two-hour American television music video program, which ran from August 1988 to August 1995 through its original Yo! MTV Raps name and later by Yo! (until 1999).
      
      Coincidence? I think not.
4. Zeb 13 years ago
  
  I never found her particularly attractive. The facial expression she tends to wear just does not do it for me. And curly, dark hair is just not my thing.
  1. Bill 13 years ago
    
    Curly, dark hair? Can you be more specific?
Old Mexican 13 years ago

"We caught VJ Kennedy while she was getting out of the shower...."
Joe M 13 years ago

That argument with Maher was so lame. It should not have been linked, the faster to lose it in the sands of time.
komenator 13 years ago

She has very muscular arms.
1. Joe M 13 years ago
  
  Wonder if she has a paper route.
  1. Ska 13 years ago
    
    She used to be a blacksmith.
2. WWNGD? 13 years ago
  
  Better to beat her children with.
Raston Bot 13 years ago

Was this video made b/c she donated $666 during the donathon?

She obviously works out.
Joshua Corning 13 years ago

I don't know about atheism being a religion...but the idea that nothing created everything from no cause and for no reason, ie the big bang, makes talking snakes seem pretty plausible.
1. "Furious" Styles 13 years ago
  
  Trolling or serious?
  1. Joshua Corning 13 years ago
    
    After 10 billion years had passed could you distinguish the difference between a collision and an explosion? Would the signature of back ground radiation be any different?
    
    If a bunch of objects were all moving in random vectors for 10 billion years how many of those objects would be headed toward one another?
    
    Here is a hint: zero.
    
    I don't know how the universe came into existence...the fact that people (physicist) need an explanation so bad that they come up with something as convoluted as the big bang to explain it is more telling of human nature then it is about how the universe came to be.
    1. Zeb 13 years ago
      
      Science is not atheism and atheism is not science. The big bang is not an alternate creation story. It is the best guess cosmologists have now as to what would have happened in the past given our current understanding of the present state of the universe and physical law. No scientist says that it just came from nothing. We just don't know how it started. And the big bang is really not a terribly convoluted theory.
      In any case, the convolutedness of a theory is no reason to reject it. Quantum physics is probably the most convoluted theory ever and it is also the most successful theory ever, both experimentally and in practical application.
      
      If a bunch of objects were all moving in random vectors for 10 billion years how many of those objects would be headed toward one another?
      
      Here is a hint: zero.
      
      Unless you know where the objects started out, that makes no sense at all. And where does the microwave background come from?
      1. Joshua Corning 13 years ago
        
        Science is not atheism and atheism is not science.
        
        Never said it was.
        
        The big bang is not an alternate creation story.
        
        Yes it is.
        
        In any case, the convolutedness of a theory is no reason to reject it. Quantum physics is probably the most convoluted theory ever and it is also the most successful theory ever, both experimentally and in practical application.
        
        Which is in stark contrast with the Big Bang which has zero experimental evidence and zero application. A convoluted theory that is backed up by extraordinary proof is not the same thing as a convoluted theory backed up the observation that everything seems to be moving away from everything else....lots of plausible reasons why that can be.
        
        And where does the microwave background come from?
        
        Billions of years of galactic collisions, super nova, star formations, black hole formations, black hole evaporation....gee I don't know where does microwave radiations come from?
        
        Oh wait...I do I know...IT COMES FROM FUCKING EVERYTHING!!!!
        
        Zeb 13 years ago
        
        The observation is more than that things are all moving away from each other. It is that things move away from each other faster the farther they are away form each other in a way that it more or less linearly related to distance. The microwave background is very uniform and is the part of the microwave sky that cannot be accounted for by stars and galaxies according to current theory. You can't just say that it comes form everywhere. You need a coherent theory that explains how that happens. The reason that the microwave background was remarkable was that there was no theory to explain it. Until people really started looking at the big bang hypothesis.
        The big bang also does not preclude there having been a universe before what we can extrapolate. Current theory about the microwave background just says that it comes from a time when the universe was much smaller and hotter. Maybe it is lack of creativity that cosmologists can't come up with anything other than the universe being smaller and smaller farther back in time, but for now that is the theory that explains the CMB.
    2. yourphysicsteacherfacepalms 13 years ago
      
      actually, you could take the vectors of observed galaxies, postulate two distinct moving centers of mass and do some statistical analysis to see if the collision hypothesis is plausible.
      
      or you can look at background microwave radiation and actually see it (big bang predicted form of the radiation; collision does not)
      1. Joshua Corning 13 years ago
        
        big bang predicted form of the radiation; collision does not
        
        Wait....so when stars collide they don't give off microwave radiation....
        
