Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (September 8, 1972 – ) is an American political satirist, radio personality, former MTV VJ, and current host of Kennedy on the Fox Business Network. She was the host of MTV’s now-defunct daily late-night alternative rock program Alternative Nation throughout much of the 1990s.
Montgomery was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and raised in Lake Oswego, Oregon, an affluent suburb outside of Portland. Montgomery graduated from Lakeridge High School in 1990. She returned to school as a working adult and completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from UCLA.
Montgomery first came into the public eye in 1991 as an intern at Los Angeles radio station KROQ-FM, where she was known on the air as “The Virgin Kennedy.” A year later she took the “VJ” job at MTV, where she spent several years.
As “Kennedy”, Montgomery ushered in a new musical era for MTV as the host of Alternative Nation from 1992-1997, helping popularize bands like Nirvana,Soundgarden and Pearl Jam.
Montgomery appeared as a panelist on the 1998 revival of Hollywood Squares.
In 1999, Montgomery completed her first book, Hey Ladies! Tales and Tips for Curious Girls, in which she incorporated a multitude of personal experiences. That same year, she moved to Seattle to host a talk show on KQBZ “The Buzz” 100.7 FM talk station (now country station KKWF “The Wolf”). The show was a mix of news, local issues, and comedy. Montgomery then left Seattle in 2001 to co-host a morning radio show with Ahmet Zappa on the ComedyWorld Radio Network. The show was entitled The Future With Ahmet & Kennedy, and like her show in Seattle, consisted of news and current events with a comedy bent. She later co-hosted the morning show with Malibu Dan entitled The Big House, her final show on the network before the network went off the air.
Starting June 3, 2002, Montgomery hosted Game Show Network‘s original program Friend or Foe?, which ran for two seasons. On April 1, 2003, she guest-hosted the GSN show WinTuition, normally hosted by Marc Summers, who made a “guest” appearance. She also hosted GSN’s Who Wants to Be Governor of California?, a televised debate among some of the more colorful candidates in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, such as Gary Coleman and Mary Carey.
As of September 23, 2005, Montgomery appeared as an occasional panelist on VH1‘s Best Week Ever and MSNBC‘s Scarborough Country. MSNBC endedScarborough Country in June 2007. In October 2005, she became host of Fox Reality‘s Reality Remix until that series ended in June 2008.
In December 2007, she guest-hosted the evening show several times on Los Angeles talk radio station KFI, before being hired by the station for a regular show on Sunday afternoons from 3-5 pm. In April 2008 she joined Bryan Suits as cohost of the Kennedy & Suits Show, which ran from 7 pm-10 pm weekday evenings.
Kennedy’s final broadcast on Kennedy & Suits was September 30, 2009. She hosted Music in the Mornings (6 am to 10 am) on KYSR 98.7 FM in Los Angeles from 2009 until March 2014.
On January 18, 2011, she started appearing as Anthony Sullivan‘s assistant on PitchMen, looking for new inventions to promote in infomercials.
Kennedy is a contributor to Reason.com and Reason.tv, and occasionally serves as guest host for Bill Carroll, John and Ken, and Tim Conway Jr. on KFI AM 640 in Los Angeles. She was a “special correspondent” on the Fox Business News talk show Stossel, and has made occasional appearances as a panelist on Fox shows including Red Eye and Outnumbered.
She hosted The Independents, a current events and political discussion show, from its debut on the Fox Business Channel on December 9, 2013. The show was cancelled in January of 2015 but she continued as host of her own show, Kennedy.
Montgomery is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, married to former professional snowboarder Dave Lee with whom she has two daughters, Pele and Lotus. The family lives in the posh Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, but Kennedy rents a pied à terre on the Upper West Side and logs 5,000 miles a week in the air, taking a redeye every Sunday night to New York and returning to the West Coast on Wednesday afternoons. Meanwhile, she is continuing to host a three-hour morning drive-time music show on Los Angeles radio. It is, needless to say, a killing schedule. “I want my girls to see that if something is really important to you,” she says, “you have to move hell and high water to make it work.”
In March 2012, reason magazine published an article by Kennedy claiming that atheism is an organized religion.
In September 2012, during an appearance on Red Eye, Montgomery said that she had been diagnosed with celiac disease, leading her to change to a more meat-based diet.
Montgomery is a libertarian and a registered Republican, describing herself as a “Republitarian“. She even has a pink Republican elephant tattooed on her upper left thigh. She actively supported Gary Johnson’s 2012 presidential campaign. Before she started hosting shows full time on the Fox Business Network she was a frequent speaker at libertarian conferences like those of Students for Liberty.
She is a supporter of same-sex marriage, pro-choice, privatizing social security, opposes the War on Drugs, and opposes bureaucratic regulations.
When Montgomery joined MTV in 1992, she said “I didn’t dare out myself as a conservative” in her early months at MTV. At MTV’s 1993 Rock ’n’ Roll Inaugural Ball for Bill Clinton, she chanted, “Nixon now! Nixon now!”, whenever the Clintons went on stage. Along with being a fan of Richard Nixon, she supported Dan Quayle and Bob Dole. She was also a speaker at the 1996 Republican National Convention.
She later abandoned conservatism. Montgomery said that “Social conservatism was really bringing me down, and I realized, as time went on, that I wasn’t a Bush conservative. I was really a libertarian.” She says she was first introduced to libertarianism when Kurt Loder suggested she read Ayn Rand‘s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, though that sounds so improbable it is more likely a joke and it was more likely from reading Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Kennedy hopes to wrangle some rocker-pals as guests: “There’s a strong connection between music and politics, and a strong spirit of independent thinking that political musicians share,” she says. “And it’s funny because they tend to be libertarians. Frank Zappa”—whose children Kennedy remains friendly with—“died 20 years ago today [December 4]. He was a libertarian, and he was smart and tough to debate—and we don’t have a lot of people like that.”
The Insomniac Libertarian 