        You are a terrible physicist.
      2. Joshua Corning 13 years ago
        
        postulate two distinct moving centers of mass and do some statistical analysis to see if the collision hypothesis is plausible.
        
        After 10 billion years from only one view point (earth) with distances only derived from shaky red shift calculations.....
        
        Good luck.
        
        Also who is to say the collision was a collision in the classical sense....imagine two black holes 1 trillion times the size of the know universe passing near one another say a few million light years apart....the evaporating energy and matter from the two black holes could have easily coalesced in a temporary Lagrange point into the universe that we know and love today...all without any trail of two centers of masses.
2. Apatheist ?_?? 13 years ago
  
  Being an Atheist has nothing at all to with accepting the Big Bang Theory (I do) and saying we don't know what happened before that is different from saying "nothing created everything from no cause." And yes it was for no "reason" because that makes no sense.
  1. Joshua Corning 13 years ago
    
    reason can be used as a synonym for explanation.
    
    and yes I am an atheist as well.
    
    You know the kind that does not believe what priests (physicists) tell them to believe.
    
    Anyway the big bang could be true as true can be...still it is funny that fundamental questions about it are dismissed....in the exact way questions about religion are dismissed by the religious.
    
    If you cannot explain the evidence of the big bang then you are believing it on faith.
    
    I cannot do that...show me the evidence.
    1. Sparky 13 years ago
      
      I'm with you to a point JC. I'm not sure I believe that the Big Bang got the universe going but I'm not sure that I care either. I'm happy to let people believe whatever it is they want to. The human brain is a pretty decent pattern recognition machine but I don't think it will ever be up to the task of fully understanding reality.
    2. Apatheist ?_?? 13 years ago
      
      I think the Big Bang Theory is the most plausible for now. I'm not a physicist so I'm really not going to worry about it to much. It has no effect on my life whatsoever and it is unlikely we will have solved all the mysteries of the universe before I die.
    3. Tony 13 years ago
      
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang
      1. Joshua Corning 13 years ago
        
        Cosmologists now have fairly precise and accurate measurements of many of the parameters of the Big Bang model, and have made the unexpected discovery that the expansion of the Universe appears to be accelerating.
        
        Accelerating....
        
        You do realize that this completely contradicts everything we know about gravity time and space let alone the big bang theory right?
    4. Zeb 13 years ago
      
      fundamental questions about it are dismissed
      
      Such as?
      
      If you cannot explain the evidence of the big bang then you are believing it on faith.
      Um, no. The big bang is the explanation of the evidence. That's what scientific theories are. People looked at lots of other potential explanations. The big bang was quite unpopular for a long time. It;s not as if someone decided one day that it was the theory and everyone immediately got on board.
Yet Another Dave 13 years ago

I was never a fan of Kennedy back in the day. Not nearly as hot as Nina Blackwood, or cute as Martha Quinn. The good news is, I don't live in LA so I don't have to listen to her as a jock, but I do have satellite radio, so I still get to hear from Nina and Martha.

That said, I do like that the ranks of libertarian celebrities (and even moderately conservative celebrities, vs. the throngs of radically left ones) are growing. Maybe as more and more celebs come to the forefront espousing libertarianism and making it cool, more of the rest of us will stop associating it with crazy gun hoarders in Montana and actually start casting votes that direction.
1. Gun Hoarder in Montana 13 years ago
  
  Whatchu got against me?
  1. Yet Another Dave 13 years ago
    
    Not a damn thing. But to Mr. and Mrs. Middle America, you're scarier than the Left or the Right.
2. R C Dean 13 years ago
  
  Ya know, on reflection, I was thinking of Martha Quinn.
  
  Never mind.
3. yonemoto 13 years ago
  
  she was hotter than Kurt Loder.
  1. Yet Another Dave 13 years ago
    
    Yeah, but so was Alan Hunter. What's your point?
4. Taste Police 13 years ago
  
  I don't live in LA so I don't have to listen to her as a jock
  
  You know those knobs? One changes the volume the other the fucking channel.
Gray Ghost 13 years ago

As someone else who was fond of her back in the day, all I can say is that time is rough on all of us.

Here's a "where are they now" that ABC did on the VJ's in 2011. For 52, Martha Quinn doesn't look too bad.
1. Almanian 13 years ago
  
  Skip Roper and Mojo Nixon are still Stuffin' Martha's Muffin...
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPts1cPQRh8
  1. Almanian 13 years ago
    
    SKID Roper...although "Skip" is pretty lulzy when I think about it...
? 13 years ago

I was a Kennedy fetishist back in the day; you know, when MTV actually played music videos.

She's half of how I know when I stopped watching MTV.

The last video I remember getting sick of seeing repeated every nine minutes was by some proto-Nickelback frat-rock band called "Pearl Jam," and when everyone at college was OUTRAGED about somebody on MTV being a Republican, I didn't know who they were talking about.

So I'm MTV class of '92.
Gray Ghost 13 years ago

Somewhat OT, but related: Dave Mustaine endorses Santorum. Link to full interview hier. From the interview:

"Ron Paul? you know, I heard somebody say he was like insecticide ? 98 percent of it's inert gases, but it's the two percent that's left that will kill you. What that means is that he'll make total sense for a while, and then he'll say something so way out that it negates everything else. I like the guy because he knows how to excite the youth of America and fill them in on some things. But when he says that we're like the Taliban? I'm sorry, Congressman Paul, but I'm nothing like the Taliban.
1. Yet Another Dave 13 years ago
  
  Pshaw. Like anyone actually cares what the members of Megadeth have to say about politics.
  
  Now when Bruce Dickenson, Ozzy Osbourne or James Hetfield chimes in ....
2. Episiarch 13 years ago
  
  I love Dave's music but he's also a renowned asshole. I wouldn't worry about his opinions. Besides, it was Dave himself who asked the question "peace sells, but who's buying?" He should appreciate Paul's position.
  1. yonemoto 13 years ago
    
    Epi, I love your comments but you're a renowned asshole.
    1. SugarFree 13 years ago
      
      Then he speaks from experience, yone. He's the loosest slot in town.
    2. Episiarch 13 years ago
      
      I can't disagree with you.
      
      But it would have been nice if you had called NutraSweet an asshole too. Or at least call him a "severe tool" or something. Maybe "stupendous jerkoff". Yeah. I like that one.
      1. Almanian 13 years ago
        
        SugarFree is "beloved asshole, SugarFree".
        
        I know that will burn you forever, Epi, but there it is...
        
        Episiarch 13 years ago
        
        I'm not sure I want to be "beloved" by you, dude. I know NutraSweet is into that kind of thing--NTTAWWT--but I think I'll pass. I'm a vegesexual, anyway.
        
        Almanian 13 years ago
        
        I always figured you for a BABY carrot lover, ya fokin' PERV.
      2. yonemoto 13 years ago
        
        yeah but he writes amazing porn. You don't.
        
        Almanian 13 years ago
        
        Very good point, yonemoto
        
        Almanian 13 years ago
        
        ...and. hence, why is "beloved asshole" SugarFree
        
        Episiarch 13 years ago
        
        He writes amazing porn for free. I don't.
        
        Think about it briefly.
        
        invisible furry jacket 13 years ago
        
        Do you act in it for free?
        
        Almanian 13 years ago
        
        That's not "acting", if you know what I mean...
        
        yonemoto 13 years ago
        
        what are you, an objectivist? There's such a thing as charity, and it's a noble enterprise.
        
        Episiarch 13 years ago
        
        How dare you call me an Objectivist! And my charity is given to young women on the street...who accompany me to a hotel room! I give a lot!
        
        invisible furry jacket 13 years ago
        
        And after you've gotten your breath back, you give again
3. mr simple 13 years ago
  
  I like what Alice Cooper said during the 2004 election:
  "If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal."
  1. WWNGD? 13 years ago
    
    I think he said that before 2004.
    1. mr simple 13 years ago
      
      Nope, it was Aug 24, 2004 to the Canadian Press during his 2004 Canadian tour.
4. WWNGD? 13 years ago
  
  I have always hated the religious undertones of MegaDeath's music.
5. Matrix 13 years ago
  
  So that 2% poison outweighs the 65% poison that is Santorum?
Almanian 13 years ago

I'd pretty much still do Kennedy. I always liked her.

And I still remember when MTV was BORN, so YOU ALL GET OFF MY LAWN AND STOP STEALING MY PIES THAT ARE COOLING ON THE WINDOWSILL!!!!

*rattles walker menacingly*
1. Penny-Farthing Cycle Salesman 13 years ago
  
  Good morning, sir! May I interest you in purchasing a penny-farthing bicycle? You'll look smashing on one of these, with your top hat, monocle, and spats!
jackit 13 years ago

What is her full name?
She only goes by one name, is she like Brazilian or a wanna be Brazilian or rapper or singer?
1. Almanian 13 years ago
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.....Montgomery
2. WWNGD? 13 years ago
  
  She is like Teller, Cher, Bono and Sting.
invisible furry jacket 13 years ago

Nick is naked. Has The Jacket dumped him?
jackit 13 years ago

From the looks of her, "The Bride of Frankenstein" is one of her favorite movies.
Father Jack 13 years ago

Feck all that religious shite! Drink! Girls!
Tony 13 years ago

She was so god awful stupid on Bill Maher's show that I don't even know why I clicked through on this article.
1. Joshua Corning 13 years ago
  
  What is interesting is that Bill completely cuts her off and does not even let her explain her position.
  
  When someone says something profound like "Atheism is a religion" I would think one with an open mind would want to hear what the fuck that person is talking about.
  
  But like most of the left Bill's attitude is only to be dismissive and shut off the debate.
  1. Tony 13 years ago
    
    Because he's heard it a hundred times, and there's no possible way to expound upon it that will make it seem like anything other than shallow bullshit.
    
    The thing that particularly stuck out was when Kennedy, PhD, declared that global warming was all the result of solar flares.
    1. Mr. FIFY 13 years ago
      
      You're not one to judge people on the subject of bullshit, Tony.
  2. O'Reilly's been pissed since.. 13 years ago
    
    ...Neal Boortz gave him shit on-air. Bill's had a hard-on against libertarians ever since.
    
    Except for Stossel, which is odd, as Bill should hate him more than he does.
Mr. FIFY 13 years ago

Wonder if she's gotten any death threats since making her change of philosophy public record...
1. Far Right Wing Nutcases 13 years ago
  
  Bitch deserves to be shot.
  1. Far Left Wing Nutcases 13 years ago
    
    Bitch deserves life in prison.
Orel Hazard 13 years ago

Once, on MTV, I watched this grating imbecile host Black Francis of the Pixies, who had an acoustic guitar with him. He began playing The Ramones' "Beat On The Brat", inviting her to sing along. Awkwardly, it became clear Kennedy had never heard this foundational song in her life.

Since cultural illiteracy so often accompanies that essential ingredient of libertarianism -- civic illiteracy -- it's not exactly shocking how apt she is today at shilling for a pet website of heavily subsidized oil billionaires.

Ha ha.
1. So... 13 years ago
  
  ...who pulls YOUR chain, Orel? Soros? Any random Kennedy (no relation) family member? Al Gore?
  
  Go fuck yourself, Orel.
  1. Give up figuring out Orel. 13 years ago
    
    He's a lost cause, shilling for Team Blue fucktards on "a pet website of subsidized oil billionaires".
    1. He's an intellectual coward. 13 years ago
      
      Comes here infrequently (thank God; the stupid bastard used to post far too often), bitches about capitalism, bitches about anyone even a pubic-hair to the right of center... just bitches, in general.
      
      Rebel without a clue.
      1. A fellow traveler of Tony. 13 years ago
        
        They both think they're better than everyone else.
        
        Orel Hazard 13 years ago
        
        Not everybody else, no. But certainly, unambiguously better than some, such as a Ph.D paid by energy billionaires to go on TV to deny that AGW exists.
        
        Happily, Kennedy radiates the same unmistakable odor of moron she always did, and so works unintentionally to spread the opposite message.
        
        Better luck next time, oil billioniares.
        
        Ha ha.
jun 13 years ago

In an annual phenomenon dubbed the "Hope Trade," enthusiastic investors pile into home builders in the fall on the assumption that sales will be strong the following year.
some guy666 13 years ago

Oh god..She read Ayn Rand and she lost her shit. Corny.

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